City Council · 2023-01-24

So with us today, So thank you, everyone, again.

Hopefully, this is very helpful to you in order to really get a feel where the design is headed. We did do a presentation a couple months ago, the design has evolved from that. But much, much of the exterior design in particular will be similar to what you've seen before, just with a little bit more detail. So we do have what we call a VR experience for those who are willing to try it. And then what we're going to do is put on screen just moving around the building for everyone else who doesn't have VR goggles, uh, if you want to try that. So we have the exterior of the building that we'll be looking at, and then there's some key areas on the inside of the building. The model is not developed in every room, to a finished level. So that's the one caveat, is that we can take it in every room, but it's going to be very blank. And so, but the key spaces, the council chambers, the lobby, those types of spaces, we do want to get your feedback and your thoughts on, see what you think, and see if we're headed in the right direction. So So what we're going to do is Scott here is our 3D artist specialist.

He's going to be navigating the VR goggles for those who are willing to try that. So if you kind of come over here, get a chance to walk around, and let them know if you want to see the outside or the inside of the building.

While folks are doing that, we'll sort of spin around the exterior of the building, So I want this to be a very interactive meeting.

It's a way of trying to engage with you, trying to get your best of perspectives.

Does that sound like an okay agenda? I think we have 45 minutes together.

Yeah, is that right?

That sounds good. Okay, so any volunteers to try the VR?

I have not taken Dramamine, so it makes me sick.

Will we be looking at the same thing that will be on the screen?

No, so we've tried that before when we can show everyone what they're seeing, but it makes everybody else dizzy. So we've separated the models So we can spin around in a more smooth interactive zone up here on screen. We have someone here that knows how to drive this thing.

Oh, Scott does that.

Oh good, Lindsay just walked in. She knows how to drive it. Scott, maybe if you could give directions sort of overall to everyone in terms of hand controls and things.

Yes.

This is Lindsay Moore, also with Memphis. She's our interior designer.

So this is, this is Senator. Make sure this is a public space.

Remember, the building is designed to meet all the setback requirements and then also to be built around this building, so it sort of didn't have a lot of wiggle room of where the building and the shape would go.

But nonetheless, it still turned out really great. You enter from this side?

You can, yeah.

So that's the lobby that's straight across the building.

Real main entrance.

coming from the parking side. You can enter and exit from this side. We wanted to make sure that it still has a sense of entrance from the community perspective, and that you have the ability to enter the building there and across the street. I like that clock too, as far as You take this kind of across the street, so we're looking back.

So that looks like that's where a lot of the trees are.

So there are trees in the corner that are around, just simply not fit to sit along the edge.

So right now the model, the time of the day is such that it's going to put some shadow.

We'll adjust that.

So one thing you'll see here is that we have gathering seating zone.

That canopy currently is not in the budget, so it's going to be designed as an attachment. And it's favorable, and you guys will be able to make a decision at that time.

We wanted to show what it was like with it.

Yeah, maybe, maybe adjust the time. We're bringing parking, as you remember, there. So parking's in the market, but still trying to preserve the green space, structured, you know, sort of landscaping.

When she gets through here, we'll walk and look closer.

We're going to do an aerial view so we can see it from top down and kind of get a sense. So is this area we're walking right now, is this where the current building is, or is this—

Yeah, we're inside. This would be inside the current building. So we have a large canopy on this side also to sort of do that.

Yeah.

That helped orient you a little bit?

Yeah.

Something that I thought was a little bit of a— what do you think?

Oh, it's amazing. Something I thought was a little bit of a nice touch is where this current building is and the number of trees being sort of planted in there and doing it in a way that kind of gives a little bit of a nod to our orchard.

There's a zone here.

If you were to need to expand, there's expansion opportunities in the basement.

We have some interior shelf space also in the building, and exterior framed-in shelf. So that'll just be framed in.

No, so it'll be like what you see here, and then some walls so that— Can you come out on that though and enjoy the—

Yeah, for now it's an outdoor balcony.

So to be clear, though, the way it's designed on the east side, structurally, to code.

So could expand and make it just like the rest of— Yeah, you can enclose it someday, but in the meantime, it's an open balcony.

Here's the real question: is our mayor's balcony as big as Michelle Obamawusi's balcony?

No, it's not that big.

There's no way.

I figured you were light on your feet.

Glass ribbons are kind of cool. This will be in the front or on the inside?

You're starting to see some of the interior feature wall element in here.

Those colors were These are all browns?

So these are a lighter cream color.

They're not this color, similar to that.

So they somewhat match closer to the lighter colors.

Did you already go inside while we were at it?

Yeah. Did you get a chance to go inside? Uh, we did not.

He hadn't loaded it.

Okay, he's loading it now.

I can see it on the screen if you want to try it again.

Because Lindsay's mom switched over from—

Oh, that's true. This one is just furniture placement.

Don't mind that black wall.

That's not—

this was more just to give you a feel for the view.

See, I told you.

That is.

Can I see the south side, like the southwest corner?

Yeah. Yep. Center Street, right?

Like from Center and State?

Oh, that one. Yeah, over here.

What's our placement on the corner there?

Where's the tree?

So the intersection where we started.

What's our setback from the curb? 15 from the back of the sidewalk on Center Street.

So the back side of the sidewalk is 15 feet.

And then those trees that were beautiful there, we're planting.

They're working on—

Mayor was saying so that we can not only tell people what to do, but when. I like that.

We probably talked about Christmas trees, lighting the trees, but the building here now has a permit. You have just the— is that just the one entrance there on this side?

For this side, yes. Okay. And then interesting, it's the main center office space, and you have the opposite one on the other side, really the primary one.

Do you have any like employee plans?

There are egress stairs.

We can—

we have plans. We'll go to the plans.

You're good.

So they had significant issues.

Are you familiar with the Tannerville? They had significant issues with HVAC because of all the glass on the south We have significantly less glass than that. Adobe has problems too, but they're—

is this glass tinted? Is it thermal? So this is not an unbearable office space.

So this is a low—

so it has the latest technology in glass.

It's what they call a Solarman 60 or Solarman 70. on the south and west elevations.

And then you have probably 50% of the amount of glass. So some of the images here show the standard panels. It's actually not clear on this.

Behind this darker section is a moonlighted wall, so it's to help.

You'll also have window shades, roller shades, some of this. What about reflection on the outside?

No, so we're not doing a highly reflective Mirror, what we call mirror glass.

This is going to be clear except for that solar refraction. This is one of the emergency Are you going to have the kind of shade like those you can't see through? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, so they come in all kinds of densities, and so some that you can see through, but that's like solar gain coming through. That's what we would propose.

There are some rooms where We're gonna have a new system where it'll be blackout shade or a semi-translucent shade.

Okay, so you have that option.

Yeah, it's really nice to have the ones in Seattle.

I think that would be primarily the majority of the building. Some key spaces like your—

I think it's the City Council, like this room will have a dual shade.

They can be fully private, or they can have a screen back.

Essentially, those spaces where there will be projected screens.

Using screens.

And then I'm sorry, I know you mentioned this, but so its basement is a little less than half of the building. It's under the City Council Chambers.

Wasn't the utilities on the other side mostly?

Yeah, we didn't do the east side for cost reasons. Okay. So is it possible to use solar on the roof where you're piping down?

That makes sense. It's totally possible.

Explore that.

Right now it's not a good program.

We love them. It wouldn't be bad to explore it.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, just a bunch of paper software.

You got the money change?

Yeah, what we found, because we've done it on a lot of buildings, is that the payback is 20 to 25 years. If anyone wants to see the interior, let's switch over to the interior model.

Yeah, before we go over to the interiors, as we're setting it up, comments, thoughts?

I like it.

I like it. Yeah, we like the look.

I think it's awesome.

How big, how big is the building?

So 74,000 square feet.

Yeah, 74,000. What would the story be? Of that $65,000 above the basement.

shelf space that's what, 1,500 square feet or 2,000? 2,000 square feet. It's interior shelf and additional 2,000 square feet. It's not included in that 65, you know. So you have 3 different ways to sort of flex out over the years. Interior shelf space is 2,000 square feet. Basement. Now there are some rooms in the basement, like electrical and other storage areas and things that take out that 9,000— some of that 9,000. There's still a bunch for future use.

And then Basement space, could that be—

that be awesome?

It could work more storage. Yeah, it could. Right now it has no windows.

So if you have offices— So Brandon and I will joke with each other about who's going into basement.

He currently doesn't have windows in his basement office, so we rib each other. Are you gonna be okay, Brandon, moving up?

No, man.

Give him time for his eyes to adjust.

Well, he still wants blackout shades. It'll be adjustment periods.

So if people are coming to pay their utility bill, they can enter from the main entrance. Is that close to where this is?

This is the council chambers.

Okay.

And can you turn to the left? Turn to the left to show them the 311.

Right there, front and center. So move this back.

That's where all the city services are, basically.

Help center, 311, utility building. Right out front.

That's right.

We have another portion of work to do still to get some graphics and wayfinding to make sure it's very clear where to go, how to interact with the space.

That is a display screen to give you some information.

It's interesting, it's distorted up here just a little.

It's part of your screen, it's like squishing it. The ratio is different.

Are you still on target for groundbreaking in March?

That's a great question.

Yeah, we were actually talking about that this morning.

We're still pushing for, for March. Yeah.

We're, uh, working on a few things.

We'll probably try to get an earthwork sub on board soon and go that route, but we want to take advantage of the weather.

And then is it a 2-year build? I can't remember the timeframe.

It's like 18 months with the demo.

Yeah, okay, yeah, we've got 18 months for construction of this building and then demolition of this building. And then we'll have plaza landscaping that would have to go in after this building's down.

So is that a 2-year thing?

Um, I actually just had it up.

I think it is pretty close.

Yeah.

So the first thing that Layton will have to construct is that clock on the outside of the buildings.

Have a countdown.

But we don't charge you.

So with the landscaping and everything that has to wait until it is, it's roughly about $26,000, just because there's a time frame of about 2 or 3 months where nothing's really happening due to weather.

So the city council, you know, This room is right here off the lobby. This is the council chambers, and then there's ways to enter this room.

I have another question. I know we've had supply chain problems. Are we getting closer to having some things we're going to get ordered so that when we get ready—

So one of the things we've done to help curb that is we've actually, a few weeks ago, We actually went out for bid for design assist subcontractors.

Okay.

So we now have a steel subcontractor, an electrical subcontractor, a mechanical subcontractor, and I think we're close on a fire sprinkler subcontractor. What that allows us to do is to work with the design team up front before the drawings are completed to start working on procuring those materials that are long lead items. So in a traditional system, the drawings would be done, let's say, the end of February. They'd go out for bid and then be analyzed, and it would be probably March or April before you have somebody on board, and then you would start ordering across—

ordering things.

We're looking to start ordering those things, you know, as early as March or even February if we can finalize the design.

So, okay, thank you.

I'm going to take us into, um, the council chambers. How many people could be seated? You will have 270 seats total.

How many do we got here?

Is it—

so I think we've figured out that you have 110 over there and in here 110, 35, or 30, 32.

So 110, 32, you'll have 34 in your conference room and you'll have 270 in the city council chambers.

That's nice.

Is it about the same room?

This, this one or that? So your existing City Council Chambers square footage is 2,032, and this one is 3,487.

I guess I'm trying to decide, is this wider and narrower?

It's wider and longer.

And you have 62 more seats than the current one.

There you go.

The chamber is also dividable.

There's a wall. Yes, there's a bar folding wall that you divide it so you can have smaller multi-earners, half that size in the chamber itself, and then use the other room for something else.

Because normally you only need half that size, but there are some weird times.

Yes, the Planning Commission.

So any, any talk about security? I know there's been some weird things happen in City Council meetings. I know you've got exits out the back behind.

Yeah, so the dais itself will have bulletproof material within it. So if Council can— I know no one likes to talk about this stuff, but it's the reality of today, right? So you can duck behind there, and then there is an emergency sort of back exit from behind this wall. You're looking out the large display, is an exit into the secure corridor, and then from there you can also exit out of the building. Okay, and that secure corridor connects to a stair that goes all the way up the building so that the mayor's office You can also exit down that stair and outside the building as well. So one thing Joe mentioned is kind of the need for that ceiling height in here.

You can kind of touch on that a little bit.

Yeah, so again, because of the size of the room, we needed additional ceiling height, so the whole first floor is taller. to accommodate this room. And it also gives it, from the exterior, a nice sort of base condition to ground the building.

Is that wood on the ceiling? Is that kind of a wood—

Yeah, so it'll be a perforated wood or a vent slatted wood so that it can have some absorption on it. We're trying to create some interest and then also Behind the council, he's seen above their heads. So that's the other reason being that tall-looking mountain room. How high did that wind up being? So we're on average, the lowest spot point is 12 feet, but we're higher than that in most locations.

Like 12 or 14 maybe?

12 to 13 and a half, probably.

Is that stone on the behind that?

It's not real stone, but it looks like real stone.

It's very nice.

Can you zoom into the medallion?

Closer.

There you go.

See, right off the bat, even in the details, we're making sure.

Okay, so where are you putting the countdown clock and all that stuff?

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about?

Right now we just have this clock that just sits there.

Can we do— yeah, can we make it a little more aesthetic? Find a pretty place for it.

You could take a stab at that.

Yeah, okay.

It's a trapdoor.

The screen, uh, we have at least another 3 minutes. So this is 160—

this screen is 164 inches diagonally. It's one screen that's LED, so it gives you a lot of viewing from the distance.

And so the most of the individuals in the, in the area in the seating can see.

Then a supplemental once you get the partition with some other screens that are 98 inches.

So our heads aren't going to block the screens?

Oh no, if you're seated.

If you stand up, you might.

I won't, Terry will.

Yeah.

Is the podium and the chairs where people would come to talk or present, is that Movable, or is that a permanent fixture? You tell us what you want.

It seems a little close, but it does seem awkward.

Um, I mean, I know this is just a— this is just a rendering, but, um, it's about the same location that you currently have it. See, it could be— it's— yeah, we can move it easy.

I think you want it movable. Yeah, movable again, because we have other meetings in there.

Okay, um, I guess just pretty much slides on floor box location.

Electrical on the 2nd floor. If you want to comment on the wood chairs, I think that matches nicely with the room. I don't know if that's your—

Yeah, that's a placeholder. I know, but I'm saying if we can afford that, that's very attractive. Yeah, we'll probably have the same chair.

Okay, put a pin in that if we can under budget.

I'm with you.

I think they'd be great coming in and out of the building.

This, this is the equivalent of this room.

Any ideas on sound? Because depending on the person's voice, some people you can hear fine, other people— this is sound in this room is not very good, especially planning commission meetings. I get a lot of complaints from People want to play a tradition they just can't hear.

Yeah, so, um, we will address it acoustically just like we do in more modern buildings.

So yeah, I guess, or you can put a microphone in.

Yeah, all else fails, for, for a build, uh, a room that size with 270, you're going to want a microphone and speaker system and as a dam.

Now, that being said, this also won't be as tall of ceilings in here as this current council conference room, so that'll help a little bit. The ceiling in here, just for reference, is 16 feet. So it's just kind of a reference.

So you're going to lose your little kitchenette over here then, right? Do you have one nearby?

Yes.

Yeah. You have a whole room for it so you can have a caterer through this door.

Nice. Is that what that is?

Yeah, serving, catering, kitchen.

So they can come in another door, set it up, get all the food ready, and then say, here, you're ready.

Open up that window, you can walk by, gather your food, eat it, close it, and then they're not disturbing your meeting.

You guys are thinking of everything.

Okay, how is everyone feeling about it?

I like it.

Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think it's great.

Beautiful.

Functional yet beautiful. Is that a bench? That was one thing we wanted to ask you. There's kind of a space, as opposed to chairs. We wanted to ask if the bench makes sense or if it's best to have everybody have their seat. What do you guys think?

Yeah, just on one of the walls.

I like the flexibility of chairs.

There'll be chairs on the other walls, but where there's a lid, it's a little on the tighter side. Chairs don't get pulled out and they can be structured here.

It could be furniture bench, like it doesn't have to be quite so substantial.

So, but it, um, just one thing we wanted to watch around, there's a whole bunch of chairs right here where it sort of buttresses everything. It'd be nice to sort of structure it. The rest of the perimeter could have chairs.

Yeah, it's kind of secondary seating really. It seems— it looks less cluttered too when you walk into it.

Yeah, that's the thinking behind it. But again, whatever you want. Easy to pull out the bench and put in chairs.

I think it looks attractive and kind of makes sense.

What material is that floor?

So that's what polished sealed concrete—

where they grind down the concrete to expose the aggregate and then polish and seal it. It just makes it really durable, long-lasting.

So it's flat, right? It's like shellac. I mean, you don't have the texture like we do out here. That's really bad for shoes.

Yeah. Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's just similar to the library hallway.

Does the stairs have the same flooring going up?

Yeah, so there'll be, there'll be a precast tread, but it'll have the same look and durability as the— Looks good.

Are they wood slats that are coming down?

Whether it's real wood or it's The light's cool, just something similar. Yeah, the wood wall feature, it's a way to sort of bring warmth and then sort of connect the spaces on the various levels. One of the, I think, big, big positives working with Joe and Method Studio and Layton is that they're— I think you can see that they're doing a really good job of making sure we get a really big bang for our buck, much like we were helped with on our family fitness center. Now, we are managing staying within our means. But still going to come away with an inspiring, wonderful place to work and do the business of the city.

Yeah, I agree.

It's nice.

Oh yes.

Is $26 million still our target?

And what's our budget?

Where— let Brent take that one.

Say again?

Oh, our cost. My money was $26 million-ish.

Where—

well, so I was gonna say, I, I don't know when the last time you guys got an update, um, how the total cost was.

I was looking back, there was kind of a target value we provided in like June or July of last year.

I don't know if that was kind of our last reference point.

We are a bigger building since then, so it is more expensive than it was.

$22 million, $28 million?

Our building budget's $28 million. You're trying to pinch down a little bit. Yeah, absolutely.

I think we've been kind of—

we started around 60,000 square feet. So we're a 14,000 square feet larger building than when we began. So you may recall some of our Some of our early presentations over the years, we were starting to get to a point where we were thinking we were going to be in the $400-plus-ish range on dollars per square foot.

I think currently at about—

We were at $395 in the estimate we provided the meeting with you guys on a few budget items.

So we're moving up.

What was that? We're just in—

yes. Yeah, that was the EOC space.

I'll go back.

So the Emergency Operations Center.

Okay.

So it's a large room that also can be divided if you remember correctly. Can be divided in that sort of multi-use room, but it also becomes your Emergency Operations Center. So someone is not—

the Emergency Operations Center, what, how How would you use it? Most of the time it would be a training room. So we'll have a podium, you can see that in the room right there, and they'll have a speaker, and then a screen will come down in front of that glass. We'll have the dual shades that make it dark, and then all the seats will be oriented that way. You can also divide it and have training on that half, on the other half, and orient the chairs the other way. We talked about in that second half also of having set up with like a conference room service with tables and tables and chairs around that. So it really has multi-function space because it has a break room off the side. It's similar in function to your space down below, that they can cater that room and then not disturb what's going on and then bring it in through the other door, those type of things.

So a lot of function.

Those, those panels that you see on the side are ready stations, my ready stations, the emergency operations center mode, they'll open up with those desktops and computers ready to go like that.

And this is built to your higher earthquake standard, this area of the building?

That's correct. The lobby and this side of the building is higher seismic standards.

This is a large screen that has 9 screens together for emergency operations center mode. So they can see it all put together or separate screens and have that command center as they go through their emergency operations. So does that have like a Generac backup system? I mean, the power's out, how's that, how's that function?

So we have a generator for the entire building.

The generator for just that room, or would it run the whole—

So the generator runs the whole building.

If I understand it correctly, that's correct.

Yeah, I mean, there'll be— there's still a prioritization of specific outlets, or, you know, it wouldn't— the generator wouldn't cover the entire building, all lights on, all outlets used.

If there's 100% demand, that won't cover it, but if it's like a 50%, 60%, demand, then it would cover that for a period of time. So yeah, you kind of prioritize the space, right?

And then of course the EOC would be top priority, chambers, the council conference room, those would be top priority locations.

Looks good.

This almost feels like a concert hall, just the open Yeah.

So one thing, going back to the budget, just to keep in mind too, is we've added the basement, we've added additional square footage. We've also made the library so that it can be independent on its own, which was currently being functioned or serviced by this building. And all of that we've been able to, through working together as a team, to do with staying within the budget. So we've been able to add a lot of things that were not part of the original program and enhance the building even more.

So, yes, um, okay, we're past our time allotment.

Yeah, yes.

So we're at the hour. I think we've gone 15 minutes over. My apologies. Overall, any parting comments, thoughts?

Good job.

Excellent.

Yeah, it looks great. It's, uh, it's exciting.

I mean, it should be a huge benefit to the city, city employees.

It should be awesome.

Absolutely.

Full steam ahead.

Get her done.

Now let's just like do it and be done.

Just to address what Joe had already talked about, because of the increase in the first level, we're bringing an amendment to the council next, in February, to talk about that 4-foot parapet height. So the height of this building is 48 feet, top of the roof, and then the 4 feet above that first parapet will be an exception.

That's what's coming.

That 4 feet of parapet height also helps screen off that rooftop equipment. Okay, we're not doing a specific screen around the equipment. It is taller than 4 feet, but from down low around the median area, the screen helps to reduce the sight lines to that rooftop equipment.

If there was solar on there, would it be pretty hidden, you think?

Yeah, because you have a 4-foot parapet around the edges, so you would not even see the solar.

Okay, any other questions?

Okay, thank you for your time.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

I made note of a little bit of the input, so if there's additional things that come to mind that you'd like us to try and incorporate, don't hesitate to let myself know or me.

Is this yours or ours?

That's theirs.

We'll take that. Oh, really?

Is there a way to pull this full screen, or is it just PDF slides?

Yeah, just the PDF slides.

Okay, that's not a problem.

Yeah, okay.

Awesome.

Let him know to give Sam a hard time for not being here for this one.

He asked me to—

he's in Utah National Park.

That's how it goes.

Gotcha.

But he can't tell us anything. I'm thinking he's holding or something.

If I— what if I open it up right now?

Gotcha.

Oh, when it comes up.

Yeah, when I—

yeah, I'll save them.

And then I could—

gotcha.

Zoom share screen.

Just share that screen instead. Gotcha. We don't use Zoom as much at the department, but hopefully I can figure my way out around it.

All right, I think we're good.

We're good to move on. We've got presentations. Geneva Road Project, Tyrell Edwards.

Yeah, Merrill, just a quick introduction.

Tyrell's the project manager for the Geneva Road Project.

We also have Tiger Bone in the back corner. He's our assistant city engineer, and he's been representing the city on the project and working with Tyrell.

So any questions you have into the details, the two of them can answer them for you. But Tyrell wanted to come give you an update on the progress with the project, where we're at, some of the design decisions that have been made.

So definitely over to Tyrell.

Thank you.

Um, so yeah, I believe that Andrew Gwynn, he was the project manager of this project before I took it over. He may have given you some updates, but there's been some pretty large scope changes. We saw some opportunities to reduce impact from this project and another project that's coming along that's a MAG project, which is the Lakeview Parkway extension from 2000 South to Geneva Road. That project was going to be coming along within the next couple years of this project, and we saw an opportunity to potentially combine those projects, integrate those projects a little bit together to have one construction season and one impact to the public there. So real quick, I just wanted to give you an overview of the current scope of the project.

This is—

I'll just be reading it because this is what we prepared for the state legislative session. We usually give an update on projects so legislators can look at it, see what's going on with projects. So real quick, the overview of the project is the Utah Department of Transportation is widening Geneva Road to include 2 travel lanes in each direction and a center turn lane between University Parkway and the future Lakeview Parkway connection in Orem. In fall 2022, the project scope was updated to include realigning Geneva Road to connect the new Geneva Road-Lakeview Parkway intersection. I'll talk about that a little bit more as we get further in. Additional improvements include bike lanes and a sidewalk throughout the project area. Construction is anticipated to begin early 2024. The project will improve mobility and regional connectivity by providing additional roadway capacity, and connecting to the future Lakeview Parkway, which will connect to the University Avenue interchange system. So a little bit of history on the project. Originally, the scope of this project was to widen out to 5 lanes like I discussed earlier, and that was going to happen between University Parkway and the future Lakeview Highway tie-in you can see there. And then south of there, we were going to widen out to 3 lanes and continue some of those improvements. The project was funded for $20 million of House Bill 433. That was some infrastructure funding that came from one of our legislative sections, and our original construction schedule was to finish at— finish and advertise the design in late 2022 and then construct in spring 2023. So in this area, I'm sure you're all aware, we have the temple, which is currently under construction. and is going to be holding an open house. UDOT was committed to not having construction during the open house. We didn't want to have a big, you know, open construction site people had to drive through to get to the temple open house. That open house, we started to have concerns, was going to slide into the 2023 construction season. It seems like it now could even slide further and impact further, but we looked at that, we looked at the funding we had. And we looked at the upcoming Lakeview Parkway, which we knew was getting funding in fiscal year 2024, and we had some discussions with the, the region senior staff about whether it made sense to— if we push back into 2024, have our project go, and then within 1 or 2 years have Lakeview Parkway come tear up the roadway and realign a portion of Geneva to construct its section. And we determined that if we have an opportunity, we should avoid that because it's a bad public perception if we're in there making improvements and then Utah County comes in and makes improvements. So I met with the Region Cedar staff, with Mag and with Sam, and we looked at some, some opportunities and how we could incorporate the projects together, how we could coordinate those and get one construction season, one contractor, and make it look more like one project rather than rework. So we looked at a bunch of different options. MAG asked if we could take all the funding for the Lakeview Parkway project. There were concerns about that. We would lose some of the benefits when we had to redo the environmental document. So what we determined would be the best course of action is the UDOT project would We'll take the realignment portion of work, that scope of work where we realign Geneva Road and where we construct the intersection and then tie back into Geneva Road. We would take that into our project, and then the Lakeview Parkway project would have a cleaner section they can tie into. We would have 2 different design packages go out, one for Geneva Road and one for Lakeview Parkway. And then when those go out to contractors to bid on, we would tie the 2 contracts together, so the contractors need to bid on both packages, and then we take that and award it to one contractor who does it under— basically, it'll look to the public like one project. So the scope after the change to the scope of the Geneva Road UDOT portion of the project would be widening Geneva Road out to 5 lanes down to the intersection. We would still have all the improvements, the bike lanes, the the 10-foot trail, the sidewalks, we would take those down to the intersection, and then the bike lanes would continue on to where we tie in back with Geneva Road. And then—

Are you still going to be 3 lanes past the lake?

We are not going to be 3 lanes past that, so we are going to be taking the funding that would be used for that to construct some of this. So yeah, that was one of the other parts. Thank you for bringing that up. We went to the Transportation Commission for funding to extend all the way down to 1800 South with the 3 lanes. And one of the things they looked at was this Lakeview Parkway coming in and taking the main part of the corridor that way, and they didn't want to spend money on the corridor that was shifting over to Lakeview Parkway more. So we felt like it'd be better to spend the money on, you know, making the Lakeview Parkway tie in and meet standards. So And updated schedule, we would advertise for construction in late 2023 and then begin construction in 2024. We say 2025 in our legislative update. We're still trying to fit that into one season. We've just given ourselves some room to slide if there's any, you know, design schedule impacts or impacts from the Temple open house or right-of-way impacts, because obviously there's a lot more right-of-way that's included in the scope of work.

So your $20 million you had previously assigned to you, is that gone back into the pot?

No, no, we still have the $20 million. We don't believe the $20 million will cover all of our needs, so we are probably going to— we don't have any formal agreement with MAG yet to take some funding from the $15 million that's for the Lakeview Parkway project, but we're probably going to take some from that and then go to Transportation Commission and ask for the additional funding that's needed to to cover any gaps that we have. We've— I'm sure you guys have been hit just as hard as we have by inflation and increased project budgets, so it's been pretty bad, but we're working through it.

And this does—

I'll move on to the next slide. This does present some benefits and some cost savings because instead of going from 5 lanes and tapering back down to 3 or 2 lanes and having to tear that tapered section out to rebuild 3 roadway out for the Lakeview Parkway project, we don't have to redo that work now. We just get to include it and build it all at once. We minimize impact to residents, like I talked about. There's a lot better public perception if we're not out there putting something in, tearing it out, and rebuilding it a few years later. And then one of the other big benefits we see from tying the 2 projects together is we have time to coordinate our utility designs. So we have some chance to look at trunk lines, different ways to handle drainage, and we can work with the designers in the design phase on both projects, so they can coordinate their designs rather than having one project that's in construction and one project that's in design trying to coordinate with the project that's already set in stone. Potential risks: timing of Lakeview, or timing of the Orange City portion of the design. Sam's in the process of Hiring a designer right now, there may be a little bit of catch-up they have to do, but we feel like that risk is worth the benefit of tying the 2 projects together. And then other potential risks are schedule delays due to the Temple open house, design delays, right-of-way acquisitions— gonna be a big part of this project because there's a lot of right-of-way needs. So let me pull up this interactive map here. I would have Shared it more through, but see here. What's the best way to do this? There we go. I'm sure everyone wants to see kind of what this design would look like.

Of course it's going to fight me.

There we go. I'll try my best to navigate this without a mouse. So here's the current design of just the UDOT portion of the project. So you can see, if this loads in, we continue the 5 lanes down from University Parkway all the way down to the new intersection, which is—

2nd and 3rd.

Right in here, we've moved the intersection from where it was in the JUB concept that they prepared for MAG. We've moved it a little bit further out, and that gives us the opportunity on this section of Geneva that is now somewhat a frontage road. It gives us the opportunity, just because of spacing, that we can tie back in instead of having the cul-de-sac. We feel like that kind of improves the connectivity of the area. It gives us opportunities to consolidate all these accesses rather than having them on the main corridor where it's busier, to have them on this frontage road. And the older design— I can pull up real quick the older layout. They weren't all coordinated there. So this is the JEV concept for MAG and the city. You can see here, there's a lot closer, a lot closer to the intersection. So we wanted everything to move further out to meet our spacing standards. So, so that's—

this looks like you're trying to move all the traffic onto the Lakeview Parkway. Geneva, is that—

am I reading that right?

That's—

yeah, so originally it's a MAG concept. MAG has already constructed a good portion of Lakeview. Geneva won't lose all its traffic, but there is— this does open up some chances for development, and it becomes more of the arterial in the area. would be Lakeview, which Geneva tied in here, and then Geneva south of this area would be more of a collector.

Does Lakeview eventually go to the Provo Airport?

Yes, yes, exactly. So if we look here, you can see they're constructed about up to the end of the high school. Provo is moving forward with their section from the high school up to 2000, and then this would be one of the last legs here. This would be the last leg, as far as I understand it. But yeah, it goes and connects to the Provo High School and to the airport. And this was all funded through MAG, so it's all a MAG roadway. So I'll try to be brief since I don't have A ton of time. I don't want to eat all your time. I don't have the designers with me to get into every technical detail of the project, but are there any questions or concerns about the project? Anything anybody wants to look at specifically? Any areas of concern?

How much is the city responsible for? Is it design, or do we have money for building?

So the city's portion on I think it's all through MAG. I'm not sure how MAG and the city work together, Taggart, but they're funded for $15 million, around there. I don't know the exact number.

I can answer that.

Lakeview is a federally funded project through MAG, and our portion, our local match, is like 6.28%. That money has been— we're budgeting it over a couple of years.

Okay, setting that aside.

Have we started with this year's budget then?

I think we started last year. Okay, I'd have to go back and double-check our CIP budget.

Sounds good.

That's right.

On Geneva Road North?

Yes.

What, um, that's owned by the state?

Yes.

Yeah. What type of additional width does the state own on that road?

Right now or after this?

Post-project.

Post-project, I think we're looking at acquiring around— or yeah, doing acquisition for in some areas like 30 to 35 feet. There are a few full takes of properties, so we've been reaching out to some of these landowners. But yeah, there is some widening. All that widening is happening out to the west.

So, are they looking for some transit opportunities to parallel the road?

Transit opportunities as far as BRT? Not in this project.

There's—

I haven't heard anything as far as that.

Would that be sufficient width for something like that?

Potentially. It's, it's going to be pretty close. There's some ways we could use the existing width we have. That's kind of a more Eric Rasband question we may be able to answer— handle at our You know, or UDOT meeting, but—

In that case, would you still take it down the middle of the road, or would you put it to the side?

I'm not sure. That's a good question. I can follow up on that and get back to you though.

That'd be great.

Yeah, definitely. It's Lynnae, right?

Yes.

Yes, I think we met at the Mag Plan 50 meeting, right?

That's right.

Thank you.

Do we have any other questions?

Let me go back to my contact information, the project update sheet. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, my email address is tledwards@utah.gov, or you can reach out to the project hotline. I'm sure we'll update you guys further as we get further in design. So right now we're approaching our 60% design review. We're trying to kind of not go too fast so we don't get way past the city's design, so coordinate those, but that's about where we are. So, like I said, advertising end of this year and hoping to construct next, next construction season. All right, thanks everybody.

Thank you.

Okay, next on our agenda is Irma. Hey, Brian, in terms of the construction schedule for the Geneva Road widening, he was saying that it would be completed during the 2024 construction window.

Construction season.

He said, yeah, he was for clear early 2024. That's when we start.

But he had it listed as 2024 and 2025. Yeah. So would it take that entire time? He said their goal was to have it completed during—

I wrote it down here— so during the '24-'25.

But he— but they put through '25 on the website. My guess is the temple— no, what I hear here, the temple is struggling with materials, so that open house—

yeah, it really should have been last fall.

Well, the temple should have been turned over last fall with the open house going on next month. That's kind of the original.

What are you doing?

Well, they're still—

I don't know where they're at with the smoke damage and cleaning that up from the fire, but I do know the exterior materials, they had trouble getting it shipped to the US.

So it's just the boat sank. I'm not kidding you.

Sure.

Isn't that like not allowed as far as like My son used to work for the same company.

Are you ready, man?

Yes, I'm ready to go.

Good afternoon, and thank you for having me. My name is David Peterson. I'm the executive director of the Utah Risk Management Agency, affectionately called URMA. I want to introduce our board chair, Seth Perrins. from Spanish Fork City. My goal is to give you an overview of the services that IRMAA provides and then answer any questions that I can. So just by way of history, IRMAA was created in 1985. OREM was one of the founding members of IRMAA. The goal was by pooling and coordinating efforts, we could reduce costs for providing risk management services, claims litigation, In 1985, you may not be aware, but that was a very hard market for insurance. It was a time when municipalities either couldn't get insurance or it became cost prohibitive, and the founding of IRMAA with a self-insured retention program where members contribute is how we got around that at the time. IRMAA is a— we're a small organization staff-wise, so we keep overhead We do have contracted services at some discounted rates, and I'll talk about that a little bit more as we go along. IRMAA is accredited by AGRIIP, the Association of Government Risk and Insurance Pools. We've gone through the standards for accreditation and met the standard to become accredited, and we're an exempt commercial provider. When it comes to commercial insurance, because it's so technical, You can't independently buy it unless you're an exempt commercial provider. Then you can go to a brokerage and purchase it. Otherwise, you have to have an agent. So, we cut out one of the steps and costs associated with that because we pool. Each member of IRMAA, each municipality, has a seat on the IRMAA board.

We—

and so, they have They're the ones that determine the course and scope of coverage that IRMAA provides and the services. Each member pays individual contributions to the self-insured retention, which pays claims and service costs. And IRMAA has a self-insured coverage up to $1 million, and we buy excess insurance beyond that. The services provided by IRMAA are we provide risk assessments. We'll come and look at an individual risk and then do the risk analysis and data analytics to determine what the frequency or potential severity of that risk is. And it's separate for each individual city depending on their operations. We also do risk monitoring. One of the things we tap into is all of the industry industry trends that are going on with regard to risk. And we publish awareness bulletins, reach out to our risk managers, and have roundtables where we discuss these risks and how to potentially mitigate them. Um, we have a risk management, um, consultation. So when a risk manager or a city has a question about moving forward with a certain type of activity and they're concerned about the risk associated with that activity. We'll do the research on that and provide a risk report. Just an example, we have a city in Irma who was considering taking over some Forest Service property which has a mine on it, and after all the information, they decided they didn't want the property because mining is very expensive and has a lot of liability. We have a risk management information system which provides anybody, any city staff, the ability to go in and query claims or litigation, the status of claims or litigation, when they have access to the system. And then we provide education and training on risk management-related topics, law enforcement liability, cyber risk, supervisory training with regard to employment law. We have a loss control inspection program, and I will, I will hand these out or leave these before for each council member. But we have an inspection program where we have a loss control manager who meets with your risk manager and staff here at the city, goes through facilities and inspects them, reviews policies. and procedures to ensure that they're current. Um, and then each year there's a risk score generated, but it helps understand risk within, within the city. Um, we also do— we have a self-insured retention, which I talked about, and I'll talk about a little bit more in just a minute. We purchase group insurance for excess, or what some people would term catastrophic losses. And then we have claims investigation, adjusting, management, and legal services that we provide. Some are at a discounted rate and some are just internally provided by IRMAA. Our insurance program, we have, we have a number of policies we purchase. As you're aware, you can't cover your car under your house policy. And so into the commercial environment with municipal operations, there's different types of policies that we cover. Here's a list of some of those policies under our general liability. And then also we purchase cyber risk property. And then we have an internal auto physical damage program. We were able to create one where we didn't have to purchase the property damage or physical damage. For city vehicles, um, you pay a premium of $390 per vehicle for a year, and it pays any physical damage to the vehicle beyond the deductible amount. I wish I could pay $390 a year and get that kind of insurance, but because we're a pool and we have about 1,300 vehicles in the system, and not all of them get in accidents every year, We're able to provide that at a significantly reduced rate over what commercial auto insurance would cost. We have an off-duty vehicle program policy because, believe it or not, insurers make you insure it separately for off-duty than on-duty. And then a high-value vehicle, and those are for dump trucks and public works trucks and fire trucks that are very expensive to insure. We also have insurance that we do internally because it's either cost prohibitive or you can't find it on the market. One of those that I'll point out, I've listed these, but one of those I'll point out is land use. IRMAA has been providing land use coverage to its members since 1986. it can't be bought. We've looked at trying to transfer that risk to an insurance company, but insurance companies just won't do land use because it's such a volatile issue, and it's— they're generally expensive claims. So IRMAA provides that for members.

Oops, I'm sorry.

Some of the advantages we purchase at a group insured rate. So, um, and probably the easiest example of this is we usually see anywhere between a 9% and 15% reduction because as members we purchase for everyone. But probably the easiest way to show how this works is kind of the theory of large numbers. Um, if we were to add all the property value of all the municipalities that are part of IRMAA, our members, it's our best guesstimate is about $1.2 billion. Well, we don't purchase that much insurance. We actually purchase about $700 million. And the reason we do that is because the odds that everybody from Enterprise to Brigham City are going to lose all their buildings at the same time, according to the actuaries, are so remote you can't even put a number on them. Essentially, the state of Utah would have to be wiped out. So what happens is we can purchase it at a discount because we're able to insure any one given city or any one building or a group of buildings at any one time. Premiums affect— are not affected by losses. So the way IRMAA operates is under an actuarial formula that's based on probability risk, based on the size of the city and the operations within the city and the city's budget. And so if Orem has a loss this year, their premiums are not affected next year by that loss, which is one of the things that's very appealing to a lot of our members, is that you can have a bad year amongst 10 really good years And unlike a traditional insurance company, if you have a couple claims in one year, you'll see your premium go up the next year. Just insight for those of you, we shop for excess insurance every year. And on a personal note, understanding the insurance industry, I do the same thing, and I encourage most people to. I know people have allegiance to a company they've been with for a long time, but in the, in the industry, if there are hurricanes in Florida and State Farm is who you're with, your rates are going up next year even though you weren't affected by the hurricane because they passed that on to their, to their purchasers. We don't do that in Irma. Um, We also provide more coverage than you could get individually. We have a general liability policy that has— and I hesitate to say this because if someone from Chubb is listening, they may go, how do we not catch that? But we have an unlimited aggregate, which is almost unheard of. So we could have 50 claims this year and all of them max out individually or singularly, and they'll continue when the next claim comes in. Usually what you see in an aggregate is you say you may see $1 million, $5 million, meaning we'll, we'll pay $1 million a claim until we hit $5 million. We don't have an aggregate at Irma, and that— a lot of that is a testament to we're with one of the preferred insurance companies. Chubb is one of the preferred premier insurance companies in the nation, and they pretty much don't take anybody that's high risk. And that's why IRMAA members and their focus on risk reduction is so important for our insurance. The advantage to IRMAA is member control. When we look at claims, litigation, coverage, It's a decision made by our members. The representative you send to the board, whether that's your city manager or whoever you designate, that board sits together and says, here's what we want to do for PERMA. And the other thing that's important to know about that is that it's member-controlled in that you have the decision-making authority with regarding claims and litigation. If, as a city council or whoever you designate— city manager, risk manager— on an individual claim, how that should be settled or not settled— some of our cities have taken a position that it's a matter of principle and we're not going to settle a claim— IRMAA will support that. And, and the attorneys that we contract with at discounted rates will take that position and and push that position through. With traditional insurance and some of the others out there that you see, um, once it taps into they're going to pay, they take away the ability for the individual municipality to make a decision about what they're going to pay or what they're not. Most insurance companies will try to get out for as cheap as they can, so they may want to settle on something that you feel philosophically as a city you don't want to settle. Um, insurance coverage levels that are, um, are not available, and I talked about that briefly. Um, our coverage is higher than you would be able to purchase as an individual municipality. You can't purchase an unlimited aggregate, but we can as a group because it's a shared loss. We have discounted legal rates as we go through and discounted insurance rates. We have several law firms on, as it were, retainer. We utilize all the time and they provide discounts so we don't run up the bills as fast as you historically would if you just went out and reached out to one of the local law firms and said, please, you know, please provide us legal services. Um, I already talked about claims not being, um, affecting your losses and your rates. Um, and then we're full service, which I talked about originally when I talked about the services. Insurance companies don't provide the risk analytics, the assessments, the loss control inspections. the consultation. Insurance companies predominantly just do claims. That's what they do. They take your money and they do claims. The other thing that you'll find with IRMAA is we don't spend a lot of money on marketing. This is marketing. When you want to know what we do and how we serve you, we're willing to come out and do that. But I don't, I don't go knocking on people's doors and take them out to lunch and, and buy them all kinds of trinkets. We just don't—

Give us a nice golf shirt.

We do, we do golf shirts. We do golf shirts. Yeah.

I really like food and Dave's never ever taken me out to lunch.

Sensing that maybe that's not a good decision, but I, um, we, we, we just don't, um, you know, we have a couple of counterparts. There's a Utah County Indemnity Pool, which insures counties, um, and then there's a local government trust, and they have— I don't know how many people that do nothing but marketing.

Is Orem your largest city, or do you have other large cities?

West Valley City is our largest by population. It depends on how you categorize largest, but I mean, by population, yes, West Valley is our largest. Enterprise is our smallest, but we also have Ogden and Draper. And, um, so—

And any city can join if they choose to?

That limit—

well, let me— it requires a vote of the board, so it's actually your representative to the board who can say— we have had a couple of cities express interest and And the board was not necessarily interested in that city.

Um, and the higher risk, or what's—

That's, that's some of it. Some of it, yeah. I mean, that's kind of it.

We—

our focus is on reducing your risk so we don't play claims, so you don't pay claims, so we don't have to spend more money, so the city doesn't have to spend more money. So anything we can do— so cities that adopt the mentality like Orem has and the other members of IRMAA is we're gonna do what we can to avoid the claims rather than— we're uninterested in cities that wanna treat it like an insurance program, right? We're gonna pay a premium, we don't care what happens, we just want you to pay when something goes terribly wrong. And it just doesn't— that's not conducive to having an unlimited aggregate. That's not conducive to buying discounted insurance.

The pooling really matters there, and if you have a bad actor that comes into the pool, then it can have an impact on you and me as a city. So I think we do, we do vet them.

Remind me how many cities you have.

15.

Maybe you can get into this, but as far as the pre—

so we pay a premium of some sort, right? But then we also, if we have a claim, don't we effectively pay it back over 5 years or something?

Yes, you pay contribution And that covers all the services and resources and then contributes to the reserve. And the reason it was created that way was if you were to have a multimillion-dollar loss for some reason, most municipalities are not necessarily in a position to come up with multimillion dollars right off the bat. They can budget for it down the road if they know. And so what happens is it's— we front funding to pay the loss out of that retention or reserve. And then the city has an opportunity to pay it back over 5 years interest-free with the, with the other provision of we have a shared loss provision wherein if your claim meets a certain criteria, IRMAA's reserve will cover a portion of that claim. The city only pays a portion of it back. Just by way of information, because I was looking in preparation for this Meaning Orem has had a shared loss every year for the last 12 years where they haven't paid the full amount of a claim back because the reserve from IRMAA has come in and said, we'll pay this portion, you pay this portion. And it's different for each city based on their size and what their contribution into IRMAA is.

Okay.

So you essentially pay contribution and that funds that self-insured retention $1 million worth of coverage and IRMAA services, which are relatively, relatively good considering the number of staff we have and the services we provide. And then if you have a loss, you pay in addition to that, and then we purchase that excess insurance, and OREM would pay their percentage of that, but it's pooled, so it's significantly discounted.

So, so we get a variety of benefits by being pooled. We also get your expertise on the risk management side of it. Absolutely. But, but to say that the premium doesn't go up if we have a claim, it pretty much does because we're paying it back over 5 years. I mean, so our overall cost would go up depending on our claims, right?

Well, the premium doesn't, and I, and I don't want to— I don't want to do semantics, but the preferred is what I'm saying.

Yeah, overall cost would go up because we've got that, right?

So, right, right, it would go up the amount of your repayment divided by 5. So if you have the, you know, $100,000 loss, you divide it $20,000 a year, what you repay back to the reserve would go up $20,000. It's the motivation though also for reducing and not having claims, because if you have no claims, you don't pay anything back. Right, right. You get all the services and all the benefits and you don't pay anything back.

So, but that fee is in addition to your yearly premium?

The contribution is the one that covers everything and funds that reserve. That repayment is only if you have claims, and it is in addition to that contribution.

So is there a deductible?

There is, and it's different for each. Right now, for A member your size, do you remember? Is it $10,000?

So I looked at the printout that we got, you know, the last few years' claims.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of claims that are $8,000, $7,000. So that's just the city paying for that.

Because—

Yeah, remember, the city's, the city's gonna pay for all of it. If it's a $20,000 claim, you'd also pay all of that as well, right? Because we have— yeah, that repayment over time.

Over time.

So in Spanish Fork, we've chosen actually not to use the deductible because there's no— in effect, I'm going to pay the dollar amount the same over time.

You're paying either way. But what I've, what I've come to really appreciate about the IRMAA contribution and repayment is the transparency of where it's going. When it's a blended rate, say even through workers' comp, you pay your workers' comp rates, you're going to pay X dollars and what that— what is that going toward? Profit, your loss history, some other city's loss history, etc. That's all boiled into some dollar amount that is X.

And with, with the IRMAA contribution and then my, my loss history, I know exactly what I'm doing.

This is overhead and this is my loss history. I can budget for that, I can plan for that, and I can control at least— The contribution side doesn't go up very much and the loss history goes up and down based on my successes in my city. It's kind of effectively a managed self-insurance.

It is correct. Very much correct.

So I've got a question. If, um, when you determine what's going to be a claim and what isn't, uh, if, uh, if I'm the city manager and I run a red light and crash into somebody, is that something that Who decides what— I am the city manager, I bet I, but I did something that probably wasn't— I mean, in my mind, that probably wasn't in the role of their job description to run a red light and hurt somebody.

But is there—

I would never run a red light.

So is that— but who decides whether IRMAA is going to pay for that? IRMAA meaning the city is going to pay for it.

Is it on the job?

Ultimately, ultimately, you do. Well, with, with regards to claims, by statute, claims come to the individual city. It has to be served at the city. You can't serve it to IRMAA because we're not the one you're filing a claim against. So you file a claim with the city, and then the city evaluates that and determines, no, we want IRMAA's help with this, or no, we'll just handle it on our own. And some cities do handle a small percentage of claims on their own. Jason, you good?

As a standard practice here at Orem City, so anytime we have an incident that involved an employee but it also involved a resident or another party unaffiliated with Orem, we always get IRMAA involved. If I've got an employee that backs into a mailbox with a city vehicle, that's something that I could handle internally.

But when—

especially when there's an injury to third party, PERMA's always made aware of that and we jump on it.

So our services with regard to investigations, adjusting, those are covered in your contribution. So there's no additional repayment for any of that. The only time it becomes a repayment is when we have to go outside for legal assistance or if there is a settlement that at some point in time.

If—

I mean, I— there's an attorney in the room, or maybe more, but there is a concept called vicarious liability. So when you're acting on behalf of the city, running a red light is not something we would ask our city manager to do, but if he were to do that and acting on behalf of the city, the city would have some potential liability.

But only during work hours, like if he was—

Yeah, it would be when he's acting on behalf of the city or related to city business. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, so if he's driving to the grocery store and that happens, then no, we're not going to be involved in that. But if he's going to meet with legal counsel or he's going to a MAG meeting or something like that, then yes. So oftentimes you don't get to choose what becomes a claim. you through IRMAA get to choose how you handle it. But the resident that got hit by the city manager in this example, they're the ones that are going to file that claim and it will work through whatever processes you have.

Brent, we—

I know you're going to— I'm not throwing you under the bus.

But, uh, but for example, our police officers.

Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna get to the police officer as they're driving a police car.

Yeah, they're driving a police car at night off duty.

That's where that off-duty coverage comes in, because even though they're going to the gym, which is clearly on their own, they're going to the grocery store or whatever, if you— if they're in an ORM vehicle and they cause that accident, that claim will likely filter into you, will have to be managed by those processes that you have.

I have a question.

If something goes to court, is it Steve or some attorney, or is it your attorney, or is it both that are representing interests?

This is my favorite part of IRMAA.

It is both.

It is both.

We don't ever— IRMAA never wants to do something the city doesn't want done with regard to their claim or litigation. And so Steve would be working hand in hand with an attorney who handles those type of lawsuits. The legal system is just like physicians and everywhere else, you have specialists. And we, because one of our higher dollar value claims relate to law enforcement liability, we have a few attorneys who that's all they do. So they know the ins and outs of it, but they would coordinate with Steve.

Okay.

To ensure that the city's needs are being met and also the legal needs are being met.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

So you don't have a premises medical. You have adjusters to decide if like a slip and fall is gonna be covered under IRMAA.

Is that right?

So you don't have a—

do we have a set premises medical per person, you know?

No, no.

What would happen is if you had a slip and fall, That would be considered bodily injury coverage, and we do have coverage for that. IRMAA would cover in the self-insured retention up to $1 million. Anything above that would go to our excess carrier, but they operate based on our guidance with our joint protection plan, which our members have created. Um, but what happens is IRMAA, if you reached out to IRMAA and said we had a slip, trip, and fall, it doesn't look good, we would send out one of our representatives, live you out there, usually, and her adjusting to go out and investigate it and say, we don't think the liability is Orem City's. And then Libby would contact Jason and Steve and say, here's how we see this. And then they would make a decision regarding how we move forward with it, whether we deny the claim, whether we offer some settlement compromise just to not spend exorbitant legal fees fighting it if the individual's Adamant, or if it came back that there was some liability, then that discussion again would happen with Orem City and Libby regarding what she normally sees. She sees thousands of these a year, so she can kind of tell you this is how these go. This is how they settle. This is what happens if they go to trial. This is this is the amount that this claim is actually worth. And then Orange City can make a decision on whether or not they want to try to settle or not, or what process they want to go from there.

So I guess my question is, are they always liability-based?

Premises medical, you just pay when people get hurt on your property, right? But liability is another issue. So you just— is everything liability-based, a payment?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, you're talking about your own home.

Like, I have premises medical.

Yeah, that medical insurance that you have there.

Correct.

And we're talking about a place that you and I aren't controlling, like a park.

But if someone's at the ballpark and they get injured, as to, you know, act of God, no fault of their own, we're not going to give them medical coverage for their injury unless there's some liability.

But you're going to help decide that, right? You're going to be the ones that can participate.

Sure.

Yeah, it's ultimately a decision to make. We've had, um, we had a claim not long ago Actually, as soon as the pond— the reservoir froze over, there's a bunch of signs saying don't play on the reservoir, be careful of the ice, and so on and so forth. Family was out there playing on the ice, a child slipped through the ice. They pulled them out right away, but the upset was that this brand new $300 coat was ruined because of it. In that case, the city said You know what, we'll just buy them a new coat. But there was no liability from the standpoint of us reviewing the case. There was no liability that we would— IRMAA would say, yeah, we have liability here, we should probably look at settling this claim.

So, yeah, just for an example, I'm trying to get my wrap around this still. So I'm just looking through the different claims, you know, a lot of smaller claims. The biggest one I see though, like in the last year for Orem, was it a $24,000 claim, an ethics claim? So who's this? What is that? And is there ever a time that the mayor and city council would weigh in on a claim or have any say on a claim?

That's— that would be absolutely the prerogative of the mayor and city council.

I mean, how would they know to set up whatever process you want internally?

We have We have 4 or 5 different that I've seen in different cities. In, in a couple of cities, anything that appears to be under $100,000, the mayor and council are uninterested in. They want the city manager to just handle it with staff in conjunction with IRMAA. There's a couple other cities that once a week, um, the mayor and council get notified of any claims that are out there. Um, and the mayor and council determine whether or not they want to be involved and know more about that. And then there are closed-door sessions with, uh, the city attorney to prevent— to provide for confidentiality and the attorney-client privilege.

So somebody at the city would have said pay it, pay it, and then we'll pay it back over 5 years, or—

Correct.

So someone okayed $24,000. That could be also associated fees. That might be attorney's costs. You need to get into the details.

Yeah, I need to be able to know which one that is and then pull, pull up the history on that.

I mean, a point of clarification, the ethics complaints are governed by Utah law. There's only a certain group of people that are allowed to know that. City Council is not among that group.

The city attorney is the one that manages that claim on behalf of the city.

So it's not unusual that the city council would not know about an ethics complaint being filed.

That may be true. Yeah, I'm not as familiar with that individual one.

Yeah, and that's a very unique animal. Probably that's the only situation where you wouldn't be able to really talk about that particular claim with the city council.

So it's just a very unique one here.

So wait a minute, not even in a closed door. Why not a closed door? If we're over IRMAA, why are we not?

No, it's because state law governs the—

governs or restricts the dissemination of information related to ethics complaints. So it's just purely an ethics complaint. So yeah, other types of complaints or other types of legal— So Utah law basically says you just can't talk about it, can't tell anybody about it, can't tell who's involved, anything like that. Just very restrictive. But that's the only type of claim that I'm really aware of that has those kinds of restrictions. And as you look at those, the numbers on there for your particular city, I imagine that's going to be an all-encompassing number. So there might be a settlement amount inside of one of those, you know, an element of a dollar amount might include a settlement, might include attorney's fees and things like that. So the number that you're looking at in all of those claims isn't necessarily the That was written to, say, some individual, uh, that filed that claim. It would probably also include, if you had an attorney involved, the cost of that attorney and the like.

And just so you know, I get— there might be some more information. I, I brought these along, and inside here is the Orem risk report where we pulled the last 5 years worth of risk and data and claims information that is probably the most updated. Because I had it done just a couple months ago. So, and I'll leave that here for you and the council, and you can look at that. That may shed a little more light.

But we're—

IRMAA is bound by law too. We are a governmental body. So not only do we have to— does GRAMA apply to us just as it does to a city, we have to follow whatever exceptions or rules are in there by statute.

So there's 15 cities that are part of Irma. What do the other cities do? Do they go to CHUB or they go to somebody else?

Some of them are with the local government trust, which treats most things like an insurance company. And then some of the counties are with the county insurance pool that's on the counties. And there are a few that just go out and independently purchase insurance. You have a couple that are small and don't feel like they need the other services that IRMAA provides. On the same token, we have enterprise that couldn't be happier to have all the services that IRMAA provides. So, and they, I think I can recall they had a claim just a year ago and probably haven't had one for 3 or 4 years before that.

So— But Dave, Out of all 15 of those cities, your most important and highest priority city is the city of Orem, right?

Absolutely.

It's actually where— well, it's where Orem headquarters are.

Why, yes, where we're headquartered.

Yes, you are the golden child.

I think the thing that some people miss in that last question was they just got my insurance. The minute you do that, you turn over control You have no more control over how that claim is handled. And if you as a council say, no, we absolutely want to fight this, insurance company says, I don't care, and they'll settle or do whatever they want. That is one of the really benefits that most of our cities like, the local control. Another one is you can't buy a lot of the insurance we have out on the market. as an individual municipality. This last year, we were pretty much told that Lloyd's of London, which is the largest and one of the only few remaining cyber risk insurers out there, is not going to insure governments anymore because governments don't invest the amount of money in information technology security that private corporate entities do. Then they came in and said, if you'll do dual-factor authentication, we'll insure IRMAA, because IRMAA is low risk. So you actually have $10 million worth of cyber risk insurance, which is almost unheard of for a municipality. I'm not aware of any. Our brokers have searched around. Most people are getting out of the cyber risk insurance market because it's just gotten to be too volatile now.

But just to clarify, so that's where it gets a little bit confusing.

So we've got cyber risk insurance.

Correct.

But if we had a claim, you know, for $2 million or whatever, that would go to the cyber risk insurance, right? Is that what you're saying? Versus the, like, the repayment—

Versus the repayment program, yes.

So that would go to that.

Yes.

Then would we still be responsible to pay it back?

No.

So that's a separate—

Correct.

Sleeve.

It's a policy that IRMAA buys. It's a policy that IRMAA buys because So in that case, you don't pay it back?

No. And there are some of those that you don't, where we have an extra policy. But the self-insured retention is a self-revolving fund. You pay in, you use, you pay back, you use, you pay in, you use, and so on. Some of those policies, because they're so costly— I've handled a couple of claims. It's about— unfortunately, this is no reflection on anyone from information technology. But once they've gotten into your system, if it's somebody very complicated, historically we don't see the ability to do data forensics at the level needed before you trigger all kinds of mandatory statutory notifications, which cost a lot of money to do. What happens is there are a few companies out there that do that, and if you're not insured, it's about $21,000 a day. for them to come in because they will certify what data was or wasn't exfiltrated from your system. Um, and so you can run up a $200,000 or $300,000, $400,000 bill right away, which is why IRMAA just pays it and Lloyd's of London is responsible for making that determination and paying the costs of it.

We are not.

So in that case, you do pay— I don't remember what your point portion was $16,000 a year. You have $10 million worth of coverage and you don't pay any of that back. So it's a, it's a, it's a hybrid system where it's not really realistic to have you pay back $10 million. We go out and we buy the excess insurance and we buy it at a group rate, which is discounted.

So is your land use excess insurance also? Land use?

No, we do not. No one will provide excess insurance for land use.

So that's self—

It's— we're self-insured.

And what's that, a million, did you say?

We're debating that right now.

Yeah, as a board, we, we have paid up to a million before. And as a board, which of course you have input in that, what should that cap be at to not bankrupt Irma? Honestly, that would be— that's the risk we run with land use. because they're very volatile. You probably didn't see on that risk report, but the one that I have here you'll see Orem has had a rather large land use claim.

In our last board meeting, I think the discussion was around that million-dollar mark, but we'll set that up.

Now, history— we've done the history since the inception of IRMAA in 1986, the first land use-related claim, and on average those claims settle Around $80,000, $85,000 to $86,000. But we have had a few big ones. We've had a couple that were in the $300,000 range and one over a million. So we believe that at that million-dollar coverage or somewhere around there, that it won't jeopardize IRMAA's solvency long-term for its members.

But via the Highway Service.

Yeah.

So, Dave, you use the analogy of in the insurance world, kind of like the medical world, where there's specialists, and you've talked a little bit about specialists or specializing insurance. In addition to cybersecurity, is there any other specialist or narrowly tailored insurance plans that IRMAA provides that isn't self-insurance in nature?

We do—

well, we do provide the auto physical plan, which is just an internal— we talked about that. That's that $390,000— not $390 per vehicle. Most of our fleets participate or participate to an extent. I don't think all of your vehicles are.

That would include our leased vehicles.

Yeah.

Anything that is under a current lease.

Roger that.

Right.

Yeah, property is another one that our self-insured retention for those cyber risks.

Um, earthquake.

Yeah, earthquake insurance.

What's the upper max on earthquake?

Yeah, it actually— it's covered under our $750 million. So I mean, you— we could have an earthquake in the Wasatch Front and And we would have up to $750 million.

And no deductible.

I mean, is it like a 10% deductible?

No, it's a fixed deductible. And I'd have to go look.

I don't know that off the top of my head.

Because honestly, we don't have a lot of claims. That sounds terrible. I mean, I should probably have all of that memorized.

I think it's $50,000.

Yeah, it's general insurance.

There's a percentage.

But that's back to the type that you don't repay, right? That's like—

Correct. That's one that you wouldn't repay. What we've tried to do is a hybrid of the ones that you could repay are ones that frankly generally are going to be the lower cost types of claims. So it's just out of that reserve. It's very similar to how I have my auto insurance. I, you know, if you have a $500 deductible, you pay a higher premium than if you have $1,000. You can get $2,500 deductible I have 3 cars. I leave $7,500 in a savings account and it just earns interest. Not much, but it earns interest. So I never have to worry about, do I have to pay my deductible? I pay that, I can take $2,500 out and pay it because it's viable and not going to create a problem or hardship. Irma does the same thing with the reserve, that million-dollar reserve. Those are the ones that a city can repay within a reasonable time, and it's not as much of a hardship. But if you have a $250 million structural loss or property loss, that would be difficult for the city. Yeah, and so that's why we buy that. It's a hybrid. This is how we do it. I don't know another way to describe it, but that's— yeah.

I do have a question.

Like, if there was an earthquake and it infected many cities, and that money gets used like that. Is there a hierarchy of like, who would get claims before?

Back to that golden child.

Yeah, I wish I could explain property adjusting to you. But I can tell you, they do prioritize property adjusting. And how they do that. And first off, we are on a claims-made basis, so we handle claims as we receive them, and it's first come, that's how we handle it. Now, obviously, if there were multiple cities in the Wasatch Front, they'd all be filing at the same time, and we'd be in contact with FM Global. The other thing I will tell you from Irma's perspective is we are with the largest and most solvent insurers in the world. Our cyber risk is with Lloyd's of London. They are the largest insurer in the world. They're Beazley Group. We are with FM Global Factory Mutual, which is the largest property insurer in the world. So we feel confident about our position, where we are, and their viability, just like Irma's reserve viability. We do an actuarial projection every year to make sure we're viable to continue operating the way we are. that we don't need to adjust coverage. We're having one done— this will answer your land use— we're having an actuarial study done right now to say, what are the probability models based on our history and based on current Insurance Service Organization claims history? Where should we say we're going to cap insurance for our members? What's that number? Is it $900,000? Is it $1.5 million? And what is the probability that we could pay that out in perpetuity without diminishing our insurance reserve?

Okay, we're gonna try to move on unless anybody else has any more questions.

Thank you.

All right, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna leave these here. You want me to leave them with you?

So where's your office in Orange?

We're on 800 North over there, and By the way, we have a— we are embedded in Orem. We have a contract with you. Your IT department provides service for us. We, I mean, we've been a partner with Orem for a long, long time, and we like it.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Okay, let's, um, let's just take a 10-minute break for everybody to get their food, and we'll have a prayer, and then we'll come back and start at 5:20.

Thank you.

I didn't say Debbie. Sure.

Father in heaven, we have gathered today to discuss the business of the city. We ask a blessing on the food that's been provided, that it'll be nourishing and strengthening. We're thankful for the opportunity to have serve here in Orem and all of our great employees who support this great city. And we ask these favors and blessings in thy holy name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Next up is Daniel Grant, CUWD Water Conservation Program.

And Chris, if you'd like to introduce— Thank you, Mayor and Council. For about 10 minutes or so, we're going to have a presentation and want some Q&A during that presentation.

I've invited Savannah Peterson from Central Utah Water Conservancy District.

I don't know if Terry, you know her?

You got the same last name.

Yes.

She comes to us from Central Utah Water Conservancy District. She will be speaking on the water conservation standards that they have, and they offer rebate programs to residents if the City of Orem adopts certain standards in our planning for land use and for landscaping in particular.

So she works with Rick Malloy. Between her and Rick, they have reached out to several communities and are having a really quite an extensive public outreach effort to talk to us about water conservation and to help us reduce some of the water use and water costs on behalf of the city.

So I'll turn the time over to Savannah.

Thank you for your time.

I'm excited to be here. Uh, I am the Water Conservation Programs Manager at Central Utah Water. I've been there for about a year and a half, so this is all new for me, and I'm excited to get to know everybody. I wanted to talk a little bit about our— So some of the programs that we offer are— we offer residential and commercial industrial, a bunch of different kinds of rebate programs. The ones that I wanted to focus on today were the residential programs that have skyrocketed in popularity lately. We've been offering them since late 2021. And those are the landscaping programs we've offered since 2021. We also offer a smart control rebate and a toilet rebate. Those, just as a clarification, will be available to your residents whether or not these ordinances get adopted. They're a great opportunity and they come from a different pot of funding than these landscaping rebates, so those will still be there. The Complete Strip program is specific Specifically for park strips, it paid $1 per square foot up to $1.25. And Localscapes Rewards was for larger landscaping projects. So if somebody wanted to switch out their whole front yard, backyard, the entire thing, we could help cover that. Had a little bit lower square footage rebate, but it was still helpful. In 2022— Can I pause there? Your Localscapes, is that what you're talking about? Similar. This is our own program that we've designed with Georgia Valley. They actually started it, and it uses zero-skating principles but specifically for Utah, so it's a little more localized. Definitely not zero-skating. So, um, in 2022, this is for Orem residents. Out of the projects that we had applications for, the ones that have been completed and paid out, was a little over $17,000. The in-process projects that we anticipate to be completed in this following year are about $179,000. That is a real lowball. I think it's going to be closer to $200,000 just from the 2022 applications. We've decided to pay applicants for last year, the new rate that I'll talk about in a second. So everybody was getting a lot more money than they anticipated, which is nice. And anybody who completed— sorry, anybody who applied in the past and has yet to complete it will still be able to participate in the program whether or not these finances get adopted on time, so they won't be cut off.

That would be pretty rough.

This is an example from an OREM resident that participated in the Work Escape Program. We're not anti-grass, we're anti-non-functional turf, so we want to make sure that any grass that is being installed in landscapes is usable.

So, so can you explain that picture?

Yeah, as far as that's just dying grass on top, right?

Yeah, this is just their yard when they applied. They said, we don't need all of this, we don't use it. They weren't Taking care of it like they wanted to, so they applied for a rebate. Is that AstroTurf or what is that? No, this is real grass. Yeah, um, just took out the spaces that they weren't using very much, wanted to take some green space, so they put grass in their front yard.

So, so that's grass on top, it's grass on bottom, and the main thing that they changed is that strip in the front?

Yeah, they got rid of, um, the grass next to their house. They got rid of some grass that was in The whole left side is no longer grass.

Okay.

And then along the side of the house, just some mulch, something.

Yes. Yeah, they chose to use bark mulch. Here's some more. These are examples of the lookier strips that we've had. There's a lot of variety. We like to give residents a lot of freedom to choose what they want to do within city code. So it's really popular because people People feel like they can take more ownership of it because it's something they designed.

So what percentage of the project does it pay for, your program?

It depends. We've had some DIYers who our rebate has covered the entire cost of the project. If somebody hires a really good landscaper and doesn't source any materials themselves, ours can— it's sometimes like 10%, sometimes 100%. It really decides It depends on what people choose to do.

But per square foot, it's $2 to $3 this coming year?

Our coming— yes, our coming year it'll be $2 to $3.

So it'll give you $2 to $3 a square foot to tear up sod and replace it with a local state like you see here on the screen.

Okay. Yeah.

And this is being funded through a $5 million note that was a part of a landscape bill last year, I believe.

And it's now being implemented through water conservation And part of this funding comes from the district, so about half of it will come from us and then half will come from the state. So these water efficiency standards I'll talk about in a second are contingent upon both sets of funding. So, but you expect more funding because water's a topic that's going to be—

Yeah, yes, we're going to get more funding.

We're going to get water funding. One of the other programs we offer is the landscape Leadership Grant. This is for municipalities, institutional, industrial, anybody who wants to do water-efficient landscaping projects. It's similar to LocalScapes. It's really great. We have it on our website. I can talk more about that. We have the Commercial Smart Controller Rebate. I'm not sure if Orem has participated in that.

I think so. Yes, we are right now.

Perfect. So that doesn't apply so much. Our water efficiency program pretty much is a catch-all for everything else that's not landscaping or device. It's a lot of agricultural projects, secondary metering. It's— I think we're going to have more money than a million. This is a little out of date.

We have a bigger pot of money than that.

So the new programs that were mentioned coming in 2023 will be housed in Utah Water Savers. which is a website that is statewide. All of the different water districts use it to facilitate these. We'll be jumping up from $1 per square foot to up to $3 per square foot. We'll have a pretty hefty marketing campaign. This year we had almost no marketing, so all of the participation we've had was just word of mouth, people interested in water conservation on their own. Um, so with marketing and a heavily increased rebate amount, we anticipate a lot more participation and interest. We're going to market through Orem, like social media? What does that mean? Yes, yeah, we have billboards, we have a video campaign, there's gonna be some displays on buses, uh, social media, all sorts. We're trying all of the avenues we can. We should be on some ads this year, so it'll be all over the place.

We'll be specifically teaming up with, with Savannah and Central Utah Water via our social media. We'll have a social media campaign that we'll do together.

We'll submit flyers, we'll put them on our website.

We're going to get the word out to promote this.

And you mentioned that it was $778,000 or so that was being used this last year, and so if it's gone up 2 to 3 times, And they're going to be more applicants. It could be like, what, 500,000 maybe?

Yes.

So it's going to be highly successful, I believe.

And if I remember right, Orem City had the second highest number of applications of anybody. So your residents are interested and do like these programs. Well, I know our Natural Resource Committee is going to be all over this. They definitely want to promote them. The program is just going to be all sorts of better this time. Improvements, it's easier for somebody who wants to do smaller projects, so there's a lot of options. The purpose of the water efficiency standards that we'll be talking about are essentially to conserve our natural resources. We've made agreements with other Colorado River I'm so sorry. Other people who use the Colorado River water to conserve our water as much as possible, to cut down on turf that's not essential in our service area. So we're really prioritizing these conservation programs and want to make them available to as many residents as possible. And outdoor landscaping is kind of the easiest place to get those water savings. This applies to Specifically new developments. And to the landscaping that is required by your city. So when we talk about the turf restrictions in a second, that's only in new builds. That's not ripping out existing turf, and it's only— I believe Orem only requires front and side yards to be landscaped, or only front yards. So if a resident decides that they want to have more grass in their backyard, that's great. So we're not restricting turf too much. The main points that would need to be adopted into your city code for these programs to continue to be offered are that lawn shall not be installed on slopes or in areas that are less than 8 feet wide at its narrowest point. This is just for irrigation efficiency. There's not really any on the market that can irrigate anything narrower than that efficiently. In small lots, there's a little bit of flexibility. If that 8-foot rule can't be accommodated or the yard will be smaller than 250 square feet, then that's off the table. It doesn't apply. In commercial, industrial, multifamily areas, the lawn maximum would be 20% outside of active recreation. So lawn isn't usually necessary as much in front of the store, so we'd rather it be somewhere like a park. Are there any questions so far?

So Chris, we could apply for some of these funds, for example, for the new landscaping plaza area of the city center? We would—

you would be able to adopt your We do, we do, uh, we currently are using the program for the controllers right now.

But yeah, we could, we are planning on that. We could also do that at Hillcrest and probably even more effectively at Heritage because that's going to be more water conservation.

Yeah.

In those water efficiency standards I handed out, I have more copies too if anybody else needs them. The only section that needs to be adopted to qualify for these are Section 4, highlighted. It just refers to the turfgrass. Everything else in there is recommendations that lead to better landscapes long-term, things like the irrigation requirements, mulch requirements, plant density. are all very helpful, but we're only asking for the one ordinances to be adopted. So that's what the rest of this presentation is referring to. Smart controllers are another great thing to require in new developments. It's not mandatory for this material. There's also a section that talks about indoor fixtures. That's lower-hanging fruit for us, but we it's better for homes to be installed with water-efficient fixtures from the beginning, so we're not having to chase our tails to replace those as they are wasteful. But that's about all I have. Are there any questions I can answer? I do have a question. As we try to message, because we're having this record snowfall this year, but come summer we're still going to need to conserve, do you have any idea of how to message, we had a good year, but you Yes, like, how are you going to message that? So we've had all of those headlines, if you remember from this last year, that were 20-year mega drought. I think the main way we're going to be messaging water conservation this year is saying we had 20 years of an incredible drought. It's going to take more than one wet year to get out of that. And if you look at reservoir levels, that kind of thing, they're still pretty low, and the Utah Drought Monitor still shows most of the state in some form of drought up to— I think there's quite a bit of the state is still in extreme drought. So we've had a good year and that's great, but that doesn't get us out of trouble. So it's okay to show gratitude for what we've received this year and say, look how wonderful this is. I mean, I don't, I don't remember this much snow from a lot for a long time, so this has been fantastic, but we're just getting out. And I'm from Heber. This is what we— yeah, Heber is like it used to be when I was younger, what they got this year. Should we just put still pray? But yeah, yes, that's it right there.

Don't stop.

Don't stop.

I heard a report that suggested that it would take about 5 years, 5 more years of this kind of weather to fill up all of our reservoirs, including Lake Powell.

So that's a good point.

So keep praying.

Yeah, yeah, good start.

It's a good—

it's a great start.

It's a great start.

Still the second driest state in the nation.

Showing gratitude doesn't mean we don't understand that we still have a long way to go.

So are there grants available for people willing to comply with this?

Is that what we're talking about?

Yes. Yeah, all of these programs I mentioned are available for cities who have adopted the bullet points in Section 4 of that document.

So just in line with the bringing the lawns back, it does limit any new development.

We maximize 20% grass, 35% turf. 20% in industrial, multifamily, institutional, outside of active recreation. In residential, it would be 35%.

landscape your whole front yard, we would say no, only 35% of it can be grass. So that's, that's something we'll bring forward to make sure that you're comfortable with us doing that. But that's something we'll have to amend our landscaping ordinance to show.

Wasn't there some concern over heat, over like rocks and too much? Yeah, that is a concern.

Right now we don't require grass. You can do bushes, shrubs, ground covers. We don't have a maximum So this would set that standard. So right now there's no max, there's no minimum.

So I'm just thinking my front yard, you know, I have my driveway, I have my little shrub area, and then I have grass. So it counts the driveway too, right? Oh, it doesn't count the area that could be landscaped. Okay, well, that's good to know. And again, this only applies to the front yards that are required to be landscaped. for certificate of occupancy. So somebody who wants a lot of grass in their backyard for kids to play, that kind of thing, they still have that option.

Savannah, you mentioned this is only for new development, but what about if Linnea wanted to redo her front yard?

That's what our programs are for. So this is, this is requiring new developments to just have it installed, and I will pay anybody else who wants to switch over to something. But in order to do that, we need to change the solar panels, right? Yes.

So what's your contact information?

It is— I have a bunch of business cards too, but there it is right on the screen. And I would be happy to meet with anybody who wants to talk about this further.

We've invited Savannah to also present at our Public Works Advisory Commission.

Maybe informally, not formally, but you're invited to present this.

And then also natural resources.

Well, Sarah, you're, you're, you're on the committee, right? Are you the, are you the lead there on the committee?

No, I'm not the current chair.

Okay, okay, we'll have Matt get a hold of you.

That's all I have.

If there's any other questions So when you say 35% grass, that's just the grass part. So you've got flower beds, you got planters, you got all kinds of other things that doesn't count, right?

No, just 35% grass.

That's the front yard, side yards, street side yards, or front yard, not a side. It's not required to be landscape, just the front or a street side on a corner.

Those are required by the city of the site and the back.

Sounds good. Thank you.

All right, well, thank you so much for your time. We've got one last presentation, and that's from Carrie.

You mean last the best?

Yes.

Well, while Carson is getting this ready, I thought I'd introduce you to him. I think you probably noticed we have a new face in the room. So Carson Hardy is coming to us from Mesa, Arizona, is where he was working for the City of Mesa, and we stole him away from them. So he is an analyst for us.

So welcome home.

True. And just really quickly, I'm gonna have Amy Peterson stand up. Amy Peterson is now the HR manager, so she's taking on more of a larger role with us, so she is taking on some more of this responsibility. So I just wanted you to get to know her face. Okay, just really quickly, I know we're short on time. We do an equal employment opportunity plan each year, and this is for city employees. employees, not for the community, but for city employees. And it's a 2-year plan. And it expired— our previous one expired at the end of 2022. So we do have a new plan. It's up on the city website. If you go under Human Resources, you can see the plan there. It's about 40 pages long. So I won't make you read the whole thing, but I'll just give you some, some really brief highlights. But the, the point of an equal opportunity plan is to make sure that we're meeting the levels of— that we need to, to make sure that we are equal to what our community is. So our community demographics equal to what we have in the city organization. So just to give you a brief overview of our key accomplishments from our previous 2 years, we looked at changing and doing more targeting opportunities for job announcements, especially through social media. We used our city website and social media outlets a lot more than we had in the past to represent some of our job opportunities, and that's been a success for us to get some. We've changed our online job application process to reduce barriers so people didn't have to physically come in. They could do it more online. We also removed the salary requirement And the salary history when you, when you apply for a job, because we found that studies have shown that women tend to not negotiate when it comes to getting jobs. And so we wanted to remove that barrier so that we weren't aware of what they were making previously, so that we would have the upper hand on the negotiating.

What does that mean, women don't negotiate?

Well, so lots of studies have shown that men are a lot better at negotiating. Their salary when they come into work. So, um, I did not negotiate very well for my first job. There you go, right? I do think that that trend is changing.

It is a learned skill.

I learned how to do it. It is a learned skill. Yes, it is. It's not a natural thing to, first of all, put yourself out there and then really kind of, you know, I don't know.

My wife hates the fact that the car lane switches.

See, I love that. I love to haggle. I've learned it, but I didn't— yeah, you get something you have to learn.

Yeah, yeah.

We also created an employee resource group that met quarterly to talk about ways that we could improve belonging for other employees to make sure that everyone feels welcome here. We also offer an incentive and a paid bonus to employees that do speak Spanish here on behalf of the city during their, their workday. So we do give them a bonus at the end of the year. And then one thing that I'm really excited about is that we partnered with UVU, their Spanish department, and we had UVU students translate a lot of our city website into Spanish. So that was really a good project. With training and accessibility, we did the mandatory sexual harassment Training. We started supervisor trainings for unconscious bias, and we also do specific trainings in departments. So if departments are having issues with welcoming other people—

Unconscious bias is not scientifically based.

No psychologist or physician would ever tell the difference between conscious and unconscious bias. In fact, there's a new article that just came out. Harvard did an article, uh, another scientific publication did an article that this type of training with cities or even with organizations probably does more harm than good.

And so if you look at the literature, maybe the city council should look at the literature on what you call unconscious bias or some of these programs where you're training employees with the underlying assumption that we're all racist or bigots, I think that's where the program goes off the rails.

So that is not our intention of doing these trainings, but I appreciate you bringing that up. Our intention is to just make sure that employees are aware that some— like one of the trainings that we had, we had everybody close their eyes and we say— and there was a gentleman talking, saying, and just, oh, here comes my My boss, and, and people would imagine what that boss would look like just in your mind, right? Was that just something learned, or was that something that you've experienced yourself? And, and that's what we want people to be aware of, really. But, but I appreciate that. Maybe we need to look into that a little bit more.

Because closing your eyes is not training on focus on unconscious bias. That's a whole different story. I'm really uncomfortable with unconscious bias being taught at Farm City as well. It's a real woke—

I just thought that had very little substance.

Okay, well, we'll look into that and, and maybe circle back on that. Okay, um, we also did disability in the workplace training. I know that Jeff and, and Dave attended that, and that was really successful to make sure Phil's welcome there.

I was there.

Yeah, Debbie was there as well. And then we created an employee intranet. It's called Walter, and that's an opportunity for employees to go in and read our employee handbook and our other things with EEO. So with career development, we are really pushing and promoting the opportunity for employees that are current employees to work towards Having training opportunities and tuition opportunities so that they can promote within. We would really like to see employees that come in and are dedicated to the city to be able to promote within the organization. And then we also want to make sure that we're always accommodating employees and job applicants that have disabilities and medical conditions. And then quarterly, we started our BABO, or Building a Better Orem trainings, and that's an opportunity for employees to feel welcome and engaged with each other. And then again, we do a monthly supervisor leadership and management training. So our key goals for this new EEO 2 years is that we want to increase our recruitment and outreach efforts. We want to continue to build relationships with professional organizations for underserved communities, and we want to ensure that we have diverse hiring panels and streamlining the onboarding process. And one thing that we're working on right now is with our new HRIS build that our IT team is doing, is that we can have our HR team review the application candidate questions that they will have to be asked during the interviews to make sure that we are staying away from any inappropriate questions to protect ourselves from lawsuits. With career development and retention, I think that you're aware that we started the Women in Leadership Scholarship. That's been really well received. We've had a lot of women that have taken advantage of that. In fact, Amy Peterson, who's now in a leadership role here with the city, she's, she's one of our recipients of that, and I would say that she's found that very successful with her opportunities to be able to to move in advance as well. And just by way of information, our tuition reimbursement program, we've used all of the money that we've had budgeted for. It's been very successful, especially in our police and our fire departments. They've really taken advantage of our tuition reimbursement programs. They've been able to add that into their STEP and career programs, so a lot more people are taking advantage of that. Finally, we want to look at our exit interviews to make sure that there aren't any pinpoints or pain points when employees are leaving that we can fix, because we do want to retain our employees and have them have a long-term career with us. Any questions? If you could have more in your budget for our scholarships for women, how much would you need? I think that— so this last year we We doubled what we had in the first year that we awarded, and because of that, we didn't get to give them the full $5,000. So it would be nice if we could maybe add another $20,000 to the budget, but I would encourage you to do so. I just think it creates a better employee and creates higher self-esteem and gives people the opportunity to finish.

So, thanks.

I've actually had a site. I'd love mentoring. It's been a great— one of the greatest experiences I've had. And we appreciate you doing that, and I think it's been really successful for those in the room that have had the opportunity to be part of the scholarship or to be a mentor. It's, it's been rewarding.

Any other questions?

Thank you, Carrie.

It looks like you're doing a great job.

Thank you.

We're going to run through really quickly the agenda items. And let's just go through this, and if there's any concerns or questions, maybe please stop me as we go. Item 1, agenda review. Item 2, city council reports.

Thank you.

That's Debbie, if we have time.

Uh, number 3, a call to order. This is the 6 o'clock meeting. Uh, number 4, invitation.

That's Royce.

And then we've got invitation, or, uh, Scott McKinney on that, and then Pledge of Allegiance, Mike Carpenter. Item 6, mayor's report. Items referred by the council.

And that's—

we'll have a presentation from the Future Business Leaders of America. That's Timpanogos High School. And who's probably coordinating that?

You just call them up there. Just call them up and then you go get a picture with them or something too.

Michael Sellers is the person for the presentation.

Okay, so Michael Sellers.

Okay, we got personal appearances for 15 minutes. We got, uh, items which should just be approval of the meeting minutes.

Uh, item 9, uh, 9.1, appointment to Library Advisory Commission.

I can do that one. That's my application.

And we got Appointment to the Care Commission.

So that's Dave and Jeff. Oh, you're on that.

So when we get to that point, I'll just turn the time to you to make that happen.

Mayor, I'm 9.3 with Sarah.

And then we've got item 9.4, an ordinance amending city code by enacting subsection 2.7, extension of existing contract in unfavorable procurement environment. That's what we talked about last week.

Yes.

You'll take that? Okay, and we've got a resolution, item 5, resolution public hearing amending the Campus Drive residential parking permit area. That's you also, Steve.

And this needs an open public comment, I think.

Yes, public hearing.

Okay, yeah, okay, so, so we'll have the public hearing, then we'll vote on the resolution.

Yeah, after that.

Yes.

And then I have 9.6, uh, public hearing amending portions of Chapter 4 housing of the Warren General Plan, including updating Section 4.4.2 pertaining to moderate-income housing strategies. And then that's you, Jason, right?

Yeah, we talked about a couple weeks ago about coming into compliance with the non-compliance surveys. Planning Commission. Okay, sounds good. And then we'll have about it.

We'll have city manager information items. And after that, we'll adjourn to a closed session.

I'll give you a high level. I'm over summer class. Our theme this year is Be the One. This is the American Legion theme for the year, and it has kind of a military veterans theme, also with suicide prevention, especially in the military. June 8th, 9th, and 10th are the main— you know, I think the parade's on the 10th, so that week, second week of June. Arts Council, I'm also over. We're going to be wrapping utility boxes. We've received numerous submissions from the public, and some of them are just beautiful. open applications for Summerfest presentations on the theater as well as our summer concert series. National Resource, we just had our retreat and everything from rain barrels, social media, adding awards, all kinds of things that they're weighing in on. So they're very active. And I think they welcome this water conservation program.

I thought they'd be happy to message.

So 3 great activities.

I mean, 3 great committees. And I will And they're all doing some great things. So, okay, thank you.

All right, uh, we'll go ahead and adjourn to our next meeting.

Thank you. We'd like to welcome you to the City Council meeting tonight. We appreciate you coming out. We'd like to call this meeting to order. We'll start out with the invocation. From Scott McKinney, uh, from Center Point Church, and then we'll have the Pledge of Allegiance by Mike Carpenter.

Would you join me in prayer?

Our Father, we give you thanks today for this city, for the opportunity, um, the blessing to live in San such a great place. Lord, we thank you for all the great gifts you've given us and the beauty around us and this beautiful valley where this city exists. And Father, I thank you for these folks that have dedicated themselves to leadership in this city. Lord, I pray that you protect them, encourage them.

Lord, that they would understand that We are grateful for them.

And also, Lord, that you would give them wisdom as they make decisions for the future, for the betterment of all.

And we thank you that, that this city is run as well as it is.

And I'm thankful, Lord, on a personal level to be able to have been able to raise my family here. Thank you for that, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Thank you, Scott. Mike Carpenter, if you'd like to say the Pledge of Allegiance, please rise.

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

Thank you, Mike. Now we'd like to move on to a special presentation from Timpanogos High School. So if you'd like to bring the group up here and Thank you, Mayor, City Council.

This is truly an honor to be here. First, I want to introduce myself, then I'll introduce my student leaders here and let them explain to what we did this year. My name is Mike Sellers. I teach over at Timpanogos High School. I run a club called FBLA, Future Business Leaders of America, and I've been doing it for 34 years. Every year my club chooses a community service project, and the project— I'll let them explain it— but the project that we picked this year was due to the fact that one of my grandsons went in for surgery, and one of the things they did was brought him a little toy. to kind of relieve him. And I told the kids, I said, hey, why don't we reach out to firemen, policemen, and the Timpanogos Hospital and see what we can do? Um, so I'm going to go ahead and introduce, uh, these individuals, and then I'm going to turn over the time. They're the ones going to present this. So first, I have Sarah Wilson here. She is our secretary. Tali Henderson is my president, co-president, and, uh, Layla Tazmatova is my, uh, one of our VPs, and so I'm going to turn over the time to them.

You guys can stand up if you want to.

Okay.

Hello. Was what we call the North Pole Postal Service, which was—

It was a project where we had little elementary school students from 6 different schools, 51 different classes, write letters to Santa, and then they were sent to us and we responded to them, and then we delivered them to those students dressed as elves. We responded—

Go ahead when it's your turn to pull the mic over to you so everybody can hear.

Okay, so we responded to about 1,200 separate letters, and we were able to get help from different clubs in our school. So one of the clubs that we were able to get help from was our LIA club, which is Latinos in Action. And so with them, we were also able to apply to Spanish-speaking students, so we were able to expand our approach with this project. And we were also able to respond to a few Portuguese students.

So you said you had 1,200 letters that you received?

We received and responded to 1,200 letters, yeah.

Wow, that's huge.

Tell us a little bit more about the letters.

Oh, okay. So we created a few different templates for each letter, but the part that took most of the time is we would have to— so we would read each letter and we had a section within the letter where we would personalize to respond to the letter so that they would know we read it and they would know That for what we were responding to and that each one was personalized. So these are some pictures of us delivering them. It was a really amazing experience to get to be one of the elves to deliver it. We had some really adorable kids running up to us and asking us all sorts of questions, and just to be able to like see their faces light up when they heard that we were from the North Pole, and to hear from the teachers that the kids had so much fun doing this was— it really showed us the impact that we had, even if we weren't necessarily making someone's life better in a more economic way or in the typical service project kind of ways. We were making somebody's life better just by making them happier and by giving them a very happy memory. Yeah, like Talia said, we were able to spread Christmas cheer, and one of the really sweet experiences that we had with the children was one of our members, while she was out delivering the letters and the treat bags, one of the little girls ran up to her and gave her a hug and a sticker and was like, thank you so much for coming all the way from the North Pole to give us these letters, and it was just really sweet and thankful, and it really made this project worthwhile. Yeah, so when we were delivering the letters, I went as a photographer. I wasn't dressed up as an elf or anything, so I got to kind of watch the kids' reaction. And I think one of the most touching things was that they were a lot more excited to get the letters and see what Santa wrote back to them rather than the candy bags, which was still a bonus. But they got really excited to read the letters, and they— the teacher had to tell them, like, just Just wait a little bit, we'll open them later. And they were super excited to see what Santa wrote them. Our second project that we did was a toy drive. So many other clubs at our school do toy drives at the same time, but the way that we set it apart and made it a bit different was instead of giving those toys to families who were struggling to provide Christmas for their families, we gave it to kids, or rather will be giving it to kids in hospitals, or we'll be giving to the police department and firefighters. And this, that way was a little different. So yeah, we were able to get a whole bunch of toys by like putting posters around our school and getting it into our school newsletter and our TV. So the holiday toy drive red poster is the one that we hung around our school, and from that we were able to get a lot of students bringing some of their toys.

Yeah.

So We raised around— okay, we raised a good amount of toys, but some of them were used, which we decided to donate to Ugly's Closet, which is just a secondhand store, but a lot of lower-income families can purchase from there. So that was a good experience to be able to donate somewhere else too. We received And we're still receiving, but we have so far received about 200 toys. We'll be having 50 toys go to the police department as of right now. Actually, and then we also have 50 for the fire department. And then we have a variety of toys for the hospital, like we have 40 blankets, we have 29 stuffed animals, and a few like things like cars and books. So we would now like to call the representatives from the police department, fire department, and hospital.

Yeah, so if you're representing the fire department, police department, or Timpanogos High Hospital, can you come on up here? So we have to remember this is only a small portion portion of what we have because we didn't want to bring them all, so you guys have to take them somewhere and put them somewhere. So we're going to deliver these next week.

So this is just kind of small representation of what we're going to give you.

So go ahead and start.

This is for the fire department. This is for the hospital. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to our presentation today.

Well, thank you. If you would like to take a picture, okay, with the group, you're all here. Just come, come on up.

Yeah, yeah.

City Council, stand up. Mayor, if you and the council want to stand up behind us.

Okay, thank you, everyone.

Thank you guys for letting us do this.

Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for, uh, you girls for Thank you for your presentation and doing such an awesome program.

Can I make a comment, Mayor?

Sure.

So Timpanogos High School is where my kids went. And one thing that you said tonight that I really like about Timpanogos is our— the partnerships with the student coalitions, the student leadership coalitions that happen. The fact that you reached out to LIA, that this was an LIA and FBLA joint venture, joint activity. you know, joint way of serving the committee is just ways that I think as future business leaders you are really leading out on helping the community and creating unity in our community. So thank you so much for that.

And Jeff?

I just, I wanted to also say thank you.

I've known Mike Sellers for a lot of years, and we've actually had some of our children that have gone through this this FBLA course. And I just want to give Mr.

Sellers and you as a, as a group of leadership and to all of the students that serve and work with you a shout out because not only do they teach business principles and leadership principles, but I love the fact that they're also teaching how to give back to the community.

And this is just a wonderful example of that, that hard work and the service.

And the joy that you have provided and will continue to provide to these children.

So thank you for that. Thanks, Mike, for all you do.

Thank you.

We'll move on now to the public appearances. And we have a relatively short list tonight. We just have 3. And I'll just read this because I'm supposed to read this, but as far as personal appearances, says 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. Please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. And we'll start out with Jason, Jason Fowler.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Jason Fowler. I've lived and done business in Orem for over 20 years, and a new business partner and I are doing a startup company where we're building escape rooms inside shipping containers.

They're very high-end and expensive models that we're creating.

We say a little like a slice of Disneyland inside and out. They have a very sharp look. We're trying to find a place in Orem that we could launch and test this business model. And we're ready to spend quite a bit in marketing, but it doesn't seem like there's anywhere in Orem we can put one of these models. Based on the inquiries we've had at the development offices, anything built from corrugated metal is, is forbidden in all commercial areas as a building material or as a structural element. So shipping containers aren't mentioned anywhere, but corrugated metal as a material for structures is. It seems to be the sticking point, and we're not trying to use these as storage containers or something like that, and we're we're making them as nice as we can. And we're looking for a temporary permit to locate them in an appropriate area for family entertainment purposes. I love Orem, and I'd love to launch it here. And I'm wondering if, if there's a way to make that happen. And just, just at this sort of bottleneck. I don't know what happens now if you guys say anything, or if I just go sit down.

Yeah, usually we don't. This is just for public comment. Okay, but I will invite you to speak with someone here from the city because this is an interesting situation. I know shipping containers are being used more and more to house businesses in different situations around the country. So do we— who should he talk to? Mayor Jason Bench will get with this gentleman and talk options about Okay, yeah, you two can hook up afterwards and, and I would like to explore this more as a council too. So great, thank you, thank you. Okay, next we've got Ben Wheeler.

Good evening. Somebody asked me tonight when I came in if I was enjoying my retirement from city politics and I said I was, but that's going to change tonight. In November, voters of Alpine School District rejected the $595 million general obligation bond on the November 2022 ballot. Yesterday, Alpine School District posted a public notice to issue a $90 million lease revenue bond to build a new middle school in Eagle Mountain at 6%, which is a higher interest rate than if the bond would have passed. At tonight's board meeting, they are going to pass that. I wanted to make sure that that was right into the minutes of the Orem City Council meeting so that, that I would make sure to encourage the City Council that did such a great job of leadership in November over the last year to make sure that the taxpayers of Orem were protected, as Mayor Young explained why he originally became involved in the bond issue last year. So please understand that it would be important for us to follow through and to make sure that if this bond is, is passed, that it is attached to the school district and not necessarily the cities that are in it when this passes. And I encourage you to take the leverage and the leadership that the 5 of you did, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to stand in front of you as now unretired.

Have a good day.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next, next we've got David Davies. Oh, David Dawes. Okay.

There's 2 items. I live at 113 North 500 West. There's 2 items I'd like to talk to. First one though, and he's taken some the pictures that I've taken, and you'll eventually get those on the screen. But at the corner of 1st West and 500— no, 500 West and 1st North, there's a drain, and the sidewalk goes— they've slanted the sidewalk, and it goes right there by the drain. It's very dangerous. There's been several people that have fallen. And most of the time they, they bypass that, that corner where that slant is, and then get back on the sidewalk. And that's— a lot of them attend the chapel there. Right behind is a big parking lot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they attend the chapel there. I was wondering if there's some way they can change that. Also, this year, there was a bunch of leaves that clogged that drain. And, uh, I went out there and raked away the gray leaves away because we had a little lake there. So, uh, if you, if you take the time and look at these pictures that he's got, and then if you got just a few minutes, take a drive down to, uh, 1st West— no, 1st North and 500 West. And just walk that path and see how dangerous it is. Second item I'd like to talk to is you've got really wonderful facilities there for the fitness. Now, I, I do a swimming class there in the morning. And They're putting down a rubber size on the slick floor there, and they said it was going to take them 3 weeks to do it. If the workers would have had the opportunity and they just closed the poles for a week, they could have done it in a week. I'm saying it's going to take them 4 weeks to do it because it's got to cure. And what was really bad is they had to raise the garage doors there and the windows so the fumes could escape. I don't know if you've ever been in a swimming pool in this time of— this type of weather, and all of a sudden they open and a cold breeze starts blowing in there. I mean, it's quite cold. So, you know, if upper management would listen to the workers— sometimes the workers know better than the upper management. And I had that experience when I was working for a company. I had written a proposal where we could save probably 4 days working if they'd implement it, and it went nowhere. Then our president attended a meeting where they was closing in 10 days, 10 days, and he came back and he wanted to do that too. And they hired Arthur Andersen, which was a big firm then, to come and do it. And we were told to do whatever you can to help them. And they sent one of their accountants to me and he says, is there any way you can streamline this? I said, yeah. He says, I got a proposal here to probably save us up to 4 days. And his eyes got as big as silver dollars. They took that proposal down to California and they got paid $85,000 for it. I would have been happy with a $1,000 bonus, even more. Anyway, we have a beautiful city. I just bring these things to your attention to avoid any accident, any more accidents, or any really severe accidents with, with the sidewalk there. Thank you very much. Oh, I don't know if I mentioned that he's got, he's got the pictures and of the sidewalk that I'd be sending to, to you. And if you look at those, and as I said, take 10 minutes and walk down that, even 5 minutes, take 5 minutes to drive there and 5 minutes to walk down there and see how dangerous that is.

Thank you. Thank you, David. Bryn, would you like to have them follow up with somebody?

Yeah, Mayor, we'll have— I'll have Chris Shirkey, Public Works Director, follow up on the storm drain item.

And okay, so David did Did you hear that? So Chris Shirkey from Public Works is going to follow up with you on that item.

And I'll just readily admit that we have plenty of our wonderful employees who are, who are smarter and more creative than, than at least I am.

Thank you.

All right. Public comments are closed. We'll move on to the consent items. We've got approval of meeting minutes, the July 12, 2022 minutes, and the December 13, 2023 minutes.

Mayor, I make a motion that we approve the consent items as listed. I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, I guess.

Yeah, we need to— oh, yes. Oh, yes. I forgot to announce that there's a voice from heaven. So Dave Spencer is on from California tonight. He's out of town, but he's, he's here. And then Tom.

Yes, for Tom.

Yes, for Tom.

Okay.

All right, Mayor and Council, I'll just say that, at least as we've kind of discussed internally, we don't feel like it's an important distinction on whether you use the term yes or aye. Maybe for those that are listening to the recordings afterwards, it's slightly easier to understand when someone says yes, but it's not that— it's It's not so important that you should hesitate or anything.

Okay, so we should, we should come to some sort of agreement to simplify everyone's life.

Was there a state thing that changed that we were supposed to say yes?

I don't know why the change.

No, somebody said there was something that changed.

Oh, here comes Steve.

I'm not aware of anything. I think I was talking to Tess after last meeting, and I think she may have heard that this came up at a city recorder training meeting, and I'm not sure if it was based on some understanding of the law or just for clarity or personal preference, what that was, but—

I know Dave Spencer wants to be like US Congress and say aye.

Yeah, the—

I mean, the US Congress or the legislature says aye, so it doesn't make—

the federal trump states.

So, so I'm going to assign Lene to follow up on this and come to a consensus with everyone what it's going to be, and then we'll be one thing.

I will accept that challenge.

Okay.

All right, the consent items pass. We'll move on to the scheduled items. Item 9.1.

Yeah, so this is an appointment to a commission that I serve on, our Library Advisory Commission. And I'd like to appoint Katrina Brittner— she's here, if she would please stand— to our Library Advisory Commission. I'm really excited to have Katrina be on this commission. She's a working mom who has enjoyed the great programs of the Orem Library for over 25 years, and I'm happy about the diversity that you're bringing to our commission. We need your point of view, and I'm also grateful for your sacrifice to serve. Thanks, Katrina. So I make a motion to appoint Katrina Brittner to the Library Advisory Commission. I'll second.

Aye. Aye.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Aye.

Okay.

We're a divided council tonight.

Okay, that appointment passes. Next, we've got item 9.2. Jeff.

So Dave Spencer and I serve on the CARE Commission, and we would like to present Mary Schumacher. Mary, would you stand please?

I've known Mary for quite a few years, played volleyball with her, and we've sung together in choirs and done a lot of things over the years, but she's expressed a desire to, to serve on the Care Commission and to just give back to the community. And we've actually had a lot of really great applicants, and it's been really hard going through those, but Dave Spencer and I both felt really good about presenting Mary Schumacher to serve on the Care Commission. So I would like to move that we accept Mary Schumacher to serve on the Care Commission.

Second.

Aye.

Sure.

Yes, yes, yes. Oh yeah.

Aye.

Okay, the appointment passes. Usually you don't get this much entertainment from this group, but okay. Item, item 9.3. Debbie.

It is my pleasure to introduce Sarah Bateman. She's here if she can stand. This is a reappointment. This is beginning her 7th year with us. She was the founding member of this committee. Expertise, invaluable are things that I would describe her. I believe she was the founder of some swap meets and has become a sustainability expert. She is a crucial component of our natural Resources Stewardship Committee, and I'm happy to reappoint her to this committee. Actually, I should say, I move that we reappoint Sarah Bateman to the Natural Resources Stewardship Committee.

Second.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Aye.

Yes.

And Sarah, thank you.

You've been doing this for a long, long time. Thank you for your service and leadership here.

Thank you.

Thank you. The appointment passes. Next, we'll move on to item 9.4, amending Section 2-7-6 of the Orem City Code by enacting subsection 2-7-6, extension of existing contract in an unfavorable procurement environment. Presenting, Steve Earle.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. Mayor and City Council, we're Bringing to you a proposed ordinance amendment to Section 2-7-6. That section generally— well, city code generally requires that the city engage in competitive bidding processes when we go out to purchase services or products. There are a number of exceptions to the normal bidding requirements. We have discovered a situation recently in kind of uncertain economic times. Particularly dealing with high inflation, supply chain shortages, labor shortages, and things of that nature, that we found that we may— the city may actually be able to procure services of some kinds at a much favorable rate by extending an existing contract as opposed to putting a contract for those services or goods out to bid. And so we're proposing this amendment to allow the city to engage in this without— under these particular circumstances that the city manager would be required to determine in writing in order to provide a better environment for the city to— and to allow the city to obtain better and more favorable conditions and terms for these types of products and services.

Debbie.

So this thing in writing, would this be kept with the record if there was ever a question as to why we didn't open it? It would be part of the record.

Yeah, we'd be part of the record that the— and the city manager would make a determination of the specific circumstances that made it in the interest of the city to, to extend an existing contract as opposed to putting it out to—

Does it—

and I'm sorry, I didn't look at the actual language? Does it have to be inflation? Does it have to be labor? I mean, does it have to be one of those?

It talks about unusual economic circumstances. And it mentions as examples, inflation, labor shortage, and that sort of thing. So that's what— those are the conditions we anticipate would cause that.

So if it wasn't one of those things, would you help him interpret, or she, an unusual economic—

Yeah, if it was something else, you know, it could be something else, in other words.

But yeah, thanks.

I mean, it appears from this, Steve, that essentially you're going along, the C manager is going to state that we're in an unfavorable time. And that unfavorable time is going to stay until it's deemed to not be an unfavorable time, right?

Correct.

Because it's not going to flip back and forth. It's just right, like right now, we're in a high inflation time, and it's making bidding very difficult.

Yes, that's correct.

So yeah, so I mean, the whole idea is just to get the— give the city the best advantage possible when they're procuring services.

Yeah, part of the problem, for example, is when we— if we wanted to bid a big contract of some sort, for example, and the people who are potentially bidding on that, they're trying to forecast their own costs, right? So they're looking at— if this is, say, for example, a 5-year or 10-year contract, if they're forecasting 8% inflation and labor shortages during that high time, then they're going to give us a really high bid. And, but whereas if we have an existing contract and we're only talking about, say, extending that for a year or 2, then they can say, well, those conditions are probably temporary and we can give you a better price than we would if we had to put this out to bid.

Right. Do we have any questions on that? Somebody would like to make a motion on that?

I can do that.

I guess, um, I move that we amend Section 2.7-6 of the Orem City Code by enacting subsection 2-7-6S, extension of existing contracts in unfavorable procurement environment.

I'll second that.

Just to clarify, it was 275. Looks like an S, but it's a 5.

Oh, okay.

2-7-6-5?

No, 2-7. Maybe I said that.

Definitely looks like an S.

It's actually, it's actually creating a new subsection to 2-7-6. Sorry, I totally messed you up. My bad. You're right. It's right.

Okay.

Is it okay?

Sorry, my bad. I totally messed you up.

So moved.

I'll second whatever that is.

I, I, yes, yes, yes.

Okay, the ordinance passes.

Yes.

Okay, pass. The ordinance passes.

Thank you.

All right, moving on. We're gonna have a public hearing on item 9.5. 5, amending the Campus Drive residential parking permit area. Steve, would you like to lead that conversation?

Yeah, so we had what we refer to as the Campus Drive parking permit area that was passed or enacted several years ago. And Jason's got up on the screen there the area that was included in that parking permit area. You'll notice it's right adjacent to Orem High School. And back at the time this was adopted, the property, the Orem High School property, was being used in such a way that you were getting lots of cars parking next to the homes that you see shaded here in the map. And so the permit area was adopted to basically preserve the residents' ability to park in front of their own homes and on that street. Since the time of the creation of this district, The use of that Orem High School property has changed somewhat, such that the parking that was occurring on that street from the users of that property has diminished substantially, to the point that most of the people or the occupants in that district now have asked that the district be removed or amended in such a way to take their However, the 4 properties on the bottom area, which Jason has shown here in the, in the red highlighted area, they actually would like to still remain in that district. And so what we're proposing is that we just simply amend that parking district to remove everyone that was originally in the district except for those 4 properties you see shaded in red. So in other words, The 4 in red would like to remain in the district. Everybody else that was formerly in the district would like to be taken out of the district. So we're just proposing to amend it so that it now only includes those 4 properties. Now that might seem like a very small parking district, and it is, but there's actually another parking district that had been previously adopted by the council that goes up— I can't remember what it is— that 200— I can't see what the name of that street is. 200 South. So it actually connects to another existing parking district. So it's not really a standalone thing. It would really be contiguous with another parking district.

So, okay, Debbie, you had a question.

So does this mean that we're just going to remove some signs that show that it's parking thing, and then if they have some sort of hang tag or sticker, they can remove it?

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

And will it be delineated? Like these 4 homes, here's where it starts, here's where it ends.

So basically the, the resolution that goes along with this will say that the parking district is basically the west side of camp— let's see, is that right? The west side of Campus Drive adjacent to those 4 homes. That's the permitted parking area. So that's, that's the area that would now be in the amended district.

Would the general public know that Here's where it starts, here's where it finishes.

So they might have to move some signage a little bit just to indicate this is where it starts and this is where it ends.

Any other questions? Okay, we'd like to open this up for public hearing in case anyone has any comments on this. Looks like there are no comments. We'll close the public hearing. Would somebody like to make a motion on this?

I'll make, I'll make a motion that we amend the Campus Drive residential parking permit area.

A second?

I'll second it.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Aye.

Aye.

Resolution passes.

Aye.

Yes.

Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, you guys up in heaven. We just hear these voices, but we can't see anything. But thank you for your votes.

Okay.

Item 9.6, amending portions of Chapter 4, Housing, of Warm General Plan, including updating Section 4.4.2 pertaining to moderate income housing strategies. Jason, would you like to lead that?

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. As we talked a few weeks ago, and it went to Planning Commission last week, we did receive a letter of noncompliance from the state in our moderate income housing amendments, the requirements by state law that we amend them. We had a couple of corrections that we needed to make. They wanted to be verbatim as far as state law in our general plan, and so we need to make those corrections. We needed to adopt a 5th strategy, which we will go through here in just a minute, and then correct some implementation plans, which we've added some strategies on how to implement over the next year. And so we gave— we were given a 90-day window to make these, to come into compliance. So today is the final day that we need to get before us, for the council, because the 28th of February is past that deadline. So tonight is an important day for us here to get this passed. Items— the accessory apartment and affordable housing are the 2 that we're amending based on the implementation strategies. Item 3 and 4 needed no changes based on the state's review, and then impact fees, which we'll explain, is the new one that we're adding tonight. So Strategy 1, which talks about accessory apartments, we added a strategy to implement the ability for us to advertise and how a homeowner can do an accessory apartment, kind of the steps, the processes, and do that in a more substantial way through flyers, through online means, and different things. So that's kind of the strategy that we've outlined in the red. The Planning Commission, in reviewing that, if you can see the strikeout, how to help report illegal units, took an exception to that and proposed that the council strike that out. As far as staff, we're supportive of that. We're fine if that is stricken out of the record. We did contact our state contact and they're supportive of that as well. So I don't think that's an issue going forward. We're simply going to use a strategy to inform homeowners on how to, to develop an accessory apartment.

So Jason, you said implement a broad community Communications campaign. What is broad? Is this flyers, social media?

All of the above, most likely. So flyers could be door-to-door. If they had out a citation, they'll maybe have a flyer of how you can come into compliance. Could be Facebook, could be all different methods of how—

So will this be a year long that you will like occasionally— because usually people have to see it 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 times before they register.

Yeah, we do have a newsletter. We do have different things that are mailed out property owners. And so we'll take advantage of that as well. Any, any opportunity we have to, you know, create a link or something that they can go to a site or a phone number to call, or so people know where to call or contact to be able to know what the procedures are, what the steps are to convert there.

I just want us to have examples that, you know, if someone were to come and say, what did you do? We could show that we did this and this, this and this, because broad is not just a one-time thing.

And in the, you know, next year, when we report again to the state, we'll have to identify what we have done and probably by example show them what we've done, whether that's a webpage, flyer, different things, and we'll incorporate that in our reporting next year.

Thank you.

So that's strategy 1. Strategy 2 is updating affordable senior housing, more of just strategies on how to do that. One is more of, again, like we did with the assisted apartments, an outreach program for developers to kind of outline what a affordable senior housing overlay does and what they can do within that. And then also update our 2018 moderate-income housing study, which we completed in 2018. So it's, it's time that we look at that and see, based on current census data that we're finally getting back from 2020, we can give a little more update on what housing stock that we have within that. So those are the strategies we're adding to that. And then the new one, Strategy 5, is looking looking at reducing, waiving, or eliminating impact fees related to moderate-income housing. The strategy would be related to affordable senior housing. We have 5— I think it's 5 or 6 projects right now that have been completed, so we don't have a lot of those. And so we'll look at whether or not the city— and what the cost would be to eliminate impact fees for those specific uses to maybe help developer come in and develop those which are restricted to seniors 60 and older. There is a limit on the amount of rent, so it does help those that are moderately income or lower income in the senior category to be able to do that. So we'll look and see if we can then pass that cost. If we eliminate those impact fees, does it trickle down to the actual renter and be able to build stock for those individuals?

So can I ask a question?

Sure.

So we're partnering with Utah County Housing Authority. Are there other interested parties that we could also partner with on this?

Those are the main ones, but we would definitely— we'll look at others as well. But we've had a couple private developers that have developed and are operating them. We've had a couple developers that have actually then sold to Utah Housing. So it just— Utah Housing seems to be the one that are able to do that because they have the money from a different source and not trying to make a profit off of their development type of thing. So that's—

So, but the downside for the city for that is that we then lose that tax revenue because Utah Housing Authority is tax exempt.

Is that not true?

That is true. Yeah.

So are we showing preferential treatment to them? Or are we partnering with others also? I would think we would want to preserve that taxing authority, right?

And yeah, and that's the point of this is to get the word out to every type of developer that we can think of, not just partnering with those that we Yep. So yeah, we're not going to be—

right.

So to your point, we're going to hopefully blanket everybody that's willing and wants the chance to be able to develop this type of development. It is a unique development because the profit margin, I think, is pretty slim because there's a lot of restrictions on how large it can be, the rent, maximum rents they can charge. And so it is pretty limiting that way.

So Jason, I have a question. So what is a typical impact fee that a let's say a senior project would have per door? I mean, you know, there's utilities, there's parks, there's roads. And do you have an idea what an average one would pay?

Like, what do you—

how much are your—

Typically, depending on the size of a single-family residential home, you're looking at between $5,000 and $10,000 for impact fees, depending on the size, right? A larger mansion home would be more of the $10,000 range. A 2,000 typical square foot home is going to be $5,000 to $6,000. So this type of—

in my mind, this would be smaller than a typical—

smaller than that, but typically you can do up to 4 units within a residential-looking home. So it, it could be a substantial amount. It could be in the $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 range.

Per home or total?

Per the development, right?

Okay.

Yeah, that's just a ballpark.

I'm— yeah.

So the Planning Commission did review that with, with the exception of striking that that one language out, Mayor, and the council, they recommended that this be approved, and then we'll move forward. So be glad to address any questions.

So I know previously we had spoken about an emphasis on an owner-occupied type of housing product. Is that still included in here?

Yes, so that language has not been taken out.

That's still included as a goal of the city is to try to promote some Occupied affordable housing.

Yeah, I couldn't find it right off the bat, but yes, we did not change that language.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

Any other questions? We'd like to open this up for a public hearing if there's any comments on this. Close the public hearing. Would somebody like to make a motion?

I can do it. I move that we amend portions of Chapter 4, Housing, of the Orem General Plan, including updating Sections 4.4.2 pertaining to moderate income housing strategies. I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Aye.

Thank you. The resolution passes. All right, last on the agenda here, we've got any items from the acting city manager?

Just, just one quick heads up. With your annual retreat coming up this Friday and Saturday, I'll be sending out, in consultation with the mayor, Just a little update to— with small changes to the agenda. And so then that means if there's any other things that any of you on the council want to add to that meeting, then it's not too late to let me know and we'll, we'll get it incorporated.

So.

Yeah, so, Ben, you're going to send that out and then I'll put a second on that, that any of you that have anything that you want to add or anything thing you want to discuss, including the 2 of you, wherever you are, please let me know. And then Brendan and I will work together to get that agenda dialed down.

Yes. Yep. I'll send that out by email.

Okay.

Thank you.

Do you have a hard deadline? Is it tomorrow by noon, or—

Let's see, it'd be technically 24 hours before the start of the meeting. So by Thursday at noon.

Thursday noon.

So give me a little bit more time to type it up then.

Okay, thank you. All right, we'd like to, like to make a motion to adjourn now to a closed session to discuss pending or reasonably imminent legal action. Or litigation pursuant to Utah Code Section 52-4-205.

And Mayor, just to note, that's in Room 107, the location on the— for the closed door.

We're going to adjourn to a closed session in Room 107.

Yeah, we just need a motion.

Yeah, I'll second it.

Or do I need to make the motion?

I think you made the motion.

I made the motion.

Okay, I'll second your motion.

Aye.

Aye.

Yes.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

For sure.