City Council · 2023-02-28

Entrance is.

Oh gosh, it's going to be. So with the temple probably being sometime in the fall. Are they going to start this following spring, or are they going to start in the fall after?

So what will happen is the construction of the project at its earliest would be next spring, would be the perfect scenario with all the property purchased.

That's usually the biggest holdup is getting all the way.

It sounds like, sounds like a good idea to me.

As far as it makes sense, you can't do them while you can, and when you got to do them, the economy is getting in the way.

Yeah, yeah, with you not changing their whole scope and actually building that intersection, I think that was a huge thing to have happen. It's a huge need to have them do that, and then for them to wait because they want to do it all at once would be great.

And it should give Provost some time to go ahead and finish and get their 2 lanes up to our 5-lane, and then they Figure out how to do that the rest of the way.

All right, any other questions? Okay, sounds good. Thank you, Sam. And this will be voted on next week, just for reference.

By next week?

I'm sorry, next council meeting. Okay, we'll move to item number 2, uh, North Utah County outpouring. Uh, Reed, if you'd like to educate us on that.

I sent Cass.

Cass?

Yeah.

I sent you—

is it in this?

Absolutely. Unless it's not shared with you. There we go.

Yes.

Okay, Mayor and Council, we have been— as part of our responsibilities of managing the city's water resources, we are of course connected with many different organizations. all who have the directive and goals of making sure that we ensure we have a long and sustained water supply into the future. There's an organization called the North Utah County Aquifer Council. It was created back in 2017. This particular group recognized the critical relationship between groundwater and surface water sources. The original members were the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, Pleasant Grove City, American Fork City, Highland City, Alpine City, and Lehi City. They actually started a study back in 2003, which lasted several years, to look at the aquifer, particularly focused on the north end of the county. However, our aquifers are Large, they stretch all over the place.

And so by that you mean they're under multiple cities?

Correct, that's correct.

They're interconnected.

Interconnected, yeah.

They're not— they're no respecters of political boundaries.

So they started a study, created a plan where they were looking at the aquifers and trying to particular look at aquifer recharge, where you take water, surface water, and put it back into the ground and then pull it back out when you need it at a future time. That group has approached the city and other cities who weren't the original members to see if we could collaborate together because our aquifers are interconnected, and it's good that we work together and collaborate as we plan as we make these types of decisions and make sure that we have a sustainable water source well into the future. So they've approached other cities— Cedar Hills, Lindon Vineyard, Saratoga Springs, and Provo— to join forces with them.

So why Saratoga?

Just because the aquifer would continue out that way.

Because we're out in Lehi now, we now are connected to Saratoga, but Orem isn't necessarily connected to aquifers in Saratoga. Other than around the lake?

Yeah, it's really hard to define exactly where aquifers are. It's a water source that we all have. We have aquifers, and if we can plan together—

Have they ever been—

I mean, I can't imagine they haven't been defined in other states. Is that typical that they don't define their territory? They're not territorially used?

Aquifers?

No, I mean, because they just can't— like Arizona, right? Huge aquifer under Mesa, Phoenix.

Right, they're interconnected, they blend together. So you've heard of the Provo, perhaps the Provo Recharge Project that they're going to be spending a significant amount of money on. They're all recharge. They're going to put or inject treated water into the ground to be able to be stored and then to be pulled out at a future time and not just send the water down the river. And this can be controversial, especially when you're talking about the Great Salt Lake.

Right.

You have aquifer recharge and water reuse are being targeted right now in the state legislature this year in an attempt to try to preserve as much water running downstream. So with that said, if another community puts water into an aquifer to recharge it, that water will go where it's going to go and will follow the least— the point of least resistance. And we may benefit from actually from Provo City putting water in the aquifer that is interconnected It's all the same.

You don't worry about claims from other municipalities? No.

Yeah, we have water rights to pull water out of the ground, and wherever it comes from, it comes from, and we pull it out. So the purpose of this group, again, is to coordinate and facilitate the ongoing planning and development of groundwater sources, in particular aquifer storage and recovery, which is what we talked about, putting water back into— or putting water into the ground to pull it out. at another point in time. Also to investigate possible recharge and recovery locations. Where would a project be ideal to be? Where are the soils good where if we were to inject it, that that water would spread out to be able to be recovered at some point in the future? It's primarily a collaborative effort to plan for the long-term viability of these important water resources. So the activities that this group has done, I mentioned that they started a study back in 2003.

It took 5 years.

working with the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, where they identified some sites that they felt would be good for aquifer recharge in the north end of Utah County. They have since approached these other communities that aren't involved, recognizing that this may be a good way for us to collaborate and to create— not create water, but save water for the future. And so They've got a work plan for 2023 where they will continue some groundwater monitoring that they've done for years, but primarily to update the aquifer storage and recovery and feasibility study that they conducted back in 2008. They also have plans— their long-range plans are to implement some aquifer storage and recovery projects or recharge sites at some point in the future. But primarily to coordinate planning efforts. It comes as a relatively nominal cost of about $12,500 per year for us to participate in this and to ensure that these— that this study moves forward and that we are involved in planning for plans for the aquifers in our area. So it's the recommendation that we join the North Utah County Aquifer Council. You can kind of ignore the north.

It's kind of— It's not—

It's not— it doesn't mean just those cities, we're expanding it. It's probably easier just to keep the name than to go through and have everybody change their agreements. But it's our recommendation to join the North Utah County Aquifer Council. And after discussion here, we'll get direction from you to move forward with that. And our expectation would be to place this on a consent agenda item at some point in the future.

Thank you. Is there any downside to joining this?

We don't see any.

Okay, seems nominal.

Yeah, I think it gives us a voice. If they were to propose something that would be harmful to Orem, we would voice our, our disapproval of that. So, but we don't see that as happening. We see this as a collaborative effort where water managers in this area are trying to get together and manage these critical resources in the best interest of all communities.

Can you go back to the first page? So those were the original members: Hudson Grove, American Fork, Highland, and Alpine, and Lehigh, and then those other cities came on later.

These are the ones that they're approaching. for their upcoming— for this current year and say, hey, this is what we're doing, you want to join? And, uh, we would scale our work, uh, study, uh, based on the income that comes in.

So they're, they're having conversations just like this with all these cities?

Exactly.

To see who wants to join and who doesn't?

Yeah.

So would the amount go down if there were more people?

They— the amount that they sent us was, uh, was this. It was based on popular— if you fell within a certain population range, you paid a certain amount. There were different factors, and ours was $12,500.

If Provo did not join, does that affect our joining at all as far as the way the water goes?

No, no, we don't think so.

Why did Lyndon opt out?

Well, Lyndon did not opt out. They just didn't join initially. They've been approached now, and I couldn't tell you if Lyndon what Lyndon's decision has been. I could talk to my colleagues down there to see what they—

It seemed like they got skipped, right?

No, they may have been invited back. We were also encouraged to participate back in 2017 as well, but we didn't choose to participate at that time.

We would be listed as an additional member, one that they're approaching right now.

Okay, now that makes sense.

You know, this really started after Geneva Steel went out of business, and Casey Shaw, who you know as a member of our PWAC committee, he was one of the chief engineers down there at Geneva Steel, and he performed some of the analyses that were required to know how much water they could extract from, or actually change for a point of diversion to take out of the groundwater. They actually, and they based it on the tonnage of steel that was produced on an annual basis and how how much water that they used to produce that steel. They then were able to derive a number which was downgraded to about 48,000 acre-feet of water annually that they can actually pump out of the ground on an annual basis. We know that that will affect our aquifer and our abilities to pump, that there will be a drawdown effect that will probably cross all of the lines of all of the boundaries, you know, from Lyndon to Orem to Provo and up further north. They since performed that USGS study that was done in 2003 to 2008. It didn't show that there would be a significant amount of decrease in our aquifer because we're in a middle aquifer and they're in a deeper aquifer. And so there are certainly benefits for us to be a part of this, to learn and understand the hydrogeological formations that are beneath us and how they interact with each other and how if Maybe there could be a collaborative effort to inject some water at the mouth of Provo Canyon or American Fork Canyon or another area where it might then flow north from northeasterly to southwesterly across this area. That's the general gradient of how the water flows in this area, in this part of the county. And so we anticipate that we would all benefit to some degree in gaining and sharing knowledge and understanding. They've spent to date, I don't know, maybe $300,000 to $500,000 in a variety of studies for which we've gotten some benefits. They've shared information with us, and we feel like this is probably time now for us to move forward and to be a part of this. It makes sense. It's a small contribution to make, and then we feel like we'll be able to be a collaborative partner with others in ensuring that we have water for generations to come.

So would you characterize it as a research-based organization? Because there's no real power as far as getting water going a certain direction.

Yeah, it's research and knowledge and sharing information. For example, we've been a part of their group informally. We've attended some of their meetings. We're sharing information regarding— we have 9 wells and we're sharing what our the water elevations are, the water tables are at each one of those, and what the respective drawdowns have been over the years so we can look at things historically. We'll compare it against other communities as well, and we're trying to create more of a uniform analysis and understanding as to how water drawdown is occurring in the community and how we can perhaps benefit from aquifer recharge.

The interlocal agreement, you— I mentioned that it identified potential sites for aquifer storage and recovery. If there was a site that was identified in Linden or in Pleasant Grove, the interlocal agreement is specific that that would be that municipality's responsibility to do that if they chose to do it. We're not going to be asked to fund a project in Alpine for aquifer recharge. We're just part of the discussion process, and if a municipality determines that this type of project is beneficial to them, we would give them a thumbs up and support them, but by no means financially other than as this discussion body, this research group.

Mostly like a research, a good neighbor trying to understand what's going on, optimize it for the group kind of thing.

And perhaps even leveraging each other's resources to some degree where maybe multiple municipalities may have an interest at participating at developing an aquifer recharge at the mouth of, let's say, American Fork Canyon. And those communities might be Cedar Hills, might be Pleasant Grove, Linden, maybe Orem participates to some degree, you know, to help fund that initially. I can't— and that would be the result of after doing some fact-finding and research and analysis and engineering studies before we would make any kind of recommendation to do anything like that, of course. Obviously, I think where we would benefit the most is if we were to do some kind of aquifer recharge in the Provo Canyon area where we have, let's say we're only using 40 or 60% of our total rights, we could inject some of that water into the ground to be used in this area for future. It would be treated and cleaned, and then we would be able to use it, you know, into the future, whereas it would go downstream and then flow down to Utah Lake and then down to Salt Lake. Again, it doesn't come without controversy, but it's— we want to participate just to be able to gain new knowledge and understanding of where we are today and where we hope to be in the future.

Right, it seems like it fits in the puzzle of water conservation.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

So, Tom, I tried to get 4 slides for you, so—

You did great.

Any questions?

Thank you, Ruth.

So we'll bring this for a resolution to be signed by the council then, um, probably in 2 weeks.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay, next we've got review potential amendments to the landscaping ordinance. This is Jason, he's going to present this.

Thank you, Mayor, council. Now to the important part. So before you, last month Savannah Peterson from Central Utah Water came and talked about a program that they're doing to allow Residents to apply for a grant through Central Regional Water. In order for any citizen of Warren to participate, we have to make certain changes in our ordinance to comply with their requirements in order for a citizen or a business owner in Warren to allow for that to occur.

Otherwise, they would not be eligible and they would not allow the grants to happen.

Just a little background on our ordinance. We currently do not require grass in the front yard, but we do require 50% of the area to be landscaped in some type of vegetation. So it has to be ground cover, shrubs. I mean, a lot of people use grass, but grass is not required currently by our ordinance. But this kind of proposal, you can see there's 4 requirements that they're asking us to have implemented in our ordinance. Is 35% would be the maximum that a resident could use in the front yard or required area to be landscaped in a residential zone. So that's one of the requirements we're proposing. Like I say, right now we don't have that requirement, but this would maximize the amount of landscaping grass that they could use in the front yard. There is an exception if it's under 250 square feet or if it's like a townhouse or something that doesn't have a large backyard, they would be exempt. Or a city park, for example, those areas that are going to be used for recreation and things are also exempt for that requirement. But any single-family home or any business owner would be required to be complying with these requirements. Any slope in a burned area that's greater than 25% or 4 to 1 could not be used for grass. And any commercial, industrial, institutional, or multifamily development could have a maximum of 20% lawn. It could be other material— shrubs, ground covers, things like that. But that's basically these 4 criteria, what they're requiring anybody in Warren— since we're representing Warren, we would have to incorporate this as a city in order for them to comply and get a grant to help defray costs.

of what they're requiring.

So first one is that this black is obviously our existing ordinance. The red is what they're asking us to do. So this would require any new resident that comes in or anybody that wants to modify their landscaping in the future in order to be compliant with our ordinance would have to have a maximum 35% lawn and the rest would have to be up to 50% is what's required. Could be other materials and I'll show you some examples of what that would In a commercial—

is that changing from 60 down to 35?

So right now it's 50% of a front yard. So let's take your yard. You could, if you wanted to go down to 50% grass, you could still meet the current ordinance. But you also could take the whole grass, all the grass out and put 50% into shrubs, ground covers, those types of low-growing vegetation and not have any grass at all. And that would also be in with our current ordinance. What this is saying is that now you don't have that option. You have the ability to put 35% in grass, the rest has to be in something else. So it basically— we should say restricts, but it requires a maximum amount of grass rather than— but you still could opt out and have no grass. Let's say your wife really likes grass and she wants the entire front yard to be landscaped. Any new home could not do that. They could only have 35%.

Of their front yard. And currently they can have as much as they want.

They could have as much as they want.

So we'd be going from 100% to 35%, right?

So this isn't just to get the grant. This is a, this is a new restriction on front yards in Orem for new builds.

Yes, because that's what, if we want to go down the route of allowing citizens to have the grant from Center for Utah, and this is the purpose we're here today, is simply to allow them to to do that, but it also then changes our ordinance permanently that requires a maximum amount of grass rather than an option. Right now, if I choose to take out my grass, I can, but I have to have 50% living material in my front yard.

If they wanted the whole look of grass, could they do artificial turf, and would that count?

So right now we do allow up to 50% of— so 50%, let me go back up— so 50% of your Front yard has to be some kind of living material. The other 50% could be artificial turf. That is allowed by current standards, but it can't be 100%. It has to— there has to be 50% of your yard has to be some type of living, whether it's ground cover, whether it's bushes, shrubs.

So does that— so I have shrubs and I have bark around those shrubs, but my shrub bed is 2 feet by 8 feet. Are you counting the 2 feet by 8 feet?

The area of the shrub is full growth.

So just the plant, just the plant, the area that it possesses, that it covers at full growth, at full growth.

Right.

But if you get a flower bed with like 10 bushes in it, then we'd probably end up counting the whole thing because eventually it's going to grow into that space.

So if I buy a house, well, that's not how it's calculated though. It's calculated based on full growth for that plant.

Yeah, so that's less— that's quite a bit less than— because I got a lot of flower beds in my house, we trim them back all the time. And based on this, the flower beds wouldn't count.

So we're not going to come out and say, well, you trimmed down your bushes, now you got to do something else. If you plant bus shrubs and eventually, or potentially, that grows to fill a 5-foot space, let's say, but you trim them down because you like the look of it more of a box, we're not going to come out and say you're in violation of that. Because you've planted the area and met the requirement.

It seems like the flower bed would be counting as something else because that's where there's no grass.

As far as residential, we don't, we don't go out unless somebody takes out the entire— it just has gravel. We're not really going out policing those types of things. Now commercial, we do, because it's a requirement of site plan to have certain landscaping plans approved, whereas residential, we don't require landscaping We do. They have to meet the general requirements.

And the reason we're having this conversation is, is because in order to get this grant, we would have to change our ordinance to match this as opposed to what it is right now. Right. So what is, what is the grant?

What is—

So Central Utah is allowing citizens— so if you have a separated sidewalk, for example, and you have a strip out by the sidewalk, they're providing— I don't know the total amount— they're allowing a certain percentage, let's say $5,000 $500, whatever, $5,000, let's just say as an example. They'll give you that grant and then you go out and actually do the work and exchange it. Instead of having 100% grass, you're taking that out, planting shrubs, putting drip irrigation instead of spray irrigation that gets, you know, some of the streets, on the sidewalk. It just reduces the amount of water usage because this strip is narrow and there's really not a great design of sprinkler heads. just water that specific area. You're usually overwatering, and it's wasting water a little bit. So that's what they're proposing there. But they're also now this year providing a grant that if you want to change your entire front yard, or the city center redo, we potentially could do that grant as well to do some of the improvements of the city center's landscaping. That allows a certain percentage of that landscaping to be paid for by the grant in order to be more water-wise.

I'm just trying to get in terms of dollars, the It's going to be dependent on maybe the process.

Well, Savannah Peterson from Central Utah, the conservation manager for Central Utah, was here about a month ago, and she suggested that it would be up to $3 a square foot of a credit that you would get for anything that qualifies and meets these minimum requirements here. So if, let's say, you had in your front yard— let's say a typical yard is around— our typical home is around 10,000 square feet, and the front yard Jason might be around 3-ish. So let's say you flip 50% of that, 1,500 square feet, you could get like $4,500 at $3 a square foot for whatever you converted from natural grass turf to anything that meets these requirements here. So it could be some xeriscaping, which includes like bark mulch with some plants and some small shrubs and flowers and other types of native plants from this area. So it's not an insignificant amount, or it's not inconsequential. The seed money that went to this last year was $5 million, and now it's increased, I think, dramatically, and it's going to continue to get funded, it appears, somehow through the legislature perspective of moving forward, at least until they deem that this is still a success, I would believe.

Yeah, I mean, usually these kind of programs, Money is not absolute. It's this much money. Once it gets used up, then you're out. That's probably a lot of money.

In that case, it probably depends on the plan that you submit. It's gonna have to go through the review process to make sure it meets the requirements. And they will base it on that availability.

I have a question.

You were concerned at one point when we were doing that about the heat that the rocks were giving off. You know, that if you can— if you heard it too much, there'd be a lot of heat.

Does that sound familiar? Yeah.

So would this have any worry if the lawns run down, or is that not going to be a problem if there's too much?

We hope that they use a variety of different materials, right? We allow bark, we allow whether it's rubber mulch, we allow other types of materials. It doesn't have to be 100% rock. So it just depends on the tree canopy covers and all that kind of— if you just have a blank slate of just rock, then yeah, the heat index is going to be a lot Probably a little less than an asphalt parking lot when you break it up with shrubs and different things.

So this change wouldn't necessarily be a concern, is what I'm asking.

No, I guess the biggest concern that I think that I would have as far as the city is the maximum we require now, 35% is the max, and it really takes away a little bit of the flexibility of the property.

So, and that is dictated by Central, by this grant, the 35%?

It is.

We have to do that?

Well, no, we only have to do it if you want to participate, right? If you want the citizens to be able to participate, then the city does have to approve.

But if we—

but didn't you say new construction has to— they can't do more than 35%?

If this is approved, that would be the case, yes.

So is that new construction? Is that what— tell me this definition. So we've got a lot of homes that we want some urban renewal to occur to, right? Somebody tears down houses, built a new one. Is that new construction?

Is that—

so this could impact properties through that process, going through that process then?

And the downside of the grant situation is, like I say, I don't think it's absolute. I mean, it's, it's $5 million, they use it all up until it's gone, and now they renew it with this. But at some point, I mean, because I've seen this a lot in California, there's no more money. And so there's this whole line of people outside, you know, wanting to get their grant, but there's no more money. And so then you're down to if they were ignored or not. But in the meantime, you change the ordinance to where you're kind of stuck, right?

And if I buy a home and it has this 35% and I don't— I want more, I can't do it. I can't transit— I can't re-landscape the way—

By ordinance, that is correct. Okay.

However, this is only the front yard, right?

It's only, only the front. Well, Central Utah requires Any, any landscaped area. Our ordinance only requires the front yard to be landscaped. The wording that Central Utah wants to see is that the entire yard would have to be 35 max.

So I think it's just the front yard, just the front yard.

My concern is, I mean, those are hard to maintain flower beds. They're very labor intensive to keep the weeds down.

If they're not installed correctly.

Yeah, or once the weed barrier wears out, you've got the stuff coming up through.

The type of maintenance will change, there's no doubt. You're not going to be sharpening your mower blade and getting oil and gas in your mower and mowing and edging and trimming. It's a different type of maintenance, and I think Savannah did address that pretty well, that you will have to maybe do some pre-emergent, spray some pre-emergent down, or do something like that. But then throughout the year, it should look pretty good. You can't just set it and forget it and not do anything with it forever, right? You're going to have to do some different types of maintenance on it that might require some kind of a treatment for weed control.

Then you have the issue with Roundup.

Roundup chemicals, yeah.

So my question though, if this doesn't work, say we pass this, then we find that it's too burdensome, we could change it in the following year to go back to something else? We could.

Are we allowed to though, based on the people? I mean, sign up, change it, our biggest grants, we change them back.

Well, I'm just saying though, if we keep asking—

I mean, city can do whatever, right?

If they want to participate in the program, decide it doesn't really fit into their thing, then we can always change it back. But let me just show you a couple of pictures. For the sake of time here, let me just—

May I ask one question first?

Oh, sure.

So there was a home on 4th West that was tried to landscape and had big boulders, right? It was not an owner-occupied dwelling, let's put it that way, in the whole front yard. And somehow that—

but that they could do that.

As long as it's within the areas, the crevices and the things of the big boulders, as long as 50% of that has some type of living within the boulders, not in the boulders, but around it. long as it's 50% collectively, that would meet the—

Like a kidney bean or something in there.

Yeah.

Okay.

Do you guys remember the Mox-Tek on 12th and Oak?

The rock area?

What's that?

Mox-Tek on 12th and Oak.

That doesn't count at all. There's big boulders there. How big that plant will be when it's fully grown, right?

Right.

So in this instance here on this, 50% of that is going to have the grass. Yeah, that's what we're counting as meeting the requirements. Yeah, the under— underlay of the rock is just the material they're using to keep it So as you can see on these, they've got bark on this one, they've got rock there. The landscaping plants themselves meet the requirement. They have roughly 30%.

And what does the driveway and sidewalk count as?

They don't count as far as requirements. So we exclude those out. Whatever is needing to be landscaped is only required to have the 50%.

Okay.

So I mean, that would be a good thing to see. And I guess that's what this is.

But yeah.

Quite a few different versions of what 35% looks like.

But it does— then I guess the drawback is that it does limit the amount of landscaping you can have. Now, are we going to go out and write down every street and make sure? No, we're not going to do that. But it would be the ordinance, right? That's what we would tell— somebody calls up, we would tell them what the ordinance is.

I think my house actually qualifies for this just because I've got a ton of flower beds. But I don't know that all my neighbors would like to be forced to look a certain way or do a certain thing.

Only new homes, right?

It's only new homes. Only new homes, but all the old homes would be legally nonconforming because they wouldn't conform to the standards. So if somebody did come and want to redo it, they would technically have to comply.

So like if you remodeled your yard, that's not—

that's acceptable.

So if I have overgrown bushes and that I want to replace—

If you wanted to—

not bushes. If you want to tear out your whole front yard and redo it, okay. You would have to comply with the new standard.

Okay.

So the, uh, Orem Natural Resources Stewardship Committee did review this. Of course, very supportive of the direction, but they did indicate that, you know, maybe there's some other alternative, other types of grasses that maybe are more drought tolerant. So maybe the 35% is something we could work with Central Utah to come up with. Maybe if you use this type of grass rather than Kentucky bluegrass, maybe it's still a water-wise So anyway, that's something maybe we could work out before we bring it back, or we can talk about that.

Yes, I mean, that makes sense more.

So a couple of the advantages, obviously, we're going to be more stewards of water. You're going to be more water-wise.

You're going to use less water. The more drip irrigation you use, the more centralized to the plant roots rather than spraying everywhere. So there are some advantages to this. The disadvantages I see is that it is going to be maximum amounts rather than minimums. And the property owner would be non-conforming and would have to comply if they choose to tear it down.

So that's—

this is a tentative schedule.

If you'd like to go back and have more discussion with Central Utah about maybe some other drought-tolerant grasses, we could do that. This, without passing it, I guess I just want to pass along, they would not— any citizen-owned would not be eligible unless we passed what they're asking us to do now, unless they modify their standards.

We come back with So the first $5 million that was spent, are there cities who have this adopted already?

I don't know at this point. I would need to go back and do some research on my own.

I think there'll be more money though, because this is an important conservation project, right? So I can't imagine funding—

I don't think this is going away.

Yeah, having people flip their strip, is that what they call it?

Flip the strip versus—

yeah, I think this is kind of The future.

I think what Central Utah is doing is wanting to keep going with that, but also have some requirements on cities that participate are going to have to at least have some—

So if we pass this and then we— if we could come back later and do the different tolerant grass, that would be—

if Central Utah will—

I think you get it right first.

Or do we need to get that first before we—

Yeah, I mean, right now we're working on this, and I thought we met the requirement. Because we don't require grass at all, we just require 50% of loading material, but they want to have an actual maximum number.

Yeah, that's why I'm uncomfortable with that 35%.

So would you rather, as a council, go back and have us more discussion?

Yeah, yeah, I would like to.

I mean, they're headed down a good path, but they've taken a really aggressive stance right out of the box, and so I think like Yeah, something more workable with the community.

Let's see what we can do, and then we'll come back.

That's good.

Any questions?

Okay, thank you, Jason.

All right, next we've got, uh, an impact fee study.

Well, Trevor, so we'll need to bump that just a little bit. Fred Philpott will be presenting on that. He's en route right now.

Okay.

And so I've asked Steve if he could maybe go before me.

Sure.

Yeah, happy to.

Do I need to go over there to the Zoom stuff?

No.

Okay.

So my item is a proposal for a new ordinance amendment to amend Section 2-6-1 of the city code, which is entitled City Administration, to add a new section, subsection 10, which would be called Management Services Department. And this is prompted by, I think, the departure of our deputy city manager, and who managed a lot of or several departments within, within the city, and this— his departure opened up an opportunity for some restructuring that I think we thought would gain some efficiencies in city management and city organization. So the proposal is to create this new Management Services Department that would essentially entail or include the human resources, risk management, information technology, and communication services for the city, and also include the Office of the City Reporter. 2 of these divisions, the Human Resources and the Risk Management, are currently already managed by the HR Director, which is Carrie. And so basically what this proposal would be is essentially shifting a number of additional responsibilities to her position. And, and obviously allowing the opportunity to not have to refill an executive, executive staff role. position, which we do believe will provide some efficiencies. And well, it kind of makes sense also to put all these divisions under one person, that being the HR—

well, the management—

new Management Services Department Director. So that's the proposal. Brandon, you have anything you'd like to add? Interestingly, there used to be an Administrative Services Department.

we took out a handful of years ago.

So, um, as, as I've been sharing, shared last week with staff, of trying to incorporate a series of efficiencies, slim down our executive level of our team, slim down the city manager's department. And then this is— this essentially puts together some divisions that have kind of some natural crossover Yeah, what's in person and achieved.

This formalizes the efficiencies of reporting.

And this would directly affect when we go through the budgeting process too, right, as far as allocating funds for different areas? I mean, I just think the budget really kind of breaks down the scope of the city manager's department. Well, some of these are now going to be often in other areas. Yeah.

Yes.

But it's more efficient, overall cost should go down, correct?

Right, overall cost should go down.

That's the goal. That's the overall cost would go down. And the secondary goal— well, probably the first goal is just to have the most efficient organization possible. That's a benefit of that, is cost should go down as well.

Have you had any pushback from employees at all after you presented it to town hall?

And honestly, I was humbled and surprised that everyone's very positive and constructive and seems excited about where we're going, because part of this is essentially asking more and expressing more confidence in our staff's ability to take on more and be able to be part of things more, because I'm essentially putting them further into the organization. Some of the duties that were over time were essentially encapsulated or performed in the city manager's department.

So does Ryan Strop stay in development services, or does he become part of city management?

So Ryan's position is development services director slash acting assistant city manager.

He would probably hold that position. Or maybe not.

That is not, but I will say that is a separate matter from what is being proposed here.

Just wondering how that's all—

yeah, it's, it's, it's entirely—

it doesn't matter to me, but I thought we had talked about leaving it with Development Services.

Okay, that's already in that budget. So City Manager's Department, it just becomes you and Your analyst and Tess? Might just be me, Tess, and the open but unfilled assistant city manager position to be potentially used in the future if desired.

Yeah, we're still working all that out. This is just the first part of that.

The details of the rest— this is essentially This is essentially taking some of the responsibilities that were assumed by the Deputy City Manager and not refilling that position, basically shifting those assignments over to this new Management Services Department. So that's where the efficiencies come in.

And some of the feedback I've gotten this far— you talk about feedback— um, several employees have told me that they feel like their job description is just opening up because of the restructuring, they have more opportunity and they have more upside that they didn't feel like they had before.

So there's other people excited.

Upper mobility.

Yeah, so over time, as some things would become higher profile or of greater concern, it ended up getting wrapped up into the same picture. And now, essentially, at the direction of Mary Young, and then you in the retreat, going and trying to proactively find efficiencies and taking advantage of the capacity of our employee body. Found that it, it improves the reporting structure and takes advantage of people's capacity by spreading it back around the organization. And quite frankly, you're able to hold city manager's office, I guess, more directly and more easily accountable as that department is slimmer in nature.

You'll be able to see that as a natural consequence in the upcoming budget process. Then the distribution of, let's say, a single job becomes ability to have other people get more duties, thus get more pay. Is that fair to say?

Sure.

I mean, I think It's—

we have, we have a type of wonderful staff with attitudes that see challenges as opportunities to grow, not as a—

don't just give me something new and ask me to do more with less. Those aren't the type of attitude that our Orem employees have.

They have a can-do, build a better Orem, you know, a new challenge is a new opportunity.

to prove myself.

That, that's the type of effort. But there is some pay increase, so they don't feel like they're getting more for less, right?

I mean, that's where it comes back to HR to look at job description and job duties, and then that merits a bump in pay because they're actually in writing and in actuality having increased duties. Then yes, essentially we continually look at that Through our market analysis process.

That's kind of a natural subset.

Yeah, and balancing that with your goal of cost savings, right? It doesn't necessarily— you're not going to just take the money and keep the same money, right? We're going to save money, but we're also going to give opportunities for mobility.

And some of it is reprioritizing too, right? If we want a greater emphasis Something that is becoming higher profile, like communications and PR efforts and trading and marketing plans, enacting and formalizing these efficiencies allows us to—

I mean, our overriding goal is to have the most efficient, effective workplace possible.

Yep, sounds good.

So the plan is then to bring this to you at the next council meeting.

For a formal adoption. Sounds good. Any questions?

Okay. All right, thank you, Steve.

Um, we've got—

we've got the PAC fee, and then we've also got Utah Valley Drug Prevention. Do we want to do that first?

I think Fred will be here at 5:05 is what he said.

So is Utah Valley—

I'm here.

You ready to go?

Go ahead and take the mic.

Okay, and I have some notes for the members of the council.

Well, by way of introduction, my name is Wendy Wright, as you can see, um, and I work for the Utah County Health Department in the Division of Health Promotion, and I work in, um, opioid overdose prevention. And, and part of my responsibilities in that, I am involved with the Utah Valley Drug Prevention Coalition. So I wanted to share a little bit about the coalition and share some data that we have about the city of Orem. We use data from the SHARP survey in our action plans and in our work groups. And so I'll just be sharing some of that here. So on the left side of your folder, I just have some information about the coalition. You can see our mission there is to prevent and reduce alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, and prescription drug misuse among youth living in Utah County. And I won't go over all those goals, but there is just some basic information about what we do and what we— in that mission, we do try to gather data and find evidence-based practices for reaching out into the communities and partnering with other organizations in the communities. But I'll just go ahead and go to some of the SHARP data, which is on the right side of your folder. This is all specific to the city of Orem, from surveys that were given to all students, 6th through 12th grade. But just, I just wanted to point out a few things. I'll skip down to 10th grade drug use rates. We, if they've used in the last 30 days, we consider that pretty much they're a regular user.

So.

Just down towards the bottom, this is something that is good. These are good things. 75% of students believe they would be at moderate or great risk of harming themselves if they smoked marijuana regularly. So that is reflective of some of the values that we have in the City of Orem. And one thing I did want to mention, and maybe you're familiar with this. And we'll just go to the back.

You can just read that on the front page. Marijuana, 30 days, 5%. L, 15%. I don't know what the 5% and the L, 15% is.

Sure.

Yeah.

So 5% of 10th graders in the survey reported in the last 30 days they had used marijuana. And that's what I was saying, we, we use that measurement to to determine that looks like someone who uses regular— and that means any time in their lifetime. So 15%, they basically tried it. That's a really good question. Thanks for pointing that out.

I do have a question. I mean, how honest do you think these are?

I mean, well, you know, and there's a lot of information on the SHERP survey. I know it's been in the news a lot.

couple years.

But if you go to the website that has the SHARP survey information, it gives you the list of questions that are asked, asked, and, and how these factors are determined by the answers on those questions. And there's no reason for anyone to be dishonest. I mean, obviously, I guess you could You could have kids, but they don't— these are anonymous, you can't track this back. Exactly, it's anonymous. Nobody knows what they're putting down.

They—

the people next to them don't know, the teachers don't know that.

I guess my natural would be this is probably not her reporting. I'm not saying that's just my, you know, feeling, but that's true.

Yeah, that, that could be a factor. So, and, and not every student takes the test, the survey as well.

So, do you have a percentage of opt-out?

Um, I could get that information, but I don't have it with me right now, how many opt out.

So, yeah, I think it goes up dramatically by junior or senior year. Is it pretty stable?

As far as the marijuana use?

Yeah.

Or alcohol?

It does change. And the survey Some of the questions are taken, uh, for 6th grade. It's 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th. Not all of the questions go to the 6th and 8th graders. And so, um, with substance use, it typically does go up as they get older.

Yeah.

So, but all of that is at the website for the— you can look at— you can't see Orem at the website, but you can see Utah County compared to The state and to the nation.

And what may I ask, I'm sorry, what's that? Is this survey given at the beginning of the school year or the end?

Um, I believe they're getting ready to take the new one in the next few weeks.

Kind of at the end, so our seniors are really— they're, they're almost adults. I mean, some of them are. Yeah, yeah, your 6th graders are almost 7th graders by the time.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.

And it's, it's given every 2 years, so this is based on the last one.

Did you say what school was across that campus?

So these are from the— this is from the Orem schools, the data that I'm giving you today.

Just like all the high schools?

Um, so it's all of the 3 main high schools, and then other high schools, they can opt in if they want to. And so I don't have that information exactly on which of the Other high schools are involved.

10th graders in all the 3 Oregon high schools.

Yeah, so we don't know about charter schools then.

Exactly.

Okay. Yeah, or alternate.

Do you do this in Provo too?

Yes.

Are our stats similar to theirs, or—

You know, that's a good question. I don't have the comparison, but I definitely can find that out if that's something that you're interested in. You can My contact information is there and you can email me and I can get that.

It'd be interesting if there's a difference between schools too.

Yeah, and you know, they typically don't drill down to the schools. They do have that information. Sometimes the school administrators will ask for that information so that they can address the needs in their school. But it's definitely not for the public.

So I'm sorry, kind of weird question, but so the SHARP survey then is not a state school board recommend—

or, um, I believe that's the—

it's based on the LEA, it's based on Alpine, Provo, the individual school district.

They can decide. I think the controversy over the last couple years is if it was, um, supported, but there's no financial Support. It's just whether they sanction it and say—

Yeah, I guess my question is, what board decides this, the state board or the individual LEAs?

Oh, for, for if they're able to submit the survey, and I don't have that information.

I'm just trying to figure out how much of our— because we have a lot of charter schools in Orem, right? So how much of our population is not actually included?

Right. Yeah, those are great questions. And I am happy to find the answers for those things if you wanna reach out to me. So let me just— And like I said, maybe you're familiar with this, but we base a lot of our work on risk and protective factors. And on that backside of the page, risk factors being things that statistically have shown that these are factors that children have that increase drug and alcohol misuse, and then protective factors are those things that will protect them from drug and alcohol misuse. And so one thing that I wanted to point out on the protective factors is that 79% in Orem reported opportunities for pro-social involvement at school, which I think is great. I feel like that's a great reflection of Orem as well. A couple of other things to point out down on mental health, that middle, this is probably not surprising, but it's very alarming that 76% showed moderate to high depressive symptoms. And then other findings, this is also interesting, alcohol norms. 12th graders believe that a lot of their peers are using alcohol when actually the those reporting on the survey have them— there's fewer people using alcohol than what they're thinking. They're thinking their friends are all using alcohol, but perhaps their friends aren't really using alcohol as much as they think they are, or their peers.

Is the mental health part of this, is that the same universe of participants?

Yeah, so the mental health is the 12 to 6 graders. Not— it's every other, so it's 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th.

And it's different with the same demographic?

Yeah.

Can I ask one?

What was low neighborhood attachment? How would you define that?

Okay, that's a great question. So that would be they're doing things in their neighborhood with their friends, with their schools, with their— they're involved in the city, they feel like they can go to the library, you know, those kind of things are neighborhood attachment. And so that's been something that if there's low neighborhood attachment, that is a risk factor.

Would that also include church attendance in their neighborhoods?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, those are—

that's—

those are good questions. Can I just make an observation?

You hear a lot about eating dinner as a family is a big—

you hear that all the time, but that's a important. Yeah.

Did you guys correlate that? Looks like it's 59% here with, with the overall low. Was there a natural correlation between those two?

Between the low in— Well, the low in the marijuana, maybe? Oh, right.

Versus how we eat dinner with our families?

You know, that's a good question.

We—

I don't have it with me now. But there are— we do have some charts that will show these risk and protective factors and what they're more correlated with. Which of these, like eating with your family, what is it related to? Drug use, antisocial behavior, violence. And so I can find that.

That would be interesting because that's, that's one of the parenting recommendations you always hear about.

Make sure you have family dinners.

And there's programs through the schools that help prepare family dinners to give to families.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's one of the things with the Drug Prevention Coalition, we do encourage parents to participate in some of these classes. We partner with some of the programs in the schools that are teaching things, they're adding this to their curriculum because you know, with the protective factors. So if we can support organizations that are helping children learn how to resolve conflict, learn how to get along with their family, or spend time with their family, or like their family, those are protective factors. And so we support organizations that do that. And so at our Drug Prevention Coalition website, we actually have, you know, any organization in the county who's doing free parenting classes, you know, we, we put it out there because we want to support them with that. So, um, yeah, you guys have great questions.

Do you have any kind of an opinion on it?

I mean, it seems, it seems kind of shocking to me as far as the mental health concerns are so high versus, you know, the alcohol and drug use numbers, which seem quite low. I mean, but to have 50% of our 6th through 12th graders, you know, showed moderate to high mental health treatment needs. Yeah, I mean, half your kids need mental health treatment. 76% showed moderate to high depressive symptoms. I mean, that's 3 out of 4.

That's—

those numbers are pretty much off the charts. Do you guys have any explanations on all that?

Well, that does seem to be what's going on. It seems reflective of what's happening, how across the board in the state, in the country, with mental health issues and the kids. And then, and what I'm— we're focusing here is on drug and alcohol risk and protective factors, but the SHARP survey also includes correlation to suicidal ideation and, like I mentioned, violence. You know, we're focusing on one aspect of it, but these measurements are used in many areas of health, mental health, physical health, safety in the neighborhood, all kinds of things that organizations and health departments and other coalitions and cities, even in school districts, are using this data to back up and to move forward with some of the initiatives that they have to address things like suicide. So if we know that kids are struggling with mental health and we can find ways scientifically proven ways to address that when they're young, then that's what we're hoping is these other things down the road will come down— the rates, the suicidation, the drug and alcohol use, and violence.

And because that's— I mean, obviously we're just looking for the first time, we're not scientists, and we're just regular people walking down the street, but those numbers seem like If you're looking at this and saying, where are the alarm bells going off? It seems on the mental health side where the real serious going deeper and finding solutions and getting things out from a city and a county level would be a big deal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

Do you also have an idea how these are trending?

Like, is there more alcohol use, more marijuana from previous years, or is it trending Holding still? Is it going down?

Yeah, that's a good question, to be able to compare it to the other SHARP surveys. Give a general feel. I work mostly with drugs, so I can tell you with drugs. I don't have all the data on marijuana use, but I actually presented this at a meeting. I didn't share these slides, but Yeah. So this might not be significant to you because you can't see it. But the death rate, the overdose death rate from 2016 to 2020, and this is not just youth, this is everyone, Orem was right at the state level. And I don't have a comparison from that to the other years. But I do have a comparison for just the general overdose rate. And that's fatal and non-fatal, or actually, I take that back. That's non-fatal overdoses. And that's anyone. So there's not a lot. Most of the overdoses are adults. And so you don't have a lot of youth represented here. But for them, Um, in 2021, Orem was higher than the state rate, and they are lower than the state rate now. And so if you look at at least that one year, the overdoses, as far as, um, non-fatal overdoses that have been reported to EMS, those are going down in Orem. So—

Can you attribute that to anything? Education?

More naloxone?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, a lot of it is the change in prescription. The way opioids are prescribed has changed significantly over the last 5 years. Another is education. Or at least that's what we feel like education has been a big part of it. We've done a lot of promotions, a lot of other organizations besides Us have done a lot of promotions to educate people so that they, you know, I mean, they might still be using the drugs, but they're not overdosing as much as they, they were. And again, that's not necessarily the youth. Our Drug Prevention Coalition is more targeted at the youth. But it all kind of overlaps. So.

What year did the SHARP survey start?

When did it start? That's a good question. I don't know how long we've been doing it, but it has been every 2 years.

I'd be curious to know that answer.

Yeah, well, feel free to—

What they used before.

What's that?

Or if there was a survey used before to gather data, just so we can kind of see trends.

You've got to understand if you're Yeah, it definitely can for the last few years, so that shouldn't be a problem to find the trends. But as far as the Utah Valley Drug Prevention Coalition, you know, we encourage you to advocate for some of these initiatives that your community is already doing. City of Orem has a lot of great health promotion. I know with the newsletter and programs, so there's not— I don't know about a coalition. Some of the other cities have a community sex care coalition. Orem doesn't have one yet.

I don't know if they're in the process of working on that.

But just as far as, you know, takeaways, we encourage you as you're involved with your commissions and other partners in the city, if there's any anyone who would like to be a part of it. We'd love to have people represented from— represent from the different cities, and also just promoting things that are in your neighborhood, in your cities that can help with these.

So do you have events, or do you just try to work through like the schools or organize it?

We do have events sometimes, and you can go to the website and follow follow the social media to find out what's going on. A lot of times we encourage and support other organizations, especially the Communities That Care coalitions.

Like I said, a lot of the states have those forums that happen right now.

So if you don't have any other questions, I'll take off. I have one question.

Was it the Trevor Project as a resource?

I don't know Okay, that is an LGBTQ program that helps support those who are in at-risk situations. And so that's a youth program for, for that demographic. Any other questions?

Have you heard of Sources of Strength?

Um, that does sound familiar. Is that a school program?

Just, yeah, kind of more recently in the last 5 years, but it's kind of the intervention at the top of the waterfall before the ambulance at the bottom.

Oh, right, yeah, yeah, upstream. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I know a lot of the schools— I'm not familiar too much with what the schools in Orem have been doing. There have been in some of the other cities I've worked with, they've applied for grants to put some of these programs for the protective factors in the schools.

And I guess the Sources of Strength is really more, um, it's not necessarily attacking a particular issue, it's teaching skills.

Exactly.

And looking for your sources that you can go to at different times. This is from a state perspective. So do you have a program kind of like that, or do you guys—

We don't have the programs, but we try to educate school districts or other organizations about those programs. We don't have funding to put those programs into place, although there are grants available. I know Pleasant Grove and American Fork, Provo, a couple years ago— they don't have it now— but they've, they've applied for grants to put these in the schools.

Yes.

And, um, and the school district— Alpine School District has some of their own programs that they recommend. I'm not sure if they fund them, but there are a lot of things. And you're exactly right, the upstream is where the primary prevention is.

That's where that mental health—

that's where we gotta fix that.

Yeah. Is what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah. And those things, like I mentioned, the data is showing that if we can get a 3rd grader to know how to talk to his parents to resolve the conflicts, to know what to do when somebody does something that hurts their feelings. I mean, they seem like little things, but those are the risk— those are the protective factors that can make a difference with substance use later.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, let's go ahead and, uh, take them. You guys ready for your presentation?

Yeah, we can do it whenever you—

okay, I think what we'll do is we'll take a quick break, grab some food, and then let everybody eat while you guys present. So we'll make it through this. Volunteer for prayer blessing on the food.

I can stand here.

Okay.

This opportunity to gather today, to just work as a city. We appreciate the efforts of everyone who's here. We ask for a blessing on this food that has been prepared for nourishment and strength. We're grateful for the opportunity to serve and that we can gather in peaceful community. We are grateful for these many favors and blessings. We ask this in the holy name of Jesus Christ, amen. Let's take a 5-minute break.

We'll grab our food and then we'll start back up.

He'll find his way. Sometimes that cat finds you. Hey, I'm in my meeting.

Can I call you back later?

Yeah.

Let's go ahead and restart the meeting.

Okay, all right, everybody, yeah, we'll go ahead and start.

And, uh, Chris, I probably need, uh, you guys to be done by quarter to or so.

Okay, we'll be done by then.

Sure.

All right, thank you, Mayor.

So, Mayor and Council, I have Fred Gilbaugh here. He is part of Lewis Young Robertson Birmingham, which is our financial advisor, our team that we've hired to help us and assist us in a variety of ways, including impact fee analyses, as well as creating financial plans for utilities and other types of financial support. And so Fred has made it down just in time for this meeting, and then he'll present. And then if you have any questions along the way, please feel free to stop and ask a question. Really, we'll be done no later than quarter till.

I'll turn the time over to Fred.

Thank you for having me. Yes, I am currently engaged with the city to work through the impact fee process. I do several impact fees across the state, um, as well as, as Chris mentioned, facility plans, financial planning, financial advisory services. Tonight, uh, we wanted to just do an Impact Fee 101 as it relates to the process associated with updating your impact fees. Often there are questions, so let me know.

I know we did them recently. Was it 2, 3 years ago? What's our time? 2018. 2018. So we're 5. Wow, that's not bad. Yeah, thanks.

And there is no, uh, requirement on how often you update your impact fees. Uh, we typically recommend that entities look at environmental factors, economic factors, and other assumptions, and as those change over time, uh, often those can be triggers to an update. So you may do those— some entities will amend impact fees within a year, others may sit on it for a little bit longer. It just depends on your community. At its core, the Impact Fee Act requires that we have an impact facilities plan and a proportionate share analysis, which we call an impact analysis. What that is, is we're taking the assumptions and ensuring that it's proportionate to both existing and new development. Impact fees are the fee, one-time fee assessment on new development at So it's not a fee that you charge to existing residents. It's only on new development activity, and typically it is assessed at building permit. That's not— there's no requirement on when you assess the impact fee. That's typically when it's assessed. Why that's important is impact fees are a funding mechanism or repayment mechanism that allows you to ensure that new development is contributing to the construction infrastructure. Rather than making the general public or your either general fund or utility rate revenues cover that cost or all of that cost, impact fees can be a tool that helps allocate a portion of that cost to new development based on the requirements of statute. Often it's, it's depending on the community, it can be a large portion of that infrastructure or it could be a smaller portion of that infrastructure. Impact fees are also only applicable to capital costs. So we can't charge impact fees on operations and maintenance. It's just on that capital investment. So as we go through an impact fee process, the development of an impact fee facilities plan and impact fee analysis, often entities will engage firms like LYRB, as well as engineering firms to complete some of the engineering effort associated with the components of an impact fee study. When we look at the components of the study, there are typically these 5 elements. Now, how we apply these elements to each service is different, but these 5 elements govern most or all impact fee analyses. We have to look at service area and demand. We look at levels of service specific to your community. We look at your existing facilities and identify excess capacity. We then identify future facilities when your existing facilities are insufficient to handle growth, and we look at those future facilities. And then the final step as part of the planning process is identifying the financing component associated with both existing and future infrastructure.

infrastructure.

That concept of existing facilities and future facilities is an important concept to wrap our minds around when it comes to impact fees, because really it's an averaging of those components. The existing facilities and infrastructure will provide benefit or may provide benefit to your development. They can pay you back for that investment. And when they use that excess capacity up again, layer in future facilities, then those come into that averaging as well. Depending on your, uh, the relationship of your infrastructure, if you're— if we're looking at quite a bit of excess capacity versus future facilities, uh, the weighting of that impact fee may— that influences the overall calculation of the impact fee. There's a requirement that— requirement in the statute, in the Impact Fee Act, That if we include any of your existing facilities, we have to use the original value of that infrastructure. So if I constructed that infrastructure in 1970, I have to use the 1970 dollars when, when evaluating that infrastructure. Versus future facilities, if we're constructing future facilities, I use that future cost, including inflation and financing costs. So obviously it's cheaper for new development if they're paying you back for old investment, historic investment, versus building new infrastructure. So that's really why that's there, is ensuring that we evaluate that excess capacity first and then look at future facilities. When we step into each component here, as we look at service area and demand, what's critical here is the Impact Fee Act allows us to define our service area. Obviously, that's limited to your jurisdiction when you come to the actual assessment of impact fees, but what can influence that is annexation areas, or if you have sub-service areas within your municipal boundaries, there may be a need to, you know, split the municipal boundaries into separate service areas. An example of that is I've worked with Salt Lake City on their impact fees, and they were looking at the northwest quadrant as a specific service area potentially when it came to impact fees and how they might evaluate that. Prior to my involvement, they had an east and west service area that actually created some concern from the development community, so we had to reevaluate that. So defining the service area is critical, and then once you have that defined, we look at the demand within that service area, and that's going to be unique for each of the services that we look at. For example, public safety, we're looking at calls for service for fire and police, whereas water and sewer, we're looking at equivalent residential connections or equivalent residential units. For transportation, we're looking at trip generation on your roads. So as we apply the general methodology with regards to demand, The specifics are unique to the service that we're looking at. It's also important to note that as we look at those demand variables, the standard of practice is to focus on a 6 to 10 year planning horizon. So the Impact Fee Act doesn't actually specify that as it relates to the Impact Fee Facilities Plan. What it does specify is that is entities have 6 years to expend funds from the date which— from which they've collected those. So there's a rolling 6-year expenditure horizon for impact fees. And so based on that requirement, we've shortened that planning horizon to ensure that you can expend the funds in the appropriate time horizon. In addition, we want to make sure that, you know, we're not utilizing stale assumptions with regards to planning. And so By focusing on a shorter planning horizon allows it to be— that document to be more up to date with regards to—

So I have a question. Usually there's public safety impact fees, water, sewer, you know, parks, roads. Each of those have to be put on the projects in that area, or you want them all in one big impact fee? You have 6 years to spend it, or they have to go specific to that impact?

So you—

you—

yes, the impact fees have to be specific to the service for which it's collected, the Impact Fee Act requires that the funds be allocated to a specific interest-bearing account for that service. Every impact fee is tracked.

So each fund has a 6-year—

Each fund, yes, from the, from the date it's collected. But in most cases, you're not looking at the specific individual impact be, you know, if I paid $2,000 of a park impact fee, it's not specific necessarily to the neighborhood, or that goes into the general park impact fee fund balance and is spent for park services in general across the service area. So it's specific to the service area for which it's collected, and the service for which it's collected.

And the service area is defined when?

Usually it's defined at the outset of the impact fee process, but that can morph as, as you go through an analysis. Most entities typically have the impact fee service area contiguous with the municipal boundaries.

Okay.

So it's fairly rare that we split it up, um, just because the nature of an impact fee is such that, um, we're only allowed to include system improvements in the calculation of the impact fee or capital infrastructure that benefits the system as a whole, whereas project improvements or improvements that benefit specific neighborhoods are typically either required to be constructed by the developer or excluded from the impact fee equation. So based on that requirement, in most cases it makes sense to look at a broader service area because our system improvements are also designed to serve that larger That larger system.

But there are instances where I have separate service areas, so we'll essentially relook at this as we update.

One example is we did create a specific service area for storm drain in the southwest annexation area when we implemented our current— That's because the costs associated with providing that infrastructure was specific to that service area, didn't necessarily apply to the state.

Yeah, there may be examples like that or situations like that where a specific service has a different service area than the other services that we assess an impact fee. So with storm, there was a different service area versus public safety, which may extend beyond our municipal boundaries. So another key element is we talked about those 5 critical components of impact fee methodology is level of service. And the reason why that's so important is because the Impact Fee Act requires that we establish your level of service, Orem City's level of service, as it relates to each of these services that we evaluate. And then the impact fee is designed through that proportionate share calculation to ensure that new development builds infrastructure to maintain that same level of service. Now, municipalities and local governments can raise their level of service, but we cannot use impact fees to do that, or we have to identify some funding mechanism other than impact fees to raise the level of service for your existing residents, and then impact fees can be adjusted to match that same level of service. But the critical component is we define the level of service for Orem City. And the impact fees are calculated to maintain that level of service. That's why every community's impact fees are different. There is a desire, and often comparisons get made to other communities with regards to impact fees, but every community's level of service is different, especially when you go back to that concept of existing infrastructure versus future infrastructure. Forum City is primarily built out, but you do have redevelopment happening in growth occurring in the community. That's different than communities in northern Davis County that are, are now experiencing their boom period, right? The nature of that level of service and infrastructure is different, and the impact fee reflects that in the calculation. We've touched upon the existing facilities. Again, what's critical here is we have to inventory that and make sure we're evaluating any excess capacity that you have in your system and allowing new development to pay you back for that. Again, that typically has the effect of pulling the impact fee on average down because we're paying back historic investment rather than future investment. What I was going to highlight with regards to this is it's often referred to as a buy-in component. So when you see that or hear that term, buy-in fee as it relates to impact fees. It's paying back for the infrastructure that you've already built. Again, once we identify the excess capacity and what's available, where that is insufficient to handle growth, then we layer in new facilities. The graphic here I have on the slide is designed to help you understand the whittling down that happens as it relates to impact fees. the facility plans and impact fee analyses. So typically you'll have a master plan that is a long-term planning document that covers the big picture of infrastructure. That gets narrowed down to a capital improvement plan and capital facilities plan. Then from that, we identify projects that are repair and replacement in nature, projects that increase your level of service, At projects that are impact fee eligible. We're— the impact fee again only focuses on those projects that are impact fee eligible. And often that results in a disconnect, right, between what our master plan and our capital facility plan suggests we need in total investment relative to what the impact fees will fund. But that is the purpose of the impact fees, is to say here's what we need to maintain our level of service. And here's the cost that we can attribute to new development. In the interest of time, I'll jump to the process here. There are several elements that we have to look at as it relates to the impact fee process, noticing that has to be completed. You go through the noticing process, the analysis process. Once that's completed, then you prepare for public hearing, which once we complete the impact fee The analysis will come back to you as part of that. We typically have a work session to go through the details of the analysis with you in advance of the public hearing, and then at the public hearing, you receive public comment and input, and then you have the option to adopt, modify, or reject impact fees at that time. What we will do with our team is we calculate the maximum allowable impact That represents what you can— the ceiling for your impact fees. You can adopt anything lower than that, recognizing there's some trade-offs, and we can talk about that at a future point. But the one thing I wanted to highlight there is any increase to your impact fees require a 90-day wait period, so you can't adopt those immediately. We have to allow that 90-day wait period. I think that covers everything. That was pretty quick. There's obviously a lot to impact fees. We'll be available through Brynn, Chris, through staff to address any specific questions as we go through this process.

And you're looking at all of our impact fees? Yes, we only have water, right? And we added the other ones.

We have every eligible service fee other than municipal power. So, um, if I can just emphasize, so we're doing this because, yes, timing-wise, about every 5 years we should be updating this because we have a specific time frame in which to expand impact fees. Always law changes up at the state related to impact fees. Of course, we've been experiencing inflation, so that increases the costs. So we want to make sure we've got revenue sources cover the increased costs. There is a very public process that sometimes can become, I guess, politically— well, I guess emotionally charged.

Yes.

By specific development groups. But the real reason that— to me, the most important reason to bring this to you is to emphasize that as we, as we as staff bring to you master plans and capital facilities plans, sometimes we get— we often get sticker shock.

We see the total dollar amount associated with those plans.

So impact fees and impact fee charge is part of the overall puzzle to make sure that we can provide infrastructure.

And ultimately offsets then that dollar amount, the big dollar amount we see overall infrastructure has to provide. So to me, that's the most important reason to make you aware that we are constantly looking at multiple ways to make sure we can provide core infrastructure to our citizens.

And the whole M5B conversation is really just to show that there's a scientific process where these come from. It's kind of like these are just pulled out of the sky. These are dialed down to the specific users that are benefiting from services.

Yes, and the statute and case law protects local government in that we don't have to be exact in that because there's assumptions obviously that go into this process, but it has to be reasonable based on a study that identifies all of those assumptions and creates a reasonable connection between the impact And the fee assessment.

What's the timeframe? You're starting to study now, and when will this be implemented?

It depends. Usually it's 6 months if we can get data, and it sometimes depends on the status of the master plans.

But that's—

This is kind of the kickoff, and then you'll be coming back.

Yes. And you're going through all of the master plans, using all of them?

That's right.

Not just the general plan? Yeah, police, fire, parks, sewer, water, storm, traffic, and transportation. Some of those master plans have been updated recently already, but ultimately all of them have to be recently updated.

A condition of approval or recommendation by the Public Works Advisory Commission was given that we have impact fees adopted in conjunction with a financial analysis and a plan to fund these. And that was, that was quite— that was very important to the Advisory Commission. And so we went back and did do that, and then we adjusted our rates downward as a result of that. So this will help defray the cost on existing residents in the City of Orem and pass on some of that burden proportionately and legally and scientifically accordingly to those new developments. So it's a great way to spread the costs appropriately to fund these capital projects.

Okay, any other questions?

Okay, I think we understand, so we appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. So let's move to our agenda.

We'll just run through this, make sure everyone's on the same page, see if anyone has any questions. So Do we have anyone that's reporting from city council on their boards?

Probably not. All right, so our meeting will start at 6.

Item number 3, call to order for communication. You got— you took care of this, right?

I did.

I do know the first name of Bishop Scott's name. It's Cole. I will try to get you a last name.

Okay, these will be below.

So, um, probably 10 or 11 years old. Okay, you know, we've got items 6.

Do we have anything on item 6? I don't think so. We've got item 7, personal appearances. And we've got item 8, scheduled items. Scheduled items, we got reappointment to the Arts Council. Debbie, I'll let you introduce those 2. And then we've got reappointment to Public Works Advisory Commission.

So those 2 are mine, 8.2, 8.3.

Okay, and then we got the appointment of a city recorder. So, so how do we want to do that?

Do we—

we'll just typically just turn the time over to Usually it's to a recorder into the office, and Tess is prepared to do that.

2 recorders so that in the future Teresa can do this.

Okay, so, and Teresa, um, what I may do is let Brent introduce you so people may know who you are and where you're Um, and as far as that appointment, we don't have to vote on that, do we? Or do we?

Yeah, I think this is an advice and consent situation. Yeah, so you just, you just do a motion to, uh, approve Teresa as the city recorder.

Okay, and then from there we'll—

then you turn this on.

Yeah, okay, so I'll have you introduce her.

Each one of these are separate motions. Can we do those public works together? Yeah, yeah, this is separate items.

Yeah, and if you, if you do it when you introduce your people that you recommend for appointment, just go ahead and make a motion.

Okay.

8.6, dispatch services agreement.

Um, Steve, you want to explain that?

Yeah, so we just, we just have a little bit of extraneous language in there. We want to just delete the part about appropriating the money part. And all we want that to say is just a resolution approving a dispatch services agreement to accommodate the combining of Oregon and Provo dispatch services.

Just cut out the stuff about the money. Okay, can we just go right into the motion? Yeah.

Then item 8.7— well, actually, maybe I should make that 8.6 motion because I've got Motion in front of me. The rest of you don't have—

yeah, that'd be great.

Item 8.7, appointing Graham Binder as the city's representative to the Utah Infrastructure Agency Board of Directors, Utah Transit Authority Board of Directors, and the alternate representative to the Utopia Board of Directors.

Can you explain the alternate representative?

I think Jeff is the, uh—

oh, Regular member.

Yeah, he's the alternate to you today.

So, but the board member to be totally— so the city manager historically has been the opposite.

Okay, and then back, back to 8.6. We've got presenter Jake Summers. Is Jake really doing anything?

Yeah, yeah, he'll be here.

So he will I think he's just going to give a quick overview of what we're doing.

So we'll have him come up and do that.

Yeah.

That's okay. Yeah, we're gonna keep the advisory committee from the library separate from the advisory of the rec, even though you're over both of those.

Is that correct?

Yes.

I asked past you. I'm sorry. Capable man.

Thank you.

Thank you for that clarification.

And then, so Steve, you'll present 8.7?

Yes.

And then 8.8, Jason will present that. That's, uh, many portions of General Zone Development Standards pertain to overall height requirements for the peripheral wall.

So Jason, or is that Chris and Bree?

I've got Jason on here.

Oh, okay. Oh, sorry, I'm all the way down.

Okay, and are we—

we know where we're going with that as far as this is what we're talking about, right?

It's just that single building zone.

Okay.

And then item 8.9, resolution adopted 2022 water reclamation facility capital I've got a lot of names on here. Who's the key person presenting this?

I'll introduce everyone there. So Reed and I will be there answering questions regarding city questions specifically. John Motta from Water Works will be presenting. He was the one that presented here in the worksite session about a month ago.

Okay, so I'll just introduce you, Chris, and kind of take it from there. And then communication items, we don't have any communication items, right, Brent? There's nothing on there. Um, and then city manager information, obviously you got—

do you have something you'd like to share with that?

And I, I could just let you know quickly There's been— we've been getting some notifications from Jesse, perhaps from Councilmember Peterson, that we have been very active on the Utah League of Cities and Towns Legislative Policy Committee and been trying to follow up with a different contingent that represents Orem at the legislature. And You know, I think we've had some successes in modifying some of the things that our legislature has done.

I do want you to be aware that there are a couple of bills, one's a Senate bill, one's a House bill, that will have an impact to the city of Orem and essentially our sales tax.

One is related to cities that have gravel in them. The state legislature decided to take some of our, our sales tax and redistribute that to cities that have gravitas in them. And then another is HB 499. Jesse recently—

That's related to homelessness and responding to homelessness, so that the state is, is increasing their own funding to respond to homelessness. And the amount of $2.5 million that cities are now going to essentially have to match that. And we believe there will be essentially the way they'll calculate that sales tax base, which will then have a little bit bigger impact on Baltimore versus other cities this year. economic center to the county.

So is that getting invested in more homelessness or just going to a fund?

County.

Now I know there's kind of a thing to lower sales tax on the state side, but would they lower it less if they have this homeless component?

We have been watching that.

So essentially what What we're seeing so far is that it will only affect the state's portion of sales tax associated with groceries, and that they've represented that they will not impact cities' sales tax on groceries. But will they take less on— they won't take as much off groceries, or they'll still take all that off on groceries? The state portion, not the city portion.

So if a sales tax is approximately 7.75% in total, the state gets the bulk of that, we get 1% as a city, and then another essentially 0.1% associated with that CARES tax. So they're not going to affect our Our 1% and our CARES tax related to groceries, just state's money.

I was on a call with the COG, you know, we were lobbying Senator Anthony to not take as much of the state's and use a component of that because basically if you take it off, then we have to try to put back on the little homeless.

And I— and we were saying, that's a hard sell.

You have to add something back, just take off a little less.

I don't know.

We've been very, very lobbying on this whole situation.

But that's the key.

I just want you to know that I have seen Jesse up there.

I've seen Councilmember Pearson up there.

We have been communicating proactively.

Maybe the damage is lessened because our board of What did you do last night?

Okay, you're on clock.

Yes, I am.

Yeah, 24/7.

All right.

Jeff Lamson, can you hear us?

Jeff Lamson?

Yes, I can.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jeff.

Dave Spencer, can you hear us?

Dave Spencer.

We'd like to welcome you tonight to our City Council meeting and bring this into session. We'd like to start out with an invocation from Jim Larette.

Larette? Larette?

Oh, Larette. Yeah, okay. We're starting out rough here. Jim Larette.

Don't say the T.

Okay. And he's a Cubmaster for Pack number— very awesome number— 1776. We'd like to have him give the, uh, invocation to start with.

Yeah, I always tell my friends that, you know, I drive a Chevrolet to the buffet to eat filets on the way to the ballet. It helps them. Our Father in heaven, we're thankful for the blessings that are ours. We're thankful for this great nation that we are a part of and the blessings of freedom that we have. Father, we're thankful for the opportunity we have to gather together in this meeting tonight. We pray for thy guidance as decisions are made, that we can be inspired and have our minds enlightened and our hearts opened to understand the principles and the details of the messages and, and the laws and ordinances. Father, we pray for us as citizens to understand and receive the guidance from our, our leaders, that we can be good citizens and be great neighbors to each other. And these things we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you, Jim. Now we'd like to have Cole Anderson— he's one of Jim's Cub Scouts— come up and lead us in the pledge. Please rise.

Please follow me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Cole, for leading us in that. We'll move over to item number 7, and this is our personal appearances. I'll just read what I always read. 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, please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. We'll start out with Linnea Pugmire.

Thank you for your time. My name is Linnea Pugmire. I use they/them pronouns and am a non-binary citizen of your city and have lived here for 29 of my 31 years. I attended Sarah Park Elementary School. school, Lake Ridge Junior High, Orem High, and UVU, um, and then spent most of my time after school at the Sarah Theater. I voted in every single election since I turned 18 and have avidly watched city news and growth and changes as they have occurred. Recently, the mayor, city council, and department heads held a retreat in which they laid out goals for the city. Those included an upgrade on the Family City USA branding, researching form of government, reinventing the State Street Master Plan, and seeking to have the mayor, city council, and residents together on somewhat the same page in thought and direction. I applaud that. I would like to suggest that your goals also include the following: what is a family? A definition of a family by the vote of the council be placed on the transparency portal so that those who may not fit that description be alerted to the city's goal. That could include single-family homeowners, renters, homeless, Those of various races, religions, sexual orientation, culture, or anything that may determine what a family actually is. When looking at forms of government, make sure that your committees involve those 18 and over, single, married homeowners, renters, and those whom the future of Orem will most affect. Let us all be represented and research In planning, it is important that the mayor and the council carry the vision of Orem together. It is inappropriate and undesirable for residents to see their leaders so divisive that one group appears to shut down another on the council, so that lively and balanced discussion can be heard from all by the public. In conclusion, I would like a question to be answered on why the leaders put in a library director without required credentials to run a library. Um, it has never been a place of leisure. It's a place of learning, research, study, and a place to learn about differences in people, places, and things. I have many hopes for Orem. It's a place that I love. I could have moved when I was 18 and moved out of my parents' house, but I didn't.

Thank you for the time.

Next we have Megan Lloyd.

Hey, my name is Megan Lloyd and I'm a resident of Orem. During my life, I have checked out hundreds if not thousands of books from the Orem Public Library. I've consulted library staff for recommendations both for personal enjoyment and for for school and college projects and graduate school research. My kids are currently participating in the 1,000 Books by Kindergarten program, and we regularly attend the bilingual storytime on Thursday afternoons. The library has been a safe haven, a source of learning, and a gathering place for my family and our community. And so much of that is owed to the professionals who create programming and source content that enriches, educates, and entertains. In recent months, I've been distressed and disappointed to find that many of the traditions and practices that are so integral to the heart of our library have been discontinued with no indication of a discussion or change to library policy, leaving both patrons and library staff confused and uneasy. We appear to have different opinions on the purpose of a library in a community, but I hope we would share the same desire to follow the law. As a result of the publicity from the borrowing of heritage displays, it has been publicly noted that Orem City is not following Utah state law in several areas relating to libraries that are codified precisely to ensure that libraries are operated independently by those experts with the education, skills, and training necessary to ensure they remain strong public institutions. Even more alarming, in the past 10 years, the library has received over $160,000 in grants while failing to meet the minimum standards required. These funds were used to dramatically expand the digital collection, an almost prescient move that was critical for learning and mental health during COVID and the makerspace, an incredible resource for fostering creativity in our community. What future resources might we have to go without now that it has been broadcast we are not following the law? Orem has been operating contrary to State Code 9-7-402 for many years now, longer than any members of the current City Council have been serving, so it is likely that you just weren't aware. But now that you know better, I would ask that you do better. Take the necessary steps to begin following state code. Trust the experts to do the jobs for which they have been trained. Listen to your constituents who have concerns about our beloved library institution being a welcome place for all members of our community. And at the very least, please keep, keep your commitment to transparency and ensure that all City Council directives are documented in detail and made public for—

made available for public review. Thank you.

Next, we've got Sissy Rasmussen.

Hi, my name is Sissy Rasmussen. I am an Orem resident, and I'm here also to speak in support of the library, which I've been bringing my family to for the past 20 years regularly. And it's a place that is very important to us that we love, and I'm encouraging you to do better in regards to the library. I'm willing to grant you quite a lot of grace because you're still newly elected, so maybe you're not fully aware of some of the ways that we can implement best practices for the library. The first one I wanted to hit is transparency about decision-making. Second, allow the library autonomy to make decisions to serve all patrons. 3, bring Library Advisory Commission into compliance with code. And 4th, hire a dedicated library director. I do hear that the new Recreation Services Director is highly qualified and a good person, but that doesn't make him a librarian, and that is a unique, skilled job that people go to school for and need experience for. By not doing some of these things, you're putting Orem at risk for litigation or other negative consequences, and that affects taxpayers. More than anything, I'm asking you to proactively seek input from the wider community. I've heard concerning statements over the past year, and as recently as the retreat last month, that some of you believe you're were elected to do the mandate of your actual voters. But actually, once you're voted in, your responsibility is to all residents, including those who often disagree with you. I'm particularly concerned about the lack of outreach to groups like low-income, Spanish-speaking refugees, and the LGBTQ community. I'm also concerned that there is still not a scheduled public meeting with Alpine School District and Orem City. The last election showed us that 72% of voters disagreed with a decision that many of you strongly believed in. None of you were elected with more than 10,000 votes, but more than 20,000 voted against the proposition to create an Orem District. These numbers can be a great opportunity to pause, take a step back, and reconsider How to find out what Orem residents really want. My observation is that the library is strongly supported by residents and that recent decisions to micromanage the library are unpopular and a disservice to residents. I encourage you to do better now that you know better, as Megan said. Please show support for the library by allowing them the space to make decisions and to be— to use their qualified employees to make programming for our residents, as well as following best practices and legal code. Thank you.

Rita Christensen.

My name is Rita Baguio Christensen. I'm the past head children's librarian at the Orem Library. As an employee, I was warned to be careful of what to say. as not to become insubordinate. However, I no longer work at the library, and I'm a current Orem resident. I am a Filipino American born during the civil rights movement. The U.S. brought my family to this country to work in a labor camp on Oahu for a dollar a day. We helped to build this country, but no Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month book displays to tell these stories are allowed at the Orem Library. It is offensive. 2022 was the first time in my life that I've been asked to make decisions regarding the cultural identity of a group of people. On August 2nd, I was called into the library director's office with 2 other employees. We were told that all posters and book displays on National Heritage Months would be discontinued. Amy Carr, a library volunteer, noticed the ban and commented in city council meetings about the censorship of ideas and words, which is a First Amendment violation. The mayor repeatedly, repeatedly declared there was no Yet this month, Lynette Millett wrote in the Daily Herald that we support city management's decision to end discontent by eliminating formal heritage and diversity displays. Mayor, you said there wasn't a ban. Match your actions with your words. On February 23rd of last year, I attended a maturation books planning meeting to address Lynette Millett's request to move the children's books to closed stacks. I refused the censorship tactic and stated that if I had to do something, I would do it. something, we could move them to the teens collection, although they are written for families with children. 2 catalogers recataloged the titles. My daughter relabeled the books. This was done without completing the required reconsideration form, as Lynnae is not a library employee. Despite 8 witnesses in that meeting, Acting City Manager Brent Bybee said on January 30th, contrary to statements made in the Herald, councilmember Member Lenee Millett did not give any administrative direction regarding moving books into less visible locations. In the January 2023 mayor message, Mayor Young wrote that Orem City Council has promised to bring a new level of transparency between Orem citizens and their city government. City Council members, match your actions with your words. This month, the city also eliminated the library director position. The city is now breaking Utah State Code 97407, You also do not have a true library board, and that breaks Utah State Code 97-402. The city has received over $160 grand of Utah state grants since 2013. The Orem Library's lack of a library director and board means that it is not meeting Utah's minimum standards to receive state and federal funding. The mayor also said this month that he incorporates the values of Family City USA into all of his decisions. As an Orem citizen, I demand that you incorporate the values of honesty into running the city and hire a library director and create a true library board. Match your actions with your words.

We'll respond to this at the end. Next, we've got West Parrish.

My name is West Parrish, and I guess if you listen to the mayor, you already knew that. I've been a resident of Orem for, uh, about 43 years, been a resident in Utah County for more than 60 years. I had— I just live east of the city center. We had 9 children that were raised there. Every one of them came to the Orem Library, and I now have— I lose track of the number of grandchildren, but they're coming to the Orem Library. And I'm concerned about libraries in general. Both the Orem City Library and school libraries. It seems that our nation's libraries are being flooded with inappropriate material that is damaging to children, and some of these materials actually violate state law. I've read the statutes that that define pornography and materials that are inappropriate for children. I visited Orem— an Orem school, Canyon View Junior High, and reviewed a list of nearly 100 titles and found that about 30% of those titles met the legal definition definition for pornography. These are felonies. If we possess these in our own homes or on our computers, we could be arrested and prosecuted. Some of these materials would also constitute contributing to the delinquency of a minor. This is a lesser crime, but still a crime. I believe the Orem City Council not only has a right, but they have an absolute duty to see to it that the children and the citizens of Orem are protected, that materials in the Orem City Library that meet these definitions are not available and should not be available, and it is appropriate to ban those materials, that the City Council is concerned about these issues. I'm grateful for. I detect a spirit of animus in some of the criticism that is being launched against them, and I think they should simply be given time to do their job and to meet their legal obligations. Thank you.

Jennifer Jensen.

Hi, my name is Jennifer Jensen, and I've been an Orem resident for about 20 years. Last week on February 21st, I was walking my dog at about 800 West and 150 North, which is located very close to Parkside Elementary. And there's a church there. And as I was walking along, I noticed 2 police officers, and I noticed a 3rd that was on the other side of the church. So 2 were in the west side of the church, and at least one other, possibly more, was on the other side of the church. And as I was walking along, I noticed that there was a police officer with a rifle right here on his side, and I noticed that the other police officer was standing like this, pointed towards the church. And I happen to know that that church building abuts Parkside Elementary, which is where my daughter worked and where many of my children's friends have attended. And after I got myself safely away from the situation, I called Parkside and I was notified that no one had told the school that there was police activity not that far from a school. About 250 steps was the farthest away, and a rifle can easily shoot more than 4,000 meters. First rule of gun safety is do not point where you don't want to hit. If a police officer was following someone who was leaving that building, a stray bullet could have easily hit someone, a child leaving Parkside Elementary. They have 3 trailers that are next to the fence, and children frequently go in and out between those doors. In fact, today I was there about 9:40 and I saw several children walking from the trailers into the school. When I contacted the school, neither Principal John Shelton nor Alpine School District Superintendent Shane Farnsworth had been notified that there was police activity during that time. They were later told that it was a short thing, it was probably only 10 to 15 minutes, they didn't need to do a lockdown. But I ask you, what could have happened to those kids during that time if no one had notified them and someone had made a shot? Unfortunately, these children have suffered another loss. In August of 2022, those children's older siblings had a teacher at Orem Junior High who was found guilty of pornographic material. And at that time, the Orem City Police said that they knew that they should have contacted Alpine School District sooner. In fact, Lieutenant Nick Thomas said, we recognize that we should have contacted Alpine School District as a department, and we are reviewing that process for the future. I am calling on Police Chief Josh Adams and the Orem City Police, and also the council and the mayor, to fully I want you to take care of our children. We care about these kids in Orem, and I'm begging you to fulfill your promise. Thank you.

Greg Carlisle.

Mayor, I'll just say real quick, um, Police Chief Josh Adams is here and could meet with the citizen. to talk further about her concern.

Yes, sorry, are you aware of that? So the police chief's right there at that table, and you can either speak with him there outside, or, uh, but yeah, just give them all of your information so this— we can deal with this directly. Thank you. Greg Carlisle.

I live in Orem since 1979. I've just been involved in watching this library situation happen in these city council meetings the last probably 8 or 9 months, and I'm just seeing the city council and Orem City and everything being attacked. And this— the issue that has evolved into like a political football, and it's hard for me to believe that this is really happening. I mean, we have ways that we can solve this, and to come here and just go at the City Council each month when they knew, like, 3 or 4 or 5 months ago that they were not involved in the decision-making. And so now we're at the point where, whether it's Councilman Linné or whoever's trying to meet, or all of you, I'm sure the answers aren't all there, but I think we should give time to get input from the city and let the average citizens know what's going on. Instead, we're seeing article every week slandering or attacking the city council or certain city councilmen and women about the library. And so I, I'm wondering what the library is, how it's reflecting Orem City now. I'd say 9 out of 10 people that walk in there think it's the library. But now we read all these things going on. I respect it. I've seen the different culture situations. the causes. But I'm just wondering if it gets to become— is going to be when we have Black and Hispanic and gay or white supremacists or religious heritage, and all this starts happening in our library, what is it? I mean, we have state code here, but we also— are we Salt Lake City? Are we Park City? Are we Chicago? Are we San Francisco and one size fits all? So I say we hold our breath and everybody sit down. And maybe have some open public meetings without the attacking of the city council, which I think is doing their best to represent ARM.

Laura Cole.

Hi, my name is Laura Cole. I'm not sure I have anything to add that my compatriots have not said better, but I've lived here my whole life. I've used the library, my children use the library. It's a great blessing, and my concern is primarily the lack of transparency, because finding out in February But Lynette Mellett said that yes, this was a city decision being handed down to the librarians, but there is no paper trail. I find that concerning. And as an Orem citizen, I gotta say I don't feel represented. But I recognize maybe I'm a minority. It's just a very odd feeling to grow up in a place And never feel like you quite belong because you're a little bit on the outside of it. But I love living here. I love having my children live here. My family lives here. And I would like to see a little more transparency in this process so that we do know what's going on, so that we can address concerns. It's the, it's the opaque wall of not knowing But seeing that something has changed and not knowing why.

That's what I have to say. Thank you.

Amy Carr.

Good evening. My name is Amy Carr. I am a current patron, have been a patron of our library for many years. I have been an employee, and I currently work as a volunteer storyteller and help to operate the podcast Little Learners Storytime. Almost 6 months ago, I stood before the City Council concerned about the policy that had been implemented banning any visual displays of National Heritage Months or recognitions of minority groups of people. Mayor Young publicly declared at that meeting in September that members of the City Council had no knowledge of this policy and would look into it. Not only has there never been a public announcement made about the City Council's findings, but the ensuing months have certainly led to the discovery of numerous blatant violations of state statutes with regards to government oversight in the operations and running of Orem Public Library. I'm here tonight to bring some of those issues to light with the council and to the public, and to hold you accountable for the reparations regarding your mismanagement of the library. And some of these points were beautifully stated by Rita, but I'd like to add my viewpoint too. Orem City Library has recently received, as has been mentioned, over $160,000 in grant monies from 2 different grants by the Utah State Library. In order to receive these grants, libraries must be fully or provisionally certified under the current 17 standards Currently, Orem City Council and Orem Library are in violation of at least 6 of these standards. I want to highlight 3 that I believe pose the biggest risk to Orem Library being able to continue to fulfill its mission statement and provide equitable, valuable resources to all patrons and community members. First, Orem City is breaking State Code 9-7-402 by not having a fully functioning functioning library board that has power given to them to develop, approve, and change library policy, oversee collection development decisions, and collaborate on other policies regulating library operations. Orem Library has an advisory board that does not meet the Utah library standards outlined in state law intended to provide a check and balances between city council and the library. The fact that Lenee Millett sits on the advisory board is a gross violation of the separation the library should have from direct council involvement. The lack of a board operating separately from city council has also led to a mismanagement of the monies awarded through these grants. According to State Code 9-7-404, a dedicated library fund is to be set up separate from all city accounts and without city council access. These monies are to be overseen and their use directed by a library director and board. board, not the city council. Finally, Utah State Code requires public libraries accepting these grants to have a library director. This library, its administration, employees, patrons, families, and children deserve to have a library director with the education, training, and skills necessary to effectively run this library. It should not be under the purview, purview of leisure director.

Thank you.

Timo Christensen. Is it Timo?

Hi, yeah, my name is Timo Christensen. I'm an Orem resident, have been pretty much all my life, and I just had a small concern I thought worth bringing up. So this morning I found myself biking to work, as I always do. It was around 4:30 AM and there was a lot of snow on the road, as one would expect when it's been snowing, which at the time wasn't too much of an issue. But then a few hours later, around 11 AM, when I was finishing work and going home, I found myself again following the same road. 400 East, um, for most of my time. And I found that the road had been plowed. However, all of— there was still snow in the bike lane, except unlike before when I could easily bike through the snow, this was full of chunks of ice or debris from the road as left from snowplows passing by. Um, as this usually is an issue whenever there's snow on the roads, has been for the last decade that I've been cycling on Orem roads. Um, and where I figure Public Works Department is maintaining the infrastructure that they built and their interest is in doing that, I would assume that this is a concern that I should be aware of, just as to maybe come up with a change in strategy as to how roads are plowed. I don't know. But I figure after 10 years, at least, of seeing this problem every year, even for weeks after snowfall, I figure it was probably just not even noticed previously, so just thought I'd bring it up.

Thank you.

Yeah, Mayor, Timo's one of— actually one part of our dedicated cleaning crew here at the city center. So we do have our public works director here that can speak to our snowplowing practices. and can both educate and take into account your input. He's, he's right here, Chris Shirkey, here on the side.

Last, we've got Karen Adamson.

Hi, I'm Karen Adamson. I live here in Orem. I kind of hesitated deciding to say anything tonight, but I really just wanted to express my gratitude to the City Council and the mayor. In Orem City, you can't make everybody happy, not all at the same time. And there's been a lot of people that have been just not paying attention to the things that are going on for years and years.

I've been one of those.

Recently, I decided to start coming to these council meetings. meetings on a regular basis, learning how the City Council works, learning what's going on in the city. It's been pretty eye-opening and amazing. I'm very grateful for the work that you do and for all the different topics that you have to address. I'm very grateful for the work that you're doing in helping people to realize that going along to get along is not the way to do business, and that it's very difficult to ruffle feathers, and I appreciate the All right, thank you.

We'd like to address— and we'd appreciate it if you would stay for the responses. I know sometimes people come, they make their statements, and they run out the door, so they never really get the benefit of having a conversation.

I'm sorry.

conversation. I'd appreciate it if all of you that have made comments would stick around so we can have a conversation. I'd like to— we'll start with Bren, and we knew that some people were going to be coming and having some of these comments. We want to address them, and so we'll introduce a few people here. But Bren?

Yeah, I appreciate it. So first, just want to add my genuine appreciation for public input. And I just want to assert and reassert that your Orem mayor and council do love the library. They are committed to making sure our library continues to, to be the best. I will reassert and reclarify that your— our Orem mayor and council, they did not give administrative direction regarding our library policies. I'll let our city attorney speak to maybe some of the legal concerns that have been brought up, but I'll— I think it would also be helpful to have our library and recreation director, Bryce Merrill, speak to how we're— we aren't sitting on our thumbs. We are— we have— we are listening and hearing the need to clarify and review our library policies, we will make sure to go about it in the proper way. But again, I just want to make sure that it's publicly known that our, our Orem mayor and council are committed to, love the library. I grew up going to the library, Orem Library. I'm in full support as well. And, and, and I think something that I've— that's really great about Bryce Merrill, that where I've worked with him on the— in the recreation department, which is distinct from our— we will maintain a library department. He has been very proactive, energetic, detailed about making sure that even if we maybe can't make everyone happy, he is very skilled at making and joining us and making everyone happier. So he will bring that skill set to help oversee the, the library as well. So maybe, with your permission, Mayor and Council, we could let Steve Earle, our City Attorney, respond to some of the legal aspects and then give a little time to Bryce.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

So, Mayor, City Council, yes, there have been a number of allegations made about the city not being in compliance with state law, and the sections that have been referred to specifically are Sections 9-7-402 of the Utah State Code, as well, as well as Sections 9-7-404 and 9-7-405. 9-7-402 says that when the city governing body decides to establish and maintain a city public library under the provisions of this part, that it shall appoint a library board of directors of not less than 5 members, not more than 9 members. Then these later sections, Section 9-7-404, talks about the— this library board board of directors having the, the ability or the right to establish policies for the operation of the library. Then 9-407 talks about the library board of directors having the power to appoint a person as the librarian having immediate charge of the library. So I can certainly understand how people reading this would think, hey, the city is out of compliance because we We have a Library Advisory Commission, but we don't have specifically a library board of directors, and we— and our Library Advisory Commission does not have the power to establish policy for the library, and it does not have the power to appoint a librarian or a library director. So again, I can easily understand how people could read this and think that the city's out of compliance. But I've had the opportunity to do some research. into this section of the code and to look at the history surrounding this section of the code. And it's clear to me that these sections of the code do not apply to the Orem Library. And let me explain the reason for that. Let me go back to the language that I read from Section 9-7-402. That language again says, when the city governing body decides to establish and maintain a city public library under the provisions of this part. So the question is, well, what does that mean to establish a library under the provisions of this part, as opposed to just establishing a library? Well, there's— there used to be a Section 9-7-401 immediately preceding that Section 402 I just read from, and that section provided that city could levy an annual tax not to exceed 0.001 of taxable value of taxable property in the city for the purpose of funding the library. So if you read this Section 402 in context, what it means, in my opinion, to establish a library under the provisions of this part is to establish a library using this funding mechanism of a special library tax, a levy of an annual special library tax. Now, the City of Orem does not do that. We do not levy a special library tax like we're authorized to do under this section of the state code. And so, in my opinion, our library is not one that is established pursuant to this part, as the code says. Now, it's important to know that there's actually separate independent authority for a city to establish a library. This is not the only section of state code that allows us to do that. So there is independent authority separate and apart from this section that allows us to do that. And it— that section does not contain all of these requirements associated with the library board of directors and the power of a library board of directors. So again, although at first glance it might seem that we are subject to this, in fact we are not, because we're not a library established under this part. And therefore We're not required to establish a library board of directors. We're not required to give that library board of directors power over policies of the library, and we're not required to give them power to appoint a librarian overseeing the library. And this is in fact the model, the pattern that we've been operating the library for as long as I've been here, 26 years. And in fact, we are in compliance with state law in this respect, this respect. We are not out of compliance, as has been alleged.

Thank you, Steve. I'd like to— did you want to say something, Ron?

Maybe just if you're willing to give a few minutes to Bryce Merrill.

Yeah, what I'd like to do is give some time to Bryce. I'd like to just make a few comments leading into that. Because I think, I mean, Bryce is going to bring you up to speed on what we're doing with the library currently. And I think to have that conversation, we have to have a foundation of honesty. And unless we have a foundation of honesty, if we're just coming in and throwing rocks and running away, that's not a foundation of honesty. And our foundation of honesty— and I can understand why some of you would be upset. reading some of the articles in the paper. I mean, some of the things that have been said— I've got in front of me 3 articles here. Orem Library accused of censorship over removal of celebratory displays. That was the day before Thanksgiving. Former librarian accuses Orem of book display censorship. That was January 28th. 2 days later, Warren Public Library director retiring amid censorship claims. Now, in order to censor, you have to censor. You can't just like put it out there. It's not like in World War II, the Nazis burning the books and that sort of thing. That's real censorship. And there is no censorship going on. And just like I told the lady who came up 6 months ago, when we were accused of creating displays, and she was concerned that our presence was scaring her child, I told her then that we never banned any displays. We never had anything to do with it. And you shake your head. But I'm— it's really interesting because it's talked about in these articles about how we ban these things. And it's not true. And it's hearsay. And it's what is being put out there. And if that's being put out there, and we're trying to have a real conversation, we can't have that unless we have a foundation of honesty. I'm just going to put out a few things from some of these, these censorship, censorship, censorship Articles. Utah Library Association and leaders from Equality Utah, Flag Utah, and Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce called on Orem City Council members to publicly and transparently address their actions in this matter. Okay, we do, but you don't want to hear it. Rescind any directives that have been given to the library Related to displays and materials. Okay, how do you rescind something you haven't done? But this is, this is what we're being advised to do here in this Daily Herald article by these groups. We're supposed to rescind something that wasn't done and commit, commit to refraining from future directives that seek to restrict library staff from carrying out the mission of the library. So we're supposed to rescind, we're supposed to commit to refrain from something we haven't done. So I have to ask myself, why is this game going on? Why are we keep being attacked for something we're not doing? And I let it go after the first article, after the second article, after the third article. Eventually, We've just got to stand up and say, we're not doing this. And so for you to keep attacking us for doing something we're not doing, it makes it really difficult to have a conversation. And I could keep going because, you know, the— Yeah, I mean, it just keeps going and going, but I'm not going to take everyone's time tonight. But I will tell you, that there's a number of inaccuracies. It talks in here about how the Orem Police Department officers had an LGBTQ pride badge they wore in one of these articles. Well, they didn't. So you can't just keep making things up in articles. You've got to deal in facts. Anyway, I'm not going to go on with that. But I want to say one other thing, because it seems like the favorite target— it seems like part of the game is to pick a target and then go after it— is, is to, uh, to hassle Lenee Millett. And Lenee Millett's worked with the library. She's worked hard with the library. She's probably the hardest working city council member that we have to make Orem a better place and to make Orem a phenomenal place. But she keeps getting these rocks thrown at her. unjustly. And she's got personal health issues in her family that are much more important than any of the things we're talking about. And so when I see you attacking her, I think that's terrible. And I'm just gonna leave it at that. But where we're going to go from here is we do have a desire to create the best situation throughout the city and our library. And so with that in mind, we've been having a number of meetings over the last several weeks to say, how can we best manage this? How can we deal with this? And the best person in the city that we've got is Bryce Merrill. And so I'd like to turn the rest of this time over to Bryce to explain what he's got going on.

Mayor, Council, thank you for providing just a couple of minutes. I think I want to start from a place of gratitude as well. If you were to choose to have a group of citizens, apathetic or passionate, I would always choose passion. And I love that we have so many advocates in this room for our library. and for the services that are provided and for the staff that are provided. I love that even if we are on very different sides of this issue, that we have a passionate group of citizens, a passionate staff, and a passionate council about this. Gives me hope that, like you've said, that we're going to be able to find something that's going to work and going to help us move forward. When I started this position just a couple of weeks ago, this became priority one for And I will also commit now that this is not going to be resolved anytime soon. We are still very early in a process of trying to figure out how we can build a policy or bring together an idea that helps us represent the complexity of the issue that we have before us. Perhaps you were like me, and that as you read about this or learned about it, that it might have felt like this was just a couple of displays in a couple of places in the library. But as I did a cursory overview of what it meant to have displays, I found that there were over 150, and this is just me going through, over 150 different locations in the library at a given time where, where you could consider it a display. Maybe it was a cover-out area in the stacks, or maybe it was something on top of the stacks, an end cap unit. Maybe it was a table. Maybe it was the choice of which book our staff would present during a story time or a teen and tween book club. Maybe it was the choice of which show we would show as part of our movie nights and movie clubs. We have different groups, cultural experiences, curated art pieces, user-generated art pieces, each of which bring together and show the vibrancy of the library and of what we have. When you consider the number of iterations that we're talking about each year, we're talking about over 4,000 places and times that we have staff that have to make a decision about how they choose choose to display certain pieces of information. I mentioned that because that to me brings us to the complexity of a policy that works and will work for us moving forward. And to say frankly that we don't have it just yet. But to have something where we can operate and repeat so that it is consistent and, as we've heard today, a desire for it to be transparent. It's easy to anticipate how the library will operate. I think that's incredibly important for us, and that is priority one. That is what we are here to do and work through today. I'm confident that as we set a policy that will help us govern the intent and purpose of those areas, how you curate these types of processes, how you work through escalating concerns or talking about future years or continue to iterate it. I'm confident we can find something that works. We have a number of stakeholders that we're interested in consulting when you look at something like this. I'm grateful to our library division managers, experts in the library field that have been front and center in this process. They are experienced, they are talented at what they do, and they are well educated in the library field, and so I'm grateful to them. I consider other stakeholders that we've offered to bring in, including the Utah Library Association. Our first day in, we We, we reached out to them. My very first meeting in the library was an invitation to the Utah Library Association to meet and to discuss this. We reached back out to them at the end of that week, and although we had hoped that they would choose to meet with us, they opted to do a public press release or something like that. I'm hopeful that as we move forward and get to the actual business of governance and of managing, that we're able to have stakeholders that want to meet, to want to discuss and reflect the nuance of what we have. And so I repeat my invitation to them that I would love to sit down and to hear from them and include them as a stakeholder who has the residents of Orem as their best interest. I'm grateful for the chance to have so many of our residents here today, and I would make the same invitation to them. If they would like to speak about this, please reach out, reach out to us as staff, reach out to our Library Advisory Commission members. and allow us to be a part of that process. We are grateful to do that. And I hope to not be resigned to a spectator of that process as they have frustrations or have great ideas or something like that. I know that we are an open door and an open phone line and an open email address so that we can collaborate and move forward with them. Again, I start— or I end where I started. I'm grateful that they are passionate. I'm grateful that they are wanting to be educated and involved in how the library operates. I'm grateful that they're wanting to hold us as staff members accountable to deliver on these results to our residents. I think all of this is the best possible place to start from, is to have an engaged group of residents that are here to advocate for the library. And I look forward to meeting with them as we engage with the various stakeholders and build a policy that reflects the nuance and the complexity of this issue. complexity of displays in a library.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bryce. Okay, thank you everyone for your input and your comments. We can move to the regular part of the meeting. We'll start out with some reappointments and appointments. Our first one are some reappointments to the Art Council. Debbie, if you'd like to introduce your reappointments.

It's Dave or John here. Both of these are valuable members of our Arts Council, and this is a reappointment. I also want to get a special shout out to John Reinhardt, who's taken on the art that is wrapped around the utility boxes. He's really worked hard to get permission and has really been kind of the key related to these utility boxes. Be sure to look for these in our parks, and we're doing many, many more in the upcoming year related— we thought we had a call for art and we received many submissions. So from children to adults and everything in between, these were wonderful submissions that you'll be seeing wrapping on around the ugly green utility boxes that you see around town. So I'd like to make the motion that we reappoint to the Arts Council Dave Blackington and John Reinhardt.

We have a second.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

This is Jeff.

Oh, and Dave are there.

Okay.

Yep.

The passes. And, uh, yeah, just to clarify for the group, I wasn't aware So Jeff Lamson is on the remote system, so he'll be voting. Dave Spencer is down in California, but he's made the effort to be on the remote system. And Terry Peterson is out of the country so far that he's on a different time zone, so he won't be on tonight. But we'll move on. Next, we've got a reappointment to the Public Works and Library Advisory Commission.

Okay, so this, as you said, Mayor, this will be a reappointment of Todd Hadley. Is Todd here?

I saw him.

Okay, to our Public Works Advisory Commission. He's been working on that commission previously and would look forward to making a motion at this time to reappoint Todd Hadley to our Public Works Advisory Commission.

I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The reappointment passes. Thank you. Next, we've got an appointment to the— this is an appointment for the first time to the Public Works Advisory Commission.

Yeah, this is another one of my commissions, so I'd like to make a motion. Is Mike Wimpy here?

I didn't see him.

Mike's a great addition to our Public Works Advisory Commission, so I'd like to make a motion at this time that we appoint Mike Wimpey to our Public Works Advisory Commission.

I'll second.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The appointment passes. We've also would like to make an appointment of city recorder. And, Bren, would you like to introduce our new city recorder? order, or about to be?

Yes, Teresa McKittrick is a super big fan of the City of Orem. Not only is she a resident, but we've been interviewing her for this position unbeknownst to her for the last 5+ years as she has been a supervisor in our 311 help desk area. And so she brings with that The, the dedication, the love of Orem, the detail-orientedness, but also the customer service that, that comes with being a supervisor in our 311 help desk area, and she'll bring those attributes with her energy and smiling face into the city recorder position.

I'll make a motion that we approve. Teresa McKittrick, as I said, as our new city recorder.

I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The appointment passes. We'd like to now swear in the new city recorder.

Okay, time to decide how to best do this. So I'll have you stand in front of the mic, that way they can hear you on the Zoom. Make it all official.

It's so exciting.

Okay, I'll have you raise your right hand. So just repeat after me. I, Theresa McKittrick. I, Theresa McKittrick. Do solemnly swear. Do solemnly swear. That I will support, obey, and defend.

That I will support, obey, and defend.

The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the State of Utah. The Constitution of the State of Utah. And the laws and ordinances of the City of Orem.

And the laws and ordinances of the City of Orem.

And I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity. I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity. Congratulations.

And Theresa, we'd like to welcome you to the group. And I know you've been with Forum for a while, but this will be a new, a new challenge for you, an adventure. And the city recorder is a very important position, and that's why she had to take the oath. So thank you. Our last appointment is another library commission appointments, so I'll turn that to Lynae.

Yes, Debbie Smith. Is Debbie here? Will you stand?

Hi, Debbie.

Um, I would just like to, just since she's here, just say a little bit about Debbie. She had a very impressive resume. She's a retired teacher, educator, worked in a number of different districts. She has a master's degree, experience with our English language learners. She's an author. She's a grandmother. And she will add a great, wonderful set of skills and her expertise and diversity to our Library Commission, and we appreciate your accepting this opportunity and, and to serve. Thank you so much. So I'd like to at this time make a motion that we approve Debbie Smith to be appointed to our Library Advisory Commission.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The appointment passes. Thank you. Okay, moving on to item 8.6. We're going to review our dispatch services agreement. We've got a resolution for that. Jake, if you'd like to tell us about that.

Mayor, City Council members, in September of 2022, the City Council expressed its desire and intent to combine the Orem Dispatch Center with the Provo City Dispatch Center and directed city staff to work with Provo to prepare an initial agreement for the creation and operation of a joint dispatch center. Over the past several months, the Orem City Fire Department administration, the Orem City Police Department administration, their counterparts in Provo City, and multiple other departments and individuals collaborated to create an initial agreement for the creation and operation of a joint public safety answering point, or PSAP, most commonly known as a dispatch center. At this time, city staff believe that we've reached An agreement that is acceptable to both Orem and Provo. On January 31st, 2023, the Provo City Council passed a resolution approving the agreement and appropriating funds for the creation of the joint dispatch center. Subsequently, Provo City Mayor Kafusi signed the agreement. This agreement specifically furthers the City Council's focus on safe, livable, connected, and engaged neighborhoods, and community-focused and effective government. At this time, the staff present the agreement to the City Council for final approval and authorization of the mayor to sign the agreement.

Do we have any questions from the council?

You might mention we took a tour there today, Mayor.

Go ahead.

A tour of the, of the combined dispatch center in Provo today. Found it to be well, well managed and in very nice surroundings in the new Provo City building, and we were impressed with what we saw. So I think I'd be in favor of moving forward with this, Mayor.

I think you're going to make the motion, right?

Yeah, I know we've gone through this for a while, working on this final moment of everything coming together officially, correct? And like Tom says, our visit down there, it's a great work environment. We think it'll be a really effective thing for the city, so We're excited about it. Debbie?

I think one of the reasons we decided to combine these was that our dispatch employees were having to work overtime. They were— it was becoming very stressful. And I talked to them today. They've been able to integrate our employees, and they've also added some new employees. So I feel like the work-life balance has much improved for our dispatch And so I think that was one of our goals, and I feel really good that we are achieving that goal.

Thank you. Any other comments? I'd like to— go ahead.

I'll just say, I'll just add that the City of Provo has been great to work with in hammering out the details of this partnership, and we look forward to working with them to together even more efficiently provide dispatch services.

Thank you.

Like to make a resolution, a resolution approving dispatch services, a resolution approving a dispatch services agreement to accommodate the combining of Orem and Provo dispatch services.

Mayor, can I just suggest that you add to your motion that, that the council authorize you as the mayor to execute the agreement on behalf of the council? Okay, you could just say yes, that's Yes, added.

So added.

I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Resolution passes. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next item, 8.7. We have a resolution that I'll have Steve Earl explain.

Thank you, Mayor, City Council. The city is involved with a number of different entities on which we have a seat on a board of directors. These include the Utah Infrastructure Agency, the Utopia, and the IRMAA, Utah Risk Management Agency, and we need to have a representative on the board of directors of each of those entities and We have— staff are proposing that the City Council appoint Bren Bybee as the city's representative to UIA and to the IRMA, Utah Risk Management Agency, Board of Directors, and as the alternate representative to the Utopia Board of Directors, with Jeff Lamson continuing to serve as the regular member of the Board of Directors.

Thank you.

If you're ready, Mayor, I'm sorry.

Yes, I moved to approve unless we have any questions. Okay, I think we're good.

I'd like to move that we approve the resolution just discussed by Steve Earle appointing Brent Bybee as a city representative to UIA— the, what's the other one, abbreviated— IRMAA, and as an alternate representative to the Utopia Board of Directors.

I'll second that.

Aye.

Okay, yeah, we know we're good. I'm just reading this.

Okay, did I get it?

You got it.

She, she said, where do you want to start the aye?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the resolution passes.

Thank you. Next, we'd like to have A public hearing on amending portions of Section 22-8-8A, General Zone Development Standards, pertaining to overall height requirements for a parapet wall for municipal buildings located in a C-2 zone. And Jason's going to present that to us.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council.

There we go.

So tonight we're making a minor exception to the overall height requirements for buildings located in the C-2 zone, specifically for municipal buildings that are located in the C-2 zone. This has come about by the design of the City Center building that's soon to be started here in the corner of the City Center property. During the design team and the architects and and designers, in order to get a larger space for the council chambers and other things on that main floor, wanted to design it to the maximum height of 48 feet. But there's also items on the building that they want to be able to surround with safety issues with the parapet. And so in order to do that, we're here tonight to request that the council amend the ordinance to allow that 4-foot parapet exception. to allow the maximum height of 48 feet with a 4-foot parapet on, on the top of that, to be able to have some safety features and things on top of the building. For those that may not know what a parapet is, this is kind of an example of— you got the main, main roof structure, and then you got the wall that surrounds that to help people from not only falling off, but also screens different things that are on top of the roof. Planning Commission did review it and makes a recommendation the council approve this, and we would recommend that as well. So any questions that I can address?

Debbie?

So this is more about safety than aesthetics, I'm assuming?

It is safety.

Does it—

yeah, the architects would prefer that they have a maximum they can, so 4 feet is what they would prefer to help not only hide things that are on top of that, but also for safety, those that are working on top of the building.

I feel like I can do it if you need to or not.

Jeff, you need to be on mute. Okay. Um, all right.

Yeah.

And Resolution.

You're bringing it back.

Yes, let's go ahead and bring it back if no one has anything to say.

So, Dave, I've got a question.

Or Mayor.

Yes.

Well, Jason, you said that was only for government buildings in the C-2 zone?

That is correct.

Okay. Just want to clarify. Thank you.

Mayor, if you're ready for a motion, I don't know if there's other questions.

Any other questions?

I, I move that we amend portions of Section 22-8-8A, General Zone Development Standards, pertaining to the overall height requirements for— tell me the word— parapet wall for municipal buildings located in a C-2 zone.

I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Resolution passes. Okay, we're moving right through these. Thank you, Jason. We've got one last discussion we'd like to have about water reclamation, and Chris Shirkey, if you'd like to come up and introduce your group.

Yes, as we set up, Mayor. Thank you, Mayor and Council. We have before us tonight our team of experts regarding our capital facilities plan for our Autumn— our Orem Water Reclamation Facility. Mr. John Motta is representing Water Works engineers. As well as in the first row, we have Mr. Wayne Fawcett and Sister— sorry about that— and Miss Jenny Calderon. And then up here we have Reed Price, our Assistant Public Works Director, and then Giles Demke, our Water Reclamation Facility Manager and Water Reclamation Section Manager. We've spent, well, several months over a year actually on, on this process. We've made a presentation to you as a City Council in a work session approximately 4 weeks ago. And so none of this has changed in our, in our, in our presentation. We've condensed it slightly since you've already seen it, but I'll now turn the time over to Mr. Mata.

Good evening. So this is a brief presentation of the work that was done by our firm, Water Works Engineers, and the staff of City of Orem, the plant operations staff, to assess the water reclamation facility, the wastewater treatment plant, and to identify what is the best strategic plan to move forward to maintain the functionality of the facility while meeting all the regulation and the treatment requirement that it was initially constructed for. This is a brief agenda that essentially we're going to go through the background on the facility, how old it is and what it includes, what are the process units and the systems that are in the facility, the capacity of the treatment, whether it's water conveyance or solids treatment, and then we'll talk about what drives the evaluation, the building codes and the safety and the redundancy aspects of, of the regulations and give you a result of the condition assessment. Quick overview, the plant is essentially a relatively old plant. It was built in 1957. It was upgraded twice, almost about 25-year cycle, 1984, 2010. It serves about 111,000 people from Orem, Logan, and Lynden— sorry, Lynden and Vineyard. And the build-out population is 146,000 people. It's estimated around 2060. The plant is a complex plant like any other water reclamation facility. You have the liquid stream, which is headworks and primary clarification that separates the solids from the water. You have oxidation ditches that use aeration to deal with the nutrient and the dissolved pollutants. And then we have the ultraviolet disinfection to essentially make the water safe for public exposure. And then you've recently— are in the plan, in the process of adding filtration for reuse and phosphorus reduction. If you want to kind of, in a summary, this By the time the water goes into these facilities, it's dark brown, black water. By the time it comes out of the UV system, you can't tell whether it's drinking water or clear water. So it's a pretty intense treatment process. On the solid stream, the solids and the sludge that's collected from the liquid stream is sent to the solid stream, and that's where you essentially break it down using temperature to make it usable for as a fertilizer or for land application. And there's a, there's a big mechanical system here that essentially squeezes the water out of the sludge to make it cost-effective to truck it off-site. So you want to remove the water so you don't pay money to truck the water. But also there are other facilities that are to support the liquid and the solid stream facilities, which includes large blowers, large pumps, odor control systems, and very intense electrical and control systems. To focus into the plant capacity, like I mentioned, there's the hydraulic capacity, how much water you can run through the plant, and essentially the good news is the plant was planned initially, and it still holds whatever we need to do for the future except for one criteria, which is the peak hour. We estimated that with the current conditions, we have to increase the capacity of the peak hour condition from 21 million gallons a day to 32 million gallons a day. It sounds big, but essentially we just got to revisit some pumping systems and some piping and conveyance to make it— to make sure that water doesn't come out of these systems into the ground. So as far as the solids and the pollutant that the plant can treat, whatever was planned initially, which is if you look at the 3rd column, the building loading at 2010, that's a big number, 39,000 pounds per day. You're still within that margin, and we do not expect that to be exceeded at the build-out condition under the current, you know, forecast. So that's, that's good news. Now, how do you assess a treatment plant? The mandate of the treatment plant, the first thing is you have to comply with federal and state regulation to meet, to essentially clean the water. Currently, you're operating under a permit to treat carbon or organic carbon solids and ammonia, and you're doing that very successfully. There's a new regulation that will be in effect on January 1st, 2024. To reduce the phosphorus to 1 milligram per liter. And then there's also some future regulations that are being discussed about nitrogen reduction and other contaminants that are being discussed. Similarly, on the solid stream, you have to deal with sludge. They classify it under Class A and Class B sludge. Class A gives you more flexibility on how to dispose of the sludge. It costs more money to treat. But it gives you that flexibility. And there's also the future constraint that everybody's, you know, looking at, which is the availability of land application, especially with light of the future contaminants that may limit the availability to apply sludge to agriculture. So these are all factors that we took into consideration in addition to the safety and building codes. Like I mentioned, the plant was built— started in 1957. There has been quite an evolution of the building codes since the plant was constructed, specifically in the seismic requirements. You are in a very active seismic zone. And also the NFPA 820, which is a subset of the National Electric Code, and it was developed specifically for wastewater treatment plants to avoid avoid accidents and explosion in wastewater treatment plants. So that code essentially was initiated after a big part of the plant was constructed. This was a 1980 kind of code, and the plants were started in 1957. So really, there's quite a bit of facilities that do not comply with this code. Other requirements are for safety, reliability, redundancy. One one of the regulations on the wastewater treatment plant is you have to have the capacity available at every process unit, even if you lose the largest process unit. If you— if it's down for maintenance or if it breaks, you still have to be able to treat, uh, you know, the permitted flow. So that, that's a, that's a major factor that we need to look at. Um, now when we reviewed about 800 assets, uh, that you have at the plant. Really, it's the same theme. They are very well maintained, they're functional, they're operational, but a large part of them, over 50%, have exceeded their textbook expected useful life. There's quite a bit of electrical and control systems that are almost an outdated technology. If you try to go to purchase replacement parts, they won't— they don't even make them anymore. So those are the challenges, just the age of the facility more than the, more than the, you know, maintenance. And then we applied another dimension to it. If a piece of equipment fails, what is the results of that failure? Is it going to cause a violation? Is it going to cause a safety issue? Is it is going to cause a hydraulic problem. So that we put in— we put an importance factor on these assets. Again, the major findings is you have a very well-maintained facility, but it's an aging facility. And the big gaps are the NFPA 820 code and the, you know, age of the control systems, the availability of spare parts. As a summary, again, if you see, we went and we summarized this for every major area of the plant. There's a common theme here almost everywhere. It's old equipment. Some of it is in a very harsh corrosive system that needs to be replaced, and you have to comply with the building codes on a, you know, selective basis. With input from the plant management and from your public works department, we devised a first ground of strategy, how to tackle this, this project. It was essentially a balance between how to manage risk and how to kind of— where do you deploy your, your, your funds, your, your money. You don't want to just go and spend everything up front. There is no need for that. We're not, we're not advocating for that. It's essentially picking the most critical units and the ones that are more closer to failure and essentially perform the improvements or the replacements. So we, we came up with the 4 phases, and Phase 4 is actually dependent on the future regulation. You may not even need to do it, but the first 3 phases are based on condition and age of the facility. The cost in 2022 dollars You can see them here. They're $58 million for Phase 1, about $40 million for Phase 2, and $25 million for Phase 3. The total including Phase 4 is about $160 million. You have 20— over 20 years to implement that. And again, the window of 1 to 5 years, this is like our first iteration. Things are— could be very fluid. You can stretch the first phase more, or you can slice the first phase into 2 smaller phases. It's, it's whatever is, is available as far as, you know, balancing the funds and the criticality of the system.

I have a question. Um, sure, Chris. When we did our 7-year plans for infrastructure, I'm assuming you knew some of this equipment was going to be replaced. Did you put any amount— this is like $58 million— was there any dollar amount that we've already incorporated in these plans, or is this above and beyond anything we thought we would have to pay?

And then that's a great point, Ms. Larray. So yes, we did incorporate some of our current fees and revenues from those fees to pay for some of these system improvements at the water reclamation facility. So some of the equipment and other expansions that we were looking at doing have been funded already, but not, not But not a significant portion of this master plan that's before you now.

So, would we have to— I mean, would you say we have so many million already and now we're going to have to come back with $30-40 million? I mean, I'm trying to get a gauge of how much more we're going to have to—

Again, that's an excellent question and that's something we do not have the answer to yet, but we are going to be— in fact, that's our last slide. We can, we can, we can jump to that right now. you'd like. So the 2017 Master Plan designated a portion of the revenues for the facility degradation, as I just mentioned. So for the first 10 years, there was $12.5 million designated for the stormwater reclamation master plan, which in part included the reclamation facility, but primarily focused on the sewer collection system. We've since done this plan, the Capital facility plan. That's why we're here tonight, which, which we did our best to accommodate certain immediate needs in that master plan to fund that with our current rate structure. However, this is a much more detailed plan than, than I think we had anticipated accomplishing at this time. And so a small portion of the fees and charges and the revenues generated therefrom did accommodate some of these system enhancements at the Water Reclamation Facility. As you know, much of this is what we're talking about are federal and state unfunded mandates, and as a result, we're looking for ways to fund a project that will cost $160 million over the next 20 years. We've strategically developed a plan moving forward that's phased into 4 different plans over a 20-year period. That number there that I mentioned, the $12.5 million, was a number generated in 2016. It's estimated that that would probably be about $25 million today. As you know, we've had extraordinary inflationary increases over the last 5, 6, 7 years. So what we're proposing is about a On average, about a $40 million increase in expenditures over the next 20 years, so in 5-year tranches or 5-year segments.

Have you evaluated the cost to an individual homeowner yet?

We haven't gotten to that point, no. Okay, no. In fact, we're— we are just now starting our interaction with Lewis Young Roberts in Birmingham. Fred Philpott was here representing that firm tonight. They're our financial, financial advisor. We will work closely with them in developing strategic plans for funding. As you are aware, I believe the water reuse facility plan a year ago was estimated to be at $9 million. The bids came in at over $18 to $19 million, so 100% higher than what our estimates were. We've since gone back and received $13.5 million of grants and other funds through the federal government. And so about 70% of the project is being covered by resources outside of the tax base here in the city of Orem. So we've been very fortunate with that. We hope to move forward in the same, in the same spirit and the same methodology to accommodate or to accumulate additional revenues from either low-interest loans, through bonding, low-interest bonds, through grants, through any donations by anyone here tonight. I'd give probably $10, maybe. That doesn't go very far. So as you can imagine, this is going to be a multi-generational project that will benefit not just us and our children, but grandchildren and probably great-grandchildren. So we anticipate that these cost burdens will be shared across multiple generations, as they will each receive benefit from, from these enhancements and improvements.

Chris, I appreciate the fact that you are going to be working at grants and other things, so you can't estimate that right now. Since this is an enterprise fund and users must pay for it, we do want to be sensitive to how much the rates So as you build your plan, we want to make this reasonable. And again, to your point, some of these assets are items that will last 50 years, as this plant did for our— for great-great forefathers some 60-plus years ago built this, and we're grateful for them. And now we have to make that commitment to future generations. So we want to try to spread the cost as we can to properly match users with the cost. So thank you. We'll look forward to the group Lewis and Young and Company and their report as we work for creative ways to finance this and make it as painless as possible for the users.

Thank you. I didn't mention also, and I— but I think Mr. Motta did mention that, you know, in 2060, our build-out population is anticipated to be 146,000. That's not just Orem residents. Orem residents is around 128-ish is what's anticipated. And then the remaining balance was about 1,000 Vineyard residents and then around maybe 13,000 for Lyndon. I think their population is roughly 11,000 right now. So they are contributing, they're paying for these, and they're under contract to pay for their proportionate shares as well.

I just, I just like to add real quick, the resolution that we're asking you to consider specifically addresses the funding option, directing staff to use a financial consultant to provide options for funding these improvements that are identified, and we will come back and discuss those with you as, as they're considered, or as we look into this further.

Okay.

Mayor and Council, if I might add, at this point we're very confident in the research that's been done to identify all that needs to be done to upkeep and expand our, our water reclamation facilities so that it can last and continue to serve our residents well into the future. But Councilmember McDonald's point is very well taken, and I've, I've listed a number of ways in which now from here we'll identify to ultimately figure out how to fund or respond to or implement the plan that is here before you. So grants, impact fees, existing funds, extending the life of the existing facility. wherever we can, regularly updating our priority of projects on an ongoing basis. Chris mentioned other, other cities and their portion of it, looking at low interest rate debt. And then again, as Councilmember McDonald said, spread any cost impact over as much time as we possibly can. So we will incorporate all of that as we look forward. But so, so those are, those are all coming in the future. And then ultimately, we would come back, of course, to you for budget approvals for any changes in, in any of that. But, but again, I'll go back to where I started. What we are confident in today is the master plan and the identification of what needs to be planned for and fixed and expanded upon in our water reclamation facility.

Thank you, Brad.

So when you talk about spreading the cost over multi-generation, that usually refers to some sort of bonding mechanism. I'm assuming you're going to evaluate that particular vehicle.

It's 2 ways. It's both bonding but also phasing over time the increases so that we wouldn't necessarily have a jump in one particular year that's, you know, a super high percent increase in our rates that we— so, for example, rather than a 10% increase in rates today or in one year, we would try to do 3% over 3 or 4 years. So spreading the increases so that we don't have a huge jump in one particular year.

But do we need an upfront cash infusion to do a big project? And that's why we do the bonding?

Yes, and that, and that's what we're referring to when we're saying debt.

Okay, thank you.

So essentially, we, we know we have a situation. We know what the solution is. You know, you guys have laid that out. Now we're just— we're hiring you guys to figure out how to best pay for it. And that's going to be the way that net-net costs the citizens the least possible amount of money.

So that's correct.

Okay, any other questions?

No, no motion on this tonight.

This was just informative, correct?

No, we're asking for a resolution to be adopted.

Oh, thank you.

This plan.

Okay, thank you.

We're adopting this plan and we're going to—

even though more information is coming.

Yeah, we will have a financial plan.

Thank you for that clarification.

Adopt at some point.

Part of this is to have the consultant be able to come in and put together—

sorry.

So it's—

we're—

the resolution is on the plan, but the funding mechanisms are— we're still figuring all that out and we'll address that.

That's correct.

We'll work with you to create those— the financing plan. And then hope for you to adopt that. And then we know that we have the support of the council and can move forward to address these important matters.

Okay, Mr. Mayor.

Oh, you got a question?

No, I don't.

I make a resolution that we adopt the 2022 Orem Water Reclamation Facility Capital Facilities Plan as discussed this evening.

I have a second.

Did I say—

you're good.

You said resolution. I think you meant motion.

I made— I'll make a motion. Thank you. That's what the smile was about. Do I need to say it again? Are we good?

You're good.

We have a second somewhere along the line.

Yes, I'll give a second.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Resolution passes.

Thank you, Mayor and Council.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, I think we have nothing on item number 9, communication items.

And then nothing else for me.

You're good. So, with that, somebody will make a motion to adjourn.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, we're adjourned. Thank you for attending.

Take a selfie.