City Council · 2023-03-14

Yes.

So I can see your— yeah, right.

Yeah, well, when you're first starting, you can't see. Get started here.

We're all live and hooked up.

Okay, welcome to our work meeting, and we're going to try and give Brandon as much help as we can by letting him go first.

How many slides you got, Brandon?

Uh, 18. Some of them we're not going to touch on a lot. They're just here for your reference.

We'll turn the time over to you and Terry to tell us about the site difference.

While that's pulling up, Mayor, I can just preface with this is This is kind of the first presentation that we tend to do every year and start off with, I guess, the biggest rocks.

And then it's something of a preface for the rest of the budget presentations that we'll bring over in this next month or so.

So today we're focusing on revenue projections for fiscal year '24. Seeing in terms of market and how that will extend around.

All right, let the fun begin. As Brent mentioned, kind of the kickoff of our budget season, at least in relation to presentations.

Obviously, we've been hard at work for the last months preparing and getting information put together. We're still in the process of doing that.

Revenues, however, we generally are the first thing that we focus on, try to tighten down as much as possible, because obviously how much we can spend is based on how much revenue we have. So I did give you kind of a lead-in to our fiscal '24 budget. I wanted to touch initially on where, kind of where we're at right now. So here's our current '23 budget and some of our— well, some of our major revenue sources within the general fund and kind of where we are at year to date. Now, year to date for many of these is not necessarily meaning through today, not necessarily meaning through February. For instance, sales tax— that sales tax number is actually through December. You know, we don't receive— we receive a 2-month delay.

It's fun when you receive sales taxes.

In the future, I'm going to put a column in here indicating what month that's through. But right now, that's just to give you an idea.

But we are 2/3 of the way through the year, and as you can see, we're basically in total 2/3 of the way through, sleeping out our budget funds.

I expected obviously to end up being Higher than that, primarily because of sales taxes and property taxes. You can see both of those are doing that.

But really, the column to focus on is this far right.

What that column does is say, comparing the number that we have here, here, where we were at the same time last year. So where are those revenues? As you can see, sales tax number, 6.9%, etc., down through those. And one really, really cool one is this one right here, which you can't see anymore.

The interest.

Yes.

Is that because we're making more interest from our banks?

Yes. So obviously interest rates have changed significantly, not only from when we prepared the fiscal '23 budget. So fiscal '23 budget, we had approximately $350,000 budgeted for interest earnings. And we were at the time of that, we were earning approximately 1.4%. Today, as of through February, we are now earning about 4.6%. That's a 275% increase rate. That translates into a rather significant increase in earnings of approximately— so far, what we expect this year would be a 725% increase year to date so far.

Obviously even get higher as we complete the fiscal year.

That you'll see that as we translate that looking ahead into fiscal '24.

You have a feel because obviously things are costing more. So yes, we're making more interest, but there's a cost. Do you have any idea if there's— which is it going to be higher, lower?

Well, certainly our, you know, our costs have increased and they're probably higher than that amount we earn in interest. Obviously, interest earnings is not necessarily a foolproof inflationary tool. So while it is great in relation to our budget, because obviously our '23 budget was based on a significantly lower number, therefore the costs that we budgeted were also significant. So yes, some of that's going to get eaten up just by cost increases in the current year. And we will— you would see that also. Just for your reference, just kind of give you an idea percentage-wise, where does the sales tax revenue— how much of our general fund major revenue sources is that? You can see it's a pretty high percentage. Of our general fund revenue, of the major revenue sources, where that stacks up against other— our other funds, both DOT roads, CARE, all of our enterprise funds. Similar concept. 3, that percentage of that total we reached at this point. And then where does that stack up comparatively to a year ago, the same exact time period?

Point out again which ones are not through February.

So, uh, so B&C Road will be through January. Okay, fair taxes through December. Transportation sales taxes through December because they're tied to tax rate.

Tax rate.

All the rest of these would be through February.

So obviously there's recreation.

Recreation, they continue to— not only did they do really well last year because it was really their first full year, and you do really well through this fiscal year.

Compared to the prior year, 30% increase in revenue related to that fund. So that's good to see, continue to perform really well.

Same concept, kind of seeing what percentage of those in relation to that total of revenue, how the relative level fund is. Then we started talking Now about our fiscal 24 budget. Our first column we do is here's what same number is the 23 budget, trying to comparing those to our fiscal 24 budget. First thing we obviously always talk about is sales tax. You can see a $2.5 million increase in that compared budget to budget. However, keeping in mind that we are currently at 6.9% through December above budget, what I have estimated and used for a very conservative estimate, in my opinion, is if I said, you know what, we're not going to end fiscal '23 at 6.9%, we're going to end fiscal '23 at 4%.

4% increase.

That's just over $33 million. I then take that $33 million as my base, looking ahead to budget '24. And I budget $33.5 million, $33.5 million. That's only a 1.3% increase. So even though the budget increase is 8.1%, we're looking at really a 1 point— for if The $33 million comes to fruition for the current fiscal year, we're looking at a 1.3% increase. So that's really, really— not only am I expecting potentially— expecting it, I'm being very conservative in that, putting a decline in our current increase of 6.9% down to 4%, and then a very small increase in relation to fiscal '24. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Do you see any recessionary pressures on the horizon? And if so, obviously costs are more expensive, so you're going to get higher tax, but it's going to put pressure on the household budget, so they may be spending less. So do you have kind of a feel for that?

So that's, that's a large reason why only putting 1.5%. 3% increase. Obviously, we saw our December numbers come in. That was not very encouraging. So was the December numbers impacted because November's was pretty decent? So as we knew from— I've heard various reports talking about people bought stuff in November, not only because Thanksgiving was a little earlier But also because they were afraid of shortage, supply chain issues, right? So they were buying all of that Christmas stuff early so they could make sure that it got here. So did that have an impact? Was that the impact? Really the reason we had a decrease for December? I would expect some of that was in relation to that. Talking about tightening of our belts, I expect much of it was also related to that. Continue at least here through the winter months. We'll see obviously when we get to March and April, April and May, as people head out, do they start buying more stuff, are they traveling, etc.? It's yet to be seen. Obviously there's always the impact. Certainly banks going under doesn't give people great confidence in the economy either. So you have a lot of interactions there that don't necessarily look good. However, there are also lots of things that, especially here in Utah, right, a lot of those are, are maybe more national type of considerations. So here in Utah, we still are— our housing market is actually still pretty relatively strong, and spending seems to— I've seen several reports on spending that We as Utahns in particular, we're continuing to help keep the economy moving here in Utah by not necessarily totally backing away from spending, but certainly is an important element of why I put that so low.

Property tax is another one I want to—

So, say, Brandon?

Yes.

You know, you said that's a low number, 1.2, 1.3, right? Compared to previous years, as far as what you usually estimate?

Normally I would have budgeted 3, 3 to 4%, somewhere in that range.

You know, again, feel. Yeah, that would have been what I normally would do.

If December's number had been flat or positive, I probably would have raised it. But again, it's a pause for action.

Pause a little bit.

Yeah, better wait and see. If we get January and all of a sudden January is like really great, maybe we, maybe we would tweak this a little bit, increase it. Obviously, if it's even worse, it's more, even more. Okay, well, maybe we're going to look at it again, or at least pay attention to that. So by the time we actually do our 10-day margin You know, that number may or may not change.

But in the whole scheme of things, that's a relatively conservative number. Yes.

Especially considering, as we mentioned, inflationary standpoint, we have— we've seen it come down, but it's still relatively high.

So that, that does it.

While that—

we're not talking about the cost side of things quite a couple weeks. From the revenue perspective, that still supports revenue. Property taxes. So I don't know what property taxes are until June 15th. That's a little late in the whole budgeting process to know when. So we have to adopt our, our budget, our final budget, right around that same time. So we obviously budget relatively conservative in relation to Property tax. Basically, what did we get last year? We'll raise it just a little bit. Well, as you— we well know, 2022, for instance, was a— I mean, things were going crazy, right? And there were lots of growth, lots of homes, lots of other things that were being built. We, we don't know what the impact of those growth elements are for almost a year, year and a half We've seen the impact of that this year.

You can—

on that prior slide, you can see how we are already past how much we budgeted for the year. We are half a million dollars already past that. We still have 5— so that was through January. We still have 5 months. So using that, I was obviously ultra-conservative budget for fiscal '23, that number. But now we know what those numbers are, and we're projecting a much bigger number in relation to our fiscal. Property taxes, once they go up, they generally—

I mean, they stay there in relation to us other than growth.

And that's the hard part, right?

We don't know that growth number until such a long time after.

So that's what those are related to and why there's such a big impact. We already, we already touched on interest earnings.

Here's what we are budgeting in the general fund for anticipated interest earnings.

Just to give you an idea, as I mentioned, the end of fiscal '22, so June of 2022, We were receiving interest rate of 1.44%. As of here in February, we are seeing 4.6%.

And we—

it's my anticipation that— I believe I've heard that the Fed is going to raise interest rates again here in March. Supposedly right now they said that they were also going to do it one more time during the year. So with that kind of mind where we're at, plus the looking ahead, we've not only used where we are currently, how much we are receiving currently, but also what we would anticipate those rates continuing to get better.

Any questions with anything else on there?

Um, you don't have much going up in building permits, so you're thinking it's going to be pretty much the same as this year?

Yes, it is. So, um, we touch back on this slide. You can see here compared to our budget where we're at. This is through February. So they're down, you can see, compared to a year ago, significantly down. So in building permits, we don't usually budget how much we thought the prior year. We have a, if you will, a base, which is what you see here. We use that basically, we might move it up a little bit each year, as long as we see a trend that we're going beyond that. But we use that base as a way to say, you know what, we're going to budget conservatively, we're going to budget this base amount. If we exceed that base amount, we use those funds for construction, usually streets or parks. It falls to our bottom line. And, you know, in June when we do that budget transfer to move money out of our general fund to our CEX fund, Some of that money is usually coming from, assuming it exceeds, of course, that base amount that we set, which is relatively— now this year, you see, we're struggling maybe to get there. As we know, sometimes all it takes is one big project and all of a sudden we're right there. So, so that is kind of how we do it. building permits.

My question is, if it's like now 23.5%, if that kind of holds, will you lower your number building permits for next year thinking that credit's tighter, people aren't taking risk? I don't know, I guess. Or are you going to keep with this 1.4 because that's kind of what you've been doing?

Correct, we would leave it alone. Do you have any idea how that number compares instead of like Regionally or through the state?

I don't—

I mean, high-growth cities would—

I'm just curious how much interest rates—

because I know it's killed mortgages. I'm curious how much interest rates are affecting that.

So just to give you an idea, the last fiscal '22 Again, funded at basically that same number, we received approximately $1—

approximately $2 million compared to our number. That $600,000 would flow through to our fund balance.

If it holds true that you don't bring in as much though, are you going to have to cut things to make up the difference of that?

Again, it's just money that won't flow through into— because sales taxes are up, right?

So in essence, sales tax covers the shortage. For the most part, especially with the—

Runback expenses.

Brian maybe has something.

Yeah, so just, just within Orem for single-family homes, and we do our reports on the calendar year. So for this year, we've only had 2 single-family permits pulled. For 2022, we had 47 total, and your report, 77. So we've gone from 77 to 47 to 2 in 2 months, but Last year we only had 4 through the same time period versus 10. I'm just curious how much that is our level of growth within the city versus, you know, macro rates and all that. So what—

and we have something of a relationship with them, we asked them for some of their, their building permit information, um, that we related to some of our trials with them. Vineyard is, as you know, has had extremely rapid growth.

It leveled off a bit, but we're saying that there's a lot of pipelines that will, that will begin to construct.

So from that perspective, that's, that's more growth-oriented?

Yes.

If we have—

I believe the permits have dropped off like 50%. Do we make adjustments to the number of staff inspectors we have? No, because, um, let me pull that report back up. Just one second. Well, there may not be as many single-family homes. There's more remodels. There's more commercial permits. So the workload stays pretty consistent. And some projects require more inspections than others. And then also the one thing we always have to remind people is if you have a good contractor, you have fewer inspections. If you have a bad contractor, you have more inspections. You can go out a number of pre-inspections.

So from a—

For us, this has been a perfect storm in a good way because we have been down-seasoned. building inspectors. We've been bringing 3 inspectors through an apprentice program, and 2 just came out of it, and 1 is just coming into it. So it's been very beneficial for us. In fact, we've had enough inspections that our chief building official has been out helping pick up the slack in the field. Usually our chief building official stays in the office, manages, helps at the counter and things like that. So, so our workload right now has been pretty good. It's actually been a little bit of a nice steady rollout versus the chaos over the last few years where it's been so busy it's hard to keep up. And we have quite a few lots being developed right now here in the city, don't we? We do, yeah. There's a number of single-family homes. Jones Court in South Orem has 22 lots, I think, and there's 20-something up by Technology High School. It's going online as soon as they can get asphalt down. There's a few. Few decent-sized projects out there.

Just touching on, again, on our other funds other than the general fund. So see the various expectations, obviously, repair tax, transportation sales tax, again, most sales tax-based, a similar concept that I just talked about with our regular sales taxes, what's used In relation to those sales taxes as well. Water reclamation—

water, sorry, water revenues.

See here in a minute, rates, small increase.

So you see a small increase in those.

Reclamation revenues have been— no, budget also continue to be down. In relation to that, we're still trying to actually evaluate why our revenues are down in that area.

That one's still in the works as far as trying to figure out what exactly is causing that. Stormwater.

Next on that plan, it's recreation. All of the districts.

So now we're going to touch on just some of the rate increases.

As soon as we finish putting together the draft, fees and charges, sending that out to each of you over the next month or so.

So you have any questions about any of those fees and charges, you're welcome to contact Trevor, Trevor Bell over here. Officer, closely in getting the budget all put together.

Yeah, myself.

Directors who are specifically related to that particular fee, you're welcome to reach out to them as well.

So we have some cemetery increases primarily related to costs of personnel.

Obviously, as our costs of personnel have gone up, cemetery is very heavy in Using personnel to take care of things there.

So we have an increase generally in relation to those fees.

I mentioned, touched on water, water fund.

Any increase in main Tier 1 usage charge? Various increases here, usage.

This is actually 2045. My apologies for not getting that updated.

The percentage increase is basically the same.

This is still 0.5 and this is 0.7.

So small increases in relation to the base rate for water, which participants may or may not remember. Base rate is primarily the thing we use to support the actual infrastructure, as opposed to usage rate, which is generally tied to actually getting the water, especially cleaned, etc., and getting it out of the reservoir. Questions in relation to— and again, just keep in mind, this is The meeting is just to give you now a heads up as to kind of where we're going and what we're planning on related to the budget.

We hope that you'll actually take that, review it, and then as you have questions about any of these things, obviously feel free to reach out to discuss those items. Emphasis on the word proposed.

Yes, I realize this is the time you've seen it, so we don't necessarily expect that you have all the questions you might want to ask right here. Stuff might come up over the next time period that you go, huh, I don't know about this, so I have a question.

I have a question. So when we adopted, I don't know, a few years ago, the 7-year master plans for infrastructure, are we just picking along with what those were proposing?

Not for water and not for water infrastructure. So those 2, no, because we just made that shift in our cash funding, as opposed to hybrid funding between debt and cash. So the rates have been adjusted to accommodate for that hybrid, issuing those bonds for those big projects. And so we're still working through that bond money. To be honest, we haven't yet spent it all. And so we're still working through using all of that. These rates take that hybrid model. For water, yes.

Following those plans.

And then we're obviously in the middle of developing our permanent master plan. It would then try to obviously make adjustments here to accommodate for that new master plan.

Details of a full financial analysis of what wastewater treatment plant, government facilities plan, what, how we might fund those projects.

Same, so water reclamation, same thing, percentage increase from $1,239 to $1,248.

I just wanted to make a comment that you updated the sewer water last year, and then the utility that you also adopted, all of these numbers are exactly what we saw.

Stormwater is following the master plan rates there. Solid waste, again, waste management.

Quite honestly, we've been able to negotiate a pretty good rate in relation to if we—

contract had ended, we were going back out to bid, we had some headwind that maybe we shouldn't do that. Rates that we were going to get back were not good.

So we were able to negotiate with waste management to keep the rate at a relatively decent increase.

And so that's what you see in relation to these fund increases for the Street lighting, trying to accommodate new— we're now in maintenance mode. Almost done with— Chris, how much longer all the streetlights are going to be in?

There are 2 lighting districts remaining, another 2 years before those are completed. We are funding the construction of those. So these—

this fund is primarily almost entirely now maintenance of the existing poles and trying to update.

Okay, now recreation. So Yeah, I do have a slide. And I know many of you would— I forgot to get a copy of it. I forgot to get the slide into this document comparing us to all the other cities, which you usually see in our tentative budget document. But if you want, I'll just pass that around.

You're welcome to see where we fall.

Keep in mind, this includes these changes, including our Proposed changes, our number. Other cities does not. It is, as far as we know anyway, it's their current rate. A lot of times they don't tell us, well, maybe we're going to do this. So that just kind of gives you an idea of where we sit overall in relation to many of the other cities. Recreation, they have lots and lots of changes. So we have put this slide together to kind of give you an idea of what, what they are doing. They are trying to, as you can see here, simplify many of their fee schedules. If you look at their fees and charges in the past, it is pages and pages and pages. And they've been trying to make sure that they simplify that so that it's much more understandable, it's much easier, it's more equitable across all of the groups. So there are many, many, many changes you'll see in the fees and charges schedule in relation to trying to do that very thing. You'll see that both in the sports programming area as well as the fitness center. And again, we hope you will take the time to look through the fees and charges schedule when we send that out to you. And then as you do that, obviously, I will guide you to Bryce to touch on exactly why— whys and whatnots of those changes in that schedule.

Bryce, maybe you could just give us the 30-second elevator pitch.

I think like 2 big examples, like Brandon said, we used to list out like spring basketball and summer basketball and fall basketball. There's different numbers of games, some are in these types of gyms and that type of gym. What we did for the fee schedule was say we will charge $6,750 per basketball game, and then that way if it's an 8-game season or 11-game season, it's easy for our residents to understand. And we took what was 2 pages of very specific programming, and now it's one line on one page. Similarly, when we used to do a pool party rental at the Sierra, it had a deposit fee, a security fee, the rental fee, and then the reimbursement of the security deposit afterwards. So we had to have a staff manage 4 processes, we have to have 4 conversations, it takes a long time to do it. We have not had to refund security deposits in years at the Sierra because we have staff there. So now we have one point, one time to pay, one time for the resident to have to interact with the city staff and go from there. So the bulk of the changes for what we're doing was looking at a lot of those processes and making it simpler for the resident to understand. Same thing, a karate class, gymnastics class, a dance class, We cost it per session, so we put that to a singular per-session cost.

And thanks, Bryce.

Well, obviously, these are some times, things that we think you might want to specifically know about, changes that relate to our general admission.

You seniors, Increase in relation to those.

Obviously, as I mentioned earlier with the cemetery, we've had a lot of pay increase pressures at the fitness center. These fees are generally to try to alleviate pressure that fitness center and the sort of pool-based lifeguards have been just really tough. And so that's the primary reason for these increases. Should be noted, however, all of our passes— there are no increases in passes.

So how does that daily fee compare to other rec facilities around here?

At or below.

So Provo went up to $6, American Fork is between $6 and $7, Lehigh Legacy.

So we are in or below market still.

And how about annual passes?

We are on par, I think we're below Provo, and we're on par with like a Springville. We're above Lehi and some of the smaller communities, you know, not quite as small as centers that are on this newer tier of this. One other area of note, fire area. Fire prevention. So they're listed above. Fire prevention is looking at fire inspections, an increase, change to that whole structure, and an increase in revenue as we attempt to try to do a better job with our fire inspections. And then that has hopefully an impact Down the line, as we don't— we have people who are paying attention to that within the city.

Sure.

Well, I can tell you, in 26 years, we've never really had a good efficient structure to capture what you have up here, these 4,600 annual fire inspections. And so what we're doing is currently building a structure that's more all of these annual inspections. And our goal is every single business in all 3 cities. And so, and we're going to do that annually. And so that's, you know, it's— there's a lot of different ways you can look at this, obviously, but from a preventative standpoint, there is a huge benefit to citizens. This cost, obviously, the recuperation is going to be huge as well. I mean, you go out there and you knock on doors, you talk to businesses and say, what's the last time you saw a fire inspector? You're going to get taffy from all over the country. And so it's really a project that looks great, and that's a structure that I believe will work, and it's going to be on an annual basis.

And yeah, it's—

there's also a community risk reduction component to it where we're working on right now that actual homeowners, citizens, families can reach out.

They can—

and we can notify them.

They can get online.

They can conduct their own survey, their own inspection on their residence, so to speak, right at that level. And so it's kind of exciting. It's really above and beyond anything we've ever had here.

So kind of an exciting time in fire prevention.

So to be clear, the individual inspection fees go down, but because of the energetic, proactive, efficient way we're doing it, total revenue will go up because we're doing more of them. But one of the big deals from our past conversations is this entire program Together should ultimately bring down, potentially bring down insurance rates. Yeah, for homeowners, right?

Yeah.

And I mean, if that, if that comes together, that could be millions of dollars. Yeah, it's the ISO rating that you're referring to, and the better that gets, the lower that everybody's—

not just businesses, but homeowners, residents— pay for insurance.

So yeah, it's a good thing.

Okay, on the final tab— slide, I should say. So just a note, there are changes into all of these other areas, so go to Jim.

This time I'm going to turn the time over to Okay, so Brandon's talked about how our revenues are going up, and we're going to talk about how we're going to help our employees by spending that money. So I'm going to have Jenny go over some details, and then I'll talk briefly about what we're going to post for the new fiscal year.

So I'll talk about some of the history and some of the factors that lead into our decisions and what our plans are.

At this point.

So this is just a slide that shows kind of some of the biggest changes we've made to our compensation program over the years. This is outside of traditional merit market increases that we do and look at every year. So in 2018, we implemented Phase 1 of the Public Safety Career Ladder Program, which created our police officer 1, 2, 3 classifications, as well as firefighter, paramedic 1, 2, 3. Just to kind of give our employees more opportunity to advance and see their career path. And then a couple of years later, we expanded this program to be what we call the hybrid step program, which combines the career ladder components that were there, as well as a step increase that the employees received every year, and then expanded it to many more positions. So from Our police officers, their lieutenant, and then they fire all the way up through the value chains. So this gave employees the ability to come and see, well, if I start today, this is what I'll make, and then you know what they're gonna be making every year. In July 2021, NFP completed their compensation and benefits study for us. So we worked with them to do a comprehensive review of all of our positions. and benefits to determine how competitive we were with the market, and if there was internal equity, just to make recommendations. And we made quite a few structural changes at that point to all of our classifications and positions. At the same time, we also implemented phase 1 of the Public Works Hybrid Step Program, which is— it was for the entry-level positions in Public Works that we were having hard time recruiting for and retaining employees in these positions. So again, to increase recruitment and retention efforts, we created this for our technicians, operators, and mechanics. And then just this past January, with your support, we were able to do additional target market increases for positions that were deemed to be out of market. And again, every year we do an internal review of how we look in the market, how we are internally equitable, and to make recommendations for that coming year. Obviously, benefits are a major factor of compensation, and we think about that. So health insurance is obviously the biggest cost to our organization, and this just shows how the cost has increased since 2015. And this is for the High insurance, high deductible health insurance family plan. So since 2015, the cost has increased from about $13,500 for the city's portion to now about $20,000. The city has chosen to absorb almost all the increased costs, but we have to factor that into our budgeting. So we're anticipating again an additional 5 to 6% for this next—

That slide, before you leave it, is showing it flat this year.

Yes, so for the first time in my professional career, we were able as a city to keep our rates the same from, from last year to this year, which I've never seen before. We're not trending in that way this current year, but we were really lucky to have low rates.

Yeah, and we try to keep the employee premiums relatively the same. It has increased the past couple of years though. So now employees pay $85. So this shows our turnover for departments. The green line is Public Works, blue is Police, red is Fire, and yellow is all other.

So this is from fiscal year '18 to fiscal year '23 as of last week.

So we're seeing positive movement, as in reduced turnover in all departments, which is highly positive, especially in Public Works compared to last year. Last year we had a lot of turnover in Public Works, but this year that's down to below 10%. Um, our police and fire have also decreased significantly over the past few years.

Do we know why we had such a high turnover in Public Works?

Was it Other opportunities, a little bit hard to find people. Chris, answer that.

Typically low pay.

And what we've been finding in the last 2 years, the Public Works Apprenticeship Program, apprenticeship, and it's taken off. It's helped. It's saved us. We've taken people that had no understanding of what they what we do, be able to educate them and train them, and to the point where they really like what they're doing. And they would not bring people that were hungry and humble and increase their knowledge and skill set in that area. They wanted to stay. So.

I think the biggest difference is with this apprenticeship program is we're able, we're able to find the right people that have the best attitudes that do positive attitudes, we can train them into these positions. We just need to get the right people in the right spots. So that's what the apprenticeship program is.

And keep in mind, this is turnover for all reasons, so it includes retirements, dismissals, resignations, all of that. So speaking of retention and recruitment, so these are some of the things we're trying to do to reduce this turnover and make sure we get and keep the best employees. So, the hybrid STEM programs, again, have been just a huge component of this, allowing employees in these programs to see their career path and know what they can get. The apprenticeship program that we just talked about, so we have it in public works and also with our building inspectors. We've expanded our hard-to-fill incentives as well as referral bonuses and expanded employee development for existing employees through trainings, And other components.

Can you go back to that previous slide?

Yeah.

So the yellow, um, that's all other. So are these full-time employees?

Yes, this is just full-time.

And then what would that be?

So Library, Recreation and Development Services, Management Services, City Manager's Office, Finance.

I think that sums it up.

Does that—

does that include—

Yeah, I'm pretty good at throwing people in other positions.

Right. Okay, so now what you're all interested in. This shows our historical market and merit increases for the past several years. So you'll see in fiscal year '20-'21, we had a 3% merit as well as a 1% market. And this is obviously for positions outside the hybrid step programs.

They won't have the merit, but they get the 3% increase.

Appreciate it.

In fiscal year '22, we didn't have a global market increase. This is when NFP completed their compensation study, and so it was much more targeted that we gave the market increases to positions that needed it. And this last fiscal year, in July, we implemented a 3% merit as well as separate market-driven increases based on position and employee group. Again, this was heavily driven by how each of the positions fell in the market, and because of how we structured our compensation system, that now we don't have everyone in the American Market Program, it allows us to make these changes more easily, that we can look and see, well, how's our fire department doing? Do we need to do more or less for them compared to other groups? And then again, we were able to do some mid-year market-driven target adjustments in January.

So define what merit means. What, what's that mean?

So employees are evaluated each year and they're able to get up to a 3% merit as long as it's in the budget, and it always has been as far as I mean— as far as I know. But up to a 3% merit increase based on their work.

And who decides on that?

Do they get the 3%?

The department director does.

The department director. So they could get 2%, they could get 1%?

Yes, and that's for everyone outside of the hybrid step program. So the hybrid step programs, they, they get bumped along through the steps automatically. It's just the employees that are not part of that system that get the merit increase.

So, so if I have a manager that just can't stand my guts, I'm not going to get my—

So there is, there's checks and balances. It's, it, it does go up through the chain. So if you have a frontline employee The division manager has a say in recommending the department manager. But it also is based on their performance evaluation as well. So it's not just a random number that they pick out of. Usually if it's less than 3%, there's, there's some performance issues and they're already working through that.

Is 3% the max that it goes to?

Yes.

Well, so departments can go higher as long as they stay within their budget. So if you have a golden unicorn superstar employee, and you can give them more than 3%. Does that mean you have to give someone less than the 3% so that the average is 3%? You have a total bucket of money. So yes.

We have positions that aren't filled or employees that aren't eligible, so it gets a little more flexible. But either way, when someone—

if there's a particular employee that would be above and below, it has to be documented with incentives that justify the We had this discussion.

It came up that, you know, maybe city manager's office, their percentage was higher than maybe development services or whatever. So I think we'd like to look at that and say, you know, maybe drill down the top 5 or whatever and say, you know, has it really been fair to other employees compared to maybe this group got way much higher? I think if we could do that, that would be a good So we can look at that and drop down and say, was it fair?

That will be even easier for you to do as you slim down the city manager's department and kind of spread out and push down.

Yeah, but I mean, like last year, I mean, the history would be, you know, this person normally gets 3% or whatever in this department, but maybe that department got maybe 10% and everyone's got 3% because maybe they're both that household. If we can look at that, I think that we talked about last year. I think there's some conversation we talked about, so I think we just want to make sure everything's fair. And moving forward, it looks like it will be.

Yeah, as we, as we start phasing in more positions into the hybrid STEP program, it kind of takes away that, that concern that the two of you brought up of, well, what if my department director doesn't like me or my manager doesn't like me?

Because in the hybrid STEP program, both merits And to Brett's point, the city manager's office is going to be a lot more flat in terms of structure than it used to be.

Yeah, there's 2 employees in that department.

Where it was a lot more vertical.

Okay, so this shows kind of a comparison From both last year and what some cities are proposing. Most cities have not stated what they're going to be doing for the upcoming fiscal year. They're kind of like us, waiting to see what's happening and make sure how much money they have to be able to do this. But in fiscal year '23, the average of these sister cities was about 7.25%. Ours was in line with this at 7.5%, again for those positions outside And then the positions received their 3% merit as part of this.

My memory is this was a high year because we're trying to retain the good employees.

It's not usually that high.

Usually it's like 4 to 5.

Well, inflation was high last year, is still.

And I think you're seeing a little bit of bleedover in that from some of our other cities too. Um, that they're still worried about that, those same concerns this upcoming fiscal year as well.

Be interesting to look at the state repo. It's on there. Yeah, they just went up 5%.

That's just the market increase.

That doesn't include if they can merit.

Yeah, we just know what they've heard legislatively.

So what's their merit usually?

We don't usually include them as a sister city necessarily, but we just included them because it was— Again, the only cities that have said, and these are alternative, is South Jordan, Sandy, and West Valley for traditional cities, what they're thinking. And it's looking similar to last year. It's, I think, like Carrie said, a lot of it's that lacking We feel confident that we were able to make some of these targeted mid-year adjustments that maybe they're not as far behind as we would have been otherwise.

So we're grateful for that.

And then I'll turn this over to Liz. Okay, so really what we're most concerned with is what are we going to do for this upcoming fiscal year. The first thing that we were tasked with when we were coming up with proposal to what we want to propose for the upcoming fiscal year is that we want to take care of our current employees first before we look at expanding positions or making drastic changes. We want to make sure that our current employees feel like that they're taken care of and compensated fairly while still being fiscally responsible. So we appreciate one of your areas of focus, as it has been the last couple of years, is to provide the city with the best skilled and talented workforce. And that, that shows for all of our employees. We appreciate how much that you guys provide our employees and appreciate every single one in every department. So we appreciate that.

So we are looking at doing global market increases and then also target adjustments for some positions that may be more out of market than others.

Some of the positions that we have struggled with the most right now are attorneys, Engineers and accounting. So those are the 3 positions that we've noticed that are the most difficult right now. So we'll be looking at making some changes for those. We'll do merit increases for positions not in the hybrid step programs. The biggest structural change that we'll do are all the positions that are outside of the hybrid step programs. We're doing away with grading system. Each position will still have a range, but they will not have a grade tied to that. And by removing those grades, it allows us to be competitive in the external market without having to look at the internal. So we can be more proactive in looking at the outside market to make sure that we're being competitive.

So then we plan to expand the hybrid STEP programs in our key departments.

So Public Works, they rolled out Phase 1, and that was for our technicians and operators 2 years ago. Now we'll be adding more positions as our Phase 2 approach. So that will go up to the 4th section manager. So anything below section managers would be in this Phase 2. We're proposing that Finance, Management Services, and Development Services starts with Phase 1 of moving some positions into this hybrid STEM program.

program.

So the goal is that we'll slowly move more positions into that and move away from the merit. Any questions on what we're proposing here?

What does that mean? Tell us what you're moving from what to what.

So the concerns that you guys have about merit increases, that it's subjective, right? Moving more people into these hybrid step programs allows them to have to meet certain criteria to improve their skills and their certifications to be able to get pay increases. And it's very objective, right? So you either meet these metrics or you don't, so that you get— of just being merit-driven.

So are they more time-based?

Are they more performance-based? It's both.

So that's why it's a hybrid. So every year is a step, and then after you've met the top of the steps as long as you meet the career ladder piece of it. That's requirements. So, Chief Adams, maybe you can talk about like one of the requirements.

Yeah, a lot of our assistant trainees decide to develop their career trajectory between training and so forth. They know from day 1 to far into their career exactly what's expected of them each year to maintain, to expand.

I know there was a concern that not every class was offered at the right times, so are we offering these stats on, or our pay stats on that.

We had some issues getting behind those, ironing out the wrinkles. And yeah, we're getting there with that. It's not fun to dangle a carrot and not— for them not to get that, right?

I think the biggest issue was when we implemented it, then the certifications were then required, where now it's been a couple of years, they already know what sort of So they've got several years to do them, and if they haven't done it in 4 years, that the classes have been offered in 4 years. Okay, anything else? Appreciate your time.

Thank you. That's everything from both you guys. Thank you. Okay, the first item is to review a proposed amendment to the Oregon State Code for pediatric child welfare facilities. And so Jason is going to take us through this. Yes, go ahead. Thanks, Mayor. Members of council, this is the issue that came—

we have brought up to the attention of council.

We have a lady, Becky, who owns, operates what's called Ray's Place. It's a palliative care facility.

She actually does home care now.

What they're proposing to do is locate a specific facility offer healthcare for those that are coming out of the hospital that has traumatic— whether that's an injury, whether it's a life model, whether it's a terminal—

typically we'll get some type of breathing tube or something like that.

This is a place where they can come and actually learn how to install that tube, maintain it, feed the child. So what she's wanting to do is A place that will be— I think there's only like 8 in the country, actually. There is one in London. There's not one in Utah County. So it's something that people can come and get taught how to do that. It also allows daycare type— not daycare, but actually, if someone has multiple children, they have one that maybe has some issues, they can drop the child off. They will watch them for a period of time. If that family then wants to go on vacation and be able to get that needed time away from them, then they'll be able to come back. Or they'll be able to spend a couple nights, family members, in the facility as well as they get a grip on what the actual issues are with the child.

So as appropriate Steve Burrows.

It's in connection with that as well, to be able to locate in this facility. The facility, it's an existing facility, was built back in the early '90s as a senior care facility. Modified in 19— or 2005, actually.

There was an addition on the back of the Just to clarify, this is the same property that we were talking about like a month or two ago?

Yeah, it's that same property. This has been vacant for a while, right? This has been empty for about 3 or so years. And is this the same person that we were talking to?

Yes.

Yep.

So what they're wanting to do is come in, and the way the ordinance is crafted, it has in existing Right now it's a conditional use, proposed conditional use in an R-75 zone, which is what this facility is located in. We have about 9 or so of these types of facilities throughout the city.

They're in different zones, R-8, R-75, R-10 zones.

This facility, like I say, is existing. The ordinance is crafted in a way that it has to be an existing facility. It has to have had at least a number of operated as a care facility for elderly. Or something similar to that in order to qualify for this requirement. It still is going to be a conditional use, so the applicant will have to come back through Planning Commission, City Council to get approval for their final plan once this— if the council decides to adopt this.

Basically, they have to go in with exterior modifications.

What they're going to do is do some remodeling and fixing up. It's been vacant for years, so the roof is leaking. Things like that. But you will not see any difference as far as building facades or things like that, other minor upkeep. That's the requirement. You see there's 20, roughly 20 parking stalls that are existing. That will remain, so there'll be plenty of parking as well. The original additional use was approved for 26 beds, so this facility basically will be a 26- bed facility for children. If there's nothing specified, so if there's another project like this coming forward, there's nothing specified, a maximum of 12 in that facility. So there is some limitations on moving forward with what can be allowed in these types of facilities. There's a couple of parents who stay for permission to stay at home. Get taught on how to take care of the child.

Then there's a—

they can come and stay if it's a terminal type situation and they need a couple of days of care until the child passes away.

They can come and stay on site and be able to take care of them.

So that's built into the ordinance. They do allow—

When you say stay, do you mean they have a bed for them to stay?

They would have a—

so there'd be a way that she's Describe it as connecting. The child would be in one, other siblings, parents could be next door in another.

Like a adjoining room or something?

They would be adjoining.

Yep.

Um, let's see, then they would be able to treat— right now she goes household to household. They would be able to treat up to 5 patients, so they could come, get a little training, and then leave the facility. So not have an overnight stay. So just if I can interject, one of her things that she wants to do is to be able to have some different types of therapists that have an office here that they can provide, you know, therapy to not only the kids who are staying there, which I think the duration, expected duration of the stay for the kids is between 7 and 30 days, relatively short, but then Like Jason says, some of the kids that they may be providing services to in-home could also come there, you know, on a weekly basis or whatever it is to get some therapy, you know, on an outpatient basis, but not actually be staying there. Before you leave that slide, Jason, I'm sorry, maybe you didn't catch it. Since you said most of these are in R-75s or R-8s, And this may come up to us again. Do we want to prove it for R-8s as well, or is this very focused? So I guess that's more of a question for you to see.

Yeah, that's okay. I'll answer that.

I think we think this would be okay in R-7.5 or R-8, but the thought is let's try it in a limited zone first, see how it works, identify if there's any problems, then have it expanded beyond what's being requested.

Okay, and then we can always modify.

And then we can always expand it to To go into RA. Thank you. So basically, they would go through the same process, right?

They would go through the process of coming.

This kind of goes through the regular— the rest of the steps. There would be a small sign, 6 square feet, which is their sign.

They should sign up.

Then they would be required to be licensed through the state, licensed through the city, and a business license. So they're saying this is private? It's not like a public-private— it's a private company doing this? And is this usually billed through health insurance, or— I believe they use insurance. My understanding is she's a registered nurse and basically operates—

has other nurses that work And what was this before?

This was a B-hybrid about 3 years ago. Is that where you're saying any other situations like this? Well, this specific zoning request is limited to this particular kind of use. So it's pretty narrow.

There's not going to be a lot of people trying to do this kind of thing.

So that, that's all it was. I guess I'm just curious if there That's something we're looking at, is that there are other similar situations coming at us. Oh yeah, maybe what you're talking about is, you know, back in the '80s and '90s we had a lot of assisted living facilities for elderly approved and built, and for some reason they're just going out of business for whatever reason. And so they're looking to convert those buildings to different uses, and this is one of those, and there are a number of other ones out there. One that we just dealt with was Where they wanted to convert part of that to autism, you know. And so, and we've had requests for other former assisted living facilities as well, right? Whatever the reason is, they just want— I guess it's not working for that, find other uses. Okay, so this is going to Planning Commission tomorrow. Yesterday I believe I sent you an email and outlined this text in that email, so if you have any questions, the Planning Commission will review it and then the City Council So next, next council meeting.

It seems to me quite a no-brainer, but is there any concerns that you guys have? I mean, I'm assuming the neighbors won't be too bothered by— Yeah, no, there's a little car here and there.

You can see that the majority of these are fourplexes. It wasn't a whole new idea that it would be an important issue, I think, for the neighborhood. But this is something that's been here for many years. If there was any concern in my mind, it would be the outpatient aspect of this, because that is kind of like a medical clinic type of a thing, which you don't typically see in a residential zone. But, you know, that's why we try to put some limits on how much that could be so that it's not a lot of traffic. You can't have more than 5 kids getting outpatient treatment at the same time. And it does kind of dovetail with the proposed— during daylight daytime hours. And it's also, there's, you know, up to 20 or so apartments.

There should be plenty of off-street, shouldn't be any on-street issues. Somebody else's chance to speak.

It reminded me a little bit of the—

we have—

we had this discussion with the Planning Commission. So I think the plan is— so Becky has filed an application And so we'll be taking this to Planning Commission. We have it scheduled tomorrow. Okay, maybe you already said that. So, and then Council on—

Thank you, Jason. Thank you.

Okay, next we've got a presentation, Gold Star Families Memorial Lawn, and Taylor and Karen Cardin.

Good afternoon, Mayor and council members. I am greatly honored to be able to introduce our special guest today. Some of you may know her, Jenna Taylor from North Ogden City. We're privileged to have her to help present on this topic as she has become the expert in this field in Utah. A great public speaker, a great public servant. Um, she graduated from BYU and Utah State University, and her and Brent, her late husband, uh, originally started their married life in Utah County and lived in City of Orem. So she's back to some of her roots here. We're happy to have her. Um, Brent, her late husband, was a city council member, very active in public service, and also served in the U.S. Army National Guard. However, unfortunately, Major Brent Taylor was killed in November of 2018. And shortly after, Jenny Taylor started a foundation called the Major Brent Taylor The foundation seeks to ignite patriotism through service and looks forward to continually working with cities across the state of Utah to honor those who serve and also families who have lost those in the line of service.

Thanks, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. It's hard to drive through this part of town and not just go straight back to Henry Lane. I Delivered our first baby living in a home just blocks from here. We used to go to the Macy's. I used to take our walks around the stroller, and we used to come to story time at this library with my little toddler. So it's great to be here, and thanks for the introduction.

I'll just get through this if that's okay.

Um, first question you might ask yourself is, what are you doing here? You're from Northampton now. Uh, how many military members are there here in Warren? And the answer is a lot, and the answer is a lot more than you think. And I don't just mean military members, I mean those who have fallen while serving. The Department of Defense tracks numbers in a bunch of different ways, just like all statistics. These are some of the names of some Orange City family residents who lost a member of the military serving in the line of duty overseas during the Global War on Terror. That's a very finite number. In the country, there's about 7,042 that lost their lives in the line of duty in the Global War on terrorism. In the same 20-year period, we also lost another 30,000 to suicide, and even more than that to just other causes of death. A soldier might die from cancer or a car accident or a heart attack while also serving in the military. So these are some of those that come at the top of those lists because of their line of duty nature of their death. But I think you would be surprised if you just started shaking hands around the community, you'd find more surviving family members than you might think. The Gold Star Family Memorial Monument movement was started by Woody Williams. I don't know if any of you are familiar with him. He just recently passed away at the age of 99. He was the last living Gold— not Gold Star, excuse me, Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. He was at Iwo Jima with that Greatest Generation, and I think part of him in his surviving that was grateful for his survival and also always felt a debt of gratitude and a debt of grief to the families of those, his comrades, that didn't make it home. So just several years back, he built one of these beautiful monuments in West Virginia, in his hometown, and it just caught on. People saw it, they wanted one. More people saw it, they wanted one. I once saw one on Facebook shortly after my husband was killed, and I wanted one. So I called our city council, presented a meeting much like this to our council and mayor, and True. And just said this would be a wonderful way to honor those families of the fallen. This memorial is different from what you might have at your cemetery. It's different than what you might see in Washington, D.C. It's different than what exists at Fort Benning where the names of the fallen are etched in stone. This monument has zero names on it. It's to the family and loved ones of the fallen. Now you might look statistically at that list of those first few that fell, or I could tell you in North Ogden. There's my husband who had a wife and 2 parents and 7 kids and 6 siblings, but he also had friends from high school and college, buddies from the beginning of his professional career like Brent in this room. The family of our fallen is far more than biology and that biological connection. So we started one in North Ogden, St. George, South Jordan. We started the new— we We haven't gotten this far south yet, and we would love for Orem to help us get into Utah County especially. You have a very high concentration, particularly of National Guard down here. You've got some great military intelligence units, and it's located right here, in addition to the others that travel around the state to serve in different units. There's 3 proposed locations that I have. If you want to speak more to those, or— Yeah, absolutely.

Do you want to go into details?

Yeah, as Jenny said, we have the opportunity as the City of Orem to become the first city in Utah Valley, Utah County, with one of these monuments, and the next southern being St. George. So we cover a wide gap to provide this memorial monument to these families, as she said, that span the state of Utah. These 3 locations that that we've identified with Parks and Rec are proposed ideas, and we will continue to work with our Parks and Recreation Department to find the best location to get the highest traffic, where people are walking in our parks more often with their families, high-traffic areas, one of them being Nielsen's Grove Park. We've looked at 2 locations in the park where we could potentially put this monument. One being in this flower bed where that circle bed is. It would be fairly easy for us to construct and lay out the concrete there and build a monument at the end of this flower garden. The other is seen from Sand Hill Road here, very easily visible. We talked with the— One of the division managers in Public Works, and they said It would be very easy to build a connecting path on our existing trails to connect down to this and make it highly visible for the public to be able to interact with it. The next proposed location is the Orem City Center Park because it's another park that has a lot of traffic and a lot of our community members going there walking around with their families, and we have some ideas of locations in this park as well that would be suitable. And finally, a cemetery field up on the corner where it's not the cemetery and it's the park before the cemetery would be a great location as well that feeds in. People can go to the memorial monument that's already there. They can explore the parks and paths down in this area with that monument being an icon.

Yes, we're building a new park, as you know, in South Warren. Was that area considered?

That has not been considered yet. But we will consider it.

Perhaps one reason why. Do we know who gets more traffic, the cemetery, Nielsen, or right here by the city center?

Yeah, well, it depends on which street you're talking about by city center, because if you're on Center and 400, that corner gets a lot of traffic, whereas these proposed locations over on the other side are less traffic by car.

Steve—

Stephen, I know, walks out here every lunch hour on the nicer, nicer days.

Every day.

Every day. Nice or not.

You know, and I think I know, I know how much traffic this gets.

I don't know as much at Nielsen. I see more of the cemetery as well. So I don't know if we have counts on that at all.

Yeah, I talked with Tyler in the Public Works Department, and he said Nielsen Park gets some of the most traffic. not only from our residents but from people coming in because it's iconic. Another one he mentioned was Timpanogos Park, but that's kind of in the far reaches of the city and we want it to be more central.

Well, it's still far reacher than Nielsen, isn't it? Yeah, the 2 opposite ends, northeast and southwest.

Um, this— I would zoom in if we can, or you can see because it's large here. I love that you're considering putting it in a high-traffic area. I love a cemetery. Cemetery is a beautiful place. Those of us who bury someone go there frequently. Military monuments are often in the cemetery to honor the fallen. I would just like to point out this one is intended to be to the living.

Right.

Who are still left.

I can remember my husband at his gravesite every day that I want to. The intent with this is that, let's say Becky's maybe here with one of her kids or grandkids in a few years, or Or Councilmember McDonald, you bring one of the grandkids going to the library, you're going to pay a traffic citation, you're going to apply for a deck permit, and you accidentally see it versus you have to intentionally go to the cemetery, to the military veteran memorial on Memorial Day or something. When you see this, the symbolism and the power of it— this picture really doesn't do it justice. I'll invite you to North Ogden any day you want to come and see ours. It's about if you tell tall at the apex, about 13 feet wide, and a grown man could stand in this silhouette, which of course is the idea.

It's the silhouette of the missing person.

And then you have this front, which is nationwide. It looks the same whichever city you go to. The back you get to personalize and have it feel like it's Orange, it's yours. You know, in North Ogden we have a photo of a flag flying in a canyon that's very much ours. St. George has a beautiful aerial shot of see something like that.

You can have, you can have that, that kind of just really ties it into making yours.

But the idea really is to be exactly as he said. We want as many people to see it. I hope it's a conversation starter. I hope a child says to their parent or grandparent or teacher, hey, what's a Gold Star family? What does that even mean? And then maybe it can start that conversation about the price of freedom that is paid in this country that we all know is Very well worth paying. It needs to be paid.

Yes.

So in a very short time, we're gonna have a beautiful courtyard. Yeah.

Visible from library, utilities, to see for whatever reason.

And you're already tearing up the concrete, so you're only gonna have a few months. So, Jenny?

Yes.

You know the city, you know the parks. I'd like to defer to where you think it should be. Not, not all of us would, where we don't have a clue.

Your vision?

I would put it here, sir.

I would put it here. I would put it right in the center of the city. It's the center of your government. It's a symbol of the residents coming together.

The government is the people in our country, and I can think of no better fit. I love the idea of a park that gets lots of right by traffic. But I— we have found nationwide, the most impact they have is when they are right at the heart of the city center, and especially a beautiful city center like yours. And especially with new beauty coming, you know, our city, our town building is about this big, the monument's about as tall as City Hall. But where you have such a beautiful— if it were entirely up to me, Cost and sprinkler lines and crane expenses completely tossed aside. Right.

So one of the things we've talked about is the selfie moment, right? Yeah.

So we got—

and you You'll be surprised when you break ground and when you dedicate, assuming this happens, the surviving families will come from all over the state to your city to see it.

They— there's something powerful in them getting together.

You'll be surprised that you probably know some of them and might not have even known they were on the list. My husband served on the city council for 4 years, and then he served a term and a little bit more of a second term as mayor. In that time, he served with the city councilmen that had come to our home for dinner, been to several meetings when St. George for ULC team met every Tuesday and argued half the time. We came to find out after my husband died, his son-in-law died in Iraq in 2003, and somehow that never came up. And I lamented not knowing that in Brett's lifetime and really felt badly that I hadn't known for his sweet daughter all these years later to say, I'm sorry you lost Austin building 20 years ago at the time. So the, the goal is to just start conversations. Family City USA— patriotism in America is, is almost a bad word. We've almost become so sensitive to not hurting someone's feelings that we forget that patriotism isn't arrogance, it's not supremacy, it should be awareness and gratitude. And so when you look at a project like this compared to the cost of your new city building, $75,000 is a drop in the bucket. And it's One of the easiest things we've ever fundraised for. In fact, Boxelder County called me this morning and said, we'll give you $20,000 just to get it started. People want these, they love these. I haven't met anyone that says no, let's not honor the families of the fallen. The granite itself is pricey. I don't know if you've buried anyone lately, but headstones are very expensive pieces of property, and this has those 4 giant granite slabs. They're beautiful black granite, breathtaking, worth every penny. And then the site development really will come down to site costs. And if you're digging it up in my backyard, you have to move the sprinklers and the sod and the playground. Well, that's more difficult than if you're already in the middle of construction. You just know you need 8 feet by 13. You do need some good strong footings because the thing is quite heavy because of the size and dimensions of that granite.

How tall is it?

It's 8 feet at the peak, so it's, it's man-sized. It does have a little bit of a lip Lift there, you know, it's got an 18-inch base that it sits on, and you could, you could probably just stand right there. It's life-size.

And the point of the conversation today is really, like she said, we want this piece to be a conversation starter, but we want the conversation to start before this monument is installed in our, in our city. And so One of the things that we're going to do, and I've heard Councilmember Spencer say this many times since I've only been here a month, but if you're not doing it, if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. And we want to make this fun for the community and for the residents. And so we are going to approach this as a communal effort with residents to fundraise. Um, working with, uh, Jenny Taylor, and I want to give her the opportunity to talk about her foundation, their role they play, and how they've worked with the city in the past.

So our— the role we have is just that first bullet. We become a nonprofit through whom people can donate if they'd like to write off their donation and for whatever their tax purposes are. As a foundation, I started this summer after my husband was killed. He would have turned 40, and I'd already planned his birthday party, and it felt really sad to not have that birthday party. So we held it anyway and started raising some scholarship money for BYU in the U, where he had gone to school. That was 4 and a half years ago, and we haven't stopped since. So we've had a great opportunity to get out. I love the idea of making it fun, making it energetic. I love the idea of seeing patriotism come alive in people. We use the tagline, we want to ignite patriotism through service. We're not inventing it, we're not forcing it, just igniting it. It's there. It's just dormant in a lot of people. We're busy, we're divided, we're chaotic in today's world. And we find when we bring people together— when you get a civilian with a member of the military, if you get a survivor with a city government leader, when you get a business donor, a philanthropic person with a lot of money, with someone that's just down on their luck— when you bring those different people together, you've all of a sudden bridged all kinds of gaps. You're bridging generational gaps from one war to another, to a time of peace. to a time of conflict, and that's when you, you start to see that patriotism come alive. And then we kind of get out of the way and let those little patriots run and make their difference and their impact on our communities and our state and our nation. So we've— we'd love to get involved. We help with the fundraising. Like I said, to date it has not been hard to fundraise. There's a certain amount of money needed up front, of course, to get the grant ordered and get in line and and get things going. But where you've already got the construction project happening, that helps almost dictate a timeline. You don't have to wonder when or when not to do it. You look with your contractors and see. And, and cities have had great luck reaching out to local businesses, but also local residents. Some will choose to do the little tiny paver stones on the ground that might be $50 or $100 or something, and it's easier to go get $10,000 somewhere. In fact, I think it was you Councilmember McDonald that told me it's easier to get one person to give me $10,000 than 1,000 people to give me $10. But in this opportunity, we probably want some of both, because if those 1,000 people each give $10, they've each pitched in, they've each— they, they can honor someone, or they put their family name, they can show their children or their grandchildren they helped, like an old-fashioned barn raising. They helped.

Like our park here.

Yeah, people love to be a part of a good cause. Most people are just waiting for you to invite them to be part of that good cause.

My question is, does this qualify for any CARE funds? Could we get matching CARE funds from our allotment coming in?

We can certainly include whatever amount we think we could fundraise, some type of money.

Yeah, but I do think that the last set—

What, how much do you need up front to get going?

Oh, maybe $20 grand. I mean, to be honest, if we know we want to do it, what we've done in the past is we can sign an MOU with the city, between your city and our foundation, and then the Hershey Whitney Williams Foundation is the nationwide organization that runs it. We can even front that first deposit. I'm confident we'll raise the money. And then we just determine how to, how to best handle those payments. We've also held a beautiful groundbreaking ceremony. It's a great opportunity to invite the media and members of your community to come and see. People love a good shovel of dirt. And then the dedication— what we've done with most cities, and this happens nationwide— well, let's say you're going to dedicate on a Saturday morning or something. The Friday night before, you would invite the Gold Star families to a little more private reception. provide some kind of sponsored hors d'oeuvres or something. We give them a beautiful coin to commemorate the event, and then the Saturday dedication would be more open to the public. So some funding can be used for some of the celebratory means. The granite itself, technically, is a piece of rock you're buying, but the price does include shipping and installation, and they, they have some teams around the country that have come and done it. You are welcome to use a local monument company I know some cities prefer to do it that way. When we priced it out with ours, the nationwide company that does it around the clock could just do it more cost efficient. So, but yes, if we, if we want to get going, once we decide we want to get going, we are more than happy to say, hey, we will kind of prime that pot and get that money going.

We're confident we'll raise it. We'll do some activities.

I know you saw Summer Days, Summerfest. What is in June?

What do we do?

You know, those types of—

what do you call it?

We don't know.

That's a great question.

Can I propose that we use the CARE funding to get the $20,000?

Oh, that'd be great.

And that's just easy like that. And then we just get to fundraise. I think you won't have a hard time getting the rest, but okay. I personally, I want to get this done tomorrow. I'm so excited.

Doesn't matter.

She wants to get the city building done tomorrow.

That would be 9 months to go. Yeah, yeah.

Perfect.

So the more, the more time, the better. For example, we had, you know, sometimes you cities are competitive. We were working with Sandy and South Jordan at the same time, and it was a race to see who got it first. We tried to stay out of politics of city politics. But if you know, for example, that the City Plaza is on an 18-month timeline or something, now would be the perfect time to get in line. Every one of these leads to 5 or 6 more, as you can see around the country, and then the line just gets a little bit longer. And if we can raise the money quickly, then we go quickly.

Yeah.

What were the process?

It's a great idea.

I think this really is a patriotic center for families to come and remember. Well, I think too we have, we have the Freedom Tree right out here that's always lit at Christmas time with the lights, so that could coincide with That flagpole, um, and go from there.

So I mean, I'm all for it.

And oftentimes we've had great luck with— I think it was in one of your slides before, you know, you need lights for the flagpole and lights for the monument.

Well, surely you have an electrician in Orange City that wants to be a part of this project.

Surely you have a concrete contractor that would love to provide the concrete. And that's how we're really able— I mean, the cost of the project is probably $150,000 if you're paying top dollar for everything.

We've not yet needed to pay for much more than the actual heart.

But you see, like, people putting in benches.

Yeah, yeah.

And the more you pay, yes, you can even get a couple matching granite benches if you want them, and they can be inscribed. I think the idea, if you've got more space, of making it a beautiful plaza is, is just that much more inviting, and you can involve that many more people or businesses or philanthropists when you live in a very good area. Again, we came from North Ogden where we have 19,000 total people and like 4 businesses. We pulled it off, so I think that you guys could probably do it in your sleep.

Yeah, and I love to see how passionate our mayor and council are about this, and I think that is reflected in the community here. And so I think this is going to be an easy project to fundraise for, and I think everyone's going to want to be involved, and we're going to make it As Councilmember Lamson said, the best in the country.

So we'll look forward to it.

We like the best.

Any last questions or comments?

I think, I mean, I think council's very excited about it. I'm excited about the community being involved as possible.

Oh, I think the next—

I think we're probably all in. So you want the mayor to sign? He'll sign right now.

I think you're welcome. First check. Yeah, perfect. A good step, a good step. A good step might be to invite a couple of the Gold Star families in your community, and maybe we form just a small committee that helps plan some of those logistics. There's not really a lot of planning that needs to be done when the city is so supportive, when you've already said, hey, here's an idea for land, hey, here's some idea for money, hey, here's— we've got the energy behind it. But if you, if you bring in maybe, maybe appoint a council member or 2, a staff member or 2, and a couple of Gold Star families that are right here in your community, and then I can come down and kind of sit on that, help steer that committee, and then they have that, that piece of ownership. They tend to know each other and get, get the other peers from the military surviving world involved. And one last note, I mentioned at the beginning that Gold Star might mean killed in action in the line of duty overseas in a war. There's all kinds of national definitions and conversations that sometimes cause hurt feelings among survivors who might not have died in such a blaze of glory or a public way. What I love about this organization with the Woody Williams Foundation, when they say Gold Star, they mean anyone that ever wore the uniform and died any way, anywhere. It's not a matter of which death was more more glorious or more grievous or more sudden or more drawn out. And so it really does just open the arms to all military families. We've had some come from as far back as World War II and Vietnam. One sweet widow from Vietnam, she just was in such tears when we dedicated the North Ogden Monument. Ironically, her husband died 49 years to the day before mine did, and she said she felt this was the first time she felt her family was recognized for their service, an entire generation that hadn't been. And so in addition to that, you bring the grandchildren of those who died a long time ago. We had a nephew of someone whose remains were about to be repatriated back to the States after Korean conflict. So anyway, I think you'll find it opens wonderful doors and starts beautiful conversations far beyond this most recent war and will really be something that welcomes military families of all backgrounds to feel honored and included.

And I just want to thank you, Jenny, for coming today.

It's great to be here. I might drive back by my own house on my way out.

They're quiet over here.

No, we're okay.

We're all fucking ready to go.

We're in the summer fest, people. This is happy time now.

Hey, Steve, how's it going?

Doing well.

Hey, Brynn, are you waiting for us? Ready for us?

We can wait.

You want to grab one?

Uh, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's, let's go ahead and, uh, Take a minute to get reorganized. So, any volunteers?

Heavenly Father, we're thankful for this opportunity to be here this evening.

We pray this food that will nourish and strengthen us. I pray that we'll be guided in the things we say and do, the decisions we make, that What do we have?

Any big—

Yeah, they did.

Yeah, I have never seen more classy high-end basement box.

We made a mistake, and I called it. Here's the awesome— here's the example. Sorry. Yeah, let's go ahead and restart.

If you'd like to tell us what you've got on this, uh, Thanks, Mayor. Summerfest is dead.

Why? Bummer.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Nobody's in Milwaukee anymore. They've had it for 55 years.

Sorry, friend. I just drove by this venue last week. It's all music and they got some good acts going there.

I don't want to belabor the point there. And this is, you know what, it's a blessing in disguise. It's a good thing. It's going to help the whole Family USA City, USA Park, you know, it's going to help that because we have to change. And we have ideas on how we're going to change here. Debbie, it's not dead. We carry on.

I know.

That's fine.

That's fine. It's council's side.

I know that. I've done all my homework on you.

Okay. Yes, so we get through things too, Daddy. Not ready yet.

Not ready yet.

What, um, before we pass up, we're going to show you what we—

what you ought to do in our professional opinion.

Then we're going to hear opinions, but we're not going to vote with 20 people.

So we talked about names. We've had a few meetings on, you know, what we're going to go with, and there's a few that came up that really stood out, and the one that we feel confident in is FormFest. Sort of like SummerFest, right? Rings off the tongue, it's pretty short, it's memorable. And as much as we'd like to throw family in there, just too many F words. I worked on that one, guys. I worked on that joke. Okay, no, but for real, it is a mouthful. FormFamilyFest is just— it's a mouthful. But family's not taken out of it. But it's not, and we got to keep that branding going.

Whatever way you leave your logo.

Here's the thing, you don't want to be trite and overbearing.

Certain things should be more subtle, and throwing the tagline on there and throwing the slogan on there is a perfect way to subtly show it. And then in our marketing, when you do want to market it, you know, it's self-explanatory. I mean, when you see pictures of families frolicking in the, you know, in the pool, it's evident that it's a family event.

Are you opposed? My kids call Orem O-Town, right? So it's going to be O-Fest.

I love it. That could, that could be a work off of the marketing campaign for the kids who want to wear those cool shirts.

Okay, you're talking like Federal Express now, because Federal Express didn't start out as FedEx.

It happened that way. I, I don't know if they've made more of that.

No, my, my kids will do it. That, that they call this O-Town.

Oh, what?

My children.

Nobody calls it.

I'm telling you, they call it— they write it in their letters, they call it OFS, and it's fine. You think OFS is going to be here? I'm just saying it's going to eventually fall down.

But you understand, you understand that the shorter— that you're demonstrating that shorter is simplicity seems to be more better than having it. Yeah. And in terms of application, when you start getting longer names and more syllables, it becomes a nightmare in design. So keep that in mind. So if you want to hand out—

okay, so here's the rule. I'm going to hand out no PowerPoint presentation. This is something for you to take home. Mayor, we'll follow your direction on where you want to go with these later on.

If you can look at the top sheet only, if you tear through the paper—

I have eyes, right?

So here's the thing, before you hand that out, Design— not everybody likes the color blue, right? And this, this meeting is not for you guys to shout and say, I hate blue, we're not going blue. It's to show that what could be possible going forward, right?

If we need to change certain things, certain iconography, certain looks, we can do that.

But keep that to yourself. I'm just kidding.

Obviously, we do want input and But let's, let's start with the top sheet, right?

Yeah, the top sheet that you're seeing right now, after it's handed out, because I don't want people who don't see it.

There's even some for the viewing crowd.

And again, the name Orem Fest, right? There's so many different ways you can do it. You can do Orem, capital O, space, capital F.

But really, Orem Fest should be like Summer Brent, so if I can just introduce Peter and Jacob.

Oh, I thought we—

I made the AIM logo, what are you talking about? Oh, sorry.

I love that they've come in and grabbed our attention.

But, um, Peter and Jacob are the ones who helped us create our Quorum logo and then our update with our Quorum family speech. USA logo.

And so then we went back to them.

Let's name and brand City Day celebration.

We made them aware, you as a council aware, like Councilor Street, that Summerfest itself was being trademarked. And trademark owners were then going around serving everyone notice.

Use that out there. So that's, that's a little bit about why and who.

I've been in business since 1984. He's been with me for 15 years. Of all the projects that I do over the years, this is the, this is the biggest one. This is the hardest one. Because we're like shooting a wire. I mean, how do you, how do you do that? And everybody's got an opinion.

Thanks, Mayor.

I did do that.

They've got it figured out.

No, it works.

All right, everything's fine.

So here we are. Let's talk about page 1, then we'll look at the other pages.

Um, I chose the, this, this typeface purely for nostalgic vibes right now. This typeface is really big amongst the younger crowd in terms of nostalgia, retro-ness. So again, if you go to the next page, you want to flip there briefly. I did give it— oh, not the next page, page 2, page 3.

Okay, page 3 is when you show the other font.

That's the other font. Here's your more corporate, probably a little more classic, that probably lasts a little bit longer. It's relevant to your current logo in terms of It's sans-serifness. And honestly, as much as I want to decide the logo today, I really want to decide the name. I want to decide that going forward because, you know, every 5 to 10 years you may be updating this to stick with the trend anyways. So I know everybody was going to have a huge opinion on that, but the name is really important. And Steve, sorry, you're eating, you got food in your mouth.

I'm sorry.

What is some concern you have with actually using the term Family Fest in the name legal-wise?

Well, we did do a little search to see if anybody had trademarked the term Family Fest, and as it turns out, somebody has. So as I understand it, there are some other communities in Utah that do use the term Family Fest as part of their celebrations. And we could do that too, you know, as long as nobody challenges you, you can do it. I mean, we basically have done that with the summer fence the last 50 years, but you just never know. At some point somebody might decide to challenge you until you no longer use it. So I think there may be some value in trying to stay away from that, uh, that term if we can, just because there is that potential out there.

Thanks, Steve.

Can you turn to page 5?

And look what it looks like when you spell out the word. Born on Family Fest, Family City USA. Last page, the last page.

A lot of families. I'm sorry, you sent me that thing about yesterday, uh, 21 was one of the changes you wanted to see.

Hopefully I got that in there, right? So we'll get to that symbol in a minute, but I mean, it's pretty big.

Yeah, it's pretty long. Um, and, and when I say application, if you go back to Page, I don't know, page 2. The longer it gets horizontally, the more difficult it is to design that. We're gonna have to start breaking it apart, and when we start breaking it apart, it's no longer one word, right? It's Form Fest, and we're stacking it. And so my goal is to stick and be, you know, having Form Fest as one word continually, right? Not to break that up.

So So on your first page, you've got a bigger O.

I do.

Yeah.

So this one, you just got a block of all the same size.

Yeah. So again, yeah. And the first page—

Stand out.

Say that again.

Would you want the O to stand out?

We totally can. The reason why I did the lowercase was because usually when you do lowercase, people are— it's softer, it's more approachable, it's more family-friendly, right? It's almost more kid-like, if you want to say.

Um, but that's okay.

Uh, well, I mean, like, here, let me give you—

let me give you a point.

So if I capitalize— if I capitalize ORMFEST, it's yelling at you, right? It's yelling at you and it's like, come here! Whereas this is like, it's soft and it's— it's— but again, it's boring. That's why we're advocating for Version 18. It's corporate, and I don't like any of this. I hate it. By the way, it has—

I hate it.

Sorry, personality.

Or if the O was a little bigger than that.

Well, capitalization. Yeah, yeah. So, but again, I'm with you. Version 18 is what we should go with, uh, from my professional opinion. Um, but I'm not making decisions. So if you hit it on the head though, like, Rupert's gut reaction is probably the most correct. If you feel like it's boring and You know, but again, and the last— honestly, the last thing I want to do is set up a committee right now with 20 people making decisions. We're never going to get it done. So whoever wants to decide on, Bren, on who's making this decision, you can set that committee up and we can go from there.

So at that point, so we are working badly from deadlines in terms of when it's going to print.

So that June's around the corner.

to report facts. It came up in 3.

We'll make you aware of sort of new concerns related to a new potential trademark issue. But at the same time, we wanted, we wanted to be connected with our new ORM analyst.

Yeah, and that's what I was going to highlight as well. So throwing the tagline on there really just comes full circle with your current tagline that you have now. It's, it's, it's an easy transition.

So, and I do, I do know that Summerfest can committee will be very passionate about it, at least having input on what they like.

Oh, absolutely.

And we meet tomorrow.

Yeah, and again, I, I just, I want to emphasize, like, we're moving away from Summerfest. Legally, we can't do anymore. Let's figure out what the name we're going to be doing, how it's going to look on paper. Yeah, go ahead.

I think you're selling past the close. I'm fine with Virgin 18.

I said I think you're selling past the close. I'm fine with Virgin 18.

Oh, really? I've got other people talking to, so I just want to make sure.

So this one, you know for sure this is a firework, right?

Yeah.

This one, you think it's a firework.

Yeah.

Can we get something in between where we possibly—

So here's, here's my, my hesitation on, on 21. One, it's very faint, right? Application-wise, could you imagine trying to embroider that? That's why I added the thicker one in terms of application.

I'm wondering what the little star in the circle— so why not make that a little bigger?

So here's the thing. There's trite, and there's sort of being subtle, right? And if you want to find a mix of that, we totally can. The star represents nighttime fun. The circle could represent, you know, beach ball, whatever. It really is— we're going down to like somebody's personal preference on what you like. If we want to go down that road in terms of maybe emphasizing the firework, we totally can.

That is the culmination of our—

Yeah, well, you should have seen my first one I did. I have like a music note. People are like, this isn't a music thing. Like, whatever, you got like 4 music things here. So it really is like, what do we want to emphasize? It sounds to me like one night of fireworks over culmination of activities and that.

Well, I haven't talked to the committee.

Yeah.

Just, just what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah.

And again, when we— and I don't know what kind of marketing you're going to do, but I mean, when you look at the first page, what are you seeing? Are you seeing this is not a festival? I'm here with you. It's a festival, right? You see food, you see swimming.

Yeah, yeah.

Is this something new?

Yes, yes. Before, Peter W over here took, um, he did a really good job of making the firework. I'm just, I'm just, you guys are paying me to do something, so I'm gonna do something, right?

Just a comment, I, I love the V18. I like the fact that if it doesn't have a bunch of other stuff on it, that's a shirt you can wear throughout the year. Yeah, Summerfest is kind of one week. I'll wear that shirt all the time.

Yeah, and I want it to be— it's got to be a balance between corporate iconography and tried clipartness. I just— I'm not going to throw a clipart of a, you know, it's just— it's too block. Like, this is an original logo that I've spent time in that I feel like, you know, will differentiate yourself from other, you Festivals. Yeah, go ahead.

Not to be critical, but—

Oh, you're not gonna be critical, you already were. Yeah.

What's the deal with the squirrely O?

I mean, are we trying to be consistent with our regular logo?

No, no, no, no, you need to contract your logo. And yeah, it's kind of an old school retro.

It's an old school, and you can honestly have like an old grandpa with his kids.

Sure, it could be, it could be a swirl of ice cream, like it's It's hard, right? Family Matters. It's literally Family Matters. I probably— if you go look at their logo right now, it's probably Family Matters. And if that is not Family USA, I don't know what it is. I'm more on the rec side.

I was thinking of those big suckers.

So I could be talked into the firework.

Yeah, but, um, explore it more. Okay, yeah.

So, and it seems like it needs to look more like a spiral, like version 21.

Well, I think version 21, right idea, but I think that's probably not working because of the reason we talked about.

But if you— so now that my style of that firework needs to maybe—

that's why I said somewhere between this one and this one.

Good, good catch.

That's totally fine. Then I'll go, um, will you make notes of that? I mean, I'm making mental notes as we speak, but that's good.

Maybe if you took the tail off of that firework and made that just another, uh, just like a boom in the night.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll just go suggestions for sure.

Um, any other suggestions or observations?

Can we send your suggestions to our committee tomorrow?

Oh, absolutely. Yes.

Yeah, Debbie, if you'd like, I'll send you a PDF of this so you can share with your friends if you'd like.

Senator Bryce, he's the committee, um, Hey, Bryce.

Chair?

What do you call it? Staff.

Staff.

You have my email already, Bryce? I think so. This has been confidential all day long.

Yeah, I really do appreciate the feedback because your gut reactions are probably correct, right? Not everybody's going to agree that, you know, that Swirly is bad or good or whatnot, but at least we can agree that we're going in the right direction in terms of the name and, you know, application.

So Good job.

So that's it. Thank you. Hopefully we can move forward with them.

Yeah, I mean, Wormfest, we'll go—

we'll go.

By the way, O-Town Ogden has—

Wait, there's an O-Town?

Yeah, they have it copyrighted.

Oh, they do not.

I'm telling you, that's how my kids refer to it.

So here's the thing, I love that idea. Yeah, as a, as an emperor supplement to the current logo, like throwing O-Town on shirts.

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, that's not a bad idea.

That makes it—

so anyways, I'm done with my presentation. Is there any other questions you have?

Thank you.

I think the blue is great, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's—

don't put that picture on there.

We're gonna be young.

That's okay.

You don't like that? You don't like the young?

No. girl with the leg with the shoe.

What would you like to see? You want to see some big man with pileupers? Is that more accurate? We'll get to that point later on today. What do you have for a goal today? Well, my question is, is that even down the road? Are we going to be marketing?

How are we going to be marketing it? So that is something we'll be—

I don't want to go down that road right now.

We've talked a lot today. Great.

We're on the right path now.

We can do some— here's our takeaway. We're going to go back and make the— look like a firework.

And we're gonna wait for you tomorrow before we do anything.

Yeah.

I'm just saying, I know this could be very— these are very passionate volunteers and they're going to want to say or give them a couple choices and then we can say—

Could you do me a favor and send that logo only version 18 to them and say, tell me your gut reaction. What do you think?

What do you hate?

What do you like? Without saying, what do you think of this stupid— you know, right?

I'm certain you can print that one off for us.

Yeah, we just connected.

I did invite all of them to watch the last 20 minutes.

Oh, great. So they'll have some general—

but I think, yeah, we'll present version 18 and solicit feedback off that.

Great.

We'll work from there. So that's what they're thinking about. That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, big old blown up. You get a little more on the face. That's not good.

Even though it's a difficult subject that there's always a bunch of opinions on, Peter and Jacob have done a great job of getting us to a couple.

And you know what?

Hey, we don't should I be a team man? We've been going through a lot with everybody this topic.

We do do a fat team. We put like an eating contest down.

Yes, we do.

What kind of what kind of eating hot dog and pie? Is it?

Hot dogs and pie.

That's why you don't like it.

I gotta put a big, you know.

Okay, thank you.

I do have a question, if you would be willing. We have different events. It's nice to have this with an event.

For sure.

As he does his magazine, it'd be nice to have a Worm Fest and then have some sort of stylized that would keep the event there. The Grand Parade.

Consistency with the logo.

Yeah.

It's part of this.

In the end, we're gonna give you kind of like a style guide, like this is how you use the logo. You can't use it both ways.

For example, you're not allowed to change the color and things like that.

So Pete puts together the main magazine, which will be going out to all residents.

We will help them.

So it needs— I like the idea of having that, like you said, brand color.

I mean, you want to change the color for a contest, that's fine.

But Pete's the guy you're going to have to have help with that consistency. Yeah, absolutely.

I look forward to hearing from you guys.

You can either look at our events.

We are right here.

I went to mine and I thought I saw this one. Are they updated if I go to the summer?

Uh, yeah, feature guy, you know.

Okay, let's work on a little bit.

Yeah, I, I can.

Or is it me? Can you guys hear me okay?

Hello, Brynn?

Can you guys hear me?

Am I—

is my connection coming through?

Blake, can you hear us now?

Can you hear me?

Oh yeah, there we go.

Okay, we got you.

Now I can.

Yes, now, now I can hear you.

You guys can hear me okay?

Is my connection coming through?

Yeah, it's a little, it's a little shaky, but I can hear you.

A little delayed too.

Okay, I can't see your, I can't see your connection or anything or presentation, um, but I now can hear you.

Yes.

Oh yeah, there we go.

Okay, we got you now.

Yes, can you— now I can hear you. You guys can hear me okay? Okay, it's really muffled, you guys. I'm trying to do what I can here. I can't see your connection or anything or presentation, but I now can hear you. Yeah, okay, you can hear me?

I have a horrible connection. I'm sorry, you guys.

Can you hear me?

Well, and I can watch through the presence.

I can hear you.

Can you hear me?

I have a horrible connection.

I'm sorry, you guys.

Yeah, there's a huge delay.

We scheduled one to come down.

Can you hear me?

Well, and I can talk through the presence too.

I can hear you.

Can you hear me?

You guys, there's like a full minute delay. Yeah, there's a huge delay. You guys, there's like a full minute delay. Yeah, there's a huge delay.

So we can, we can share.

essentially these slides with you, Mayor and Council. And of course, we can schedule additional time with Blake at a later date.

If they have any questions, but this is something should be exciting. I mean, it's a pilot. It's something we're excited about.

Doesn't get exciting.

Unfortunately, I apologize. The connection's just horrible. The next council meeting, they just want to reach out to me.

So I think we, at this point, we just wanted to give you a heads up that Waste Management has chosen to form the, the front runner pilot, this new ability that Waste Management has to recycle essentially film or additional plastics that they weren't able to recycle technology, recycling. So we start to roll this out and start to educate our citizens.

This is now a possibility.

We of course want you as a member of council to be aware and make sure there weren't any initial questions or concerns about the idea of doing this.

So Blake, do you want to at this point, just give us the, you know, 3-minute version of what the program is and what the timing might look like.

And some initial feedback.

Can everybody hear me through this?

Yes.

Okay, great. Yeah. So this is exciting. What we were finding is there was an abundance of contamination coming through our recycle stream, and it was completely made up of plastic film and plastic bags. So rather than, you know, we bought this, we bought this, you've heard me say it a million times at council meetings that, you know, hey, this is the biggest contaminant. We purchased technology and we have put this into process. It's now on our equipment. where we have found an outlet for this material. In doing so, you still won't be able to bag your recyclables. That's, that's still going to be probably the largest hurdle to overcome, but you'll be able to recycle plastic bags, plastic film. We're putting it in pilot phase, and since Orem has always been an early adopter of this, we thought it'd be a perfect test trial. to do it with you for the next 90 days, try it, evaluate it, see how that comes in, and be able to say, hey, this was a huge success, or let's go back to the drawing board on this. So that's really kind of high level of what we're looking at for the plastic film, plastic bag, as that's one of the number one contaminants that's coming through on our berth and that we're seeing in our streams. We're very excited about this. We're excited to have you as a pilot. This is something that everybody should be excited about. And, you know, it really— we see this as a revolutionary change as we know it when it relates to recycling.

So, Blake, yeah, that's really high level. Can you tell us just what this means in terms of how it works functionally? For the community?

Yeah, so what it will be, you're not going to change a whole lot. We're just going to ask when we roll it out, we haven't yet, we'll notify everybody, but we'll essentially let them know that, hey, plastic film and plastic bags, you know, educate, send out a postcard, these are now acceptable items. And we'll, we'll do communication on the front end. And then we'll prove the concept at the back end of what that looks like and what the success looks like to the end user.

When you say acceptable, you can put them in the recycle bin.

Those two things, you just put them there, especially that.

Just, it would be like, let's say cardboard wasn't accepted. Now we're saying, hey, Cardboard is accepted. In this case, plastic bags and plastic film haven't been accepted. Now we're saying, hey, put it in, uh, let's have that as another quantity in your stream.

Okay.

Blake, Tom McDonald here.

Full scale on this is because, as you know, it's very difficult to take something out versus put something in. That's why we want to try this. Prove the concept and then do a full-blown campaign once we prove that concept.

Blake, this is Tom McDonald. Yeah, uh, question for you. So my wife currently takes the plastic bag back to a grocery store.

Now we throw them in the recycling bin, is that what you're saying?

You can, correct.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, you can bring them over.

Yeah, we're talking.

So like, this is, this is Debbie. So say you get like a case of water, plastic around that case can now go into the recycle. I'm thinking of things that they wrap in plastic, right?

That is correct. Okay. So essentially any plastic film, that's what we're now looking for. Plastic film, plastic bags. We've partnered with a very large organization that wants this material. And really what we're seeing is how clean is this material coming through, what does that fail look like. And that's what we're hoping. And if each council member or anybody would like to see it, We just put the technology, it is up and running. You're welcome. I can do a tour of it as well. It's quite impressive how it's done. I know all of you have seen the MRF, most of you have seen the MRF. You remember seeing the plastic bag tree and the wheel getting caught in the plastic bag? That's now being processed and it's very, very exciting.

Will it affect the cost at all?

It won't affect the cost. We believe there may be incentive down the road, but it won't affect the cost positive or negative at this juncture. But down the road, that is to be determined.

Are there any other questions? When we're supposed to start, I'll let us know.

So we'll follow this up then, Blake, with sharing this presentation material.

And then as soon as you have timing sort of nailed down, then let us know and we can, we can pass that, the timing aspect of this along to our council as well.

You got it. I apologize about the technology. I greatly wanted to be there in person. I never miss a great time at forum, and I was so bummed. I, I at least got to hear all about Summerfest.

So, and yes, in the next week we'll have timing on all that.

If anybody has any direct issue, concern, question, you all have my contact information. Please pass that along. And, uh, yeah, we're— this is really exciting and, uh, excited to have a board amend that pilot. So thank you very much.

Great, thank you, Blair.

Thank you.

Take care.

Right, moving on, we'll run through the agenda here.

We have 8 city council members that are doing a report on their Other committees?

Yep. Okay, on to the agenda.

Uh, 6 PM, call to order, invocation, inspirational thought.

We've got Troop 2020B and So we've got the scouts. You did my turn. Yeah, yeah, but it works out.

It was my turn.

Okay, that's great.

It could be your turn.

Um, anyway, if you get the names of these people—

oh no, he wants the names, not proof that you got the names.

I get it. Yes, I need a picture of this. If somebody could give me the names before I can fix it. What is that? Yeah, that'd be wonderful. It's a secret terminal. Um, Tom, does it say it on the list?

Yeah, it says it was, uh, Terry Peterson.

No, you're right.

Okay, item number 4.

Uh, Mary's report, item by the council. I have item 4.1, Beautification Commission annual report. And then we'll move to personal appearances. And then we'll go to item number 6, consent items. We have item 6.1, resolution. authorizing the mayor to execute an interlocal agreement joining the North Utah County Active Fire Council. We talked about that in a previous meeting. Item 6.2, resolution appointing Drew Firke to the North Point Solid Waste Specialty Service District Board of Directors. Item 6.3, resolution authorizing the mayor to execute an interlocal agreement with Utah County for the design and construction Lakeview Parkway project. And then that will take us to scheduled items. Item 7.1, the public hearing. I think we will receive public comment on the community development block grant projected use of funds for fiscal year '23-'24. Item 7.2, additional permit This is approval of an AT&T telecommunications facility co-located on the field right at Orms High School. 7.3, another conditional use permit for another AT&T tower. So we've seen more and more and more of these going up, you know, on banks, whatever. Like, what, what's the deal? Do we have limitations? Limitation on the number of them? No.

We don't.

So that would be something to have a conversation about. I mean, it's just like, seem like every week we have another tower going up on the credit union and over here, and now it's in school. It's a matter of coverage. There's so much different— there's so many more cell phones that are coming. There are certain areas of the city that still don't have— Do we get a percentage of this?

What would it be?

That help us? No, it's just cool. I mean, these 2 that are on tonight are both on school property.

So the school gets—

we generally— our ordinance requires, as a matter of priority, to have to look at city property or secondarily school property so that basically the lease fees they pay are for the benefit of the public as opposed to private.

Do we—

does the school—

can the school just approve this? Or do we have to approve? We have to approve it.

But let me back up.

Actually, that's a great question because— Because at UVU we don't have to say anything, right? Yeah, UVU we don't. So the school districts are different. We still have zoning control. So, but one thing I want to point out on these 2 poles we're hearing tonight, they're actually permitted uses under 75B, which means they could just go in without the city council At 75 feet. They're coming before you tonight because they want to go up to 100. And to get up past 75 to 100 feet, they have to get a conditional. The purpose for that is they want to take a light that's on both football fields for high school and take that— the light is right about 75 feet— in order to get their pole on that. So they're combining the poles so they don't have to put So the light would still be on the pool. So that's the additional.

Does that look funny, or have you seen what a mock-up would look like?

Before my school—

before my school has one, it almost has a tower that's next to the pool. So they're kind of a dual purpose.

But then also get a tower that also serves the neighborhood. So theoretically, I think there is some advantage to letting them go from 75 to 100 feet. Again, theoretically, the better coverage— we're able to get better coverage typically the higher they are, which hopefully reduces the need for more towers other places and also provides the ability to happen Co-locate more than one provider on the same pole, which again hopefully reduces the number of towers they have to put throughout the city. So these towers, both of them AT&T and the Verizon, will be here. Both will have the ability to co-locate one provider.

From 100 feet, they'll be able to pull up below and the lights will be able to follow. AT&T wants to obviously follow the wood and actually be able to follow the street.

Yeah, so the co-locating, you usually have a primary provider. It's like they're usually common, and they co-locate another provider, a different provider. So they're— they pay them the fee. We call those co-locators. Is this about 5G as far as— I think it's more of just coverage. 5G is handled there, but typically we spend a lot of State Street.

So we can talk about that.

Item 7.4, amending portions of Pennsylvania's regulations for residential zones pertaining to parking. For trucks, trailers, and RVs. Or having mayors and council this ability— this will allow you later on, you still have to have a paved driveway on the side of your house.

Right now we're requiring paved, but the cost of, uh, having a lot of Area.

Just a driveway would have to be off the street, or— so the driveway would have to be accessed to your current A-use, right? So you could drive in your driveway and you're off onto the ground.

Okay, that's what this is.

Um, and then item 7.5. I think the current fiscal year 2022-2023 budget, Brenda will present that.

It'll be almost as long as the first session item.

We have not lost anybody. Believe me, you get credit for that one. Um, then item 7.6, an ordinance proposed by the amendment creating the Management Services Department. Did you get that all worked out? I think so, yeah. Um, we, we talked about this, I think, the last work sessions. So creating a new department, um, managing services, obviously that involves reorganization, restructuring some city administration, which we think will redo— result in some efficiencies and some cost savings. Okay, so this is the big picture. As far as the details down Yeah, I mean, it's basically—

it creates this department and indicates the different divisions that are located under management services.

That's Carrie's group, right?

Okay, thank you.

So are we adding a new department? Well, it's kind of a restructuring, if you will. You could say we are sort of adding a new department, but at the same time, It's kind of in conjunction with elimination of some other positions like Deputy City Manager. So it's kind of the, the Management Services Director will take over a lot of the responsibilities previously handled by the Deputy City Manager. So it actually— You're probably about to say this, but it does result in a reduction of executive level Employees, so it's kind of reducing the higher-level employees, if you will, and making a little bit less bomb-heavy at the city manager. Yeah. That way, there are cost savings.

Did you get any more pushback from last? House of any library, your definition of—

No, nothing.

So no one's challenged your, your interpretation of the taxation plan?

Okay.

All right.

Last we've got communication items, agenda information items. Any questions about me tonight?

I do, Mayor.

January of 2022, we appointed Jesse for a 6-month contract. In July, we extended that for 6 months, and we haven't acted on that again.

I'm assuming he's here, he's still employed, but that his contract ended according to our minutes, I think.

Yeah, um, I mean, I have to look at that. I mean, we talked about different things.

I think he is on a—

he's an employee, but he had a 6-month time frame and we passed that, right, initially. And, and yeah, and so we will be looking at that, but we've actually talked about a bunch of different options. Okay, but he's operating right now outside of our approval? No, he's still here.

I know he's here, but we only extended him through January of this year.

And this is past January. So we don't have a board approval or city approval for that. So we'll work on that.

May I make a point?

Yeah, yeah. The 6-month contract was not given to buy the new home wall in order to put a term in it.

So the term was never—

So we approved something we shouldn't have?

Yeah, that's the term. That is the term.

You can't have a term agreement unless you have an ordinance that permits a term agreement.

And that's a decision you have to make, whether you want to make the position a term agreement.

And we've been talking about it. Okay, so, okay, anything else?

Okay, let's adjourn the city council.

Thank you.

And we can't start at 6, right? Because it's stated that people are going to get here. Test, test, test, test, test, test.

Check, check, check. Oh my God.

Test, test.

Oh, that's good.

That's good.

The ground running, look at you! Yeah, if they've got your presentation, then they'll queue it up for you. That's my brother-in-law.

He went to fight—

I didn't even recognize him.

Oh no, that's an interesting—

No, I don't.

I don't know.

My kids went to Windsor. As did mine.

They did Spanish immersion at Windsor.

That's why we— that's why we lived where we did.

Windsor was the one that had Spanish, so we moved They could go there. That's exactly what we did, why we chose our school and where we were gonna live.

Test, test, test, test.

Lynnae, can you hear us?

Lynnae?

Yes, I can. Sounds great.

Can you hear me?

We'd like to call this meeting to order, and we'd like to begin with our City Council. First, we'll start out with an invocation and inspirational thought by Brighton Pine. Sorry, Brighton Payne. And then Brighton will also do the Pledge of Allegiance. And then, Dave, if you would like to introduce the Scouts and what they're going to do.

Yeah, so we have, uh, Callum Payne, Brighton Payne, Jonas Bowman, Connor Anderson, Aiden Lowe, and Peyton Whaley will be doing the pledge and the flag ceremony. So We'll invite Brighton up to— I guess we have to do the prayer first and then go from there. So you can come on up.

Heavenly Father, we're thankful that we can be here and thankful for the gratitude and kindness For the community. And, uh, please bless that we can continue to show kindness and, and be grateful for our community and make wise choices.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Amen. Thank you. Now we'll turn the time over to your troop to, uh, do the flag presentation.

Yeah.

And then once you're done, you can come back up to the front if you would, and we'll get a certificate and a photo opportunity with the mayor. I also want to thank the, uh, the Scoutmasters that, uh, helped the boys out in getting their, their Eagle. So you have Sean Trondheim, I'm not sure— Scott Whalen, Warren Lowe. So we— Whaley. So we appreciate your, uh, your, uh, opportunity to serve here, and we appreciate your time. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. And we'll move into our scheduled items. We've got a mayor's report, item 4.1. This is going to be our Beautification Commission, if they'd like to come up and give us their annual report.

You guys are looking really good in your blue shirts.

And Jared, if you would like to introduce all your members here.

Okay, so I'm Jared Goble. I'm gonna help kind of present our updates for this at this time.

Elaine Parker.

Barb Cooper.

And Shawna Rillian.

Thank you.

I'm hoping you have our presentation.

I do want to draw attention that Jared Goble is my brother-in-law, and so I appreciate his wonderful service and all the committee, but I'm especially proud of Jared.

We won't hold that against him.

Okay.

So if the presentation is not up to par, is that a reflection on you?

No, I taught him everything he knows. No, no, he's, he's He's very detail-oriented, so I'm sure it'll be fantastic. I needed to embarrass him, but he's a wonderful man.

Yeah, thank you for the embarrassment.

I think Pete's, Pete's working on it.

Thank you. And I'm assuming you guys will see it up on your screens.

Have it on you.

Who has it?

Tyler, you got it?

You have that?

I hope not.

Got bigger.

Let's go back.

Perfect.

All right, so again, this is our opportunity just to give you an update on our progress from last year and then our goals for this year.

As always— oh, you betcha.

Okay, so as always, our— one of our goals here is to help preserve, enhance the beauty of this beautiful city. So we're striving to do that through just efforts to promote more beauty here in the community. And we got a few different things we'll highlight on that, if you'd be so kind. You met a few of us already. A few that were not here is Mark and Josh. And then we appreciate David Spencer's sponsorship as well for the commission. So a couple of our accomplishments from last year. This is from the Summerfest Parade. So we participated in that. And then we also—

Thank you.

use various media outlets. So Facebook, we use the newsletter to help get the word out what's going on in the— at least the beautification community or commission. And it's just something we've been doing now for several years, I believe. If you'd be so kind, Sean. Some of the key things we do is we really try to raise awareness for those that are going above and beyond in the community. So we've got our Residential Beautification Awards, which we do during the summer, and then during the holiday season is when we do our Spirit Awards. We'll highlight a few of those.

Just also, just to— I don't— we might have mentioned this last year, but we're doing a different thing now where we hand out the signs and they get to keep them. So if someone from 2020 wants to put a sign out next year or this year to brag from the 2020, they can—

they get to keep it.

Before, we took the sign after a month, so this is a lot nicer for them.

This is just a map of how, as, as members of the commission, we divide and conquer so that everyone in the community gets an opportunity to be represented. And then we also do something for the businesses within the area. We'll highlight a couple from the residential awards. You're just going to see various pictures from different homes here in the city. I will say, um, as we've done this— my— this is my first year in doing it, and it's just amazing to see the looks on some of these people's faces when they get recognized. And, um, they were just shocked that we, we went out of our way to do this. So it's— it is welcomed. And then we should come up on our Spirit Awards here.

I don't know, any—

do you want to comment on Barb from the business I went around to different businesses to find where they've kind of gone out of their way to make the front of their business really pretty.

I really like that. And then our Spirit Awards. So we— this typically starts right after Thanksgiving. We did this in December, so it just highlights some of the community spirit that was, was shown. So just some key pictures. From those this year. And then we will get to some of our goals here in just a moment. The one thing you're going to notice, we're not making a significant change in our goals. We believe that the prior emphasis hasn't really changed much. And so our goal again is to promote promote worthwhile practices, enhance the beauty of the City of Orem. And we're going to do that through these recognition awards. We're going to do that by helping the citizens become more aware of how to use water more wisely. So we partner up in those programs. And then our goal also is to continue to make Orem recognized as one of the Tree City USA designations. So that's part of what we do. So none of those things will change. And then just some of the other activities we do from a beautification perspective is participate, of course, in the Summerfest, which we'll do this year, and then our continued promotion throughout. And so that's just a quick synopsis. If you guys have any feedback or questions of us.

I serve on the Natural Resources Committee, and I thought we were going to do a joint award for someone who uses kind of a xeriscape or a local Is that something that you want to do that with us still?

Yes, I think they talked about the next—

next year.

Okay.

I think that's a good idea, especially with still being in a drought despite all of our snow. I think it would be good to have some people who convert those to low water, you know, flip their strip, whatever it's called.

So.

And also, as we give out awards this year for the, for the yard awards, that's something that personally I'm sure others are looking for. I'll be looking for that kind of too, and I might even include that in my decision to give someone an award if they're doing something like that. That's, that's attractive.

So, will you still call it beautification, or will you actually have a different name for it?

I might just use the, the sign, but if it's, if it's significant to where it, it looks like a definite xeriscape and applies to that, we might talk about it with the Natural Resource Commission.

So, okay, but we did highlight even a couple homes this past year with that.

I saw some businesses that had some nice rock with plants, and, and so looked like that a lot of them had done that sort of technique. But yeah, okay, well, I think we'll definitely want to continue to work with you guys. I'll work with Councilman Spencer and make sure we make that happen.

I appreciate serving on this commission, and it's great to work with you. And the blue shirts are awesome, and I, I wore my blue shirt but wrong color. But appreciate your service.

Thank you.

We appreciate the support. Thank you.

Okay, thank you for your presentation and all your good work. We appreciate it. Now we'll move to the personal appearances. There's usually something I read here telling you all to be nice, but, uh, it's not here, so just be nice. Um, we've got a fairly short list tonight. We got 6 people who would like to come up. I'll just go down the list. The first on the list is John Barrick.

Mayor, City Council, thank you for your time. I would like to thank the mayor, Terry Peterson, Dave Spencer, and Lenee Millett for their support of Orms School. As you know, Alpine School District has announced the closure of several Orem schools. They lied to Orem voters.

I'll explain that in a minute.

It was clear to everyone that had eyes to see and ears to hear what Alpine School District was going to do to Orem schools. Yes, I'm talking to you, Tom McDonald. It was clear. ASD had 3 schools in the last 5 years, and they've announced the closure of 2 more, and potentially a third, with Aspen moving to potentially a magnet. It is unfortunate. I never wanted to come here and say, I told you so, but I told you so. I take no pleasure in that statement. Alpine School District lied. About seismic issues. They told the city of Orem in their first grammar request related to seismic issues that there were no seismic issues. And then when we asked for the specific reports from 2006 and 2022 through FEMA, they revealed seismic issues, and then they minimized the effects of the seismic issues. And now they're closing these schools because of—

oh, what?

What?

Wait, wait.

Seismic issues. It's unbelievable. They lied. Alpine School District lied to the residents of Orem. Sissy Rasmussen, a founder, founder of Stronger Together, in a Facebook response to me said, Stronger Together never promised that Alpine School District would not close Orem schools. I was just surprised how fast it happened. So was I. Brittany Lentz said in a Facebook post that our school's parents and staff went hard against Prop 2 because they were— they told us there would be no school closures. ASD was disingenuous, and Aspen parents felt betrayed and lied to. And they were. They were lied to by Alpine School District. Jason Sundberg created the financial disinformation for Alpine School District regarding Orem's loss, which was a lie. It was fraudulent. He was promoted to the assistant business manager of Alpine School District. I'm not sure what his increase in compensation was, but I think it had something to do with 30 pieces of silver. Tonight, ASD is moving ahead with a $90 million bond, $150 million $54 million with an interest through lease revenue bond. Orem's share will— that will be over $30 million. Alpine School District lied to the citizens of Orem. I take no pleasure in that, but some of us told you so. Thank you for your support.

Thank you.

I'm back. I'm here to make my voice heard tonight. I was an advocate, fought very hard for the New Orm School District, along with our, our good mayor and Dave and Lenee and Terry. Uh, they were involved. They were out there pounding the pavement trying to make this thing happen. Um, and what I can say is that you 4 individuals told the truth. You did not lie. So here we are, um, after being lied to. Remember this? Remember this that was being handed out? We were lied to by the Alpine School District. We were lied to by PTA presidents, and we relied— and I specifically was lied to by board member Ada Wilson. It's just reprehensible what was said and what was done. And so, as was predicted, Sharon and Windsor— remember this part?

Okay.

And Sharon and Windsor Elementary Schools are being closed. And what else? Probably Lake Ridge. And Orem Junior High School, probably Mountain View, and probably another 4 to 5 to 6 elementary schools as well. Why? That's the question. Why Alpine School District is closing Orem schools? It, it's, it's an easy agenda to follow here, folks. They're selling the land here in Orem, our city, using the money towards building other schools. Guess where? Not here in Orem, outside of Orem, somewhere in Utah County. And this is exactly why Alpine School District fought so hard to prevent Orem from forming their own school district, so they can do exactly what they're doing now. And this was their agenda all along. This has been their agenda. And all we can say here to those of those who fought the idea of a new Orem school district, I, I echoed the same thing. We told you so. We knew this is where we were going to go. And as a result, um, here's what's going to happen. Um, and having been a teacher, this is again reprehensible. Um, teachers are going to be reassigned to other schools or let go. Kids will be split up, placed in other schools. Probably increase classroom sizes, which was one of the agendas that we were trying to prevent. Some local kids that are going to the schools are going to get bused, including the Title I kids who now won't be able to be involved in their after-school programs. So they lose out. And so the big question here as I close is, where do we go from here? Hopefully our community's woken up. Hopefully some of the city councilors woke him up. I'm grateful for those who were involved. And the answer, folks, is once again a new Orem School District. That's where we need—

Stephanie White.

Step down because you're already on balance.

Wayne Young.

Hello, everyone. Yeah, thank you. It's come before you, heard this brought about what's happening with our schools. Um, I'll thank school district for doing such a disservice to our residents and our children that it's hard to describe. The announcement of one of these schools, um, it was set, it was lied about, and they willfully covered it up. When rumors came out, you know, the one slide came out that they showed it was gonna— it was going to, uh, they were going to find the funds for schools. Um, they said, oh, that wasn't supposed to be part of what we were disclosing.

So, um, you know, they, they lied. They set us up. They, uh, um, covered it up in such a way that it They should all be really ashamed of themselves because that's not the way public servants should act. These closings will hurt our schools and our kids in ways, and their plans to sell the property, use the money to build schools miles away from Orem— that's a misappropriation of Orem taxpayer dollars. We've spent that money. We've given money once for these schools. Now, if we have, you know, we've already had one school taken from us. We had to buy that property back, and that to me is a criminal misappropriation. misappropriation of funds, and people need to be held accountable for that. These properties serve our communities in many ways. Orem needs to block the closings of these schools in any way possible and retain the properties for the use of Orem residents, and not have to buy these properties back like it's already been done. Orem City should have multiple options to block this action, even if a lawsuit is warranted, to keep the properties that Orem taxpayers have paid for. Alpine School District plays dirty by strategically lying to us, setting us up, using their secret combinations to act more And it's not serving our children by making them go to larger schools where it's proven that they do worse academically, especially when they're further away from home. I request that Orem City use these resources to protect its residents and especially its children.

Thank you.

Michelle Lee.

Like, we're missing some regulars in the audience tonight. Wonder why. We are saddened and disappointed, though not surprised in the least, that Alpine School District is doing exactly what they said they were going to do. They are continuing to close Orem schools. We knew they were planning on closing schools. They've been telling us that for years. Stacy Bateman from the school board even wrote in face on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. She said, I know these decisions seem rushed, but they have been years in the making. Why do you think they overbuilt Cascade and Centennial by so much? This has always been the plan. They will continue to decimate our city. ASD is claiming they are closing our schools because the bond didn't pass. This is an absolute lie. These Orem schools were never included on the bond. We know this. You can't change history. The only thing the $600 million bond would do for Orem is give us 2 unneeded multipurpose rooms in 2 high schools. Ada Wilson said in her October 8th debate, there are 2 elementary schools in Orem that will need to be consolidated. This was weeks before the bond was massively rejected by voters. Try as they might, ASD and Stronger Together cannot rewrite the history of this. I wrote a press release from Alpine School District's own information from From their own meeting alerting Orem citizens to the fact that they were planning on closing our schools. Alpine School District aided in defaming me and called it misinformation created to mislead or create fear among voters. In an article by KSL, it was reported that ASD said these schools unequivocally will not close. Now who's guilty of misinformation created to mislead? Not even 4 months later, they are closing the very schools I warned about in my press release. I want to sincerely thank the members of the City Council who stood up for Orem. They saw this coming. They knew because they paid attention to Alpine School District's own documentation, slideshows, bond presentation, study sessions, and by their own words, the Alpine School District was always planning on these closures. I would like to express extreme disappointment to the elected members of the City Council who did not stand up against this agenda and who vocally opposed Prop 2 and allowed this tragedy to happen. Oh, and tonight at the Alpine School District meeting, Sissy Rasmussen is getting an award for advocacy. Look what her advocacy did to Orem.

Thank you.

Where's Parrish?

Looks like everything's on the same topic. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity, and, uh, I'm going to read directly from, uh, statements from Stronger Together. This has to do with the KSL press release. This is what the KSL press release said. Alpine School District announces 7 possible school closures in Orem.

That's accurate.

Then Alpine School District unequivocally says those 7 schools will not close. And then— I'm not reading everything. It is concerning members of the community in an official capacity publicly share misinformation to mislead or create fear among voters. No school closures were announced. Well, that's an accurate statement as well, because what was announced was possible closures. And you know what? We have had an Alpine School District board meeting where they have voted to close 3 schools: Sharon, Windsor, and the only elementary school in, uh, what's that city to the north of us?

Linden.

So the closure of all these schools will affect Orem school boundaries. And I'm not going to say who was lying. I think most citizens in Orem are smart enough to figure this out on their own, and I don't like to use that word. I'd like to encourage the Orem City Council To lodge a formal complaint with the Alpine School District over the closure of these schools. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. We'll move on to item number 6, the consent items. There's 3. I'll just read through these. We've got a resolution authorizing the mayor to execute an interlocal agreement to join the North Utah County Aquifer Council. Item 6.2, we've got a resolution appointing Chris Shirkey to the North Point Solid Waste Special Service District Board of Directors. Item 6.3, we've got a resolution Authorizing the mayor to execute an interlocal agreement with Utah County for the design and construction of the Lakeview Parkway project. Someone like to make a motion on these consent items?

I move we approve these consent items, Mr. Mayor.

I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The consent items pass.

Oh, did you hear me, Mayor?

Oh, I'm sorry, Lynnae. Go ahead.

I vote aye on that.

Okay, thank you, Lynnae. I apologize, I didn't recognize that you were there but out of town.

Well, we were having some technical difficulties trying to connect me, so I think I'm connected now. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. Next, we'll move to the scheduled items. Item numbers on the 7 series. Item 7.1, we've got a public hearing. The city will receive public comment on the Community Development Block Grant projected use of funds for fiscal year 2023 and '24. Uh, Ken Ranson and Kenneth Matthews, if you'd like to come up and present to that. Are they here? Okay.

So we want Steve Earle.

Just table this and pull it into the next one.

We're just missing the presenters for item 7.1.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it probably just makes sense to continue this item to the next meeting on March 28th.

Okay, sorry, I move we continue this item until March 28th.

Second.

Okay, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye.

I—

yes, Debbie.

Um, we did meet with, um, CDBG, um, just at the end of February, and we do have several, um, programs that they will be bringing. Many of these are public services, things like food pantries, Big Brothers Big Sisters, things that you're familiar with. So I'm sure what they're going to do is present these, but the committee did meet and it had mayors and it had our Wonderful Mr. Ransom and a few other people from Provo, and it was a very good, worthwhile evening which I participated in. So I know that when they do present, I think you'll appreciate the great work that they've done, and it'll show these great services that will be benefiting our citizens.

Okay, thank you, Debbie. Okay, we'll move to item 7.2. This is a conditional use permit. This is an approval of an AT&T communications facility co-located on a field light at the Orem High School, located at 175 South 400 East in the R-8 zone. And Jason Bench will present this to us.

Thank you, Mayor, members of the council. Tonight is the request— I've got the wrong presentation, sorry. There's a request, excuse me, by AT&T to locate a cell tower on one of the field lights at Orem High School. This is— make sure everybody can see that. So Orem High School, of course, is at that location. Let me point where they want to. You can see the arrow on there. Pointer's not working. Anyway, they wanna— there's existing one on the East side of the football field. They want to have one on the west side. As part of this application, Orem will be receiving a new snack shack. They will be tearing down the old one in connection with the build of this monopole and building a location where they can hold their equipment. And also as part of that will be a new snack shack for Orem High School. What they're proposing is a 100-foot tower. You can see the lights. The lights are at this location here. That's about a 75-foot height where the existing lights are. The antenna array will be at 100 feet. They do have a lightning rod that goes on top of that another 5 feet. So the top of the lightning rod is 105. The top of the antenna antennas will be 100 feet. And you can see the coverage area. This is the existing coverage area. The red is the areas that are not serviced well by AT&T at this particular location. And you can see if a tower is built at 56 feet, it does get some better coverage. At 100 feet where they're proposing, it does provide some better coverage with the green indicating more area of coverage. You can see this is from 4th East. You can see the light pole that's highlighted there that will be replaced. This is from the other side. There is an existing tower there with an antenna with the lights you can see on that pole. So across the field, they're replacing this and— or this one with the Antenna on top with replacing the lights as well.

So they're, they're going to replace the whole pole?

Replace the whole pole.

Because it can't stand the wind or something?

Correct. Okay, so it's not— wasn't designed originally for the arrays on top. Okay, correct.

So Jason, if you go back, so this pole that we've got the picture of right here, is that 75 feet or 100 feet?

So this is 100 feet. The lights themselves are around the 70 to 75-foot height limit, or height.

Okay, and they're basically replicating this pole on the other side of the field, correct?

Okay.

Yep.

So, so the one— the new pole is being proposed basically northwest part of the end zone, and the other one would now be in this— or the old ones in the southeast part of the end zone, the new one would be in the northwest.

Part of the field. Yep. North, north end.

Yep.

Right next to the new snack shack, I guess, in the stadium there. So just by way of ordinance, it does require a conditional use if it's over 75 feet. It does allow the council to approve a height of 110 feet. So that's why they're coming in with 100 feet, in order to be able to co-locate with the lights and then put the antenna on top. So that's the purpose for that. And then the— it does— you can see the underlying word, upon the finding of the approving authority that the closer distance— so there is a 1,000-foot separation requirement in the ordinance right now for monopoles. But because this is within an area where they want to be able to take advantage of using a facility to do other things other than the monopole sticking out, they want the lights and the pole. So it's kind of consistent with what's You see it at Timpanogos High School. You see it at Mountain View as well, where they're— they do have monopoles, but they're also facilitating lights for another purpose. So that's the purpose, the reason behind part of that. The Planning Commission did make a recommendation that this be approved. Be glad to address any questions.

Mayor, if I may, I'm assuming that we're gonna hear the exact same report for 7.3. Is that correct?

That's correct. Same, same.

We're voting on them separately, correct?

Correct.

Thank you.

Debbie, is there any concern from any of the neighbors of this extra 25 feet? Well, the one already has a 100-foot pole, so it's going to be about the same. Is there any concern whatsoever?

I don't recall there was any issues with the neighborhood meeting. No, we did require them to hold a neighborhood meeting. I don't recall any issues. They— I don't think there's anybody at the Planning Commission either that would So there's not any concern in the neighborhood, sounds like.

Okay, thanks.

It is further. It's on the west side of the football field, so it's further away from any residents.

But this is—

the normal standard is 1,000 feet, and this normal standard is 1,000 feet. This is 420 feet. So they want it to be significantly closer than—

Significantly closer, but it also uses a dual purpose with adding the lights, and then also a benefit of the school itself for getting revenue from a new pole as well.

Is there anything— it sounds like it's gonna be incorporated into the snack shack somehow, like they're gonna be putting the electronics for the tower in.

So it's a longer— let me go back to the— I can show you on this slide.

It might be helpful.

So you can see if I outline it with my pointer. So this is the entire shelter. This front portion will be the snack shack, and there's a separate wall wall separating the equipment, and then the monopole sits right here, and the field is over here.

So have they done testing, and are there any reports on having a snack shack and the food and all the employees working right next to all this highly powerful electronic equipment?

I'd have to defer to the applicant on that. I'm not aware.

They did supply the information from So, Jason, were there any concerns on the— from the Planning Commission?

There was not. There was a 7-0 vote on this item. There was concern about height. There was concern about proximity, I guess I should say that, but they ended up voting for the location.

Any other questions?

I believe the applicant is here.

Basically, we've been working diligently with the Planning and Zoning Department, and I'm, and I'm just here to answer any questions to the best of my ability, if you have any.

Like I mentioned, my biggest question that I asked Jason, but—

So with that, I can tell you that all AT&T installations adhere to applicable FCC and FAA regulations as well as all local codes. And it's understood if there's a concern, AT&T is prepared to supply documents requested by the city.

Yeah, I mean, Usually when they build these pole towers and these poles, they're kind of just wherever they are, you know, and, you know, 1,000 feet away from different things.

There's no concern with the shelter.

But this one, you know, where you've got a snack shack and it's got a bunch of the equipment in there, and then you've got your kids and your food for your snack shack right there together.

Sure.

It just seems like that requires more testing or more understanding.

Well, most of, or almost all shelters are on the ground and located within the different commercial buildings where people walk around. So the RF exposure concerns are from the antennas, not in this case, or, or that there would be any directly in this case. But when people talk about exposure, it comes from antennas, not the sheltered equipment. Okay, those are just batteries.

So could you address what is stored here?

Will this be Backup equipment in case something— I mean, what's stored in this behind the snack?

It's basically batteries for running, running the, the lines up the equipment up to the antennas for power.

So they're just dormant until they're plugged in or whatever, basically. There's no radiation coming out?

I don't know. No, there's no radiation coming or anything like that coming out of the shelter.

Any other questions?

I have, I have some there. Maybe I'll wait until 7.3.

I mean, okay, are these, are these 2 identical? Are they just pretty much pretty close?

Same application. AT&T, they're obviously different high schools, but they're doing the same type of thing. Take replacing a pole, putting the lights on, and using it as a field light in connection with the antenna. So similar application, just a different location.

With a snack shack set up?

No snack shack on that, on Timpanogos High School. It's on the east side of the football field next to the soccer, women's soccer area there. But it's— so there's not any connection with that. Orem High School has the snack shack. That one is just off by itself.

Okay, Terry.

So what's the, what's the difference in, um, The— between the 2 towers in the Timpanogos High School, how many feet?

On Timpanogos itself, it's about 250.

250 feet roughly.

I'd have to get the presentation, but yeah.

So the ordinance is 1,000 feet. Orem, they want to make it 420. Timpanogos is 200.

225.

225. Um, yeah, I have some comments about that, Mayor. Do you want me to share those now, or First of all, Stephanie White, I share your, your pain. My wife went to Sharon Elementary, but kind of no one's proved to me that these aren't dangerous. I mean, I've read reports saying they are. I've read reports saying they're not. I know that the schools are very anxious to put up the towers because Because of money. You know, you get paid to have your towers there. And, uh, and so if you drive around all the schools in Orem, we have a lot of towers. And, uh, I'm, I'm a little confused about coverage. If, if this— these are mostly for cell phones?

Correct.

I can drive to St. George and I don't see any towers, and I'm on my phone the whole way. But in Orem, we have to have our towers 225 feet apart. So we have cell coverage.

So those are different cover— different carriers, just so you know. I mean, AT&T is not on the other pole.

Yeah, and there'll be more. You know, there's a lot of carriers, a lot of folks want to put stuff on the towers. They're sure ugly, you know, if you go walking through the city and you see these towers everywhere. Instead of looking up and seeing temp, you see the towers. But anyway, a couple concerns. One is the schools are aggressively putting them there. Of course, it's a source of revenue. revenue for the schools. And then, as we heard tonight, then they close the schools. So then they close the schools and sell the property. So they get the money from selling the property, uh, where the school is, and they're getting money from the towers. And I, I know the one at Hillcrest, that was a source of, um, debate we had to have when we— when Orem stepped up, bought the Hillcrest property, and now we're negotiating with the city— I mean, with the school about the tower. So anyway, I'm concerned about The district's attitude about closing schools. It was interesting. We heard about that press release, and the KSL had about the announcement about schools being closed. There's more, and other people talked about this time. There's more in the works, and according to the district, you know, the district said so. It's not just the 2. So if you have a junior high closed, if you have more elementary schools closed, we've had all these towers. propping up where all the kids are, where I'm not even sure they're safe. So I have concerns about that, and I just question— I mean, I guess you'll put as many towers as we'll keep, as we keep approving. So if we approve them 225 feet apart, why not stick one in the middle? Now you have them every 100 feet. You know, that's more revenue. So I just think we need to look after what's the best interest for the citizens of Warren. And if it used to be 1,000, now it's 400, now it's 220, I think it gets a point where it's just ridiculous. But it's a money grab by Alpine School District, since that's where most of our towers are. Let me just see if there's anything I missed that I just, just thought about. I'm concerned about the children. I'm concerned about safety, and I'm also concerned about the people that are supporting these towers and getting the revenue. So that's, that's my main concern, Mayor.

Thank you.

I have a question.

Any other thoughts?

So I'm, I'm a little concerned about the distance here. I mean, this is to get better coverage throughout the city, right, for residents. So can you explain how far they need to be apart? I mean, I guess I'm a little confused now about distances, how this— the whole goal of this, that people have better cell coverage. Am I missing the point?

Well, you know, the standard was, was built in the city ordinance 1,000 feet back, even before I was here at the city, when cell phones first came out. We've, you know, discovered that they needed towers, and so the city came up with a standard of 1,000 feet back, 25, 30 feet back. So obviously the standards have changed over time, and maybe we need to look at that 1,000-foot separation. But part of it was just initial creation of the ordinance allowed a conditional use permit and other things to happen. But that 1,000 feet was something that was put in back then to separate those out. So yes, they could locate it somewhere else on Tippinoga's property. I mean, they have a big campus. They have a big campus at Orem High School in connection with Orem High School and Tippinoga. They have the light, and then they have the tower, much like they have at Mountain View High School. So it serves— instead of having just a pole now 1,000 feet away, which they could meet the standard out over by the seminary building or over by wherever else, instead of having 2 towers on the property, now they're consolidated, a little more dual purpose of having a light. And by the way, it's also a cell tower. So, you know, that's the reasoning, I think, behind why they're doing it. I think that's why the schools want it there as well, because it doesn't stick out. Could they relocate it somewhere else on the campus? I'm sure they could, and I imagine AT&T would be willing to do that. Same way with Timpanogos. So I mean, there's, there's a way to do it and meet the standard if that's what the council decides. This is just a way to allow that to be there, but also be a purposeful you know, eyesore or whatever you want to call it, with the lights on it as well. So that's, I think, the reason.

Well, maybe you can answer this. Um, I'm sure you've, you've figured out wherever you put it how far the, you know, it's going to radiate for your, for your customers, right?

Well, if you refer back to the RF map, you'll be able to see how, what the distance is and how much further out it covers. I just wanted to add also that This site was driven by the demand of the community, by an increasing number of complaints to AT&T for lack of coverage. And AT&T is trying to accommodate and better serve the area. And additionally, AT&T has partnered with FirstNet 911 services, and this additional coverage will increase the community safety standards by more effectively serving the area in the time of need.

Okay, so I think you've answered my question. This really is— you, you've located these in an area that's going to give you the most coverage for the areas that you've had complaints, correct? Whether you moved it a couple hundred feet this way or this way, I'm assuming you've analyzed all of those.

We have.

Okay, thank you.

I think maybe a clarification too, the multiple towers are not the same company, right? They're different companies that are co-locating their antennas or locating their antennas. So AT&T doesn't have currently an antenna Antenna there. So they're, you know, that's why they're putting an antenna at this location. So the other antennas are other carriers that have antennas on.

So will you, will you reach out to like the T-Mobiles and see if you can co-locate so there'll be less other antennas? I mean, is the idea to consolidate?

Uh, basically we can't consolidate on the ones or co-locate on the ones that are existing because of the reach. There's already a couple carriers on that pole, so we won't we would be too far down and we wouldn't be able to have the coverage. But, um, that's why building the monopole with a light structure on it would look cohesive with the other one that's there and also allow AT&T to have the coverage that they need.

So will you reach out to other carriers, though, to co-locate with you guys?

We don't need to reach out, but they will definitely see that our pole is there and they will reach out to us.

So ultimately, the net would be less poles From other companies all coming to one big pole?

The goal is first to— is to try to co-locate if possible, always.

So this pole would allow another additional co-locator underneath, and then the light would be in the 3rd position, right? So they'd be able to have one additional antenna on this pole.

Okay, thanks.

So do we know what type of revenue this pole will generate for Alpine School District?

I'm not sure what the rent agreement is. Um, it can be— I can give you— it could be anywhere from $1,800, $1,500 to maybe $2,000, probably more a month. A month. It might even be starting off as low as, as $800 to $1,000, and then it begins to increase, you know, over years with a, with a, an annual increase.

Because I think I remember when we, we bought Hillcrest, we had to Calculate that because it was a source of revenue into what we were paying for the property. So, okay, thank you.

Any other questions?

Okay, just so if I could just—

oh, go ahead, Jeff.

Just another perspective on this. So You're having Orem citizens that are contacting AT&T complaining because they're not getting cell coverage. I mean, they're not having a suitable experience because they're not getting the coverage that—

Correct.

They would like to get, that maybe I'm getting because I live in a different area.

Correct.

And I have better access to a cell tower.

Correct.

So, I mean, in my mind, it would make sense to do somewhere like this versus putting them in the neighborhoods or other places so that it's right in my backyard to have this big tower versus putting it somewhere where there's a lot of open space and it's not as, you know, as someone said, an eyesore. So I mean, I Looking at it from another direction, I see this as a benefit to Orem citizens. You know, everyone— I mean, not many people have landlines anymore. We all depend on cellular coverage and also for our emergency services, as you mentioned before. So I see this as a need to help Orem citizens.

Correct.

Steve?

Yeah, Mayor, thank you.

I just wanted to point out that, you know, I'm sure there are probably some people out there that, that do have concerns about the, the radio emissions, the electromagnetic radiation, whatever you want to call it. And, and there may be people who say it's harmful and others who say it's not harmful. I have no idea, quite honestly. But basically, federal laws has said that the cities, municipalities cannot take that into account in making decisions whether to regulate or to deny an application for the siting of a cell tower. Basically, the FCC has said, we're going to be the only ones who regulate this and who decide— decides what's safe and what's not. And they've basically taken that authority and power away from the local governments. away from local jurisdiction. So I just wanted to make you aware that although that may be a concern out there, it's not something that, that the council is allowed to base a decision on under federal law.

Thanks, Steve. My concern is just that, you know, I mean, we've got this ordinance that says they're 1,000 feet apart, and that's kind of the guidance that we've been going off this entire time. And so if every time we have to try and approve something that's not 1,000 feet apart, we're essentially being asked as a council to justify that, and we haven't done a research project on all these different variables. I mean, maybe it means something, maybe it doesn't. The FCC means this and that. But at the same time, I would rather see it— if we're going to change, you know, the 1,000-foot rule, then we've got a different basis to approve these things on. But right now we're asked to be asked to do a variance without really— I mean, I mean, next, next week it could be, let's do a 100-foot one next to a 500-foot. It's just a sloppy way to work. And so I don't want to be in charge of making that decision. I'd rather have a set rule, you know, like the 1,000 feet. Anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, so that's actually a question I was looking at this past week or so. Going back and looking at our ordinance and trying to better understand what was the purpose of that 1,000-foot rule. And as Jason mentioned, too, that was adopted back in the— I believe the mid-1990s, when, you know, cell service was just kind of developing and becoming a relatively new thing. And from what I have gleaned, the concern about the 1,000-foot separation was, you know, these towers considered— were considered at that time to be a visually unappealing type of a structure, having a negative aesthetic impact on the city. And so the idea—

That hasn't totally changed.

That hasn't changed. I understand that. So the idea was, is that, well, since we know these towers are going to have a negative visual impact, let's try and spread that negative impact out over the whole city so that everybody kind of bears their own And, and I guess that kind of makes sense, but I think that's, that's the purpose of it. So I guess the question for the council would be, is this, you know, is this something that is creating, you know, having it located within 200 or 400 feet? Is that creating that negative visual impact in a too concentrated area that we want to avoid? And then the other thing is, is that the location of the parking lot, And I think the argument could be made, actually, if you don't allow it in this location, then it is going to probably go somewhere else on that site where it's going to stand out more potentially. You know, here you're not actually— you're getting a different kind of pole, but you're kind of exchanging one pole for another pole. And, and so you're not actually adding another pole per se, and it's in a— it's in a location where people are used to seeing poles. And so the argument at least could be made that the visual impact that we're concerned about with this 1,000-foot separation requirement is going to be less in this location than it would somewhere else. And this, this is for the council to determine. The finding that you're required to make is just that allowing a separation less than 1,000 feet would still adequately protect the, the health, safety, and environment. welfare in terms of visual aesthetic impact. And so, you know, that's— I think that's the decision needs to make, is, is the visual impact better where it's being proposed, or would it be better if they actually separated out 1,000 feet?

So, okay, thank you.

Mayor, maybe this is something that we should table and discuss as far as how do we want to go forward instead of making an exception here, an exception there. Is we ought to have a discussion, a work session about what are we comfortable with. Are we comfortable with 200 feet? To me, I, to me, I think that's just a joke to put a pole every 225 feet. And I hear what Steve says, and I appreciate what he said, but there'll never be a time when the U.S. government tells me how to vote as a member of the city council. I'll always vote what I think is right. So I mean, I heard what I heard.

Thank you.

I hear what you say, Steve, but I also will say I'll vote what I think is best for the citizens of Orem.

Okay, thank you. Okay, so we have— well, we can, we can just vote. We can vote to table. Does anybody have a preference?

Is there another poll that's at a different location on this project?

No, unfortunately.

Just a matter of time.

And we're, we're trying to obviously make it so that we aren't adding another pole, but we're using an existing pole.

On the baseball diamond, do they have lights there?

I, I'm not, I'm not sure. I am for— I'm not—

Did they?

I don't believe they did.

I'm just asking if there's another option that we could move it. If we have to talk about it being too close to another pole, if we can move it to another pole that's a little bit farther away that's already a pole, right?

I mean, I know at the Arm High, but they don't have lights at the baseball field.

I don't think so. Does it?

Well, I was thinking about Timpanogos, but I don't— maybe they don't have lights there.

I don't think so.

I don't think Timpanogos has lights either.

So would somebody like to make a motion?

There are no lights there.

Yeah, I'll still make a motion to approve the conditional use permit and approve an AT&T telecommunication facility co-located on a field light at Orem High School, located at 175 South 400 East in the R-8 zone.

I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Nay.

Aye.

Nay.

So I'd like to make a comment, Mayor, if I can, before I vote. I'm uncomfortable with the visuals that have been given to us. The, you know, we've got good coverage or poor coverage on these maps. I want to know what the light green coverage is. Does that mean it's average coverage? I mean, I'm just uncomfortable with understanding the need to change our ordinance. I agree, I would much rather have something in place so we're not constantly making variances and changes and exceptions so, so that people can, you know, know what's acceptable in Orem. I would have liked to have seen this go before our Natural Resources Committee or our Beautification Commission to let them give feedback on the visual impact, which is something that we've talked about. And I'm also Worried about the proximity to our children. I'm uncomfortable with the shack, the snack shack thing. That's the first I've heard about that is tonight. But anyway, with that being said, I will vote nay on this.

Okay, thank you. The conditional use permit passes 4-3. Okay, then we've got item 7.1. 2.3, which is same story, different pole, no snack shack, correct? Okay, but this, but this one's 225 feet as opposed to 420 feet, right?

Yep.

Would someone like to make a motion on that?

Oh, I'll, I, I'll make the motion that we approve an AT&T communication facility co-located on our field light at Timpanogos High School. Located generally at 150 East, 1430 North in the R8 zone.

I'll second.

Can we have a vote? You want to start, Terry?

Nay.

How about nay, saying I just don't see any reason to have 225 feet between poles?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

And once again, I'm gonna especially vote against this one because It's the— it's a whole different layout. The residents— there's a new subdivision going in nearby with 22 homes. There's the homes that are close there on the other end of the football field. That's my high school. So I'm gonna be voting no on this one also. I think that's way too close.

Okay, the conditional use permit passes.

Comment.

Yes, Jason, would you like staff to bring something forward to discuss the 1,000 feet and some other criteria of this ordinance?

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense than the way we were doing this right now.

Okay, so, you know, in the coming months we'll bring something forward, discuss it.

Okay, thank you. Okay, both those passed. Item 7.4, we'll have a public hearing. Amending portions of 7— or Section 22-6-10, Miscellaneous Regulations for Residential Zones Pertaining to Parking and Storage of Trucks, Trailers, and RVs, and Section 22-14-7, Supplementary Regulations, Conservation of Values in Residential Zones. Jason, would you like to tell us about that?

Yes, thank you, Mayor, members of the council. So tonight we have a request to add a portion of a driveway, not the regular driveway or permanent driveway that's part of a home, but a secondary driveway next to— on the side yard or something where somebody will park an RV or a third car or something like that. Right now we have an ordinance that requires it to be paved, and the neighborhood improvement team is having a lot of enforcement issues with the cost these days of concrete, the cost of labor, the cost of— it's just inexpensive or prohibitive for homeowners to come in and put a paved driveway. And so what they have asked us to do, and I think the council may have been part of this original discussion, is to come in and allow an exception and allow some gravel or other type of material to be as a secondary driveway. So we are proposing to make a change to several sections that relate All to that. So in the storage of truck, trailer, or RV, you can— and I'll show you an example of what we're meaning with this text— have a portion that's gravel as long as it conforms to several criteria. One being the shallower— and you may have experience with bark or things in a planter bed— the less depth it is, the more weeds grow. And so we're— the 4 inches is a typical standard where it's deep enough the roots will If they do have weeds on them, they're easy to pull because it's— the roots are in the gravel and not in the dirt. So we're proposing that at least be a 4-inch depth of gravel, that at least have a separation if it's on a property line, that it has at least a barrier, a 4-inch, whether it's concrete or whether it's bricks or something that separates, so gravel doesn't spill over onto a neighbor's property, or there's a 3-foot separation from the gravel driveway to the neighbor's property. So we don't get spillover and complaints from neighbors of having gravel on there. So those are a couple of the things that we're proposing to be a part of that requirement. And let me just show you what we're meaning. So the outlined in green, the main driveway is still required to be asphalt or concrete or pavers that are block. The blue crosshatch, it would have to be accessed off of the main driveway. You couldn't access directly onto a street, but then that portion could be gravel. So you would access here on your main driveway and then be able to access the gravel portion off of that driveway and not directly track gravel out onto the street. So this is kind of 2 examples of a separated sidewalk or a combination sidewalk. The Planning Commission did review it and does recommend approval for this amendment. Be glad to address any questions. Thank you.

So I've got a question, Jason. So on the, uh, 4-inch gravel, if, if the person has an existing side driveway or whatever it is and they have gravel, but over the years grass has grown up or dirt, you, you— we want to make them take it out and put—

No, they just need to maintain it.

Well, I mean, yeah, because the key thing is the problem we're having is, you know, there's gravel, but then there are, there are grass, maybe it might be 2 or 3 inches, and they're giving people tickets where— that's, to me, that's unacceptable.

Well, the weeds I don't think are the issue currently. It's the fact that they can't have the gravel driveway. So this would allow them to— the gravel surface would be permitted.

But I'm just saying what the tickets have been given were, and I've been to the guy's house.

For overgrown?

Yeah, no, it wasn't overgrown that much. But it was just like, they want me to pull it out and put 4 inches of gravel with weed tarp. And I, I do garden boxes and the weed tarp, I buy commercial grade, it still grows through. So to me, if we're digging down for 4 inches to put weed tarp, I think that's excessive. And it's not gonna work. It might do it for a year and then the rest, then now what, I gotta pull it out again because you've got weeds growing up all through? I don't know. I don't know if I like where we're going with this. I mean, I think it's in the right direction. But I still think it's a A little bit too strict in my book for the citizens.

Yeah, and the council, I guess, can obviously address or strike out things that— this is, this is the proposal that we, you know, the Planning Commission has reviewed it, but the council does have discretion to modify any of the text before it's approved. So the idea behind that 4 inches and weed barrier is simply just for maintenance, right? If you ever— unless you want to use, you know, ground killer or something like that on an annual basis, which I do on occasion, keeps the weeds out for a year, or you use some other type of, you know, emergent that, that kills the weeds over time. And that's, that's what you need to do. If you, if you don't maintain that, then you will get a driveway full of, you know, weeds or grass, or eventually it'll just turn into grass.

I mean, do we know how much gravel is today?

I don't. It's a lot cheaper than concrete.

So this is a benefit for the homeowner because they don't have to put concrete.

They can Do a cheaper gravel.

I mean, so right now we could ticket them for not— for having gravel and not concrete. Is that correct?

Right.

Okay.

So this is a benefit for the homeowner. It's going to be less. And now we're just thinking— I think Councilman Spencer's thinking about the maintenance. Our guys aren't going to get out there and measure the 4 inches, I'm sure.

No, it's really just a maintenance issue. And if a homeowner is, you know, has pride in his yard and be able to spray and keep the weeds down, there's not going to be an issue.

Right.

And a couple weeds, I'm hoping they're not ticketing with just a few blades of grass coming up through. I don't think that's the intent.

So the way this came to be, right, is because right now you've got to have concrete there. And so there were quite a few tickets, people were getting tickets for not having concrete there and parking something on it.

Yep.

And that was causing turmoil. So the solution that you guys came up with was to come up with put gravel there instead of concrete, because as expensive as everything is, gravel is a whole lot less expensive than concrete, and it would still be good looking. It would look decent in the yard. It would give you a place to park your vehicle. So that's all really positive. And then, and then we're down to the weeds. Um, yeah, it seems to me like the homeowner should— if they're— they, they have 2 options. They could put the concrete in And no weeds. They could put the gravel in, take care of it, and keep the weeds down, or they could just not park on that side.

And that's, that's kind of the intent of the ordinance, Mayor. I think that you hit it right on the head, is trying to have some, some exception between the 2 rules. And, and to Mr. Spencer's point, a couple— about a year and a half ago, I did buy some decorative rock, and it's about $100, and I think it was $120 a yard. That was about a year ago. So it's, you know, right now you're spending— I don't know what the concrete of a yard is, but it's upward of a couple hundred dollars. So it's half or less than that to get a couple yards of concrete— or excuse me, a couple yards of gravel, spread it out and be able to park a vehicle on it. So it's definitely extremely less expensive for gravel than it is concrete.

And it does give the homeowner the chance to deal with this.

Yeah.

So they don't have to—

and really all we're asking is to maintain The ground.

I mean, I personally, I think 4 inches is too, too much gravel because if I have a trailer, it's going to probably sink. If it's 2 or 3 inches or 2 inches, it won't—

it'll be just pretty solid.

And to your point, that's true. If you put pea gravel, that's not going to work, right? That's too— but if you put a coarse aggregate that actually interlocks with each other, then you can probably go a little less. But it just depends on the type of gravel you buy. If it's pea gravel and you put a thing, it's just going to sink right down to the bottom. If you put, you know, some inch and a half, 2-inch pieces of rock, it's going to be a little more stable.

It should be more money.

But yeah, but that's, you know, you're looking at $200 or less per yard.

We want to specify that at all? I mean, I don't know the benefits of a 2-inch gravel, 3 or 4. I mean, I don't know where the perfect—

I mean, if you—

yeah, if the council wants to go to 3 inches, I mean, I don't have heartburn over there. I'm not going to go measure it, Dave, but 2.5 is fine.

The issue is the more gravel you have, the less of a weed problem you have. So that's— you pick how much of a weed problem you have.

The more the depth of— and like, back to my example, the more depth of gravel, the more depth of bark, the weeds tend to grow in it, but you can pull them right out because they're not attached to any dirt. And just easier to maintain that way. So the, the thicker you make material, the less maintenance is going to be over time. That's just my, my thought.

Any other thoughts?

I hear the concern about gravel, but cement surely is a lot better on weeds than gravel. Cement doesn't grow through weeds that I, that I know of. Maybe it's on a corner. But so I think, in, in due respect for neighbors and neighborhoods, I support cement. I mean, I hear what we're saying about gravel. I think the gravel for our home— what's our guys called, you know, that goes around, give the tickets? And I think if they were here right now, they'd say, oh man, that's gonna be a pain, a lot bigger pain than what they have now, as if a lot of people are putting gravel in and you've got weeds everywhere.

So yeah, and this application is from them, so I'm not gonna put words in their mouth because they're out of town. Yeah, but they're the ones that, because they're writing all the tickets. I mean, they support this as an alternative, basically. I would prefer concrete myself, and I support the ordinance requiring the concrete, but this is an alternative for a homeowner that we're dealing with a lot of properties that gives them at least an alternative to do something besides a ticket or, you know, no parking because you can't afford the concrete at this point.

And good point, but Jason, but they're dealing with no gravel, trying to say put gravel there, right? And, and so I can see, yeah, between no gravel or gravel. Gravel's better, but I think cement's better than either one.

I agree.

Can I—

may I make a comment?

No, the question is whether we want to just leave it cement. That is the optimum. Or if we want to give gravel a chance because of the number of people are getting tickets for not having cement.

I don't know.

Well, I know one of the issues was like the guy had a a trailer, and it was dirt on the side of his house. And he was talking to the officer. He says, well, if I put 4 pavers underneath my tires, is that going to be good? And he goes, yes. I'm like, so this defeats the whole purpose. So I think we need to make it easier for the citizens to be in compliance. I mean, cement's great, but who can afford cement? So, or we say it's got to be cement, but, you know, make sure your weeds are down, and we're going call it good. That's my— that's the way I see it. But yeah, even if you don't have it, if you're keeping it nice, there's no weeds, pull the weeds and call it good.

Yeah, pavers are still an option as well, right? So you can still do that as an option alternative.

I just don't think that the government should tell people what to do on the side of their homes. To me, I don't think it's right.

But are you concerned about the 4 inches?

Yes, I'm concerned about 4 inches. of gravel as a cost because you got to put a weep tarp down.

I just don't think it's—

I'm just going on the one situation I talked to the gentleman, he just can't afford it, and we're going to demand that he has gravel, and if not, he's going to have a ticket again.

I don't know, we'll have him call somebody else.

I mean, I'm trying, but—

Well, I think the idea is to provide a low-cost alternative, right?

Gravel.

It seems you're concerned with the depth. I don't know what's ideal, so I can go to 3 if you think that's less obtrusive, or we can leave that off. I think it has to be—

I don't know.

Well, the, the driveway I'm talking about has gravel that's been pushed into the ground, into the dirt, and there's a little bit of weeds coming up. And to me, I think that's— it's solid and it works. But now we're talking about 3 or 4 inches, so I don't know.

What, what are they parking?

Because if they can afford afford a boat or a motorhome, they can afford cement.

Just park the cars there.

Trail— trailer, he said.

Okay.

I like the idea of giving people the option of gravel. It's less expensive. And so I think that's a compromise for me. I don't know what's ideal. We need to say 4 or 3 inches or leave the hole how deep it needs to be.

I'm—

guess I'm asking, are you comfortable if we go less? Are you comfortable if we leave off how deep it has to be? I don't know.

Can I make a comment? Hello?

Can you hear me?

I was getting endless tickets.

Peter's got his hand.

Oh, we got one.

Okay.

May I—

can you hear me okay?

Yeah.

So my, my opinion with the 4 inches, I mean, I've lived in places where we had gravel driveways, and the gravel eventually goes into the ground and you have to replace it.

You're—

every so often you got to repave your driveway with the gravel. That costs money. It's an ongoing cost. So when you can, you then go back and do concrete, so you don't have to— or you pave it, right? So you don't have to keep layering gravel that keeps getting into the ground. So I don't have a problem with 4 inches of gravel. I think, I think the idea is that we want people to create a beautiful yard. We want to have the weeds gone. I don't believe our NIC guys are going to go around measuring Gravel, but it is something that you have to maintain if you want to keep the weeds down. The cement is a much better look, and I had gravel out the side of my house, and eventually we got tired of putting more gravel down and poured cement. So I like the low-cost option, and I think 4 inches is sufficient.

Mayor and Council, I'll just say that With much that's related to nuisance code enforcement, there's, there's always something of a spectrum between different cities and what they do here. As staff, we're just simply proposing an option for you to consider that may achieve something of a better balance on that spectrum. But, you know, obviously you should You should respond and vote with, with however you feel like we should be getting in terms of the—

So could we put a minimum of 2 inches, max 4? I might be able to swallow that.

Well, maximum wouldn't be needed because they could put whatever they wanted, right? We wouldn't care if somebody put 6 inches.

It's given an option, right? So, right, we're hitting your 4-inch, but between 2 and 4 inches. There you go. I'm sold on it.

So are we down to voting if we're okay with gravel?

Basically, I think it's a public hearing.

It is a public hearing.

Okay. Well, yeah, I'm just curious if that's where we're at.

Okay.

All right, let's open this up for a public hearing. Would anyone like to talk about gravel?

I don't care. You couldn't do it in my— we have covenants.

Okay, I just have a question.

I don't think your mic's working. Can you loan yours?

You could do that.

Ask my kids. I can yell really loud. Okay, I understand that this idea is to be pretty. I'm somebody who has had an Orem city officer show up at my door and tell me my yard's not pretty. pretty enough. I was in the middle of construction, and a concerned Orem citizen left a nasty note and didn't care what we were in the process of. I just better clean it up now or else. So I, I have a little bit of emotion involved in this comment, but couldn't a person simply cover what they have parked there? Like, if I have an ATV parked there, couldn't I just put a cover on it and make it pretty? Or Could I put a fence around it instead of having to do gravel or concrete? Isn't there some other way that I could hide this from view or make it pretty without having to go to the expense? Because we do concrete and it's $250 a yard right now. It's pretty expensive. Gravel would probably be about $100, $125 a yard right now. So yeah, it's cheaper. But if you're going to try to do gravel, you're also going to make somebody do a specific size of gravel. So, which then gets really nitpicky. So, and as someone who's had somebody show up at my house and say, you're ugly, I would say make this as simple as possible so that we don't have to tell people that.

So to continue on, what's your suggestion? I'm just curious. What, what's your suggestion with all that?

But like, gravel's not a problem. But what about just strips of gravel so that it can just be parked on something? If there's something gonna be parked there, why is it a problem if there's grass underneath it? Why, why is that ugly if there's grass underneath it? So 4 pavers would be fine, you know, but I guess I just also don't understand the problem with just dirt. Why, why can't I just have dirt there? Why does it have to be gravel? Why does it have to be asphalt or concrete? Why can't it just be dirt? So, because I can go out and I can spray dirt with poisonous Roundup just as good as I can with gravel, and you're still gonna have to go out and blow it off. pull weeds out of concrete cracks. So, I mean, in my case, we'd pulled out a whole bunch of weeds and it was just dirt for a while, and we got in trouble for having the weeds in a pile for too long. So because it was that big of a pile, it took us that long to get rid of it. But it's like I said, I have emotions attached to that, but it's just like, I realize Worm City wants to be pretty, but we live here. So we have to let people live here. They don't just come here and take pictures like we're Better Homes and Gardens because we live here. So sometimes it's dirty. It's not clean every day. So yeah, there are people that fall into the category of hoarder, and maybe we can work with them, but most of us don't. So make it really simple. Don't make it too picky. Don't make it too hard. And I don't know, just common sense rather than ultra pretty makes more sense to me.

Okay, thanks. Okay, so it seems like, like I said, the way this started was people are getting tickets for parking things on the side of their house from the NIT Squad, right? Because it's parked on Dirt or whatever, right?

It's currently against the ordinance to park on grass or dirt. It needs to be paved if you're going to have it as a parking stall.

Okay, so that's what the rule currently is.

And that's the current rule, yes.

So this entire conversation is an effort to make that simpler.

Gives them an alternative.

It gives people an option that if they can't afford paving, then they can afford another option, which would be this gravel, right? So then we've got other options, which are just don't do anything. But there's a whole progression of, of ways this could go. So anyone— does anyone have any thoughts on— but we probably need to— well, actually, are there any other public comments before I close the public comments? Okay, we'll close. Oh, Mike.

Um, I, I agree with Karen. I, I would like to just point out somebody shouldn't have to choose between having a recreational vehicle or concrete, because not everybody can afford them, Tom. So I mean, it's all expensive, and so families have to choose sometimes. You know, you might save a fortune just to buy that trailer to take your family on an outing. And you can't afford the concrete to go along with it. We don't want to be a nanny state. It's their property, you know. I mean, we have certain ordinances that we have peaceful living coexistence, right? But we shouldn't overinflate these regulations. So I think this is a good step. But I think, to David's point, that we should go more and back off on some of these heavy ordinances in the nanny state.

Thank you.

ordinances that we do have.

Nope, that's all I want to say.

Thank you. Any other comments?

So I've got a question for Jason.

Hang on, we have another comment.

Oh, Karen Turner.

How about just keeping it to a weed ordinance? Let's keep the weeds below 4 inches or something like that.

Okay, wait, any other comments? Okay, we'll close the public comments.

So I have a question for you, Jason. So she mentioned maybe do a gravel strip where the trailer is parked, and if you can make that look nice, Why couldn't that pass?

So yeah, back in the '70s or '60s when I went and visited my grandpa, I mean, they had those, you know, concrete strips that went back. That's not an issue. I think we could allow that under the current—

But I'm talking about gravel. Could they do strips, do gravels, you know, put a strip of gravel and strip gravel and call it good? With the—

with—

I think my thing is, I guess, as long as they maintain the weeds and even the grass, even if it's dirt, I think if the weeds are gone And I think 4-inch weeds are probably not very sightly, so I would just kill them with Roundup. But I mean, I'm leaning that way because I, I mean, I've got other issues on some other ordinances that'll probably come up in the future. So I'm very vocal in this, but that's the way I feel.

I think—

I guess my only question or point with that would be to Councilman Millett's point is, if you put gravel in a strip, over time it's going to dissipate and At least it's compacted down. So, but I imagine if somebody came in with a design that says they wanted, you know, 2-foot strips of gravel back there and park the vehicle, I imagine that would meet the intent. So we probably work with them as far as the NIT to make sure that it meets the intent of the ordinance of having it parked on a gravel strip.

How about a progression? Because it seems like— I don't know where this is going, but a progression would be right now it can only be concrete. Everybody gets a ticket if they don't have concrete. So this is saying, okay, we'll create another option. You can have gravel. But then we can fast forward and say, okay, try this for a couple years, and if we— if this is still a problem, then we go to straight dirt with Roundup or something.

I mean, yeah, the other option is, to the lady's point that they commented, I mean, somebody could put a fence in front of their home, right? Have a gate, park behind it, and they could have dirt, right? As long as it's behind a legal constructed fence that meets the setbacks, the heights, all that stuff, they could do that. But whatever they want, the backyard or side yard, and we would not have an issue with that. So it's, it's those that are visible from the street. That's where it comes into the parking needs to meet the standard. So this is an option for those that are either, you know, on next to this driveway or back behind the house. If somebody chooses to fence that off, then we would not have an issue. So there is still some another option.

So they can still fence like what was described earlier. That's a fence, they can gravel.

And that could be dirt, could be grass, could be whatever.

Yeah, that might solve for a lot of people. Okay, would somebody like to do something?

Well, I think it's a step in the right direction. I like the flexibility and the lower cost for our, our homeowners. So if Dave has consternation with the 4 inches, I'm willing to go to 2, but I don't know how others feel.

I think, I mean, 2 inches, I think, and that we get compacted on the dirt, and I think that'd probably be at least a start, and then we can look at it and see if it's a problem. But I can live with that, I guess.

So what's the wording you're suggesting?

Could you do 2 inches? Maybe between 2 to 4 inches?

Or you can just put 2 inches because then they can do 6 if they want to do.

That's true. Good.

To infinity.

Are they gonna— are they gonna have to change the corner?

Are they gonna have to enclose that 2 inches? How are you gonna have the 2 inches there? I've just been around a lot of gravel. I don't think you're— how are you going to get 2 inches Just by 2 inches and put it down. Not going down into the dirt.

It's a challenge to maintain it. I guess that's—

That's the biggest thing.

It's gonna be more of a challenge.

But I mean, you put 2 inches and you drive it. I mean, everything's gonna be compacted. So let's go with 2 and see how it goes.

I mean, the thing is, they're gonna be out of—

they're gonna cut down on the cost from the citizens of Orem. That's the bottom line. We don't want to— I mean, come on.

The bottom line is we're trying to make— to fix this ordinance. So they don't have to have concrete. And if you put 2 inches, then we're gonna have unsightly yards and weeds are gonna come up. It's gonna go into the dirt.

The ordinance says you can't have weeds. So I don't know. I'm— if it's not 2 inches, I'm not— I'm voting no.

Okay, I'd like to make a motion, Mayor.

Okay.

I'd like to make a motion that we amend portions of Section 22610, Miscellaneous Regulations for Residential Zones Pertaining to Parking and Storage of Trucks, Trailers, and Boats. trailers and RVs, and Section 22147, supplementary regulations, conservation of values in residential zones.

I'll second.

Are we defining the inches?

She kept it.

Okay, so she made the motion for 4. You seconded it?

I did.

Okay, so let's vote.

Terry, I have no idea.

Um, you want me to start?

I will.

Nay.

So, okay. Um, I'll say nay. Nay.

I'll say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Hey, I'm gonna send you guys the phone call.

It passes. Thank you. Thank you, Renee, for making that motion.

Okay.

We've got item 7.5, an ordinance to amend the current fiscal year budget 2022-2023, and Brandon's going to present this. Did the lights go out?

Thank you, Mayor. First thing, it is a public hearing. I don't sure if—

I know it doesn't say that on there, but this is a public hearing, and it was advertised as such.

So As we periodically do, we— it's time to come before you this evening with budget amendments to the current fiscal '22-'23 fiscal year and identify items that we feel need to be adjusted for various reasons. Number one, which you can see on the screen, You can see some of these items listed in the notes section above are related to various grants received, donations received, that from federal, state, private entities. So we, at this time, you know, need to adjust the budget. we can then spend those funds in order to receive the, the grant money that was awarded as part of our process of application.

Mr.

Mayor, if I may, it seems like every year we don't budget for grant money and we apply for them, and then we get many through the years. But because you, you try to assume we may not get them, but every year we get a bunch of Grants, but some of these seem bigger than prior years by a significant amount, or is my memory fading?

Uh, no.

So obviously there are several on here, and I'll touch on those, some, some of those specific ones that, uh, are maybe, um, large and/or different. Yeah, so, so, uh, and, and so just to start with, um, you'll notice the third to last one up at the top in the general fund area says, uh, grant UC PSA, PSAP proportionate share. That $177,000, that's related to our dispatch center. This will be the last time we receive that particular disbursement in relation to that award. Let's see, we scroll down a little. The HIDA grant, which is at the top here, we do receive that every year. It does vary in amount each year.

That's our—

the Drug Task Force receives that each and every year. I can't say as to whether that's larger or smaller than normal, but it's in the ballpark.

The one right here that we're—

so you can see the $1.7 million. This is unique. This is new, related the Tourism Tax Advisory Board, and those funds will be going towards the infield turf down at Lakeside Park for the infields of the baseball diamonds— or softball diamonds there, I should say.

So can I ask, did that come— did that come from—

Correct.

Yes, it was. Yeah, it was restaurant tax. It was from the county.

Correct.

Thank you, whoever lobbied that.

I think that was from Brad.

I think you're correct. The items just below that in the water fund, you can see the— we received an ARPA grant from the state, from the Utah Lake Preservation Fund, $2.5 million. These are all going towards, if I remember correctly, water reuse project. Yes.

Yes, to our water reuse project.

Correct.

The same— the second item on there for the million dollars from the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, also to the water reuse project. And then the third item on there. So since we issued our 2021 water sewer and stormwater bonds, those Funds have been sitting in a trustee account, and any of the unused funds that are there earn interest. And this is the first time we've actually booked the interest related since we've received those funds. So this is an accumulation of, you know, almost 2 years now worth of interest earnings, and those will be applied towards those— any of those bond projects. We've assigned it currently to the water fund, since we have obviously building a rather expensive water tank. So, you know, any, any need there, we can— you were intending to use those funds towards that project.

So, Brandon, that, that item number 1, Utah Lake Preservation Fund, that was the money we got from the federal government, right?

Correct.

Okay.

Oh, no, I— well, yes, I mean, obviously it's ARPA, so Does come— it did come through the state, but it is our— it is federal money, obviously, from the ARPA, but it came through the state.

Was that different than the money that Congressman Curtis helped us get?

It is different, Mayor. So we've received through various different grants, in part what's being shown here today, but in total, I believe, about $13.5 million in different kinds of grants towards the water reuse project. So the $3 million that you're referencing Seeing as part of the total $13.5 million, but this here is in addition to that.

And we will be coming back with some, some of these other pieces related to those grant funds for that project as we continue to get the actual award and, and/or get the actual funds.

So, um, can you remind me, um, this isn't our water tank, this is a different project?

I mean, Chris can speak to it in detail, but this is related to after water goes through the digestion process at our wastewater treatment plant, we can reuse that water for outdoor applications at, for example, the Sleepy Ridge Golf Course, Lakeside Park, and one other smaller park there close.

Springwater Park is also And the reclamation facility. So all in all, we've received about $13.6 million for the $20 million project.

About 75—

about 70% of the project will be funded through these dollars that are not Orem taxpayer dollars.

Thanks for the clarification.

I wanted to, even though it's not a relatively large amount, but I wanted to identify related to The facilities maintenance fund, and I'm— I know I'm skipping from 1 to 5, but since we're right here, I thought I'd touch on that. So we are transferring— we have a need within our facilities maintenance fund, which are primarily the janitors that take care of all of our facilities, and that the staff that take care of all the things in relation to maintenance and repairs and maintenance with our facilities. The wages for many of those were— was— we were suffering with being able to keep them or get them in the first place. And so we've raised the salaries for those individuals. And as well, if you'll remember back from when the— our auditor was here, that particular fund had a negative deficit fund balance. And so these funds are to also then try to alleviate that deficit fund balance as well. So we're making a transfer from funds within the general fund to cover that deficit.

Then let's see.

What's this Monday Meals donation? Was that a, um, was that a benefactor that came through, or is this the, the collection of the people paying for their lunch?

It was one particular benefactor. Bryce probably can tell us who that particular one— I can't remember who the specific Donor was, but—

Do you guys know?

Yeah, Gina could definitely tell us.

But this was just to help for the costs of providing meals, or was that— was how it was designated?

Correct.

Yes, that's what it was specifically donated for, was for those meals.

Let's see.

And then so item number 2, we've increased our rental and lease revenues and added for the UPS rental of our parking lot down at the public works facility. Item number 3, down here in the CIP fund with the impact fees for streets. We have— though there's funding there. With our impact fees that qualifies for that project, and so we've added additional surplus dollars that have accumulated within that impact fee fund to help pay for that roundabout portion of that roundabout. And and I already talked about the interest earnings with number four and and number five. So are there any questions related to any of these budget amendments before we open up this public?

We'd like to open this up for a public hearing if there's anyone who has anything they'd like to say about these items. We'll close the public hearing. Okay, would somebody— are there any questions, or would somebody like to make a motion on this?

I would like to make a motion that we amend the current fiscal year 2022-2023 budget.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Brandon. Okay, we're down to our last item, item 7.6. We have a proposed ordinance amending— we have a proposed ordinance amendment creating the City Management Services Department. Steve, would you like to present that to us?

Sure, Mayor, City Council. This is a proposal come before you to amend Section 2-6-1 of the city code, which deals with city administration, and that's by enacting a new subsection A-10, which would create the Management Services Department. The, the city staff just recently seen an opportunity to make some structural changes within the city administration that we believe will create some efficiencies. And efficiencies so we're proposing that the city administration department be renamed the Management Services Department. in management and administration of the city government, as well as will create some cost savings. And we think that this is an opportunity to improve the structure and organization of the city government. Happy to answer any questions that you might have.

We have any questions?

Debbie, do you have an idea what the cost savings— I know you've kind of combined and and eliminated. Is this a couple hundred thousand, $50,000? Do you have an— I'm just— give me— it doesn't have to be exact. Give me your best guess.

Probably Bren is in a better position.

Okay, Bren, and I will say it is a work in progress. Okay, it's hard to really quantify, but Bren.

Okay, how about at least blank?

I don't know what dollar amount to suggest to you, but We've, we've, with these efficiencies, we've decreased the amount of executive staff by about 25%. And this also creates, I guess, additional accountability for the city manager's department, as that is now a much thinner department. And then, but you know, you could In terms of dollar savings, you could note that this, this would replace, or this would negate the need for replacing the deputy city manager position.

Okay, thank you, Debbie.

I think it's between about 2 and 4 inches, actually. So it's quite a bit significant.

And what's the dollar per inch?

Brynn, can I ask any other questions?

I have a question, Mayor.

I—

can you hear me?

I saw some concerns that this reorganization would overwork our city staff and create hardship on the staff. Brynn, will you speak to that, if that's accurate or not?

Maybe, maybe you could have Pete speak to that. Just kidding.

So at least the feedback that I've been hearing so far is that there's really more just a level of excitement about more employees having more opportunity to show what they can do and to be able to learn and grow. And they have seen it as kind of a show of trust and confidence in their capability and that that we're trying to both provide the opportunity and give them a chance to develop and progress. So I think it, at least as far as I've heard, it's been seen more with a positive glass half full attitude as opposed to just being piled on with additional I have another question. Because part of what we're trying to do conceptually here is, so over time, as maybe a particular subject or city service, if it became maybe of a higher concern, some of those different subjects were rolled into the city manager's department over time. And at this time we've we've kind of taken a relook at things and trying to put at the lowest level of the organization as needed the different services that are part of, I guess in this case, the Management Services Department. So it's a valid concern in terms of, you know, you want to make sure that you're not, I guess, promoting people beyond their capacity. But I think we've— I think we're proposing something that doesn't do that in this case. But even with that said, of course, we need to continue to keep our ears open if new concerns come up based off of this change.

So I'm hearing from you that your—

So the job's changed—

oh, go ahead.

Yeah, just a sec, Debbie.

Let me finish this. Yeah.

So I'm hearing from you that the attitude Coming is that they're looking forward to these opportunities to expand their expertise or gain more levels of expertise and coordinate better, kind of down the chain a little more to get the job done, basically. Is that correct?

Yes, and that's the same feedback I've been hearing from all sorts of different levels of the organization, everything from our executive team to division and section managers to our HR office. So I at least haven't— if that complaint exists, it hasn't reached my ears.

And my question was just, I assume some people got a little commensurate pay for increase of Opportunities. I mean, is that so? While you might have lowered here, but you may have had to up a little bit here, we're probably still cost savings of the overall, correct?

Well, we always continually look at making sure that we're, we're within market, and part of a market analysis is looking at job descriptions and job duties. And so if someone's job description and their job duties is being expanded, then we look and see how does that then fit within market and if a pay bump would be justified then in that scenario.

Yeah, there's kind of 2 separate analysis, right? And one is to determine the structure, the most effective structure to where we can get the job done the best and accomplish that. That's one analysis. The other analysis is everyone being paid fairly, but those are really independent and there's not like just a pot of money that's being rearranged. It's not This is done in a way to optimize things. And to Brent's credit, I've— we've talked a lot during this process, and we've seen a lot of progress as far as the way the management's being structured, the excitement of the employees, and just all the way around. We've seen lots of positive things going on through the city. And so this is kind of a— it's a wider structure than what we had before.

I mean, sometimes our employees come to you and give you feedback, right? And Debbie and Dave were at the meeting, and there was really positive energy there. I've had Mayor walking through the building and saying he's noticed a different energy. So again, so far as, as far as this relates to affecting morale, I think it's been a very positive thing.

Any other questions? Okay, can someone make a motion?

I move we adjourn.

No, we're not, we're not there yet.

Oh, we're not there.

Item 7, we're still on item 7.6.

You want to read it?

No, I'm anxious. You go ahead and move.

I'd like to make a motion by ordinance of City Council, proposed ordinance amendment creating Management Services Department.

Oh, sorry, Terry, go ahead.

We have a second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the ordinance passes.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, if I may, sorry, there's one little thing we need to address there. I was notified that, uh, on our item 7.1, uh, that we We actually need to move that to April 11th instead of March 28th. So I wonder if we could just go back there and have somebody make a motion to continue that item, continue that item to April 11th instead of March 28th.

Would someone like to make that motion?

I would like to make a motion that we continue the city— well, item 7.1 regarding the city receiving public comments And the Community Development Block Grant, CDBG, project use of funds for fiscal year 2023-2024 to April 20—

April 11th. April 11th.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Thank you. That's moved. Okay, lastly, we've got city manager communication information items. Do you have anything, Brent?

2 very quick items. One, you received an email this afternoon regarding our groundbreaking, and we've sent out invitations for the groundbreaking of our new city center for 2 weeks from today, March 28th, at 3 PM. That's how we'll kick off the, the, our meetings in a couple of weeks. And then the second one is today is Pi Day. And in consultation with Debbie Larrabee, wanted to celebrate both her birthday and Pi Day with some pie here after the meeting.

I do prefer pie to cake, so it's a great combo.

Thank you. All right, we made it through it. We'd like to— would someone like to make a motion to adjourn? Tom, I'm sure you'd like to.

I've been humiliated.

I would, I would like to make a motion that we adjourn.

Second.

Also, yeah.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

The meeting's adjourned. Thank you.