City Council · 2023-04-25

I was late coming from Salt Lake. I got here, but I was late.

Last time it was just you and I and Josh doing the tree.

Yeah, I was freezing.

This was a quicker deal.

Or the same thing, I'm trying to wear shorts in the middle of winter.

I'm like, what are we doing?

I think she talked about it.

It's cold outside.

We're fine.

We don't have to walk through the garden. Okay, thank you.

You betcha.

All right, welcome to our work meeting. I think we're good to go. And congratulations to everyone who planted the tree over there, or the 2 trees. So thank you for your efforts.

You know, last time we have 6,000 They turned up the heat for the groundbreaking, but they didn't turn it up for the tree planting.

No, it was—

it was—

the heat was not turned up.

You should know we have over 6,000 trees in Orem, not more than that, but what was the number?

Do you remember?

I thought it was 6,843.

6,843.

Yeah, we should have done a trivia thing on that.

All right.

Let's have, uh, Taggart Bowen. He's going to talk to us about the capital improvement plan and budget.

This is the final work session meeting in relation to tentative budget, the last piece before May 9th. We present the actual Final document for the tentative budget to you.

You see, then we have between May 9th and June 13th, um, you have to review that and then adopt that. Okay, sounds good. All right, thanks, Nathan.

My name is Tiger Bone. I'm the assistant CM here, filling in for Sam today. I was so excited, I had my polo on, I put my tie on over my polo, and Ryan said, are you really going to wear that? I said, no, I'm not going to wear a tie.

This tie was this short too. He was just messing with me.

So I'm really excited to be here, and I love talking about capital improvement projects. So if I say CIP a lot, it's capital improvement plan, capital improvement projects. And just on the first slide here, we have some pictures. I didn't take these, but it looks like that one there is from the tank, and we're all familiar with the large tank project. So a lot of exciting projects going on right now. This first slide just shows a total of the CIP summary amount, which is just over $14 million. In the CIP fund, we have $4.3 million, which is Mostly parks. We got some big parks projects and transportation-related projects. That one, the water fund, which will be going completely toward the water tank, $1.6 million. Water rec amounts, $2.1 million, which will be sucked up by the water reuse project. Stormwater fund, Each of these will have a slide breaking down the subtotals for each of these amounts. We've got streets at $4 million and street lighting at $500,000. And the CIP fund there, the asterisk, is also eligible for Land and Water Conservation Funds. That's the LWCF grant reimbursement, which we have I think the main one there is sports courts at Northbridge Park, which— so if we pay it, uh, the total amount, the total cost of the project, we'd be eligible for 50% reimbursement, which is that $417,000. Then, um, the CARE money as well, and as part of the CIP fund, just over $2 million. And then the Lakeview Parkway project, which Been involved with, with SAM is $750,000. That's all part of that CIP fund. Just focusing on that, the CIP dollar amount, first project altogether, playground resurfacing, and that is right here at the city center. I guess the current surface has been eroding away and it's not doing very good. It's got a lot of use and a lot of wear and tear on it.

So is that normal wear and tear, you think? Just heavy use, or did we put down bad material, or what do you think is causing this?

Oxidation from the sun, wear and tear.

It's been heavily used.

There's a lot of traffic in that park. I think it's one of our favorite parks by a lot of our citizens.

But we knew the sun would be there. Did we put down the wrong material? Nope, just normal wear and tear.

It is. The material that's currently in place is a softball product that's essentially a rubberized product that, uh, it's— you probably saw it go in when it went in, but, um, they call it a pour-in-place surface, and it's like a bunch of little microbeads of rubber that gets poured into there and then it sets up. Uh, it's interesting to go back to Google and look at the images from the reviews when the park initially went in. All the colors are so bright and vibrant.

Wow.

You go look at that now and it's shocking how much the oxidation of the sun has bleached that color out. It's really— you'll see in all the high-traffic areas it's actually pitting and flaking up in big clumps and creating trip hazards. So we've been looking at a replacement for this product. We weren't happy with the lifespan that it gave, so we looked at some other options. To replace exactly what we have was about $600,000. We're proposing that we go to an artificial turf product that's been used in many parks locally. It's going to be about $160,000 to replace, and it's a 10-year warranty. And we spoke about this a little bit earlier in our Care Tax meeting, and you had a really good question, Dave, regarding the installation. If we need to pull that material up, the assumption was that that would be held down by an adhesive layer, and it's not. It's similar to carpet where it's stretched out. And then it's tacked down only on the perimeters and seams with a small bit of adhesive, and then they actually brush like a weighted green sand over the top of it to hold it in place. So it essentially wouldn't cause any damage to the underlying surface when we have to replace it. It looks like it'll be a really good product, so we're excited about trying this out.

We can get multi-colors, we can get bright vibrant patterns, and it holds up really well.

Is it really short?

It is, it's very short, so it should be perfect for still being used by wheelchairs and, you know, ADA compliancy. So it should be a good product. Any other questions?

When will you do that, after the summer, or—

Yes, if this gets approved, we're hoping to do it right away. We've already been talking to the vendors and putting together a design, so if you guys are awesome with it, we'll do it.

Cool.

Okay, next project is parks fiber and security cameras. Most of the parks do have fiber connections to them right now. The main parks we're focusing on is Geneva, Sharon, Windsor, Waterville, and I think with Hillcrest we're trying to find that right now, of getting cameras, remote locks, sensors all installed at those parks with that fiber. So that cost would help to cover that. Northridge Park improvements would be— we've got a concept design here. You can see that very well. It's got the current layout of that park. You've got 2 courts, and the challenge with this design is they're about 4 feet. The 2 courts are separated and they're about 4 feet, and so in vertical separation, and so we thought a good design for this just conceptually would be to put a retaining wall between them. So added a little bit of cost, but it'll be nice, I think, to have those 2 courts side by side, closer together, more accessible. And you can see that there'll be a tennis court on the east and then 4 pickleball on the west, and then we've also expanded the footprint of the playground.

So explain the cameras.

What are the cameras?

The idea of the security cameras is that we've had an uptick in vandalism in our restrooms over the last few years. It's kind of become like a social media TikTok challenge sort of thing. So the thought is, if we have more fiber to more parks that we would have— it gives us the option, ability to add security cameras around some of our restrooms at our parks so that if they are vandalized in the future, we can do a better job of being able to—

So you're gonna put the cameras in the restroom?

Not in, on the outside?

Around.

Yes, good clarification.

Outside, we don't know what's going on inside.

That is true.

It's, uh, we'll never be able to monitor the inside, but the hope is it'll be a good deterrent for the people.

It'll scare people from vandalizing the inside.

Plus, doesn't most of your vandalism occur after hours?

When—

so if you see something happen, you could go back and there wouldn't be many people going in during those times.

So we would have known during the normal hours that there was no— you know, someone went, someone from the park walked in and then later—

I think that's probably the typical case.

Yes, that has been what's happened.

So are they throughout the park too, or just facing restrooms, or—

We're only trying to monitor the assets that are expensive and targets by vandalism. So we would put them around our more expensive facilities. We've had a lot of graffiti under pavilions. We might have a camera aimed at the outside of that restroom area and include a pavilion or a playground.

To try and monitor and eliminate that.

And how does that work?

They run 24/7?

Uh, yeah, yeah, they work.

It'd be like motion sensor, probably.

Yeah, we've got a lot of options.

We haven't begun installing any hardware yet. We're just getting fiber installed.

Um, it's going to provide park Wi-Fi as part of the project as well. Wi-Fi for our citizens, and whatever security is recommended with our contractor, we would go through Sentinel, and it would allow us to monitor those assets and protect them.

It's been extreme what we've experienced in the last 2 years, even as much as firecrackers in toilets full of— I mean, it's been a real mess and a very, very expensive upkeep for the city to continue to maintain and replace all of those Is most of it after hours? Yes.

So can we do Wi-Fi locking systems?

Yeah, that's part of it. We would do remote access mag locks. We've consulted with several security groups. They've mentioned we could have a sensor that would maybe say, hey, we have a transient that's in here after hours. That mag lock would maybe lock at 10 PM, whatever the curfew is. If there's movement inside the restroom, if we have a transient staying in there or something going on that shouldn't be, we can even have like an indicator light up above by the roofline where we could have a patrol officer just swing by and make sure the area is clear. There's a lot of really good solutions, and when we get to that point, we'll probably have a lot more conversation about what we actually install and what would make sense for each location.

And who monitors that? Is that It would—

no, no one would monitor. It would just be something that we can access in the event of this, so we can go back and research on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah. Any other questions?

Or on the sports court?

I just have a question just related to Windsor Elementary's tennis courts, Windsor Parks. Okay, where are they on the timeline?

I get questions about that.

Yeah, so we, we have improvements planned for Windsor as well as City Center—

or not City Center, Community Park. Those got pushed out to— I believe we'll be doing Windsor next year and Community the following year. I don't think we were planning tennis courts at Windsor though.

Pickleball though, are you doing?

That's what we're planning on, a multi-sport court there. What is that? We can change that design. So there's a big asphalt pad right behind the restroom there to the west, if you're familiar with that big asphalt pad.

I don't know if we've got an image here.

Essentially, a multi-sport court would be— we can stripe it for pickleball, but we would have 6 basketball stands as well. It would be a multi-use court that we can put multiple activities.

Well, I guess I'm— and maybe I wasn't clear enough, but so what I'm referring more to is the tennis courts doing the same transition here where you have some pickleball courts transit— or tennis courts transition to pickleball. Is that in the plan at all?

We, I don't believe, have planned that at Windsor, but we can look at that. I think those courts are in pretty good shape, and we weren't planning on tearing them out or changing them yet, but we can certainly look at that if you're interested.

That's the request I keep hearing.

Okay, we'll keep that in mind when we get to that next year.

Maybe simple to restripe or just to add a different color of striping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that. We could implement pickleball on that multi-sport court and make it for everybody.

Great.

How does that work as far as like on this one, you'd have like a net or something? Pickleball courts, or do you, or how's that work?

Yeah, these are actually very— this would be a very similar design as to what's at Bonneville and Sharon right now. So it's a smaller fence that keeps each court separated. This design you can kind of see he's got little entry gates that separate each court individually. So does that answer the question?

So I was just curious if you converted a tennis court to a pickleball court, do you add in those small fences kind of thing?

Yeah, this currently is a tennis court. We're actually going to replace these entirely instead of just resurfacing. We found that the the cost estimates that came in were really pretty good inasmuch as we could get way more life out of the new courts than to just overlay and resurface for a pretty affordable price. It was worth the investment, so these will actually be a full post-tension reconstruct with brand new courts.

Have you ever thought of doing anything over by Mountain View's tennis courts? I was curious about those as far as I don't know how much Mountain View's tennis teams use those, if you'd ever convert any of those to pickleball courts or not.

We haven't discussed it yet.

No, they're pretty heavily used.

Yeah, Bryce knows. Yeah, we have not looked at the tennis courts, but we have looked quite a bit from the fitness center side of adding courts that would be accessible from the fitness center. So we focus mostly on those who are fitness center pass holders or day pass users.

But sort of adding to the employee—

not part of the park master plan at the recreation site.

Okay, would those go inside?

They would be outdoors, but accessible from the fitness center.

Is that in that area?

That's what we're currently exploring the cost of.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Or we could add it to big care vision in the future and add on indoor court space.

That would be very popular.

Those are super popular right now.

Probably will be for quite a while.

And the high schools are starting pickleball club teams now. So really, pretty soon I think we're going to see that as a high school sanctioned sport.

Trends are growing that way.

Let me be clear. I mean, Tyler's talking about full kind of rebuild at Northridge, but I've made a note for us to look at and see if there is a more simple conversion that we can do to a portion of Windsor Park.

So great, thank you so much. I know they've got that beautiful playground. Yeah, but everyone's grateful for that. But they're like, how about pickleball? When is that coming? So sure, that's great.

Thank you.

Just a little bit more on the design of this. So the pickleball will have a 6-foot-tall black chain-link fence around it, and the tennis courts will have a 10-foot-tall fence.

There'll be a walkway, 10 to 12-foot walkway, right here between the tennis and the—

Between the tennis and the pickleball courts.

And then landscaping here with A brand new playground here on the west side. Be a really nice— this is a nice location too. It's kind of—

This is my old neighborhood, so I get the calls all the time. So is it going to be this year or 2024? What's our, what's our plan on this one?

It'd be FY24, so as soon as it's approved, we'd be planning on, I think, starting construction. We've talked as early as fall of this year.

That'd be a high priority project for us to start.

They'll be very happy.

Yeah.

And Jeff, is this a good time for you to announce that you and I are going to win the pickleball tournament in the city? All the way champions. If we do, that's going to be called Lamson Court, right?

Oh hey, I like this.

Yeah, and if you don't, he'll pay for it.

Jesse will pay for it. Careful, I'm looking at Mountain View. It looks like the 2 west courts are already striped.

The 2 west courts, kind of the northwest courts, are striped. Jesse, careful about saying, you know, how could you ever pick a ball in front of Chris Shockey, because he's quite the player too.

I heard Jason's the guy. Right, the next item, Sealcrest Park maintenance equipment. Just have some pictures here. Riding lawnmower, about $60,000. Just some of these items that add up to that.

What's that? $104,000.

Other Kubotas, about $25K. Standard mower, riding blower, we've got trimmers, backpack blower, stand behind edger. There's some of the equipment for—

Does electric not pencil for you yet?

I'm not sure.

I don't think we've fully investigated electric in our Lawn equipment yet.

We're doing it in fleet, but not something we need to consider though.

Yeah, we got the blowers and various things that are like lawn mowers that may not work for big commercial size, but some of those are much more, you know, lawn size.

Next item, park entrance signs. It's a 6-year plan, $20,000 per year, year 2. I think as far as the layout and the concept of how those look. They're still looking at different designs of those. City entrance monument signs, $25,000 per year. We have a new logo and sign out here at the library. You have a couple pictures. This is one we installed a few years ago on 8th North at about 1,000 West. south side of the road, which has been a nice location for that. This is on the northeast corner of Center Street and 1200 West. That was just recently installed, and we have 3 or 4 more locations that we're looking at.

So I assume the diagonal is one of those coming up from the—

Oh well, yeah, that one we're looking at doing Already this fiscal year, this fiscal year's funds, and these will be additional funds.

So this will be before July, we'll do that, or June.

We'll do University Parkway coming up from Provo before June, but this is a request to do some additional entrance signs like that at additional locations.

And they're all, and they're all using all the new logo, the new branding, the Family City USA. You can see that all over the place. So that'll be big going up the diagonal.

Yeah, the one coming westbound would be following this layout right here.

This is nice. Yeah, quite nice.

This is a big one— soccer turf at Lakeview or Lakeside Sports Park and possibly Palisade. You know, let's end the conversation about this going from grass to artificial.

Rice, do you want to talk on that a little, just really briefly?

Yeah, we have looked at multiple locations, but for a number of reasons ended on Lakeside as being the right location for this field. Similar to the infield projects that are under construction now, this would expand that and reduce our water consumption over there, add Edgemont evening play, and where we aren't increasing acreage, We are increasing the number of available hours for our various co-sponsored groups and club sports and teams to be able to use.

So what's listed on here is different than the other project that we raised the money for, right? Correct.

So as part of that request with the county, it requires a match from the city for the totality of the project. And so we committed to receive those funds from the county, we committed to about $4 million of improvements. Improvement at Lakeside between now and 2026. This project would satisfy about half of that remaining balance of improvements over there. Okay, so same project but different construction project. Does Vindu participate in this financially? No, we have talked to them about, you know, that type of stuff. I mean, aren't they a scheduler of it? Some of this on their property? It is on their property. We maintain all scheduling and event hosting.

Is this part of the restaurant tax?

Yes, exactly.

So that's just the total there, $3.2 million for all those safety projects. This is also in addition to that total in the first slide that was just over $4 million. $200,000 goes toward, annually, toward transportation projects. It's going to include traffic signals, roundabouts, any type of transportation-related projects we're working on or designing. This amount would go toward funding those projects. $100,000 in year 2 and 3 toward 1200 West Center Street. Future widening project, which will be right there through I-15 to allow better movements at that intersection. Lakeview Parkway, year 2 of 3, $750,000 toward the design of the stretch of Lakeview Parkway, which you can see in this, it's from that new intersection down to The street's 2000 South, so everything that's in the dashed lines will be widening. Currently, UDOT's working with HNTB, a consultant, to design the Geneva Road widening project to 5 lanes from University Parkway down to this area about 1700 South. So everything looping back to the new intersection and up is part of that current project. And then this piece, Lakeview Parkway, was added on to that as part of that project, and that's really the plans to start construction in either next year or the year after. Any questions on that? And Geneva is a UDOT road and Lakeview Parkway is a Warren road? Yeah, there has been talk about that transitioning over though.

To UDOT.

And this will connect onto the road into Provo, which currently right now there's this road base and they're planning to connect that up to the airport, so that'll connect to the lake. The next section is building maintenance, public safety generator, $18,000.

We go through these.

Children's library roof repair, $35,000. Spartan sewer camera. Now I've heard about this, that it's a really nice piece of equipment that sewers are trying to get for TVing their, their lines. Paint for all building— buildings, buildings, actually all in there. Fire Station Number 3, HVAC and roof replacement. And these sinking funds are just multiple years collecting the money to begin these projects. I don't, I don't know a lot about these projects.

I can answer questions on any of these if anyone has any, but these, these are just needs that we know are coming down the road that we've planned for, and we're just funding a little bit each year so that when it's When it's time to do the work, we're not hit with a big ask.

So, outbursts, roof replacement here, 3 of 5, as well as the HVAC and the new city center security cameras.

So on the new city center security cameras, the way we've done our projects is, for example, with the fitness center, contractor installs all the wiring in the boxes. And then our subcontractor comes in and installs the security cameras after and installs the access control fob system. So we've set aside seed money to bring our subcontractors in and do those 2 trades instead of having our general contractor do them.

That way our systems are all integrated together.

And then the— if I could go back, Tyler, $25,000 on the library. The restrooms on the main floor of the children's wing and in the basement are pretty outdated and hard to keep looking nice. And so this is just some seed money to start looking as a—

to keep us reminded we need to do that project in 2 or 3 years. Talked about this a little bit earlier, the $1.6 million. For this coming year would be going directly toward the tank project. For Water Rec, same thing with the water reuse project, $1.6 million all going toward that. They did set aside a little bit here, $531,000, for any emergency projects or sewer replacement, their top priority, high priority projects. We did just bid out one on 1200 West near 1400 North for a couple manholes. That's a high maintenance issue, or high priority maintenance issue for the Water Reg, so that one just—

Is that System Replacement Program?

This would be just for anything that's high priority for sewer-related projects, remove and replace sewer mains, Had in the past projects that are inspected, they have issues with their bellies or main lines that need repaired.

Essentially, if there's manholes or connections or pipes that are either reaching the end of their life or that whatever root systems have gone in them or they've— essentially joints or whatever, sewage gets sort of stuck there and it compromises the quality, I guess, of the infrastructure, then we set aside money every year to address those as we find them in the TVR system.

So they have annual projects we do where we replace— we install sewer liners and HD birds. Gas or roadway portions of concrete pipe, we're going to find them. That's not part of this. This would be more for removing and replacing.

So I guess my question is, is that money that will be spent absolutely, or this money that's set aside for things as they come up?

I think, like I just mentioned, this will be spent on projects. We just bid one out that We'll use this for that. It depends on how much that costs. We haven't got bids for that yet, but they do have a list of priority projects, about 10 of them that we've tried to bid out, and then this water reuse project came last year, and so we put those on hold. So there's definitely way more needs there than what this is.

So you have like a priority list?

Yes.

You're saying we're going to spend this much money toward that priority list? Yes, get as far as you can.

Yeah, so we'll definitely spend that, but it's— there's a lot more needs there than that.

It's just a little bit of that.

Stormwater, constantly working with Public Works to prioritize the canal abandonment, West Union Canal, which parallels Carterville Road. Goes down into Provo and then comes back up around near UVU, and we've already worked on a couple areas. There are several more, but it's kind of a moving target due to the coordination with Provo and some other projects. One of, one of the current ones we've been looking at this past year is Center Street, just on the east boundary. Right now stormwater enters into the West Union Canal right there at that bridge, so we're going to try and get that water out of there into sumps.

So what are we doing? In fact, I've had a neighbor ask me about that— or not a neighbor, someone who lives along Carterville— because they're hoping that the city is going to keep watering You know, when there was water there, there was beautiful trees right along the canal. Now they're worried that the trees are going to die because there's no water in the canal.

Yeah, so that, from what I understand, and I wish Chris was here today because he can speak better to it, but Provo City is considering they may still convey water through that canal up until a certain point into Provo, and if that happens, that water will continue to flow. But if they decide not to, that canal will dry up and then Unfortunately, those trees would have to rely on whatever groundwater is there, but the city itself wouldn't be watering any of those trees down there. They've just survived because of the canal.

So I mean, you could always turn your sprinklers and, you know, shoot them across the canal at those trees.

You could, yeah, if you wanted to. I've talked to him on the phone and kind of shared that with him, but So what are we spending $1.4 million on?

What are we doing?

So a lot of our storm drainage in certain areas of the city flows into these canals. So if these canals go away, that water doesn't have anywhere to go, so we have to pipe that water. So for example, right now there's a project that we just bid out that should be starting construction any day, and it's collecting water up in the Hillcrest area and taking it— I think it's a Hillcrest, or is it 8 South area?

4 South.

4 South.

And piping it down into the Provo River. And that water traditionally went into one of these canals. So this $1.4 million is basically storm drain piping projects to get that water to somewhere else.

So who owns that, the Carterville Canal?

Because that leaks.

The problem with that is, as you know, we've talked about, as there's water in there, it's washing out people that are across the street on Carterville. not washing them out, but it's flooding over into their houses. Yeah, I'm not—

now you're getting to the crux of it, Terry. So these canal properties aren't owned by the city, they're owned by canal companies. And the West Union Canal that goes by Carterville Road along the west side of the city, that canal company doesn't want to maintain and have the liability of that property. And The city has, has used it, I guess, by some sort of agreement to have our stormwater directed towards there. But because they're— the canal company is no longer going to maintain it, they don't want it anymore, and apparently Provo purchased it, we've got to now divert our storm drain elsewhere. And like Ryan's talking about, in some cases to So we wouldn't be spending money on the Carterville—

I call it Carterville—

you know, we wouldn't be spending money on the one that runs along Carterville because Provo wants that money.

Yeah, so it would be diverting storm drain water from going into that canal.

Okay, so if there's water in there, that's Provo running some water.

Provo actually wants water to run in there because they're trying to recharge their aquifers through that area. So they've purchased pieces of that canal through there to try and get more water through there. We're trying to get out of the canal because we don't want to—

we don't want to be part of it. So they should pipe it. I mean, I know that's really expensive. It's probably cheaper than repairing all the leaks.

If we do have complaints from residents though that there's damage being caused, let us know. And we can get that to Rick Sabe, Public Works, and he can coordinate that with those ditch masters to make sure those problems are addressed.

But there's no water— is there water planned for this year?

I'm not sure if there will be water in it or not.

Are we still looking at some of those, the ones that would work for active transportation?

We would love to, but in some of the cases like the North Union Canal that runs up by, I think, Northridge Elementary. A lot of that right-of-way is not owned by the canal company, they have easements, and so you can't put a trail through on an irrigation easement, and the corridors are really narrow too.

And when you put a narrow path through people's backyards, they don't get too happy about that.

The reason Murdock worked out so well is because it's 100-foot right-of-way, so there's a lot more space in there for security, visibility, and things like that.

I know there were some narrow ones, but weren't there some wider ones also that we were trying to identify?

I'm not sure on that, but I know that we would love to if we can find them.

Yeah, it's definitely a great way to put trails in.

Just one, just trying to clarify this on the— so because that's, you know, a lot of people ask me about that. Now, so they still can't do anything. They can't put a bridge over it or anything like that because Provo now has an easement, or Provo owns the canal and has an easement. Would that be the answer?

If they wanted to put a bridge over, they would have to work with the canal company to do so.

Or the canal company, or if Provo City is maybe the canal company now, so whoever the owner is, whoever it is, yeah, they would have to work directly So someone still has an easement for that, even if they're not using it?

Well, I don't know that officially, legally, without researching the right-of-way, but I would imagine they'd still have an easement whether there's water in there or not.

Okay, and I've talked to Steve about this. I mean, it's a huge headache, I know, for a lot of people trying to figure it out.

Yeah.

I don't know if you want me to comment on that.

No, please do.

You know, you know better than I do.

Well, I'm not that familiar with this particular situation, but just to understand, the question was if the water stops flowing and there's easement remaining.

Correct.

That's a great question.

Um, you know, you can— it depends, is basically the answer.

I think you might write that down.

Yeah. Um, I think you can lose, uh, an easement by non-use, essentially, over time, you know.

So I haven't really looked into that in detail, but I, I wouldn't count on the fact of being able to retain an easement like that forever if you stop using it. That could be considered an abandonment of the easement.

So, which has only been a year now, so I guess—

Yeah, it's not going to be enough time.

If it was 20 years or something like that, you know, could be.

Thanks.

Just to follow up with what Brian mentioned earlier, the city has hired RV Construction. They started a few weeks ago to install this pipe to the Provo River near 400 South, and right now they've installed from the Provo River to Carterville Road. So right there we have a connection for stormwater drains going to a pipe that empties down into the West Union Canal. So we'll abandon that connection and then we'll trade it to the Provo River.

Where does it go? It goes where on Carterville?

So it'll go up Carterville Road, that steep part that ties to 400 South. Yeah, then it'll go down to And just up those intersections at 1000 East. This slide is just part of our yearly annual streets projects, our overlay and reconstruct, just under $1.8 million. Our slurry seal, crack seal, and microsurface, which we do every year, those Those typical amounts. Trip hazard mitigation, then our concrete ADA ramp upgrades. We try and do concrete-related projects each year to get ahead of the mill and overlay or the asphalt projects and make sure— we've tried to do that the last couple years, had some success with ironing it. Years ago, we would lump it all into one giant project and have some issues with concrete wouldn't be done, so delay the asphalt. So we've been trying to get ahead of the game on that and get the concrete in first, and so that's going pretty well this year.

So Ryan, there were some requests made that these ADA ramp upgrades work better for the bigger bikes. Do you remember that?

I'm not familiar with that.

Maybe somebody—

there was like one recommendation from a resident, I think I think it was on an email with you where they talked about if you could just design it just a little differently and make it easier for the big cargo bikes.

Oh, I—

yes, I know what you're talking about. It's the directional— the direction of the ADA ramps.

So that's something that we can—

Oh yeah, I think we do that when we can. Yeah, at the intersections where it's feasible.

Okay.

Yeah, it's more of aligning them this way instead of out into the intersection. I know what you're talking about now.

That rings a bell.

I do have a question.

With our, you know, heavy snowfall, we're going to have a lot more potholes.

Is this a lot more than we normally spend, or are we just pretty standard?

I guess we need to put more money in to fix all those.

I think that's a little bit more. I don't know about a lot more. Yeah, it's, it's pretty consistent with what we did last year.

Um, you guys probably saw that UDOT's planning on doing an overlay of $1,600 Oh good, people complain about that every day. So that's gonna be good. Chris and I will be meeting with Cody and his streets group in the next week or so to discuss addressing that issue on 4th North. We're probably going to move some projects up and get some of that done as well this year.

Yeah, that will be included in this amount.

Do you know when you're going to do 1600 North?

I'm sorry, do you know when UDOT is going to overlay 1600 North?

They said it could be as early as 1st of May, 1st start of May.

Good.

They're doing an emergency procurement on that for a mill and overlay.

Good, that would be very appreciated.

Yes, people stop me and ask at the grocery store.

With that though, there is a caveat. They will be doing night work, so they have to go around and notify all the residents.

residents because of the high amount of traffic, they'll have to do it at night.

So just if you get any complaints, we've given them the permission, but they've got to notify everyone and give them a heads up.

The complaints will shift from potholes to construction.

Yeah, hopefully it's only for a couple weeks of pain and then it'll be okay.

That's from state to—

State, well, I'm not sure the limits, but I know they're very well aware of the problems and I'm sure they'll address those areas.

We should do— we talked about this before, uh, at that luncheon that we had with, uh, uh, the Streets Group, um, just as much education as we can get out about all the efforts that went into snow removal last year, last winter, and the new problem we have, which is potholes, because that is the thing that we're hearing a ton about as far as people wanting to know why and what are concerned and, you know, all the problems. So I think the more education we can do about what the streets did during the wintertime and then now what they're doing on the potholes would be really valuable. Yeah, we've got some stuff we can go with pretty quick. Yeah, there was some really good information that came out of that street swatch.

Yeah, the, uh, the stats were pretty impressive, just the number of miles and the hours.

Next section is about street lighting. Did just award our recent bid to B. Jackson to do about 80 convert over to our new green standard streetlight pole in the 4th North to 6th North area east of State Street, if you're familiar with that area. And this is an ongoing funding mechanism, we're trying to replace all the remaining older style poles, the Rocky Mountain Power gray poles, to our new green standard streetlights.

Okay.

So we have that area south of the Hillcrest Park that we still need to do, and then about that same area going on the other side of State Street in there, west of State Street, we need to do as well. So there's about 170 lights left to Still replace. So we've been doing these— this is our 3rd phase, I think, of street lighting. We've been doing about 100 per phase, so I think we can knock out the next 2 with 2 more projects. This is again a summary just of the overall gap improvement projects. That was it. Any other questions?

So, oh, good.

Right, as we see these piecemeal, you know, we— it's hard to remember every week what is discussed, but you guys have discussed this in total, and when you produce the budget, we'll be having—

so, correct.

Okay, I've got a question on Fire Station 1.

So are we—

where's the money for that? So with—

we set it aside.

So with Fire Station 1, we have actually put together a grant proposal and submitted that on a federal level recently. And then we wanted to— we've been buttoning up some amendments to our fire and EMS agreements with, with Vineyard and Lyndon. And, and so with those, and then also, and I can probably rely on Brandon here to explain, around November, December of every year, that's when we fully audited financials for the— What will be This current fiscal year, so this this winter coming winter we'll have fully audited financials done, and then we'll know how much will be transferred at that point into our capital projects fund, which then can be used for future projects such as fire station number one. So essentially, that's essentially once we get our existing three main projects. our city center and all the FF&E and our new plaza and everything figured out, our next big capital project is fire station.

Can we use any impact fees for that fire station or no?

Yes, we can.

Well, well, if it's an expansion, I don't know if it is.

There's an aspect of it that we're hoping is an expansion in terms of a training tower facility. And then beyond that, we would also make sure and see We have our existing property. And that is where Fire Station Number 1 is at.

And we also have a piece of property down by US Synthetic that has been slated for fire station use.

And so those are— as we narrow down exactly where Fire Station 1 should be relocated, we can use those properties as a So the funds, when they're going to the capital improvement fund, and then they go from there.

So that's, that's where we would see it start to show up as funds are going for that fire station.

And that transfer, that transfer comes before you as an elected body, and we, we identify some proposed uses at that time, but sometimes not all of it has proposed associated with it and then waits for this budgeting process. We don't really have the time, but it should be sooner than later because it's a pretty important machine.

Yeah, there's no question.

And the thing that I want to represent is that I think on a weekly basis when I meet with Wren, it's It's usually at the top of our discussion, so it's, it's not going to slip between any cracks. It's number one in my mind on our city administration's, uh, to-do list and priority list. I'll just make sure to keep it there.

Any other questions? Okay, thank you, Ted.

Yeah, item number 3 on your agenda, Transportation Master Plan, uh, we're actually going to bump that to another meeting, um, because we wanted to go through the Planning Commission first, come back to one of these work meetings.

However, I'll say I think we've tried to incorporate whatever input and feedback you provided us so far.

But now that we've got a little bit more time, if there—

if you do have additional points of feedback, do you want us to run those through Sam?

Probably through Sam, right, Ryan?

Yeah, yeah.

So we had a little bit of a note of seeing staff do at the Planning Commission. So we, we're not bringing this forward to them until 2 meetings from now, which means it won't come to you till June for adoption. So we didn't want to do a work session tonight and have a big old gap before June and probably forget everything.

So we thought we'd save you the time tonight.

That way Lenee will forget all her changes.

Let's get it off.

Because this is a— it's just a presentation.

We don't need to move to the So then ultimately, we want to make sure the presentation correlates.

Item number 4, Ryan Barker is going to do a rental dwelling licensing update.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council. Sometime back, the mayor asked us to look into our rental dwelling license program and see where we're at.

And address concerns that have been brought forward with the current program.

So this is also known as the landlord licensing program or the rental licensing program, but our code technically calls it the rental dwelling licensing ordinance, so That's hence the title. So a little bit of background on this, and since we implemented the program going back to fiscal year '21, you can see what our revenues have been each fiscal year, including the number of accounts associated with those that have applied for a rental license and the number of accessory dwelling units each year that have been registered. So you'll see some nice growth from '21 to '22. '23 is as of last week. As Brandon noted, instructor taught me most everything comes in in June, so that's why we're seeing the FY '23 numbers lagging, because we're going to see all that coming in in June.

And I mean, right, this revenue you're talking about, is this the fee?

This is the $50 fee. Yep, the notorious $50 fee associated with getting your license. One thing to note, in our accessory dwelling unit database that planning maintains, we have 738 approved ADUs.

You'll notice 598 is the peak that we've had registered, so there's still 140 out there that haven't signed up for our program.

Now, they may just— may not be renting out their units and decided this didn't apply to them. We're not quite sure, but we'll have a better idea as we We see how this year plays out.

So why these—

go ahead.

I was just going to say, so these are already existing. Do you have a percentage of any new ADUs, or these are existing? No, we've now licensed—

so as— so last year, 598 of those existing approved ADUs registered of the 738.

And do we send out notices to the other 140?

Um, that's a good question.

I'm not Do we, Brandon?

Brandon knows better.

And if they ignore it, no biggie? We don't have any teeth, any enforcement.

Wasn't it— wasn't this fund supposed to go to like a compliance officer or something? And then my other question is, one of the reasons we did this was unpaid utilities.

Oh, he's thoroughly—

So these are some of the successes from the Program, and I apologize for the formatting.

When you convert from PowerPoint over to Google Slides, it does weird things.

So 300 to 350 less work orders a month. This is when a city employee has to physically go out and shut off a water meter or turn it back on. So a lot less work has been required of our staff. And then number 2, you can see how the amount of collections— accounts going to collections has drastically reduced. Pretty much cut it in 1/4 of what it used to be on average. So that's been a great success. That means there's more revenue coming into the city and people are paying the bills that they should be.

So I keep that there. So the 300 to 350 less work orders, when those work orders occur, is there compensation for doing those work orders?

Um, I don't think we charge them a penalty, do we?

Yeah, we have to go out.

Yeah, at least to turn it back on. Turn it back on.

Yeah. So they're— so the unit is billed that. So, so that— so it's not purely costing the city, right? Because it's getting paid. Am I understanding that?

These are work orders related to somebody having utilities.

So there's no charge to turn it off, but there is a charge to turn it back on.

Whichever way you want to look at it.

There's a charge.

There's one charge.

So roughly, what is the charge?

Pretty pricey. Yeah, it's pretty— $100 a month.

So I'm trying to understand if that's like a break-even situation for the city. Or are we losing money with that, you know?

I would say the one benefit is staff is spending— water staff is spending their time working on other projects. So financially we may break even, but they're, they're focused on other things and getting other duties done instead of having to go out and shut them off.

And the reason that we're not having to shut off and then turn back on is because landlords are dealing with it before it gets to that stage, right?

Or they're, they're, yeah, they may be putting pressure on their tenant to get in and get it taken care of, or they may cover themselves. I'm not sure.

So these are the—

I'm sorry, that $300 to $350 is over what time period?

That's a month, per month.

Per month.

Yeah.

So we were pulling in—

that's the revenue we want, $15,000 a month. To be turning it off.

But I guess I mean per month, but what— over what time period?

What's that?

What months are you—

2021?

From 2021 till now?

Uh, Kathy provided me this number, so I'm guessing this is on an annual basis averaged out.

Okay, of what we're doing, say it would be 3,500 to 4,000 times a year this happens, right?

Okay.

April 2nd.

Yeah, the most—

the accounts sent to collections number, it was cut in half. It went from, say, $50 grand to like $20 grand. So it's saving the city $30,000 a year in collections efforts.

Yeah, actually $70,000 if you take what we were at before we implemented the program.

Okay, so the average annual average was not $91,000 before we had the program.

So it went down further as you got more people to sign up?

Yeah.

So it's about $70,000?

Correct. And then that—

of that $70,000, what do you think they're collecting?

Uh, so, well, we're getting the $70,000, so that leaves $22,000 going to collections. Brandon, do you know what we get out of it? How successful collections is?

We were collecting on that $91,000, we were probably collecting a third of it.

So the net loss to the city would be, would be $60,000 under that program, right?

$37,000 versus $30,000.

So the 3 biggest complaints that we receive, number one is Requiring the utility accounts to be in the name of the landlord. We don't have a lot of control over this and changing this. It is part of the city code already. Number 2 is we get frustration from owners of ADU units that are renting to their family members. So they're like, if I'm renting to my son and his wife and their kids, why am I having to register and pay a fee every year?

Good question.

So it's a good question, right? And then number 3 is just the $50 annual fee. fee. So we got together and came up with some ideas.

Or wait, but also the number 2 is I'm not, I'm not getting money. I mean, I've heard people say, yeah, I own this for my mother-in-law to live in. We're not charging her. But because it's not my principal residence, my primary residence, license it.

Correct.

So it's not an investment income property.

Correct.

That's the frustration.

Yeah.

Yep.

And is that number one requiring utilities to replace the name of the landlord?

As in the number one complaint?

No. Oh, just in terms of actually occurring, because I'm just familiar with tenants who just go and rent it and they go sign themselves up and it's in their name. And you never even knew it existed until this change came about. In other words, they're signing up in their own name. I'm just curious how that gets— if that really gets enforced, or—

I'm not sure on the day-to-day, but I can tell you where it came from.

Yeah.

So if you're signing up, you have to show proof of ownership.

And that can be done by the county. It can be done by your papers that you signed at closing, warranty deed, but you do have to show something that shows you are the owner the property before we'll let the utilities be in.

Now, if they currently have it in their name, we don't really have any teeth to force you to get it in the landlord's name. So there are some still in the renter's name that just are longtime renters and their landlord won't sign up.

But all new signups do have proof, and we attach it to their accounts so that you can look and see what they provide.

So we are willing to look that up for them. On the county, if that's convenient.

So did that change as far as when this went into place?

Yes, that was the reason, because uncollected utility bills were not being paid.

Right. But as far as— so I'm just— so if somebody started running a house in 2000, that was before all this, so that would have been in that tenant's name. They could have registered back then, but now it's—

Yes, right, that's correct.

Yeah, so when we say utility, we really— we're concerned about the city of Orem utilities.

Yes, the other utilities—

I'm sorry, not gas, not power, be water, sewer, garbage, and those associated.

And the issue with that is with normal utilities, when they move and they go somewhere else, they've got their name, they've got bad credit, so they can't sign up in a new place. But in Orem, since this is The city utility, they moved to a different city and that doesn't follow them.

Yeah, and we have actually, Mayor, we had cases where, say, there were 3 people renting a home. If the one got in trouble with the city, they just canceled and one of their roommates would go sign up and they'd get them turned back on, and this person would kind of disappear. We'd never be able to chase that money down.

So it's helped solve that problem too.

And maybe get to it, but How common is the way we're doing it amongst other cities? Is this like a normal thing?

Um, from what I understand, there are other cities doing this. I know I wasn't involved when this was created. It was under someone else that was here before. Brandon, do you recall? I've heard American Fork does it this way.

Yeah, I mean, it's not the standard. Many cities do require certain elements of the utilities to be in the landlord's name. For instance, I know Spanish Fork requires a certain element of it to be in their name, but a lot of times the water use part is in the name of the tenant. But yet the other, the other standard items all fall to the landlord.

That's probably more common. There are other cities, and I don't know how they do this, this same type of thing.

I also remember that there was— because they didn't know who the owner was in some of these, and it was hard for— there was a complaint or neighborhood issue that they wouldn't know who to send the complaint to, if I remember correctly. That was part of it.

That was one of the most One of the important benefits was all of a sudden we had a database of every landlord in the city, so when those nuisance complaints came in, police knew who to talk to to solve the problem. So the program so far, it's, it's also funded one 311 employee basically for the amount of work that's required of the program, and it also funds the NIT division for $225,000. Revenue in 2022 was $297,000. So we're running a little bit of surplus in that respect, and so the recommended improvements as we as staff got together brainstormed is to help the landlords out with the utilities. The thought was we would do an additional round of notifications to the tenant before we go after the landlord, and we would copy the landlord on that correspondence so landlord's aware of it. That way, the landlord can maybe put. Some pressure on them before he has to financially be the one to come in and pay for them.

And then we would extend that, that process of pursuing payments from the tenant and take a little bit more time than we're currently doing.

That's kind of the best solution that we came up with, was kind of a second chance, I would call it. The other recommendations have to do with the annual fee, and we came up with 2 options. So option one is that We could reduce the annual fee down to $42 and take that surplus that we're running and basically kind of equal it out with the revenue. So if we have $225,000 coming in, if we drop down to $42, we bring in $231,000. So essentially the program is continuing to pay for what's associated with it, and we're not capturing any extra money off the backs of the landlords than what that fee is intended to be used for. Option 2 is to only address those that have the accessory dwelling units, and we would require a $50 fee one time, and that's when the ADU is registered. That way we're able to get the landlord's information. That way we know that the unit is legitimately approved and it's gone through an inspection process. And then going forward, We would not charge an ADU an annual fee. So we would treat ADUs separately from all other rentals in the city. And if we did that, we'd generate $245,000 in revenue, still covering our expenses. So to clarify, if you're a landlord that owns a fourplex, you're still gonna have to pay the $50 every fee— $50 fee every year. But if you have a basement apartment that's approved, you'll pay a one-time fee and never pay a fee again.

Because we have family members, or—

All of them.

We treat them all the same. Now, with respect to our processes in-house, this is a more difficult solution to program into our system. It's much easier to change the annual fee for everyone in our computer programs, but we would have to figure out how to do this if option 2 was something that appeals to all of you.

Well, 42 sounds like a weird amount.

It is weird.

Um, I wanted to go to 40, but I didn't want to run a negative.

I think the ADUs ought to have a different rule. So although that might be tougher to, uh, program, it seems like a more reasonable approach because the landlord's living with them, whereas the fourplex owner may be who knows where.

They're not living with them.

Correct.

And then with— if you pivot to renting to family members and you're not charging any rent, There's no one-time cost. So, so our goal today was if you had feedback for us, and a majority of you felt strongly one way or the other, Brandon would incorporate this into the budget for the coming year, and that fee would change in our fee schedule for the way that we collect it. So open to questions or discussion, Mayor, and guidance would be great.

You know, like what Tom's saying, $42, whatever. I don't think the fee is the end of the world as far as— I mean, if you own a rental property and you would just work that into all your other expenses, right? I don't think the $50 fee is the big deal. I think more the landlord having to deal with issues with the tenant not paying the bill. And then where it really becomes an issue is if the tenant regularly doesn't pay their bill. They always ultimately pay their bill, but they don't regularly pay it. So like every month or every other month— and this is people I've talked to— the landlord is constantly getting these things from the city, you know, where they're threatening this and they're threatening that. That seemed like the really important piece of this puzzle for me. And I understand as far as you know, we need to know what the landlords are so we keep track of it for fire safety reasons. So we need to understand who all the landlords are. But I don't know, from my perspective, the people I've talked to, I don't think the $50 fee is the big issue. I think it's more this collection issue that just— I mean, just all of a sudden you have this added situation in your life where you're kind of— you pay all your bills, your stuff's all great, but you're constantly getting harassed by the city, and then the person always ultimately pays it, but it's just this drama that goes on endlessly that seems unnecessary.

Does that make sense?

No, I totally see where you're coming from. Um, I guess the counter to that would be we have seen that that collection problem has gone away for us on our end, and when those fees aren't paid, then the rest of the board's residents are making up that that difference in that cost. So, so yeah, I totally see your frustration. Um, I can see how that can be very frustrating for a landlord, but I guess maybe devil's advocate, if that could be considered the cost of being a landlord too, right?

It's kind of territory, but there'll be something somewhere.

I mean, so if it's $70,000 is what you said was the deficit Right? I remember, right? I mean, before they started this program, but then they were collecting a third of that.

And so I thought it was much higher than utilities. Am I wrong? It wasn't like $400,000 that you were at?

$91,000.

But the deficit, it went from $91,000 to $22,000, so it's $70,000. And if you're collecting a third of that $70,000, then you're down to more like $40,000. So the city has a $40,000 deficit right there. Yeah, in the whole scheme of what's about the millions of dollars that are spent in the city, that's like, you know, that's like not really hardly anything.

So I mean, it's theoretical. I'm a normal citizen, I don't own a property, why should I pay for you, rich landlord?

I think a lot of, a lot of landowners aren't necessarily rich. Well, that's not—

even a normal citizen doesn't I would look at it that way.

Yeah, it's almost like the citizens subsidizing the landlords.

Yeah, but, but to what extent? We're talking $40,000 as a subsidy number.

I don't own a property. It doesn't matter what it is.

I don't feel—

I wouldn't feel good about it.

So $40,000 would be like 40 cents a citizen. That would be the subsidy. I'm just saying, in the whole scheme of things, 40 cents a citizen is, you know, is that even a conversation?

Just need that exact figure.

Yeah, no, and you should, you know. I mean, that's what we— I'm not— I'm fully willing to have anything challenged.

So in the amount of time that we were spending collecting money, what other work do you say would be done? We don't have to worry about that. Yeah, I guess that's what we lose, the hassle of collecting money. I understand that, but I'm a landlord. I realize that that's part of my fun of doing business. You have those challenges, you work that out with the renter. And so for me, I feel like it's a positive thing that if the city isn't having to worry about those collections. I mean, we have some collections we have to do, but to have it reduced that much, um, it just feels like that's one more thing that we're not having to worry about, that we can focus on other things as the employees of the city.

Do you ever see, um, or do you know if the landlords are Evicting people because they don't want to deal with the issue of them not paying every single month? And then my second question is, are you notifying the landlords every month? Are you doing it on a quarterly basis that their tenants are behind? What's the timeframe there?

Tracy, do you remember what that—

Yeah, I can answer that.

So they have— so we have their email and also the They have their tenants' emails, so every notification that's sent out is sent also to them. And then just to clarify, we don't go after the landlords. They have the right to not do anything and the water gets shut off. The water then isn't restored until the tenant pays. The only time we would go after a landlord is if they were selling the property and they still own money. So as a landlord, like, if your tenant just didn't pay for, you know, 3 months, now they're on the disconnect list.

If you do nothing, their water gets turned off, it turns back on when they pay.

So there, we don't report collections on them.

We don't—

there is no, like, direct problem to the landlord other than if they're living there as well. They Lost their water too, but they probably were, you know, paying.

And then there's like $15 late fee every month or whatever it is.

Yeah, it's like $16.

Okay.

But yeah, there's a late fee every month, but the shutoff happens, they have to be over 2 months, and it's about a week before their third bill would run. So they have up until then, and they can call and make a payment plan. Okay, and then water is not disconnected.

It's only those who don't make any kind of payment plan and are over 2 months. And then, then to my next question, so then you will see, you could see if the email address for the tenant changes, if this, you know, their hard times they fell upon or whatever created a homeless situation for them because their landlord was like, you're out of here. Have you Have you noticed that?

You can.

It depends. It's up to the owner to decide if that tenant is allowed to put their email on. So it's the owner's account, and then he has the ability to go online and say, okay, I want my tenants to have access. That gives them access to pay their bills, set up autopay, all of that. They also have the option not to add them, and just the landlord's going to get notified And, um, and have, you know, the choices of, you know, whether or not they can set up any kind of auto pay or something like that.

So some are choosing just to put it on auto pay and then making it part of their rent.

And others are like, no, you'll still pay it, I'll just give you access. So ultimately it stays in their names, and then when you live there, you have just access for that time you live there, and then they take you off.

other tenants. Okay, so we don't—

we wouldn't know if they were left for their choice or the landlord's choice.

So we don't know if it's negative.

But we don't class with the landlord. So there shouldn't be a reason for the landlord to kick them out for utilities, because the landlord isn't penalized.

The renter is by loss of water. Okay. And can I just clarify, so this is water? This is the utilities, water, Okay, I mean, we— there's no way.

But we don't normally do anything with trash.

Okay, but yeah, thank you.

So you're saying it's more informational for the landlord?

It depends on how they set it up. If they are the only one on this, then yeah, it's going to be more for them. But if they have a tenant on there, it would be more information. We kind of would tell them, like, we're not getting paid, that might be an indication for next month's list to not be paid. So sometimes it's a good thing for landlords because they see that this bill, they're like, oh dang, I better start watching because it might be the next one that doesn't pay. So it has some pros.

Yeah, so it's informational, but if the tenant— say if the tenant doesn't pay their utilities and then they just bail, So that's where you run into a problem.

That's where it goes.

Now become the owner's problem. So we ask them to protect yourself by your, your rental agreements, make sure that, you know, there is, you know, maybe a deposit that would help cover if they're going to run out on you. And so then you can also tell, like, the water's been shut off in the landlord kind of goes, okay, let me start watching what's going on here, or he may put some pressure on them to—

he doesn't want them to get out.

But yes, at that point, it does kind of fall back on them.

I will say, as we were looking into this, I think we found that we could, we could work things in a way that was more customer service oriented and even change like how and where we talked about payment for their utility bill in our notification system. It was just maybe a little more bureaucratic or institutional before, and now it's a little more friendly and educational.

Can you go back to the concerns?

Okay, so the frustration was the owner, you know, renting to family members. So we came up with a solution.

Yeah, that's option 2, is not charge an ongoing fee for ADUs. So the challenge with it, it's just family members renting it, there's no way to enforce that other than—

I mean, just say, hey, I'm renting to a family member.

And then when, when does that stop and they start renting to someone else? There's no way of ever knowing that. It's, it's not, it's not an easy solution to enforce one way or the other.

Because that's in the $42—

I mean, I don't like the $42.

So if an ADU, you'd only pay a $42 fee once and then you would pay one after that?

We keep the 50. Oh, 50.

Okay. Yeah. Yes.

You know, okay, well, so then, so then, as long as you're the owner of the property. And I think our reason for putting in this fee was hard to handle folks who are gone. And the ADUs clearly in my mind have a different responsibility than absentee landlords.

Yeah, because they are owner occupied.

Is there a difference between illegal And illegal according to this program?

Only legal ADUs are registered.

So if my neighbor is renting his basement, he—

I highly doubt he's got a landlord license.

But can't they do that with the state?

So they're gonna be having ADUs?

No, no, I don't think so.

I thought they passed it.

If someone came in and applied for a landlord license I'm 100% sure we're double-checking that, Teresa, to make sure it's a legal accessory dwelling unit.

I mean, didn't the legislature like 2, 3 years ago say you have to allow ADUs, but you can still have standards?

They have, yes. Building safety requirements.

And then they reduced our parking requirement, right?

Staying in our business again.

So we, we think these are the 2 logistically easiest options to implement. I'm sure there's other solutions, but it would be very complicated in terms of how our finance programs work to implement them. Is that safe to say, Brandon?

So if you left it at 50, is there a problem if you get more than what your actual needs are? Are you allowed to have a little bit extra, or do we have to look—

ramp this down every year based on There are no administrative allocations to that, right? So this, this hour Ryan's spending talking about that, it's not allocated.

So it's just the 311 and the NITs?

Yes.

So we just want to close that gap so that that administrative overhead component definitely equals, you know, here this $225,000 versus $245,000.

Variance. That's easily within an allocation.

Just to answer your question, you're not supposed to use a fee like this to be a revenue generator.

That's what I thought.

Yeah, you're exactly right.

So it's supposed to basically equal your cost of administrative program.

How close do you have to get though?

I mean, I mean, I don't think you have to be to the penny, you know, so if you're a little bit above and, you know, those costs are going to fluctuate over time with inflation and all That.

So I think it just has to be reasonably close.

So my question again is, you have to look at that every year and adjust it accordingly within $10,000 to $20,000?

I don't know.

I think if you start getting to a point where you're— what you're taking in significantly exceeded what it was costing you, then you would need to make an adjustment.

Okay.

So the $42,000 is your recommendation to keep within the spirit of the law, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Previously, we'd get a— seemed like I remember hearing we got a notification from county if ownership changed on dwellings. Is that— and then we would pursue if there were multiple primary residents for an individual, as one of them being an income property. Are we still doing that?

Is that—

Not sure. Jason, do you know anything?

Not aware of any of that.

I became aware of this back when the campaign was going on, just going door to door and talking to people. This was one of the things that I constantly got was brought up because there's actually, what is it, like 5,500 landlords in the city or whatever, or they don't— they don't— 5,500.

5,500 in FY22 registered.

Yeah, so those 5,500, so as we're just talking to people, this was a complaint. And the essence of the complaint wasn't really the $50, because it was understood that the city needs to know who these landlords are for a variety of reasons. But the complaint was just— I mean, what people said to me was, you know, hey, you know, if my tenant has their gas bill and they don't pay it, am I responsible for it? If tenants have the electricity bill and I don't pay it, or if my tenant goes and buys a car and they don't make the payment, am I responsible for it?

responsible for it.

So it's really trying to attach the responsibility for what's, you know, what's going on to the person who's using it, not shifting it to the landlord. So I think that's the real essence of the question. And then, because I— you can make everything work with the $50, it's just a question of whether or not you have to go through all this with the collection side of things.

Yeah, and Mayor, I think you're absolutely right. I think when the program rolled out, there was a lot of complaints and a lot of concerns. Um, I wonder though, Theresa and Brandon, have we seen those complaints subside now that we've had it a couple years?

So the 2 biggest ones that we've dealt with were, I have an LLC, the exact same mom and dad, they own all 8, 10, 12 properties.

Why do I have to pay $50 for everything even though they're all owned by the same exact people?

people. We've obviously addressed that. The exact owners and all those things. The second one was this issue, renting to—

and not even ADU, but renting to family. Well, ADUs, we have an ability to be able to address that. Spencer's point, there's no way for us to We cannot rely on people's honesty to tell us that they are renting to family and now we are not. That just doesn't work. And so the only— there's no option for us really in that environment to be able to say, oh yeah, just go with that. We can rely on ADUs because we don't care because the owner lives there. So we have an ability to, in essence, control the environment because of that. So that's why option number 2 is, is there as an option.

Because that's an opportunity that we could take to address some portion of that.

Okay, so we're gonna have to move on. Where would you guys like to go with From here. Think about it.

So you do have an option. Obviously, we will come with you with a tentative budget as it currently exists. Between the tentative budget and the final budget, if an agreement was to come into place to make a change to one of these, then obviously you incorporate that into the final.

Does staff have a recommendation one way over the other? strongly about one of the options?

Well, staff's is the easiest way to change the fee to $42. But as far as which one is— I use your— meets what you think the needs are.

Obviously, we can't—

you get a lot of calls from customers. Which do you think satisfies the citizens most? The ADU change would certainly eliminate eliminate a large number of costs. So we would probably be totally fine with that.

You could also say, look, one of your fees went down. Deflation here at ORM, right?

I'll say my recommendation to make it $49.99 to continue to make progress on addressing our end states. I'd say my recommendation We need to continue to address the complaints we've been receiving. So we already addressed the going from charging for each property that a landowner might have down to just— it's, it's one person, they just get one charge. We've improved our communication methods, and Teresa spoke a little bit to that, taking more of a customer service approach rather than a hammer harsh. And finally, eliminating the ADU ongoing aspect, as that's a remaining customer complaint that, that doesn't really provide the same benefit as charging it for the other rentals.

Good to me.

Okay, so, so we should put something together like that and send it out to council to see if there's an interest in, you know, doing anything or doing nothing, or actually so we can move forward with it.

You know, you could potentially make that decision.

So if you feel like— just interject—

if we go the ADU route, we'll have to amend the ordinance.

And we would just exclude ADUs from the definition of a rental dwelling so that they're not required to pay.

Just to register, not ongoing.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Yeah, just to register and not ongoing, but that would require an ordinance change. So one avenue of moving forward would be to go ahead and make that proposed amendment, let you consider it, decide if that's what you want to do.

Yeah, I think that would be fine. And, um, but I would, but I would like to see kind of what Brandon summarized as the priorities, and then that's just sent out or talked about by the council. I think people aren't ready to make a decision right now. Okay, we'd like to put it out there, give them a chance. Okay, and we talk and we can come back and say, sure, yeah, we want to do this.

If you want to give us direction to move forward on the ADU modifying the, uh, ordinance to eliminate ADUs, we can wait on that until you've decided that's the route you want to go.

Is that kind of what you're saying?

I think we should do it as a whole package, unless everybody wants to go modifying the ADUs right now.

Well, I would say maybe the other 2 things I mentioned we've already incorporated.

Oh, I dealt with—

yeah, so changing it down from one charge to one homeowner. That's already taken place. And then improving our language and our approach in the communication with landlords.

Doing that internally.

We've already done that.

Okay, so we're just down to the ADUs and whether we want to go with that or not. So do you want to decide, or do you want to decide another time?

I'm totally comfortable in taking the family ADU. I think that's, that's reasonable.

I mean, I've had family live with me and I don't charge them.

Not just family, all ADUs.

Oh, all ADUs. So do you need to do a recertification every 10 years or 5 years for safety reasons, Chief?

I mean, we actually wouldn't do any type of inspections.

No, so no, we, we wouldn't do a follow-up building inspection.

It's just one time when it's built out.

What about when it's sold?

Um, that's definitely a challenge. Um, if somebody sells a house with an ADU in it, we're not going to know that. So that's a great point, and I guess we would only know that now because they'd have to come in and register it. So that does create an issue.

We can put that in there and say that they have to, you know, when they sell it, the new owner has to come in and get a license.

So I say work on that. Let's think about this because that's pretty important, right? What we just came up with. So maybe, you know, I like the 50— I like the one-time fee, but if there's other, like this about selling it issue, maybe something else we'll think about.

We'll come up.

Okay, so I mean, I'm good with this, but is there anything else?

Why don't we say—

I mean, it sounds like everyone— no one's opposed to this, right? Anybody opposed to this? So if everybody's in favor of this, we go forward and then Steve can work up what this ordinance looks like and then we can decide on the ordinance.

That's not to say you couldn't make other changes to it at some later time as well.

We're at least making concerted progress.

Yeah, yeah, we've had a lot of questions about this, so this is more progress. And then what you're describing as far as the customer service aspect, that's, that's really positive. So, all right, we ready to move on?

Yes, but we are going to have to be—

minutes ticking down. Let's take a 5-minute break, grab our food, and then we'll start back at 25 after. Someone like to bless the food?

Okay, gracious Father in heaven, we're so grateful for this food. We're grateful for the opportunity we have to meet together today, for the good weather that we're having, for the camaraderie that we feel, and the way that we're discussing the needs of our citizens of Orem. At this time, we would like to thank thee for this food and ask a blessing to be upon it and the hands that prepared it, that it may give us nourishment and strength, and we can use that strength in moving forward for thee. In the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, amen. Amen.

You don't know what the remaining ones are?

Debbie, do you know?

I was on Facebook last night and there was a Facebook ad, what you would call advertisements for Summerfest.

We're going to Orem Fest and I'm making an announcement today.

Okay, um, so if that was a city-controlled one, I don't think the city controls it.

So did we— did you find out what was out there? Let's reconvene.

Yes, that took longer than I said.

And I promise that was my fault. Let's, uh, we've got a 5-minute presentation from Teresa, our city recorder, about your local agreement with Utah County.

Yes, so I'm here talking elections. Um, so we, in order to have the county help us, we have to sign an agreement. Part of the agreement is you have to have a resolution. So I'm just here to answer any questions, kind of go over that, and then hopefully we can do the resolution today if that works out.

Is there a cost associated with that?

With having the county help? Yeah, yes, yes. Like $90,000 or something?

Yeah. So I'll tell you exactly. So what it is, is they just determine it by how many voters. So obviously Orem is going to pay more than some of the neighboring cities that have less voters. But according to their calculations, their estimate, they can't exceed $2.25 per voter. So this is just the estimated cost, but there's a primary and a general election with 47,393 voters. So that would make—

Per registered voter, not those who come out. Per registered voter.

Um, and so it'll be $106,634.25 per election. So that's $106,000 for the primary, $106,000 for the general, which the grand total is $213,000.

$268.50.

Is that the printing of the ballot, the mailing of the ballot?

So I'll tell— I'll read over this as part of the agreement. This is what they are agreeing that they will cover. They will do all ballot layout and design, ballot printing, ballot mailings, ballot retention and storage, outgoing and return postage, ballot processing, Printing optical scan ballots, program and test voting equipment, program electronic voter registry— register, poll worker recruitment, training, and supervision, compensate vote— compensate vote center poll workers, deliver of supplies and equipment, tabulate report election results on county websites, provisional ballot verification, update voter history database, conduct audits as required by state statute and/or administrative rule, conduct recounts as required by state statute and/or administrative rule, Election Day administrative support, operation of countywide vote centers, provide final canvass report of official election results, The city is responsible to canvass their municipal election on the date designated by the county clerk. Such results will constitute the final official result of the election. And then the last thing they do is the ballot drop box services. So they'll maintain them, lock them, unlock them. They take care of the security footage. That's the part they're going to cover as part of this agreement.

Do you have questions?

I missed this.

Do they cover postage? Yes.

Yeah, so they'll take care of all of that part of it. And there were— I did ask them if there's anybody in the county that does not use their services, and they said there's not. The biggest reason is at one point they did have some equipment that they could rent out, and we rented it in the past, but that has been decommissioned. So there's not— you literally have to start your own, you know, get all your own supplies. Or the other option is hand count, which would be obviously a delay in results.

We know how much it cost the last election.

We were at $213,000 this year.

I thought it was in the '90s, though.

I think it probably went down. I mean, it probably was less expensive.

I can look it up in our last agreement. So for sure, I can— between now and the next meeting, I'll know how much they— okay, they—

well, how much we would How much did it increase to? Any other questions?

Anyone would like to do this on their own?

Anyone want to start hand counting down?

What?

Yeah, so it'd be 2 years.

Yeah, I can—

I'll pull that number for you.

Oh, He's pulling it for me.

Good job, Brandon. Good.

It's probably the last page on this one. Yeah, so it's about $20,000 more.

No worries there.

Which may be Difference in registered voters.

Or they bumped the rate.

Yeah, so it could be a combination.

Okay, any other questions? Is there anything else you need us to do?

So, um, in the next meeting, then I will present it as a resolution, and then, then you can vote on if you're going to proceed with it.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

See, I was short.

Yeah.

Thanks, Jason.

We should give a prize for the shortest presentation.

Okay, next we've got amending Section 2-3-10, item number 6. The Orem City Code authorizes the City Council to retain separate legal counsel.

Yeah, so, Mayor, Council, this is just a draft ordinance that basically explicitly authorizes the Council to retain their own separate legal counsel aside from the City Attorney position.

It's, it's basically pretty simple.

There's basically 3 main components of the ordinance. The council would be the ones to appoint and also could remove the person they retain as the separate legal counsel.

Separate legal counsel position would take direction from, report directly to the city council and not the city manager.

And the separate legal counsel could either be an at-will employee of the city exempt from protections described in Utah Code Section 10-3-11.

Thank you.

5, which is basically appeal rights.

That's basically another way of saying this person would be an at-will employee versus one who could only be dismissed for cause. So, or in the alternative, if the separate counsel that's retained is not a city employee, then that person could be hired on a contract basis without having to So basically just trying to codify that the council has the right to do that. It's not to suggest they didn't have the right to do that before, but this just makes it very explicit that they have the right to do this and kind of sets forth the terms, or at least some of the terms, who they are, who are the respondents, who would report to them.

So, okay.

So take any questions if there are any. When would this come to the board?

As soon as you would like to. If you're okay with this draft, we would anticipate bringing it to the next meeting on May 9th.

Any other questions? Yes. Yeah, it's in there.

And this is just what you said, codifying what we're already able to do. We're not necessarily making any—

Yeah, I mean, some people might say, oh, there's nothing in, you know, the law that says you could do this, you know. And so it's basically to make it official, make it, like I said, codify it. Make it explicit that you have the right to do that, so there could just be no question.

Okay, perfect. Any other questions? Okay, okay, thank you, Steve.

Next we've got item 7, a presentation Adopting rules and regulations for the government of the council. Steve, we're back to you.

Yep.

So this is something that, that I've been working on with Jesse. And this basically— I think this primarily sort of codifies what our normal practice is. Not codified, but it adopts a policy, formal policy regarding this. Basically has to do with administrative decisions and directions. That, you know, historically we do this all the time. I mean, you might tell— you might have 4 members of the council, or majority of the council, saying we'd like to put this item on the agenda, or we'd like you to, you know, do this administrative task, or look into this or that particular thing. Just so that, you know, in terms of giving staff guidance. Also could apply in terms of, you know, maybe the council wants to hire public relations firm or something like that to make statements on behalf of the city council. So this just basically says that these kinds of administrative decisions of the council can be given based on a majority vote of the entire city council. So again, it's really something we've just kind of always done, but again, just sort of formalizing it and making it—

put it in written form. Yeah, I mean, it's a—

yeah, sorry, that's a good point. It's a consensus, it's not a formal vote. So you're not voting on things, but sometimes you will just give, like I said, administrative direction on something you might want staff to do on your behalf or look into, or that sort of thing.

Actually, 2.4 on here, right, with consensus and majority.

So a consensus is a majority. So yeah, they're sort of interchangeable terms.

Yeah.

Um, so just a couple examples of other things they can do. They could enter into professional agreements.

That kind of— the example I gave you was with, for example, public relations.

The council could enter into an agreement, um, to do PR on the council's behalf.

And to your point, Stephen, we've always been able to do this. This is just saying, right?

Oh yeah, right.

And it just kind of codifies or again clarifies by procedures that everybody knows how these kinds of administrative directions can be given, what the standard is. So, um, the last item that's specifically listed here is publishing a statement on behalf of city council. So, you know, the council—

you voted on some major thing in a regular meeting and you want to put out a statement about what you did or why you did did it, then, you know, 4 members of the council—

well, sorry, majority of the council, or maybe it's all the council, those who voted in favor of that particular item, can then put out a statement to express whatever thoughts you have on the issue.

So, so you're saying if something passes, yeah, and the council wants to make a statement on it, yeah, you'd have to have 4 people that agree. This is our statement.

Yeah, and you might have a 7-0 vote, for example, where everybody votes in favor, and then in that case the entire council would have the opportunity to participate in putting out that statement. But if, on the other hand, it was a 4-3 vote, those who voted in the affirmative to pass the item would be the ones who would have the opportunity to make a statement on behalf of the council. So, but in contrast, for example, you wouldn't have only 2 members of the council or one member of the council, that they would not be authorized to put out a statement that represents or is on behalf of the council. We'd have to have a consensus to put out a statement that represents the position.

May I make a point of clarification? One city council— I won't name the city— did something similar to this, but it made it unethical for a person that voted in the minority to make a statement, which I felt was fascist in nature. Obviously, anybody on the council can make a statement, even if they're in the minority. And so we clarified that with the policies, that this doesn't prohibit a person that's in the minority from making a statement of why they may have voted in the minority.

So we're not trying to take away anybody's right to speak here.

It's just the right of majority should be by those that voted.

The one way you're counseled, if you have a majority, then that majority can represent what the council— how they want to characterize this. An individual could do it. that also, but they would be doing it on their own as their personal opinion, right?

Correct. Okay.

It wouldn't be on our Facebook page, it would just be the majority.

Yeah, that's—

I think that's the website.

Yeah.

But it doesn't even prohibit a majority member from saying, I agree with the minority— majority statement, but this is another reason I voted for it. We see that in a lot of legal opinions where you'll have the opinion of the court, you'll have a concurring opinion that goes further than the opinion of the court. And the judge may say, well, I voted for the opinion of the court, but I also voted for it for this reason. It's not binding precedent, but the judge— the justice wants to let you know why they— so they would file a concurring opinion or a dissenting opinion where they get to say, I think the majority is wrong. And this is why. So we're not trying to prohibit any council person from making any statement whatsoever regarding the issue. Minority person to make a statement on the Facebook page as an individual, not as a council member, or as a council member just with a different name.

Oh, could you do that? I mean, if you've got the count—

As a comment, you mean?

Because you're doing it.

I mean, could a minority make a comment on a city thing and say, this is—

this is—

so if the council—

if there was a statement that was made, council agrees with it, but if someone in the minority disagreed with that, could they then go on that same post and say, yes, this was the decision of the council, But I disagree with that.

So I think the way it's written right now, you know, we, we on our own Facebook page, we will make— we'll post articles, we'll post stories, you know, whatever it is as the main article or the main—

what do you call that? What's that?

Post?

Post. Okay.

And then obviously any member of the public basically can comment. either agreeing or disagreeing with what we say. I think what we're saying by this policy is that a majority of the council can, quote, make a post on the Facebook page, for example, explaining a decision or position.

But I don't think that a minority could make a post.

They could make a comment to the post.

That was what I just wanted to be clear. Hopefully we never have that happen.

You know, and oftentimes if something is of great public interest, we might get hundreds of comments to a post, right? And I don't think there's anything stopping an individual council member from making a post— or sorry, a comment to a post.

Yeah, probably because, uh, some terribly detailed policies regarding what the city council members can can't do. We really just didn't want to go there. I mean, for example, if you're in that minority and a media person reaches out to you, they require that you— that that council person contact the PIO and only address it to the PIO. We didn't really want to make it too detailed, just to basically give some guidance on what a majority statement would But I, I don't think any person that I— anybody I need to make a post on your Facebook page, whether you're a city council member in the minority or whether you're a resident. So there's no prohibition.

The way I'm reading what you're saying is the intent of this is to— there's an official— I mean, if you have a majority, there's an official city council position And that's what the city council is going with. If people do other things on their own, then that's their free speech, right? Okay, any other questions?

All right, we'll keep going.

So if the council is okay with this, we'll plan to bring both these items, uh, to you on the May 9th meeting also for discussion of both.

That'd be great.

May 19th?

May 9th.

Thank you, Steve.

Run through the rest of this agenda.

Do we have—

okay, Tom, are you going to do a report?

Oh, it says it there. Yeah, I'll do a quick report.

Thank you, Mayor.

I get to work with the Memorial Day and the Veterans Day program, which is done largely, I think, now by Peter and Tess. Grateful for the, the people who are on that committee are 100% committed. It's really, they're very committed veterans who want to see good things happening. I'm grateful for the speaker that got arranged for Memorial Day. And also you work with the Youth Council, but Stephen, I don't know that we've done a lot lately with that. The legal side headed that up. Maybe you could speak to that.

Yeah, we actually had an activity.

You want to know what we've been doing? Yeah, I didn't get—

I haven't been invited to the last one.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I thought we should have been inviting you to these things. But we had our last activity about a month, month and a half ago.

We basically did a mock trial.

So we had, um, you know, um, one of the kids act as a defense attorney and a couple as like an officer who came to arrest witnesses and then jurors. So yeah, it was pretty realistic.

It was good.

And then I'm on the community outreach for the Orange Community Hospital, and they're active participants in so many things we do here in Orange. But particularly allowing us doing their grow boxes out front and allowing us to use their facilities and of course contributing with chocolate land.

So Harvest Festival, Harvest Fest, yeah.

I have one quick question.

Did the Youth Council participate up at the legislative Days when—

yeah, okay. Yeah, we had 8 or 9.

How many are on your council?

We started the year off, I think, with about 30, and then the numbers dwindle steadily over the course of the year.

So that's pretty typical.

It's always been—

yes, there's your report.

Okay.

All right, thank you. Um, so we'll just run through the agenda for Tonight's meeting, we've got 6 PM item number 3, call to order, invocation, and inspirational thought. So we've got Todd Dudley and Julie Smith. So Todd is the son of Roger Dudley, and Julie is a longtime associate, friend, And this Department of, uh, and they're sitting over here. So, okay, so would you, would you like to say something? Sure.

About them?

About them?

Sure.

Yeah. And, uh, Terry, here's the— Oh, I got it.

I'll take that unless you want it there. You're good with me doing that? So what I was thinking was, uh, the 2 that we got sent to prayer, um, that you would— well, the prayer would introduce them.

Okay.

And just because they're your friends. Yeah, I haven't got to that.

Okay.

Um, then we've got item number 6.

This is my committee. This is Natural Resources Committee.

So 6.1, the community award that you're—

Yeah, they'll do award and then they're keeping—

I believe there's 2 awards, um, Gentleman and Wilkerson Farms.

Brian, is Matt Taylor ready to do that?

Yeah, he'll be yours.

to get them an actual award, you know.

Okay, so item number 6, we got NRSC Annual Report Community Awards. So is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, that's Natural Resources.

Matt's going to present that, or does he— Um, I know that they have slides, and I'm not sure that I'm not sure who will be presenting.

There's been a lot of talk.

Maybe Quinn, he's the president.

Do you know if Matt's going to talk or Quinn?

I think Quinn. Quinn, okay.

So is Matt Taylor going to do it too?

Matt's our planner, he's the liaison.

He'll just be here representing the committee.

So who should I call up? Would it be Matt or Quinn?

Just the committee.

So the Natural Resources Stewardship—

okay, so we'll just call the committee up. They can come up and introduce themselves.

This is Sarah Bateman who started this.

Do you remember this, Sarah? So this is—

I will call her committee because she's the one who started it.

Yes, Natural Resource Stewardship. Okay, and then next we would have, uh, Chief Sanderson.

I'm going to be really quick.

I'm just going to introduce International Firefighter Day, and then with your permission, I just want to bring up the crew that's here to have a photograph with you and the council.

Okay, before—

give us something to host in support of International Firefighter Day, which is May 4th.

Okay, that sounds perfect. So I'll call you up.

Thank you.

And then we've got the Walter C. Orum Award for Roger Dudley. And so, Terry, you know Roger the best. Okay, so we've got on here that you were going to present that award. Yeah, I'm happy to do that. Okay, so I'll just— so we'll basically just go through these 3 awards, um, and then I'll just invite whoever to speak that's working with that. And then we've got item number 7, uh, personal appearances. Everybody knows about that. Item number 8, consent items. which the only thing on there is approve the meeting minutes. And we've got item number 9, a resolution authorizing execution of interlocal agreement between the City of Oregon and Utah County Municipal Elections. Is that tonight then, or did Theresa just went through?

So we'll do that tonight. Are you—

No, I'm kidding. So, so I'll just invite you up take us through that. And then 9.2, we've got an ordinance amending the City Council meeting schedule for 2023. Turn that over to Steve. Communication items.

Just a couple of things. We have Arbor Day cupcakes for you guys. And then we're going to be— as we exit from here, we're going Set up this room so that the Roger Dudley family can essentially have a reception.

Okay, so I'll turn that time to you.

Just invite them to come back.

You have to have your photo ID.

Dudley, you're in.

All right, we'll adjourn.

Thanks.

Another way that we've acted in an advisory and educational role was with all of the issues that have been discussed with Utah Lake recently. As we all know, the future of Utah Lake's incredibly important to the health, wellbeing, and quality of life here in Orem. We've kept a close eye on the developments there and contributed to the discussion regarding any future developments. And one of our members, Hillary Hungerford, who's not with us today, also serves on the Utah Lake Authority Committee. And finally, we love a chance to celebrate the amazing things our citizens and businesses are doing to use our natural resources wisely. And one way that we like to do this is to give 2 citizenship— or sorry, stewardship awards each year, one to a business and one to a citizen. So I'll turn the time over now to Darren to talk about—

Okay, the first we'd like to recognize is the Wilkerson Farm in Orem. Let's see, Rachel. We'll just have Rachel come up here. Here, I'll hold this like this. I don't know what you're supposed to do here. So yeah, come.

Go to the podium.

Okay. There we go.

Okay.

Wilkerson Farm in Orem, led by Richard and Rachel Wilkerson. And Rachel is able to be with us here tonight. And we're so happy to have her— is an outstanding example of preserving Orem lands for agricultural use and community development. Wilkerson Farm has 19 acres of agricultural production and grew 110,000 pounds of produce last year, focusing on potatoes, onions, pumpkin, watermelon, cantaloupe, and peaches. 100% of the produce is donated to the— is donated to the food bank, Tabitha's Way, a donation sponsored by Al Switzer. Wilkerson Farm hosts a fall carnival and corn maze and hosted almost 7,200 students this last season for field trips that were free for preschool and kindergarten and disability programs. Wilkerson Farm dramatically lowered its water use this year— way to go— by using drip tape throughout all 19 acres, demonstrating the potential for wise, water-wise agriculture in Utah. The farm is a wonderful community asset that enables Orem residents to share in the beauty of agriculture in our traditional— traditionally agricultural community. There's very little of this left, and thank you, Rachel, for helping us preserve that heritage way of life and green space and beauty for all of us to enjoy. It's wonderful.

Picture now, or the other people afterwards?

Yeah, Mayor, I'd like to comment something.

Can I, can I just comment on— they mentioned the food pantry Tabitha's Way, and I'm actually on their board of directors, and I cannot tell you how grateful they, the people were who came to the food pantry to get a pumpkin, some onions. Fresh produce is expensive, and they were well, well appreciated. Also, my own family, we love to go to their fall festival, ride their rides, buy a little gourd or whatever we get. So it's, it's a great family. It fits right in with our Family City USA. It's a great opportunity, and I think their generosity to help those in need is very commendable, as well as their low water use.

Thanks, Debbie. Okay, um, I will be featuring Bramon Leake. Bramon Leake is an OREM resident who leads strategic planning for sustainability and resiliency at Brigham Young University. He is leading BYU in several transformative efforts associated with natural resource use, including a student sustainability initiative called YTalk. that tracks environment-related conversations around the globe, all 7 continents, right? He has led a number of community sustainability events, including sponsoring 2 Green Weeks for students each year. At BYU, he is working to move to increase the use of renewable energy, sourcing local foods, installing charging stations for electric vehicles, goals, and tracking all courses and course learning outcomes associated with the sustainable use of natural resources. And on a personal note, I was recently hired to work in sustainability at Utah Valley University here in Orem, and I'm very grateful to be able to turn to Bramon for his expertise and his guidance as I'm learning my way in this new role. So I'm grateful for that. Bramon, thank you. Come on up. And Rachel, if we could come up and if we could have a group picture with everybody. Thank you.

Yeah, let's go down there and take a picture.

I want to just thank the committee for their great work. These 5 people to me have such a brain trust. They know so much about sustainability.

Sustainability.

I've been impressed with the level of professionalism and the great qualities that they have weighed in on for our city, so I appreciate their great work. For Sarah, how many years did you go? Did you start the committee? So 7 years ago she came to the city and she was an amazing recycler, and I'll never forget her low, low recyclability. I've tried to be a good recycler myself, but thank you so much for the great expertise, and they have a passion for this, and they're— and they really have weighed in on many issues and will continue to do so. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Next, we'd like to have Chief Sanderson come up.

Council, thank you for this opportunity. Members in the audience, my name is Mark Sanderson. I'm the fire chief. And it's my opportunity tonight to actually introduce International Firefighter Day. And before I get into just the basics of what that is, I just want to take this opportunity to let you all know how grateful I am and honored to be the leader of this group. I truly believe that we have the very best firefighters in the business. And so with that, International Firefighter Day is observed on May 4th. It was first instituted in 1999 following the death of 5 firefighters in a tragic brushfire in Australia. May 4th was chosen as the date of recognition because that is Saint Florian Day, who is said to be the patron saint of firefighters and was known as one of the first commanding firefighters of a Roman battalion that saved many lives during his tenure. Although International Firefighter Day commemorates those who have died in the line of duty, the day also recognizes lifetime service given both by firefighters and those who support fire emergency services. And so although there are many different ways to celebrate firefighters on this day, the most important would be to just show your appreciation for their service, the risks, and the sacrifice with a simple thank you. We will be providing a lunch for our firefighters and their family members on May 4th, along with providing them a small gift as a token of our appreciation, and I'll make sure that you all receive an invite in the morning, and if your schedules will allow, then we ask that you join us on that day next week. Mayor and Council, I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank each of you on behalf of all of the men and women in our department for your ongoing support and the services— for the services that we provide to the community. And it, it's— it goes without saying. If it's okay, Mayor, at this time I'd like to invite members of B-Shift Platoon led by Battalion Chief John Tills to join us at the front for a group picture that I plan to share, showing your support for International Firefighter Day to the community through our social media sources.

Yes, that sounds good.

Great. Oh yeah, scoot over, Linnéa. Debbie, scoot over a little bit. You just gotta go— it's perfect. 1, 2, 3.

All right, very good.

Like I said, we are doing several awards tonight. Our last award is the Walter C. Orem Award. And to present that, I've asked Terry Peterson to, to take care of that.

So this is exciting. It's been said, and it's probably true, Roger Dudley has probably been to more Planning Commission meetings and City Council meetings in this city than anybody else. I think that's a very safe thing to say because I represent the City Council on a Planning Commission meeting, and he's— I don't know if there's been many meetings he hasn't been to. So Roger, I'll see you next Wednesday, uh, probably again for the next Planning Commission meeting. But, uh, let me just tell you a little bit about Roger. Um, he was born in New Mexico. I, I won't tell you how old he is, but he will have a birthday in a couple weeks and he'll turn 79 if I did the math right. So, uh, but, um, he grew up, uh— But even though he grew up picking cotton as part of his experience in life, he's not battle. But they did do that. His father, as a boy, his family moved around. They lived in several different states. His dad did, you know, he was a truck driver and did a number of things. And so Roger worked with the family. And so Roger always thought as a youngster, he was going to grow up either being a truck driver or an excavation contractor. And so being a civic engineer, I don't think ever crossed his mind. But from what I understand, some of his friends— he lived in New Mexico— some of his friends were going off to BYU. He went to BYU with his friends. After a year at BYU, he interrupted his studies and went on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served in Mexico. After completing his mission, came back to BYU, graduated from BYU in 1970 with a 5-year degree in civic engineering. And from that degree, he was working part-time with Aspen Engineering while as a student. And right after graduating, then became— went out on his own, formed his own company in 1975. If I'm getting my dates wrong, Roger, just shake your head no. But— and which was Dudley and Associates. Most of the people in Orem, either you, your family members, or grandparents, Roger Dudley has touched your lives in some way, whether he surveyed the subdivision you live in, whether he did work with your companies. His engineering firm is well respected and has been here since— well, he started about 1970 when he was still a student. They've done subdivisions, development, established boundary control. project development. And by the way, I point out— where's Ryan? Before computers, Ryan, a lot of this— I don't know how that would happen. But so a lot of this was being done before computers. So just a couple other things about Roger. His whole career has been in Orem. He's had several different offices, all in Orem. So he's an Orem guy through and through. And everything hasn't been always smooth in the surveying business. Business and development business. And I know some, there's some developers here that will probably agree to this. Things do go in cycles. During the '70s, late '70s, the country went through a recession. And so, a lot of jobs were lost and his industry was affected greatly by that. But he survived. And then there was the boom times that he also, then he couldn't handle the volume of work that he had. And then of course we had a, you know, 2008, another recession, which was pretty tough in the development business. Even 2020 with COVID impacted a lot of things that were going on in his world. But through all this, Roger has been a mainstay in our city. We appreciate him, and I need to mention the most, probably the most important part of Roger is Susie. But we'll have them both come up here in just a minute. So we appreciate you. The Walter C. Orem Award is, is the greatest award we give to a citizen in the city of Orem. And could we just have everyone who's here as a friend or family of Roger's please stand?

Terry, I think this is the most we've ever had out for this award.

Congratulations.

So thank you. Thank you very much. That's a pretty strong message. So on behalf of the City Council and Mayor— and the Mayor is going to present you an award. In fact, Roger, if you and your wife could come up, the Mayor's got a plaque that he wants to present to you.

Can you pass it on?

Yes, we appreciate you coming tonight. And it's exciting. And you've got quite the crew here. That is a lot of mouths to feed. But we just— this is, this is Orem's biggest award. And only a few people get this. And you were highly recommended. And it sounds like you've lived an amazing life. I actually lived in New Mexico for a while too. I had cotton behind my house that went on for miles. So I— yep.

Like Terry said.

Anyway, just Want to congratulate you and, and honor you tonight with this award, and we appreciate all of your friends and family coming.

Thank you.

Mayor, I'll go ahead. If I may, we'd like to ask Roger Dudley and his family and friends to stick around through our long council meeting today. Now we've got a short agenda.

We'd—

we have our council conference room set up for a little reception afterwards. And we'd love to join you there afterwards.

So I have to, I have to just end with a quote. This is from Roger. By the way, if anyone wonders if he's going to retire, that's not on the— that's not a word he understands or knows. The family's nodding. But he often says his idea of a retirement party is have the party at noon and then drop dead on the way home. But don't go there, Roger.

Thank you, Terry. Well, thank you, all of you that came tonight for these different awards. Lots of good things happening in Orem, and, and you are what makes this happen. Item number 7, moving on, is personal appearances. We don't have any requests for personal appearances tonight, which doesn't happen very often. We'd rather just give awards.

This is great.

We've got item number 8, 8.1, consent items, and we've got approval of meeting minutes. Is that—

is that for what?

For which minutes? Okay. All right, so we just have the March 28th minutes.

And Mayor, I'd like to make a motion that we approve the minutes for our March 28th meeting.

Second. Okay, Terry.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Okay, the minutes— the consent items are approved. Let's move on to scheduled items. Item number 9, 9.1, we have a resolution authorizing the execution of an interlocal agreement between Orem, the City of Orem, and Utah County for the 2023 municipal elections. And Theresa, if you'd like to present this to us.

Theresa is our city recorder.

All right, so as part of the agreement to sign with the Utah County for Election Services, we need a resolution passed by city council that will allow our mayor to enter into this election agreement. And there's various services that they're going to provide for us: the ballot layout, the printing of it, the mailing of it, the postage. They're also going to process all those ballots. They will also print the optical scans. They're going to program and test the equipment they're going to use for They're going to recruit, train, and supervise all poll workers. They will also take care of paying the poll workers for their work. They will deliver the supplies, the equipment needed. They will tabulate, report the election results. They will do the provisional ballot verification. They will update the voter history database. They will conduct all audits or recounts that are required by the state statute. They will be available for Election Day administrative support. And then they will do the operations of countywide voter centers. So they'll be letting us know where those centers will be, but there will be a physical location for our voters to vote if they choose so. And they will also be taking care of the ballot drop box services, the maintaining them, the unlocking and locking of them, the collecting the ballots, and also maintaining the security footage that is directed towards those ballot boxes. And so the proposal for both the primary and the general election, the estimated cost is $213,000. $1,268.50, and that covers, um, both those elections, and it's decided by how many actual voters you have registered. And the City of Orem has 47,393 voters registered. Um, and so I just present this to you for your vote. Mayor, questions?

Yes, questions.

Thank you.

In the unlikely event we don't have a primary, do we cut that amount in half?

If you do not have a primary, they won't charge you for the primary. Yes. And you would have to have more than 6 candidates.

Thank you.

Any other questions? I'm curious about the 50 cents, where that came from on the bill.

I'll cover it.

I'm just kidding.

I'll cover it. Okay, you cover the rest.

I'll cover the 50/50.

Right down to the penny for you.

Okay, I move that we— are you ready for a movement?

Any other questions? We have any other questions?

I move that we authorize the ex— move the City Council approve the authorization of the execution of an interlocal agreement between the City of Orem and Utah County for the 2023 municipal elections. Second.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Resolution passes.

Thank you, Teresa. Moving on to item 9.2. This is another ordinance amending the City Council's meeting agenda for 2023. Steve, if you'd like to—

Yeah, Mayor and City Council, as you just mentioned, this is a proposed ordinance to update and amend the City Council meeting schedule for 2023. You previously approved a meeting schedule back in December of 2022. We have a little modification we wanted to make to that schedule. Essentially wanted to add a City Council meeting for May 16th and eliminate the previously scheduled meeting for for May 23rd. So this ordinance would make those changes, and that's essentially the only change to the meeting schedule that was previously approved.

Okay, thank you. Any questions about that?

Okay, let's move to a vote.

Well, first I'll move that we amend the City Council meeting schedule for 2023 as identified by Mr. Earl.

I'll second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The ordinance passes. Thank you. We are having a very quick meeting tonight. You guys are extremely lucky we're having a short meeting and dessert. Doesn't get any better than that. Bren, your item number 11, City Manager information items.

Yes, just one, one little thing. We've got a memento here for you and a cupcake. I believe this is all edible to commemorate our Arbor Day celebration that we had earlier this afternoon. This actually marks the 30th year that the city has achieved and received the Tree City USA designation. And Mayor, I think we had 4 or 5 times the amount of attendance to our event. That's right, we did in previous years. Now, come next year, a lot, a lot to triple 3 people, but we did it anyway. But anyway, we're proud of the accomplishment, and so we've got this little memento, memento for you. Other than that, like I said, we've got, uh, the council conference room set up for our reception with the Dudley family and friends.

Okay, thank you.

So, so, Mayor, I believe that what— that was, I think, Julie Smith and company that did these refreshments, just so the family knows.

Anyway, thank you. I think we've covered everything tonight. Would someone like to make a motion to adjourn?

I'll make a motion to adjourn.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

We adjourn. Thank you for coming.

We appreciate it.