City Council · 2023-09-19

All right, since the mayor is going to be a few minutes late and I'm the mayor pro tem, I want to go ahead and get us started so we can stay on track. Our first presentation is by Blake. We love Blake in his fashionable suit.

Thank you.

We'll turn the time over for Waste Management can audit and pilot program update. Yes, you have 20 minutes.

I like your suit.

Thank you.

I got this in Milan, just so you know, and I had it custom done. You should see the white pants.

The Levi's suit's really nice.

Yeah, so, um, so first and foremost, I ain't gonna do a presentation. Wanted this to be very informal, ask questions, be able to go through. Um, so should I stand, sit? Do you have a preference?

Um, okay.

Um, so I'm gonna start off with the CAN audit. Um, just so everybody's aware, as per our new terms of our agreements, this is long overdue. Um, we've known for probably about 3 years, um, maybe even 4 years, that the containers in Orem were not indicative of what we were picking up. So as per this latest agreement, we were required to do a physical can audit. We did. We initially— the data showed 5,400 cans that were unaccounted for. And after, what we did was we took GIS mapping data, cross-referenced everything, and we filled Very confident in our data, but it is roughly 4,500 cans that we found.

Explain this to me. They have a can they weren't paying for, they found— like, how do you get a can if you don't—

Simply put, it happens through osmosis. Somebody comes in, doesn't set up trash shirts. You know, somebody gets a new can, but then they get set up a new customer comes in and they go, well, gosh, I got 2 cans, I only have to pay for 1 can.

Right.

And so what we found for this, we knew this was coming. This was not a— Brent and I have literally been talking about this for over 3 years. This is a good thing for the city. It's also a good thing for Waste Management. Essentially what it boils down to is there's 4,500 containers that You're not billing for and we're not getting paid for. So that's the good news. Bad news is there's going to be some, you know, when we begin or when you begin billing for it, there's going to be a little bit of heartache over it. There's going to be some customers that, you know, say, well, hold on, you know, I shouldn't be billed for this. Well, the nice part about this audit experience is very few people go, Hey, I should have been paying for this. Let me give you the money. Nobody says a whole lot when you send the bill because they realize that, hey, we were getting something that we should have been paying for.

So—

Most people will be okay.

Most people will be okay. You'll have quite a few that come back and say, hey, come pick my excess can up, I don't need this. That's where you'll see probably about 10% is usually the number that we see. That will go, hey, come pick up my container. We anticipate that, we know what's coming. Um, so that's the good and bad of the container audit. I'm gonna take a breath for a second.

So, so Blake, I'll just add there, so from here we're still kind of quality checking the audits that Waste Management has done, but then after that There'll still be a customer service approach that we'll engage in where, where there'll be communication back and forth, like Blake is sort of summarizing, where we'll say, okay, according to our records and our audit, you know, there's excess cans at your property. It is our intent that if you want to keep that many cans, we would start to bill for that many cans unless you want to turn those cans some of those cans back.

And to piggyback off that— well said, Brynn— to piggyback off it, 2 things. So right now, the file that we have, and that's why you hear me say approximate, about, is now it's in your GIS mapping team's hands to go through and verify the data. So they're verifying the data, and then our customer service— we do this all the time, so this is not something new— We then help with talk tracks, any sort of communication that you want to send out to these individuals. So it's not just, hey, we're going to start billing, thanks a lot. You know, the customer's notified and they're aware of that. And we'll work with your customer service team on what that sounds like.

So who picks them up?

Who does?

I mean, if you have 4,500, who's going to pick them up?

It won't be 4,500.

I'm going to say, who picks them up?

We do.

You guys pick them up? We do.

It'll be, like I said, we end Anticipate 300 or 400. That's why we'll kind of do a phased approach in this where, you know, we're not going to one day, you know, if everybody says, hey, come pick up our container, no. It'll be a phased approach to getting those containers. We'll work with your customer service team, put together a list. We'll do, you know, 50 at a time. But we do this all over the country. Usually you're somewhere between 5 to 10%, so it's not going to be a— it's not going to be a huge number of individuals.

Is there a certain area of our city that you would start? Maybe there's more cans in the northeast-west quadrant?

No, no, we'll just have a dedicated person that will take the first 50, we'll go to the next 50, and it'll probably take us about a week's time. Any other questions around the container audit? This is good news. I have to tell you, this is long, long overdue, and shame on Waste Management. It's a very labor-intensive process. It took us just shy of 8 weeks to compile all this data. We actually hired an individual Just for the container audit. So understandably, it's taken us way too long to get to this point. We're very excited that we finally got to this point to be able to, you know, truly identify what's on the street. Okay, I'm going to move on to exciting news if nobody's got any questions on this.

I was told I got 20 minutes.

Um, any other questions? Good. Okay, um, talk to you about the recycle pilot. First off, as everybody's aware, many of the elected officials came to our facility. They were able to see the pilot in all its glory. We are very excited about this, and Peter's going to push this out to everybody. I have to tell you, we're as excited as Orem should be. If you didn't see the news coverage of the rollout of the recycle pilot with Orem, it was incredible. It was some of the best coverage we've gotten from a media perspective. And we were just talking about this before everybody got in here. Oftentimes with recycling and news coverage stories, you hear a lot of negative recycling's this, it's all going to the landfill. And the news outlets' coverage of Orem being on the forefront of a recycling pilot partnering with Waste Management, it was excellent, excellent coverage. It really explained how the pilot's going, why Orem adopted this, how you're able to do plastic bags now. It went through the facility. It really was a very positive rollout to the recycle program, what we've instituted, what you've instituted. And yeah, so we're very excited about this, and I believe you're going to push it out to everybody because it's worthwhile. If there was a way to get it in a newsletter or something to be able to push out there, because I was over the moon, um, the coverage that was received. I mean, I can tell you we had a city that saw the news coverage and said, hey, why didn't you pick us? What— why? Yeah, well, all good things with forum, and I will say this, and this is kudos to Bren, um, not that you do this, but Brent has always been a very good— Brent and his team have always been very good early adopters of items that we've done, whether that was— what was it— Top 10 in the Bin or the Recycle Pilot or, you know, the, the app, the—

Recycle Coach.

Recycle Coach. You've been on the forefront when it comes to recycling, and you don't see that too often, so it was really good to see a worm recognized for their efforts and what they're doing. So, um, I'll take a breath there, stop, see what questions everybody has.

Can Pete send this out today?

Sure, and you can find it online too. Um, just put in, I think it was Box 13, Box 13 worm recycling, and it's the first thing that pops up. It's been all over Waste Management's website because Again, this isn't just an anomaly in Utah. This is something that is an anomaly a lot of times throughout the entire US to get such positive coverage for the efforts that you're making, both with us and in your community.

So it's worthwhile to see.

I do want to commend— I thought the postcard was really good that got sent out. It was very clear. Do we need to do that again? Some people don't see it.

I don't know.

Usually you hit them 2 or 3 times.

Yes, we meet as a pilot team and each week we try to do something digitally or a mailer.

Okay, so we're just trying because, you know, it goes all the way through the end of November.

Usually they say take 7 times before people—

And we're hitting them a bunch. So Pete's done an incredible job. We've had a team working directly with Pete. Her name is Layla. And we have roughly weekly or every other week phone calls talking about how it's going, who was targeted, what it's looking like, how the rollout's going. So this week, the real positive message was through the news coverage. And it was actually picked up by other outlets as well.

So—

I'll just say Blake was too kind to mention my name specifically.

Really, it's just I think we as staff here, from members as council, to focus on proactive communication, educating our residents, being transparent, being early adopters of technological advancements.

So really, the kudos should be— So that'll be on our Facebook page. Yeah, so we're gonna add some stuff you've had here today. And put it all together in a package.

Yeah, and Bryn said it best because you, you don't see a lot of early adoption with technology as it relates to trash and recycling. A lot of people think of it just as, hey, it's trash and recycling. A big green truck comes around, it gets picked up, and it goes somewhere. Um, to have the technology and put it in place to be able to recognize and actually quantify these numbers. The reason I don't have numbers today and that I'm talking through it is we're early. The numbers are good. I'm not saying they're not, but it's very early. We're still fine-tuning everything. You know, as people tell you, it's— the machines are going very well, but quantifying that, we want to make sure that that's fine-tuned before we provide any.

Anything else? Anyone else?

You guys let me off. Okay, 15, 16 minutes. So thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This is all great stuff. It's been long overdue since I presented, so looking forward to it. And if you have any questions, all of you have my email.

Please feel free to reach out.

So I think we need to Blake, that he enjoys working with the city of Warren.

Yeah, please. No, I— and I have— I think we've been a partner for over 20 years.

And, you know, whose fault is that? Come on.

It's fine.

It's fine. It's fine.

It's fine.

We do appreciate you bringing your trucks for our Touch-a-Truck. I think that's always good for the kids to see up close and kind of examine those. Thank you for that support.

So no, absolutely. And I just, before I leave, and I wanted to piggyback off of what you said, is we don't often get to see a 2-way partnership. You know, it's not always recognized, you know, the community giving back to us as well and having a 2-way partnership. So we greatly appreciate that as well, being early adopters, really working with us on all the things that, you know, we bring up. You don't always say yes, but we always discuss them. So, um, we appreciate it. Thank you. And continue to, you know, bring the— we'll continue to bring ideas and, you know, see what we can do and go from there.

Okay, so Blake, is this the perfect time to ask if we Waste Management can—

would like to be a part of our Gold Star Family Monument at Freedom Plaza fundraising effort.

It's a perfect time. And, you know, thank you for doing it in a public forum. Because, you know, I'll say yes, Fran put a stamp.

We always say yes.

So thank you for making sure it's in front of everybody.

But we want to—

and on the recording, by the way, it's recorded.

It's going Published in the newsletter. So thank you for putting me on the spot with that too.

So thank you.

Any other questions?

We appreciate your time.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Now it's just the amount. So the mayor wanted to be here for item 2, so we're going to skip to item 3, Healthy Utah Community Designation. Heather Cox, grant specialist, so come on up. You've got 15 minutes. Oh, if you want to beat him by a minute or 2, that's good too. Okay, Get Healthy Utah, so you know, is an initiative that was created by Lieutenant Governor Greg Bell and the ULCT, Utah League of Cities and Towns. And the effort of Get Healthy Utah is to help cities across the state improve the health of their citizens. So there is a designation called the Healthy Utah Community designation, and we wanted to be able to take on this designation as a city. And have a coalition continually looking to see how we can improve the health of our citizens. So what is this Healthy Utah Community designation? Well, I don't know if we're going to do a big presentation. No, we're just going to— Okay. And I want, I want you to know that last week when we were at the Utah League of Citizen Pounds, I did say to Brent, How come Orem's not up there? How come we're not on the list? And I said to him, we probably are already doing most of the things that— so with our Family City USA, it seemed like a natural fit for healthy families, healthy individuals, young and old. So thank you for— Yes, and we are— that is important to know is that we are one of the large— only medium to large-sized cities who hasn't had an official designation, and we are doing the things that— it was pretty easy for us to meet the qualifications. So it was pretty much just pulling together the documentation so that we can just apply for this and be recognized at the next ULCT. And it's what, a 3-year designation? It is. Every 3 years we have to reapply.

Thank you.

Of course. So the process to gain the designation is twofold. You have to sign a letter of commitment, which we send out.

Yep.

Yes.

We have a letter of commitment that has to be signed by the mayor and council. We'll send this out electronically via DocuSign so that the mayor can sign it as well. We have to identify our health— or sorry, establish a health coalition. We have to have at least 4 people on that health coalition that represents different interests in our city, and we've already established this health coalition. I'll talk about that in a minute. We also have to identify health strategies, so current strategies That we currently have in place for our citizens to have active living, access to healthy food, and mental health.

Yeah, and those are highlighted on those letters of commitment that were passed out on that bulleted list. As Debbie mentioned, we are by far exceeding the minimum requirements for this designation, so we're ahead of the game. It'll be very easy for us.

And the thing that we had to establish was this fourth, to develop a community health plan. So we had to develop a 3-year plan so that going forward we can continue to update that plan and continue to just have a commitment to improving the health of our citizens. So our current highlighted strategies: we offer free and/or low-cost community sports programs, we address active transportation connectivity gaps between key community destinations, We've adopted an ordinance to require new subdivisions to provide sidewalks and lights. Our farmers market accepts SNAP benefits. Also, I think it's worth noting that our farmers market also has a benefit for seniors 65 and older. If they are in a certain socioeconomic status, they can have an additional $30 for every $30 they spend. So spend $30 and they get $60 worth of produce. Oh wow, that's great. We promote enrollment in SNAP, WIC, and school meal programs on our city website, and we implement one new worksite wellness strategy around healthy food among city employees and our local businesses. With mental health, we all know about our mental health crisis, our mental health team in the police department. We host a recurring monthly community event that promotes social connection for our vulnerable demographic. We have lunches for the elderly. And we implement a program and a recurring event, um, or establish an area of the community that promotes connection with nature. We have awesome parks— Timonogos Park, Nelson's Grove, we're at Canal Trail— that just is great access to—

So the lunch is tied to the senior center?

Yes, yes, it is.

That's where you're coming from because they have meals every day. Yeah, every day. And they have home-cooked meals, social connection programs too. Bingo nights.

Yes. Bingo is good for the mental health. Yes, it is. Maybe we could do a bingo in the park for the seniors during the summer. Yeah, you know, get them outside. One thing, thinking the senior center, they do have that Share the Harvest thing that's out in their parking lot where they share the garden fresh vegetables. Is that something we could note or I'm just saying, I think that's a really lovely thing that we have, that for people who are maybe need some extra because they don't have quite the income. And I guess for additional context, do— the amount of highlighted strategies that are required of us is dependent on our population. So we're required to have 3 in each category here. So we just want to put 3 in each category. We can add more if you'd like, but it's not required.

That's fine.

Oh, okay.

And the farm—

I mean, the farmers market is huge.

It is, yes.

Yeah, it's very successful.

And that access to healthy produce is so important, and that's actually part of our community health plan that we're intending to put in more, uh, community gardens. It's just so helpful. So our highlighted health needs, we did some research Get Healthy Utah has resources that show that where we can access data on the specific health needs of Orem City. And so we did our research, and on your handout we actually have the QR codes to take you to the research, how we accessed it.

On the back side with the map.

And specific health needs that we thought stood out to us were Orem kind of struggles with our access to and promotion of healthcare services, especially in North Orem. healthy eating, obesity, and diabetes, and social health and community connectedness. Could you define that access? What promotion of healthcare? What do you mean? I mean, I understand access too, but what are we deficient in, in promotion of healthcare services?

Yeah, um, it's, it's mostly the communication or understanding of the value of annual checkups and screenings, and that's why You'll see over— actually, it's on this front page.

The—

and this is UtahCounty.org specific on some of these data points, but we have a high— there are different diseases and illnesses that are highly preventable that we, um, as a county have low, uh, test rates. So like one of the highest things in, in Utah County compared to the rest of Utah are prostate cancer deaths, which is a disease that can be preventable if you're screened early enough. So that's just one example of communicating to the public and partnering with our local hospitals, Orem Community Hospital and Timpanogos Regional Medical Center. to promote and encourage people to go participate in those screenings annually. Skin cancer is another.

Just reminders then.

Exactly, yes.

Interesting, prostate cancer and colon cancer.

Colon cancer.

In Oregon specifically. Do we have a reason why we think it's high? That's a good question. I don't know.

Men don't go to the doctor?

I don't know.

Why are you including men?

David was listening.

I went to the doctor today.

See, I went to get my skin thing worked on.

I'm just saying. Generally speaking, men, you have to take a lot more to get them to the doctor. You have to talk, you got to make the appointment.

Is that being kind?

Yes, because she cares about it. No, the reason is because I think— I'm trying to understand the why. And it's a matter of telling the women who love the men or significant others, make sure they get the screening. And sometimes I wonder if it's cost and access. So that's why one of our recommendations is partnering with IHC and Tipanogos Hospital to implement mobile screening units at community events like farmers markets. If they're able to bring that— now they have things like mobile nanograms, just mobile testing units where they can bring in. Well, can we partner with some of the big businesses? I mean, frankly, you, you know, partner with them, like Adobe, take a mobile unit out there and They'll— you'll get response. But yeah, they're out there. But I mean, once in a while, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the avenues are endless for this. So as Heather will talk about, there will be a coalition working with the city to help us strategize and implement these health plans.

Any questions on that before we do the second one? Okay, the second is healthy eating, obesity, and diabetes. We're always continuing to expand our recreational amenities so that we can encourage just physical activity and people moving. Social health and community connectedness. Establishing community gardens, that is interestingly, that's part of the healthy eating, yes, but, and access to healthy food, but it's had surprising benefits for community connectedness. Carson's kind of the lead on this community gardens thing, and he's noticed how much it contributes to community connectedness and mental health.

Yeah, in fact, there was a story covered on Orem Community Hospital's community gardens on the, the impact of mental health among residents in Orem. That'd be really awesome to check out. If you guys ever have the chance. But not only community gardens where people are coming together in their neighborhoods and actually interacting with their neighbors and meeting new people, but our farmers market, people are coming together and interacting. Those are all measures we're taking to bring together our community and let them interact with one another and foster, foster those connections.

You can also start a seed library program. You can do that through our library here. And we are going to, this coming spring, partner with Utah State University. They do a community well-being project, and they conduct a survey of residents' health priorities and concerns. It's actually free, and it's over the course of just a few weeks. But we talked to them last— a couple weeks ago, and they said they operate on a shoestring budget. So they I said, if you want to give us $500 to help you do this, feel free to. There's no obligation for cost. And so that will actually help us identify more specifically health priorities in Orem.

I mean, it's the same as your budget.

If you give them $500, you're gonna get more bang for your buck, or just— No, it's the same.

It's a donation. Yeah.

Would that be a citywide thing with these? Do you do that? At least citywide. Most, most of the cities that are already on— have this designation participate in this USU project, and it's mostly larger cities as well that are participating in it. It's more specific. It's not just, you know, Utah County's Department of Health data. It's Orem-specific. It can gauge the residents' perspectives. Rather than just quantitative data, it can be qualitative. And what do I as an Orem resident value or see a need or concern in my community related to health? So it gives us the opportunity to garner more insight on how do we do this for our residents specifically.

And also hopefully get us a better idea of why don't people go to these screenings.

Right.

What's holding them back so we can better address that. And then we're always going to build and add to existing trails, which helps us. Oh, we don't have the, uh, the board. So we do have a health coalition. I realized I sent this to Teresa. We do have a health coalition. We have a representative from Timpanogos Regional Hospital, another representative from Warren Community Hospital, Chief Adams, and a representative from the Eugene County Health Department. So we have a good cover of all the different health needs and people who are on the ground and know what it means. Just thinking, you know, I work at MAGN and we have a lot of aging. I just wonder if the senior population has been represented on your committee? And if not, would you add someone from aging? We can certainly add someone. I just think that's a component that has unique concerns, so we just want to make sure their voices are heard. Okay, I will definitely reach out to someone and try to get someone.

Yeah, the minimum requirement is just 4, so that's where—

that was—

this is a starting point for us. So if there are ideas or recommendations, obviously we can add to that to make it a representative coalition. We focus more on healthcare experts as this starting point so we could bring something to you today.

Yeah, well, I think that makes sense. I just think we want to have the voices of different populations.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and with Chief Adams, I was thinking safety, physical safety is such a part of health. It's not just physiological, we need safety. And I think for sure that we need to get someone from the aging population, or Gina, someone like Gina might be— Gina would be great. Yeah. Then just someone who knows that population.

Yes, maybe somebody on the rec side, you know, with the rec center or something, that you get all covered all bases.

Yeah, right. May I ask, your index here on the back, where did this data come from?

It's from those 2, 2 data sources. One is called the Healthy Place Index. It's county data. And then the public health indicator report is also county.

So are these— how do they get these parameters? Utah County Health Department, or sorry, this is the state's health department, state of Utah. Based on like, I don't even know, number of insured people? I mean, how— this is a good question.

I don't know their, their process for data collection.

Because I, I mean, it looks to me it's an income-related thing, quite frankly.

But there is income as a component of looking at the map, right? Yes. Yeah, there is a component of There's a lot of components. If you pull up that report, it talks about, you know, some physical aspects of health, but also income levels, housing, that housing-related issues that impact health. So all the health-related measures.

Is there a way we can just get physiological?

Yes.

Yeah.

So on that report, it breaks— you can click on each area of focus. So you could just click on social health and it gives you more breakdown of what are they talking about with social health.

Okay.

Yes.

Because you don't know where you got to improve. I mean, to me this is so broad, right? We got to narrow it down to figure out what we need to improve on, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's— that will be beneficial with the USU partnership if we go that avenue, where it will be directly from our residents.

Yes.

Yeah, and on that report you can even break it down by census tract. This is a citywide—

this is citywide, but it actually breaks it down by each census tract for all of those.

Yeah, so you can look at various areas of the world too, and you'll see the differences as well.

Perfect, thank you. Yes, any other questions? Back at our next council meetings, associated with like a resolution or something.

So we're done.

Just sign it now, or just— you can sign it. I think we want to kind of continue with the practice where we give you, uh, present, you know, draft information, and then we come back in a future meeting for official.

So like next week.

That's what we're— that's what we'll share.

Sounds great. All right, thank you for doing this.

Yeah, and please share with us your ideas on, you know, ideas you have for the health coalition. If you have, uh, people in mind that you think would be beneficial to that group or add some needed insight, uh, or any thoughts on the letter of commitment, feel free to shoot that our way and we can prepare it for moving forward.

You know, they have— and I don't know if they still do this or not— but when I was in the schools a lot, we would have dentists come in to, you know, present things to the kids and give fluoride and things like that. So maybe one of those dentists who's actually in the trenches and understands what's going on with the children would be a good individual to give.

Yes, that's a good point.

And I do want to draw attention that we did include the community gardens. I think there was Aren't there 2 new gardens that we will be opening up? 2 or 3?

Yeah, we're in the process of planning for those still. That's the beauty of this whole health plan is a lot of— number one, we're doing more than we need to for this designation, and number two, we already have a lot of plans that improve people's health in Orem. You know, we're always building more Parkville Crest, for example. That's going to be a big social health impact. Bringing the community together and physical health trails. We're adding, you know, some more bike trails. You know, we're constantly working on these things, so it's not going to be a lot of work on our end because we're already proactive in it.

Well, I think it just shows that we are already family-friendly and we already value people. So thank you so much. Okay, next we will go to number 4, Community Development Block Grant CARES Act. This will be Ken and Kenneth. How many times is Kenny gonna show that? We don't even know at this point.

Well, we're back again.

I mean, kind of a show. Thank you for letting us present. The CDBG Commission wanted to give you a report on our COVID-related funding that we had in the last 3 years and let you know what good it's done in the community, talking about you know, healthy communities and things, um, this money did help during the COVID pandemic, make the community better. So Ken will be presenting and I'll just fill in when needed.

So hello everyone, great to be back for you again. And we'll keep it short because I know you got a big agenda today. So we just wanted to give a report and a kind of a final summary of The COVID funding that we got. So, City of Warren, we received $699,923 in COVID CDBG funding in addition to our annual grant from HUD. And so we just wanted to— we're not going to go line by line, just want to give you some updates on that and want to summarize how these funds benefited so many of our residents and so many organizations that serve our residents. So just a quick summary of the process. Organizations could apply for funds, and city staff also encouraged applicants to apply for funds. And the CDG Commission, we reviewed and made recommendations to the council. We did that over 20 times, and then we— council approved 48 different related projects with this funding, and we're going to highlight a few of those for you. And just a quick reminder, this is our current Advisory Commission. We thank them for their service and their willingness to serve the city. And there is turnover, so some of the— some of these weren't here through the entire process. And we also thank the council, this current council, for their support, and also previous council who helped this process as well. So quick summary here. So these, these funds, these COVID funds provided funding that was not available from other sources, and it made it possible for some of these organizations who may not have been able to survive COVID, it made it possible for them to make it through and continue to provide services to our citizens and residents. And that 4th bulleted item. Some organizations like RAW and Project REACH, they were able to change their service delivery from in-person using the funds that they received to do some more online things, which may not have been possible without this funding that they were able to get. This funding also made it possible for more students to attend school online as necessary and for employees to get online access as well. So the adults in our community, they were able to get using this funding, and just go over some of that for you as well really quickly. And then finally, our seniors— there were a lot of benefits to our Senior Friendship Center, and we want to highlight those for you next. So I just wanted— this is the only example we want to go a little more in depth on and just show you all the benefits that our seniors Friendship Center received. So they received all total, multiple projects, $89,154. And they will, with that funding, continue to provide important meals to seniors. They will provide online activities during the pandemic. They were able to create facilities which are still benefiting this, the center, and those who use that center. And, uh, was able to fund holiday meals for residents. during the pandemic, which hopefully was a good morale booster for them. By equipment and set up a small food bank in partnership with Community Action Services.

Can I ask a question? How many people are utilizing that food bank? Do we have any idea? Um, she's— so I went to their gala on Saturday. Didn't she say 300 a month or more? I think that's what she said. I just wanted everyone to hear. I think— and they're only open 2 days a week, once a week. Once you remember if they were unique individuals or just that business, you remember? I don't think she said— she said it started with 9 the first week and then it's up to about 300.

So. And then the last 3 items here, added an awning to help with that outdoor meal pickup, to provide protection for those coming to visit and those volunteers that were helping. Upgraded the entry to the center, and then purchased new portable chairs. So the senior center benefited significantly from this funding. We just wanted to highlight that for you. So we'll just get a couple of highlights for you on some of these projects. That top item, we were able to help 10 low-income homeowners shelter in place using our critical home repair fund that we We're able to fund using some COVID funds, and we were able to do touchless drinking fountains in some of our armed schools to help, to help prevent the spread of COVID We're able to provide table guards and picnic tables for the kids to eat outside, hopefully to help spread as well. And then the picture of Gaga ball court there, it's funny to provide a Gaga ball court. I thought we could maybe see who's played Gaga ball, but I think—

I've heard of it. Like that picture on the bottom.

Yeah.

It's like foursquare. Yeah, I know. Is that supposed to be fun? Is that a Sharon Elementary? That wasn't Sharon. So what are we doing with that now that Sharon's closed? I don't know.

I need to find that out.

And also, like, the drinking fountains, they were in Sharon. Maybe they need to be—

Yeah, I'll have to ask the school district. And I remember, I thought I asked to see if we can go some of our parks. Do you know if besides the schools of the park? Yeah, that's in the presentation. Next, actually.

This is for you, this one.

It was a great segue.

So we did able— we're able to put touchless drinking fountains and water filling stations in 6 target neighborhood parks. And also, we work to do that same thing at United Way-owned properties to benefit our residents and the employees of those, of those agencies that benefit our community and our residents. So we'll do that as well and provided funds to Centro Hispano to help their clients with a small food bank. And then we're able to help Community Action Services with new cooler containers to help them serve more people. Because there were more— there was more demand for these services during the pandemic. I got 4 more for you here. So help provide funding for a senior infrastructure, for a senior project that helped with that. And again, with Community Action, this time with their financial education program that they run to help with guidance for those facing eviction, foreclosure, and other financial struggles. And Meals on Wheels, they had an extreme increase in demand and they were strapped there for a bit. And so this funding, we were the— our city was able to help them with that to help with additional meals for those in need during the pandemic. And we mentioned this earlier, we helped to provide the computer and digital infrastructure for Rob, Family Haven, Project READ to change their service delivery from less in-person to more, more of an electronic service delivery, and that funding helped them do that. And then we helped Community Action create an online application process and database, so again, go electronic from in-person. And with this funding, we helped House of Hope with their new HVAC system, which hopefully helped them get through the pandemic with less spread of that to their facilities. Their HVAC system was very out of date. And then 2 benefits to the Warren Police Department. One was there were additional demands on the department with homelessness, and we were able to fund— help them with funding those short-term solutions to help people kind of get back on their feet quickly when that was possible. And then this 411, I don't know if it's unexpected or not, but Domestic violence rates increased 30% during the pandemic, and so we were able to use this funding to help pay another victim's advocate to help with that increase in domestic violence. And our last 3 projects we want to highlight. So we were able to fund meals and programs for Boys and Girls Club and Centro Hispano, again, help their clients access electronic— you know, access electronically. if they need to for work or whatever they— for education and for work, etc., for their clients. And then finally, Orem Library was able to provide over 200 hotspots for low-income individuals and families to help them get access to online work and to learn during the pandemic. So again, that's our, that's our total that Orem was able to make use of. And this funding, we just went through many examples of how that benefited our residents.

Did you spend every dollar? Is anything left in it?

I don't believe that we did.

We still have a— we still had a little money left over. I mean, we, you know, we did the best we could to get the money out there. Um, just some of the money wasn't used by some authorities. It was a 3-year extension. So do you have another project out there that you're going to try to put it on? Probably not, just because it's not enough money to So we might end up drinking?

Potentially.

Yeah. Or Hillcrest. Okay, if you want to see us again. What can you tell me? I noticed Community Action was on there a lot. So they're located in Provo, correct?

They are.

Are they— what's the total dollar amount that we gave to that group? Probably about $50,000 with all their stuff. In all the different areas. I noticed we helped them set up their financial Services. Yeah, we let them set up— was like $5,000, $3,000. I mean, it was small amounts. I think the largest amount was the $25,000 for the food bank.

And are they—

those things that we help them with, are those— was that kind of like seed money? Are they continuing with those programs, do you think? Would you say? Yeah, most of them have continued with those programs. But right now, even the food bank— so the food bank now, because of the COVID-related funding going away, a lot of the The, you know, food things and things that were available. Now they're even seeing more increases in people coming. So because they got used to coming there to get stuff, and so now— but there's not the resources. The resources. So a lot of like the, you know, the SNAP benefits, things like that have gone away. The rental stuff, the rental assistance and things. So people are really struggling right now. So that some of these things are continuing to help those families that are struggling. Maybe I can also explain with the 3 major cities, county, and Provo. We look at who services what. We can all put money in the pot if they're like— if Community Action people, there's percentage that are Orem, we can choose to put some money in. The county can put money. The idea is to service the population of who the people that they are serving. So— So we don't necessarily say we, you know, we don't have a requirement that 50% of this has to go to Orem residents. Well, we do, we do have them track that because they do have to report beneficiaries to when they do that. So, but it's highly possible that Community Action could get money for Provo, Orem, and the county. So it's based on their— so are we at it? I guess my point is, are we at a deficit for our residents because we don't have that type of facility in Orem? No, because Community Action is in Provo. Is it Is it— they're going there, they keep track of where they're at. And the idea is that we each, we each pay the portion that reflects the population they're serving. So the percentage of what we're serving is how— what we provide them. So like on Meals on Wheels, we all provided money to help Meals on Wheels. We all provided, provided money to Community Action in different ways, United Way in different ways. We are always helping each of us together to provide. Would it be beneficial to our residents to attract that type of nonprofit to receive a resident, you know, to establish, be established in Orem? Potentially. So Community Action serves countywide. We have a food bank community. The senior food bank is actually run by Community Action, so they are serving our residents directly here. They have pantries all over, like, pantries in different communities besides their main pantry in Pueblo. Because I could see how some of those services could be difficult to access if you don't live near that facility, right? Transportation issues to report.

That's—

yeah, so Community Action is actually looking at satellite offices, especially like in the west and those kind of areas, to help people in those areas as well. A lot of the food banks have pantries in different areas, like we now have. So the senior center is like our satellite? Yes, there's that. Okay, thank you.

Can I add something as well regarding what we also provide seed money for is those that need assistance with utilities and so forth. We provide money for that for Orem residents, and that goes 100% to Orem residents. So those that qualify, for example, with the circuit breaker program or through any way, any other way of identifying that they have lower income poverty levels and so forth. We provide money for them if they qualify for assistance there.

Yeah, maybe your leftover money can— Chris can help it spread out. He knows about the paperwork. We talked about this this morning in our PWAC meeting.

It does go—

I mean, it doesn't go 100% for those that have those needs.

So yeah, it still has to be COVID-related.

Councilmember Miller brings up an interesting point though in terms of And we have a satellite food bank pantry, but are there other aspects, I guess, of community action that we want to help encourage for more resident benefit?

Yeah, stay cancer-free. Thank you. So, I mean, we can definitely look into that. I mean, I know that they're always looking. I mean, so we have the, like, so we have some agencies here that serve the county. So Kids on the Move, Family Haven, they, there's their countywide services that are located here. and not in other locations. So it's just kind of how different— I guess I'm thinking expanding, right? Maybe expand more. There seems to be a need. So I keep telling her to move to— I keep telling her to come to Warren.

So I think too, when Chris mentioned the circuit breaker program, that's— that money comes from the warranties. Comes back to them. So that money can be used for our citizens to help with the utilities and stuff. And I know a few people that are on it and they rely on it.

I know that food is very important. So I don't know if that extra money could go to community action for food. Ken and I are on top of this way more than you cannot believe the increased demand of food. It's— I've never seen it so astronomical. So any extra money could also go to purchase food, and that is COVID-related.

Well, it's all inflation-related.

Which is true. Yeah, it's all, it's all interconnected. I mean, there's some definitely worthy causes, and I'm sure Kenny can figure out where— Yeah, we're just waiting to see. We haven't reimbursed all the money, so once we know if we have any money left, we will. She has a few more years to figure that out. Okay, thank you so much. And I think you've been here at least 20 times because you said you presented to us.

It's in the 20s.

It's good to see you again. It is a— we owe you a debt of gratitude, and you're probably one of our most committed committee persons. I guess it's not a person, chair, whatever you are. We appreciate you very much. Kenny agreed to be chair again on Monday, so he'll be back in April and May. Well, I hope you feel like you've made a difference because I think you really have. So thank you. Thanks. Okay, let's go to number 6. Looks like 5 got canceled.

Yeah, so, Chris, unless there's any heads up you want to give, I think we ended up not being quite ready to bring up potential sewer code updates. So the plan is to forward that on to our next work session.

Next week.

Next week. Okay, we'll do next week.

Yeah, we will.

All right, now we'll move to today and potential campaign financial disclosure requirements for incumbents. You have 15 minutes.

Before the day gets started, she's a new father.

Ah, boy or girl?

A little girl.

Her name is JC.

We're very happy to have her in our home and glad that everybody's here safe.

What number is she?

She's number 2.

Do you have a boy or girl for number 1?

Boy.

Oh, so you evened the score.

We have. Luckily, I'm not outlanded in the house.

We can still play man-on-man defense.

The morning after he had the baby, he was wandering the halls of the city doing some city business.

I just throw that out.

That's how dedicated he is.

He took the whole day off? Took the whole day.

Oh, come on.

We know you weren't even at the hospital when you're like— Well, we do appreciate it. Make sure you keep a work-life balance.

Paperwork.

So as we Our previous City Council, we passed some amendments, some changes to our ordinances. And as we were going through that, there was some discussion about whether or not we wanted to go above and beyond what the state code requires as far as campaign financial disclosures. And as we did that, this idea percolated that really there is no disclosure of campaign finances that come in after that 30-day window after an election occurs. So the hope would be that we provide more transparency to the residents of Orem for elected officials after they've, they've come in and taken the seat. Disclosure has been a tenet of really transparency with elected officials since the early 1900s.

1900s.

Utah passed its first municipal campaign financial disclosure law back in 1911. So it's been with us now for over 100 years. And again, as I said, primary, primary goal here is transparency. As we, as we looked at the ordinance that we'd want to adopt, this is in a form that I think that we can work with and and modify as we hear from council members and what interests they have. But in essence, I'll walk through it. Is all elected officials who hold office in the City of Orem must file an annual campaign financial statement. The deadline here is open. As we've discussed it internally, we can have it pattern the primary and general election campaign disclosure deadline. The only question that that leaves to us is, in the non-election years, do we have a set deadline? So every year that you would be in office, you would have the obligation to file a campaign financial disclosure.

The second—

I'd be thinking like the first of the year or whenever, like, is it annually, once a year, you would Anything that came in that year?

Or—

Yeah, so the way that December 31st, the opposite, the end of the year.

So different cities have adopted different measures. Some have taken a fiscal year approach, some have taken a calendar year approach. I think whatever approach the city decides to take on this, the council decides to take on this, is we want it to be clear for the council members, the incumbents, to know that, hey, I've got a financial disclosure coming up, and that you don't miss that disclosure.

deadline.

And in that mind, it would make sense that, you know, typically those disclosures are going to come in the fall around election season. So if you wanted to adopt it around the primary and the general cycle for the election years, it would make a lot of sense to do it that way. The annual campaign financial statement would have to include anything that you had received or expended on campaign as far as contribution or expenditures. From that preceding disclosure date. So anything that you would receive in that previous year, you'd be required to disclose in that annual financial disclosure.

This would be above and beyond what you— if you were elected, so you've got those 2 disclosures. So let's say someone gave you something in December, right? Then you would disclose that, or during the year if you were incumbent.

So it would be required of you, so Here's your election cycle. So we get through the election this year, you have to file your disclosure 30 days after the election. So that's going to put you roughly middle of December. Something comes in January 15th, so you're not going to initially report that as part of your financial disclosure because there's not a disclosure deadline, but you come up to this August or September deadline, you would now report it as part of your campaign.

And all of us, even those who weren't in the last election, every—

are you picking a date of September?

And that's—

these are open right now.

These are open at this point.

And I'll jump forward to the—

yes, there's a reconciliation, a catch-up provision here.

So all, all those who are holding elected office, when we pass this, or if the council passes this, There would be a set deadline for you to file an updated financial disclosure.

So that'd be like a gift, or let's say somebody took me to lunch and it was— then I would say in-kind donation, $75, or whatever.

If it's campaign-related.

Okay. So you've just arbitrarily put September 26th. It could be—

that would be our next meeting. So if it passes at the next meeting, so if you're an elected official when this comes into effect, you would then have a deadline upon which to—

So then we say within the next 2 weeks, October 15th, you have to— we will bring everybody up to date from the past till now on October 15th of this year. That's your catch-up. But then we're going to select a different date for the ordinance that we're passing. Which would be yearly at the same time?

That is correct.

Also, we're saying we would do one for this year and then a different date for next?

Yes.

So there would be a catch-up provision that everybody would have to file, and again, that date would be October 15th. Um, at that October 15th, it would be required of everybody to kind of go back and then disclose anything they received since their last financial disclosure.

Do any other cities do this?

Uh, yes, they do. I think Sandy City has this provision in their law. Um, there are 3 or 4 other cities that I've looked at that have this, um, this provision in there for an annual financial disclosure.

Again, it is above and beyond what the state, state code requires, but those cities have adopted as a way to be more transparent with the residents so they know who's donating to their elected officials' campaign.

So everybody on the council, then we would have to do whatever that statement—

Yep.

How about elected people who ran for office but did not make it? Would they have to disclose money after the 30 days?

So the state code— so this wouldn't speak to that situation. state code does have a provision where they do have to close out their campaign and then make one last final disclosure.

I think it's again 30 days after the election.

But this ordinance does not speak to that.

They didn't get elected, so I guess—

Yeah, but they could still have money coming in that might be—

but they close out their campaign, they have to show all that.

I believe so.

Do we have any game notes on that?

State law, state law does require 30 days after the election for anybody who did not get elected to make that.

But if they got a donation on the 31st day, they don't have any—

State law doesn't speak to that.

And this is the current code, or provide a third reporting period that says within 30 days of any donation after the next period.

It does not.

And then if we don't file it, what happens?

So if we don't, that is a C— the C provision is that the city recorder shall accept a late filing fee up to 10 business days after the deadline. There would be a late filing fee associated with that. And then if there's still not a response, This again is open. Any elected official who doesn't comply could be found guilty of an infraction up to a Class B misdemeanor.

That's where the state legislature has given the city the ability to place a criminal sanction in our, in our municipal code.

So we could select anything from an infraction up to a Class B misdemeanor. And then any any subsequent failure to file that time, that financial disclosure would be a distinct and separate offense.

So if you miss 3 consecutive years, you could potentially be guilty of 3 separate failures to file.

I'd actually like to shorten that time to the 10 business days. I think you just do 5, give them a week. I mean, because that really, to me, that provision is, oh, I Forgot, I missed it, right? So I'll pay the $50 and get it right in.

And I'm open to changing it. I just didn't want to come across too heavy-handed on this.

Right. We don't want to jump right to C. That's like, oh, I forgot their $750. So I like how you put that in there. But I really think it's an I forgot thing, not a let people drag it out to—

And I'm assuming Would say, hey, you didn't file something, you have 5 days or whatever, 10 days.

Just a reminder.

Theresa has done an amazing job on these campaign financial disclosures through this election cycle, as it's her first election cycle, to really reach out to candidates to make sure that they're aware that they have this financial deadline, financial disclosure deadline, and then once it's even passed, trying to get somebody to come into compliance.

We still have the stipulation, they don't turn it in, then they're disqualified.

For the candidate, yes.

But all you can do to a sitting elected official is $750 fine.

As an infraction, yes, as it's currently written, unless we want to change that.

If somebody's on vacation, you're out of the country, you're We'll probably get a reminder 30 days before.

Yeah, well, yeah, we've still got to be close. Yeah, just seeing if someone was out, if you're out of state or didn't have access to whatever. You're on a mission to take care of this kind of business.

So, but you're not on a mission, Debbie, because you're serving. These are for— that's true.

Yeah, so the idea again is to try to create—

again, the idea would be to have it be enough information leading in that elected officials could comply with this, have enough warning, and then again make it where it becomes a regular event so it doesn't catch anybody by surprise.

So to make sure we—

I don't see a problem.

We're going to follow the state code. Whatever the state code says, reporting the contributions.

Correct.

This just will be one thing additional. That is correct, because our code does say additional layer of transparency. There is a reporting period right now open. After the 3rd reporting period, if you receive a contribution or make an expenditure anytime after it— that's what my concern was, is that It's so open-ended. Mr. Lance and I, I talked to him. If he received a campaign contribution for this campaign, he's still under the prior reporting period, which I didn't think this was well written. So this is one of the reasons I brought it to Steve's attention. So I think we should stay with the state public, and then if you want to do this additional, but let's make sure that we do this, let's not confuse the council members. members as to they have another reporting period in addition to what the state code says.

Yes, well, we changed— I believe we changed all that when we passed the ordinance in August, that we adopted the state provisions.

And this is just going to be above and beyond what's in the state provisions.

Yeah, because we talked about adding this in back then, but we just didn't have it ready. But this shouldn't be too burdensome. I mean, really, this is a few donations, signing. I mean, I don't see this Laborious. I just don't. And we all have separate accounts anyway. We're not going to commingle it with our personal accounts, so it's pretty easy to track. All right, thank you so much. Congratulations on your daughter.

Thank you.

Um, okay, um, next we'll go to the fire prevention program, number 7. Derek Spencer and Mark Sanderson. 15 minutes is allotted for your time.

Thanks, Council and staff. Appreciate the opportunity to explain our annual inspection program. I want to thank Derek Spencer and Brandon Valley for joining me and helping present this. Really special thanks to Brandon. He's the one that's put the time and energy into this program as he leads the 2 inspectors in what we're doing. Just to kick this off, In my, in my first year as a leadership team, we identified that our weakest link was fire prevention. It really hadn't, it really hadn't received the support and the needs in furthering fire prevention from a community risk reduction process, or actually just being proactive in reducing fire and medical emergencies through a division of our service. And so it took us about a year and a half, which led us up to the first of this year to really come up with a program that we're proud of to roll out. That was going— that was and is making a difference for our community. And like any program, over the first 5, 6 months, we have identified things that we just needed to tweak from a perspective for business owners and for our community. And so with that, I'll turn some time over to Brandon and he'll run us through this presentation and then we'll open it up to questions at the end.

But honestly, if any of these slides sparks a conversation, we're happy to address it then.

So, Brandon.

All right, thank you, Chief. Okay, so really quick, just, just to follow up, uh, Brandon Valley. I've been the Deputy Fire Marshal since April. And my main responsibility is operations of Fire Prevention Division at the, at the operational level. And one of the biggest things I'm responsible for is this annual inspection program. Just to give you a quick outline, we'll cover the annual inspection program the way it's currently run. We'll go over what we inspect while we're there and kind of give you an idea of what that looks like. We'll go over a few of the business concerns that I receive. Our solution to resolve these business or these concerns that we've received, and then also we'll finish with a program comparison that shows kind of the benefits and the cost reduction that we offer with this, with this solution to the business owner and how it affects the 2024 budget. So our annual inspection program, these inspection programs are common in fire prevention. Have a lot of value for the business owners, provide a lot of fire safety, and can add a lot of risk reductions to the businesses that are in our cities. The goal of any fire prevention program or annual inspection program is threefold. It identifies the safety concerns in the business. We then offer education on how that business can correct those, those issues. And then the most important one is to build a relationship trust with that business so that it feels more of a cooperative atmosphere versus we're trying to do enforcement. As far as what we check, here's some here's some pictures that kind of help understand a little bit. We check alarm panels, sprinkler systems, fire extinguishers, exit lighting and egress, and target hazards. And just as Chief explained, I can I can. definitely attest to the fact that this program has helped the citizens more. So, as with any new program, there's bound to be some hiccups, and there's bound to be a couple challenges that we faced. This slide is meant to give the operational challenges that I've faced as I've tried to run this program. The first one is physical— this program requires physical inspection of every business. And as you can see in this chart, we're looking at close to 4,000 businesses that we're responsible for inspecting. Even with the support of the City Council and giving us a few extra positions and the staffing levels we have right now, that's a, that's a big pill to swallow, right?

Is this annual?

What's that?

How often do you have to inspect?

So we've set this up as an annual inspection program, and so it is annually right now.

What does that say? HP impact? What is that?

Okay, so HP impact, uh, what that means is there's 2 different designations for home-based businesses, and you can see that under— there's 3,156 on the home-based businesses in the City of Warren, but there's only 284 of the impact-based ones. That just means that they have customer traffic coming in. So this would be like daycares, some salons, Maybe a small attorney office or something like that, but that's, that's kind of what that is.

This kind of begs the question, the home-based business, which is lower risk, could you do those every other year and then the high-impact ones you could do annually?

That's, that's a great question. We have a, we have a slide just for that.

I'm the segue queen today.

No, that's great. Would it be okay to, to capture that a little bit later on?

I promise I'll hit it.

So some of the other problems that we run into that are operationally based is there's multiple businesses. So out of these businesses, in order to inspect the business, we have to be able to find the business. And when some businesses rent a whole suite and then they lease a small office space like 100 square feet to another business so that they have a business address, we don't— we don't— we're able to capture that business as far as That also goes with mobile businesses. You can imagine how hard it is to schedule 4,000 businesses and make it functional for everyone. And then the biggest, the biggest issues are billing and credibility, which we've received many business concerns about that. Well, our, well, our billing company, our third-party billing company, has been great for medical billing. Hindsight has shown that maybe it's not the correct choice for, for our inspection bill. Oh, sorry. And then just to explain a little bit, this, the fee structure side of this, this is the fee structure for the way that we previously did it. Is for home-based businesses, the impact ones, they would be charged $150. For commercial, it was based off of a square footage requirement. So it started at 0 to 3,000 and then ended at 12,000 plus. there's multiple brackets throughout that period. It goes from anywhere from $150 on the low end to $350 at the high end for a hospital. All right, so now to cover a couple of the business concerns. In my position, I'm the one that has to, to deal with all these business concerns, and it does hurt your feelings a little bit when you have a program that has so much benefit for the citizens, but it also has some built-in flaws that we need to, that we need to fix. Here's a couple of the main ones that we've found. This feels like a scam. This is a money grab. Why is Gold Cross billing me instead of the city? Why does my invoice have a Salt Lake City address on it? Why can't I pay through a Orem website if it's an Orem City bill? How do you justify the fee you charge? This is a recent one that I just received. They wanted to know an itemized And itemized— what's the word I'm trying to find? List or hourly. Yes, they wanted to know exactly what goes into to make up the fee that we charge for that inspection. And then of course, anytime there's a new fee, this is too expensive. I added this visual just because you can see from the list that we received from the businesses of their concerns how frustrating it must be for them. This is a good visual that shows that In a more budgetary view. So out of our annual inspections, we've billed for $215,000, roughly over that, as of our last billing cycle that we have data for. This represents a lot of inspections that fire prevention has done and a lot of good that we've accomplished. The difficulty is, is when you see that less than a 20% collection rate using the current billing method.

Is there any late fees associated with that?

So, um, I'm, I'm not exactly sure on that answer. I know that there's not currently.

Okay.

And you don't, you don't outsource these to a bill collector? You just hope they pay us someday?

Well, currently, and this is with this new program, is we've been so successful with Gold Cross billing our ambulance transports That it just made sense, rather than adding a burden to finance— our finance department— to coordinate with Gold Cross, because they're amazing at collecting. It just felt like they have this simple process. We've got all the business owners' information, they generate the bill like our ambulance, they send to your home. And what we found, back to that last slide, is that all these concerns come from this billing process itself.

Well, it does seem odd that the ambulance is billing for alarm. I mean, I would, I would have the same concern myself.

And there's flaws within their own practices that we're currently working with them to try to fix to make it seem more legitimate.

The nice thing is, is that we have a solution moving forward that will solve, solve so many of these concerns. So this, this slide right here is our solution. And if I was to boil down all the different concerns that I received, it could be boiled down into 3 main groups. One would be the cost. Second would be— would be— sorry, charge and credibility. And then the third one would be just justification for the fee. So by making these 3 simple changes, we can pretty much resolve all those concerns. The first one is to change the way we bill for our inspections. And by this, this just means that we move away from that third-party billing company and we move towards attaching this annual inspection fee to their annual renewal process.

Business license.

Business license, yes, sorry. Thank you for clarifying that for me. But by doing that, our collection rate goes up, which then means we can pass that savings on to the business owner and decrease the cost of the fees involved with our inspections and get back to more of a true cost of what, what we're trying to capture. The second one is with that 4,000 number. I saw your eyes when we said that we had 4,000 in a year. Most, most businesses are pretty responsible. They do take care of their business. They know what the regulations are, and they follow those practices. This addition of a digital self-review component, pretty much what that is, is it's just a link that we can send out. It's an educational program that walks them through a self-inspection. It's a lot less intrusive and it's better for long-term data collection, and so it can actually show us which areas of our city are having problems and where we need to focus our efforts on from the fire department. Or a fire prevention standpoint. And then the third one is a simple modifier fee structure. So to explain this, what we did is we just took a simple boots-on-the-ground approach to this. And so what it is, is the fee rate relates directly to an entry-level inspector total compensation hourly wage. Does that make sense? What I just said that was— seemed really fast for me.

But within our career ladder, there's 3: entry level, your Inspector 2, and then your Master Fire Inspector. So we picked the middle route, entry level. It's— it just makes the most sense. But I want to point out that all 4 of our current fire prevention employees make significantly more money than what we're recommending changing our practice to. But over the course of retirements and new hires, it all will balance out in the end, but it feels appropriate and it feels much more customer-friendly to our business owners at this rate.

I heard the fee range was between $150 and $350.

Yes, sir.

Some of those $350 would be fairly large businesses, aren't they? 12,000 square foot.

That's the max?

12,000 square foot plus. Yeah, that's going to take a lot more more time to inspect them than twice a little home business that's running whatever. Sounds like that's on the low end.

The other one sounds—

I don't know how you do it.

It is on the low end, but it's working with business license and billing. It's hard to build it out to build differently. We may work towards that later. I mean, our net result is trying to have safety in our community, right?

get that.

It takes a lot more manpower or person power, I guess, than I would guess.

Well, just to support that, the one thing we've done is we've actually tasked our 4 stations, the captain and their crew during the day. Brandon assigns at least 10 inspections a month to each one of the crews so that they're actually walking through the businesses, they're inspecting the businesses because they're— it's their area that they're responding to in the case of an emergency, especially a fire. They've already been in the business, so they've got a heads up of turns and hallways and doors and escape routes. So it's, it's not only pre-fire planning, but it's providing us, you know, what, 25 additional inspectors on a daily basis if you look at it. And sometimes they're—

I mean, obviously if they get a fire, they're told off that inspection, but it's time that they might not be at high productivity, right?

Are you going to charge the $46.80 or you're going to round up to $50?

I mean, that's our— that is our intent to actually use— I worked with finance to come up with the hourly wage, the cost and benefits, and out to the penny so that it's easy to articulate to the business owner what— why our fee structure is the way it is.

So there is an issue too, as far as Tell me if this is accurate or not, but you said that once we do this program, we do it for a period of time, it should positively impact the homeowners' insurance rates.

Yes, our ISO rating we do every 4 to 5 years, which is a— it's an insurance rating that all of our homeowners get based on the level of service that we provide. Our community risk reduction component of our ISO rating has just— we've never scored any points because Because there's never been a fire prevention, uh, any attention in that area. So by incorporating this over the next couple of years for our next inspection, I anticipate that all of our homeowners within all 3 cities that we service, their homeowner's insurance rate will drop based on an increased rating based on the service.

All right, so even though we're having this cost, there's an offsetting cost potentially.

Oh, absolutely. For every resident, not just business owners.

Right. So mark my calendar, and in 3 years call my insurance company and say reevaluate my policy.

Yeah, yeah.

That—

and that's because now I'm ISO certified, and that's information that we'll get out once our number improves. Then we'll educate the community. Yes, reach out to your insurance. They're not going to do it on their own.

No, they won't.

And we don't want to do that until we actually improve our levels.

We get the rating, we'd love to celebrate that.

That'd be amazing. That's a part of the era for sure.

There's no reason— there's no reason a city of our size shouldn't have a 1 or 2 rating where we currently sit at a 3. With some minor tweaks to the service we provide, we can easily— because of the amount of training and equipment that the city provides for fire services, we just have a few additional boxes we need to check, and this is a huge one.

Right.

And this allows us to do it so much more effectively. By adding these 3 changes, it covers all the boxes. It lowers the cost. It helps with the validity. It completely removes all the validity concerns that we had, and it allows us to go, this is exactly why we're charging what we're charging for this. This is just to give you a quick visual of a more effective delivery method. I mean, as soon as you see this, this feels more comfortable. Every business in the City of Warren has received this document. They know it's coming on a regular, on an annual basis, and this is what the businesses were asking for when they gave input on what they would like to see the change. This is, this is the change, one of the changes they recommended. The additional benefits that this adds to fire prevention is If I can get a little personal, where I'm not chasing all of the billing problems and dealing with the different complaint resolution, it allows me and my inspectors to focus on so many more things like community outreach programs, public education, a lot of those things that can get us to the level that Chief was talking about.

One of our big focuses coming up with this program is a cadet program where we're entertaining high school students that 17, 18-year-old, bringing them in and actually trying to build our own recruitment camp from our local high schools. And because of the processes, because of the manpower and personnel, we have that ability now through our fire prevention program, which is part of the community risk reduction while trying to increase our own personnel in the future.

All right, I'll turn the rest of the time over to Chief Sanderson.

This program comparison is just exactly everything. This is for each one of you when you receive the call. We've received calls from a lot of property managers. We did really good community business owner outreach, education information. They were all provided a very detailed letter of the process, how it was going to roll out. Unfortunately, what happened was our business owners sent the letter or forwarded the letter to the property manager who wasn't made aware of our processes. And so there's been these disputes with who pays, who's responsible. And so clearly we have an opportunity to do much better at educating not only property owners, business owners, but also the individuals responsible for opening the business. But this is just something At a glance, we can provide you guys— it's easy when you receive the calls to break these down to understand from a cost savings perspective what we're trying to accomplish based on reducing the overall cost to the business. We want to be business friendly. And that comes at a cost, and I think we can do it much cheaper than the current approved Schedule B that is adopted every annual budget.

here.

And so they're big numbers, they're big percentages that are decreased. And so as an overall program, it just feels like the direction that we need to go.

Did you solve the problem of who pays the bill? Is it who holds the business license?

Yes. And going back to when they renew their business license, attaching that to the fee they pay, it's— and it's seen there on their bill. It will be the individual that's applying for the business license. And so this last slide, I think, is— it just hits home everything we're trying to accomplish in the city. If you look at your goals, I mean, safe, livable neighborhoods, everything we're doing from a business perspective with this program is addressing that. We're also trying to not only maintain the dependable infrastructure. We want thriving businesses. I mean, that's what supports everything we do in our community, along with— it really shows an effective government from our leadership team and what we're trying to do. And then also by the different requirements, different trainings, the certifications that our inspectors are doing, it's just furthering our own employees' talents that support the services we provide. So with that, that's the direction that we'd like to move.

And can we—

can't go back.

Any questions? So you— if I'm a business from 0 to 3,000 square feet, I'm gonna be at 92.60, but if I'm a huge business, plus 12,000, I get the same rate.

So Is it just easier for you to say, you know, figure out square footage?

That's why you did that.

It was just, it's just more easy.

And it's going to balance. We have much more— the majority of our businesses are about $0 to $3,000 versus $12,000 plus. And so it really just comes out in the wash. And yeah, I mean, your smaller business owners might complain about paying the same as a big business.

It's where do you draw the line, which seems the most business-friendly. From a boots-on-the-ground perspective, a 12,000-square-foot building may have lots of square footage, but they still have records. So I mean, you can go in and check the extinguisher records, you can check the riser equipment, those different things, and it doesn't take a significant more time than the, than the smaller business. In that aspect. So like, like the hospital, that's probably one of the bigger ones. Does that take a lot longer because it is hospital? Yeah, it's going to take us longer. And maybe we can figure out it working with IT to get the appointment. It's kind of— that's a challenge for them, you know, and it's just like you said, where to draw the line. And maybe in the future We understand the program, then maybe that could be— the hospital's getting a good deal now, maybe they need to be brought up to—

And I, I think after a 6-month, a year evaluation, we may— we would change those into hourly. We just increase the hourly rate. It's 3 hours, 4 hours, right, time, so that we can still articulate the cost without just pulling out some random numbers.

That's good. So, so quick question.

So if someone currently has a bill that they haven't paid, would that still be under the current rate?

Yeah, we actually, we made a decision as of September 1st moving forward until we actually have this rolled out with the intention of doing it October 1st, we're not going to bill for this month and we'll catch that business the following year, but we We don't want to— because we've had $40,000, $41,000 collected from other business owners, we're going to stick to that same pay structure that you all approved in our last budget update.

But they will—

you'll collect it because they have to get their business license. So they have no business license, right?

And we're going to work with— we'll work really closely with the $200,000 that is uncollected to figure out some positive way that they don't feel like they're being double billed because they owe for the previous year. When their renewal comes is when they'll pay this less fee. So we'll have to, from an administrative perspective, try to figure out what that balance is so that we're taking care of our business owners.

But I think it's hugely impressive how quickly you attack this monster.

They came up with a great solution all the way across the board.

You know, we were getting these notices, and I'm thinking, man, this is really—

this is a big deal.

How are we going to address all of the different nuances and all of the different problems and all the different concerns?

But you've done it in a way that a 5-year-old can explain it.

We're really good. We're really good at being 5-year-olds.

Because, you know, when somebody calls and they have a concern, okay, this is, this is how this works.

And so kudos for the great work.

Thank you.

So I have— can I say something? I happened to be at a business when they came by to do the inspection. And I just want to say your firefighters were very professional. They were very friendly. They're very thorough. I think they made potentially, you know, I saw the look of the business, I saw his face, look on his face when they walked in and said, we're here to do your annual fire inspection. And they just really did a great job of not creating any type of a negative situation. And there was even one little issue that needed to be taken care of, but I heard them address that very positively too, that it Our whole intent is just to improve the overall safety and, and be supportive versus being punitive.

We have zero intentions of closing businesses, fining businesses. We're going to work with them so that they understand the benefits of what we're trying to accomplish. It benefits them as a business owner.

So I did ask the question earlier about maybe residential going every 2 years.

Did you—

did I miss that?

Yeah, sorry, I didn't cover it very well. I didn't cover a lot of the residential— are daycares, which require an annual license. That's what I would say a good portion of them are. And those will still go inside every year.

But with our, with our virtual inspection, then they can fill that out online and send it back.

It's just a reminder to check your smoke alarms.

But they'll have an annual fee or they won't have an annual fee?

They will, they will have an annual fee. But for like daycare, it's significantly lower. So yeah, just the impact businesses, not the non-impact.

Yeah, our non-impact home businesses currently don't pay for a business license.

And so if they have an in-home—

it's just a decision that—

okay, you do away with that? No, it's the state code.

Yeah, we have to define what I think the thing that I'm most proud about is these guys working with this education component. So when you're doing your self-evaluation and it talks about sprinklers, it explains it, talks about fire extinguisher, explains it. And then what we're expecting with when they submit their business license renewal is that hard copy of that self-inspection form, which shifts some responsibility to them, but also puts document in our hands so that we can review those, prioritize them based on violations or codes that are more egregious than not, and get to those sooner than later.

Okay, thank you.

So, Chief, as far as, um, go back to that slide that shows the difference in, uh, the commercial— yeah, that one. So on that So are we— help me understand— are we taking a $236,000 hit, or do you feel like the way you're restructuring this, we're going to be covering the costs with the lower fees?

Yeah, I believe that we cover our costs without, without making an additional $236,000 that we can't justify making. We're accomplishing the safety aspect of what we do. We're covering the cost of the increase and focus on fire prevention. And, and so I guess it's how you look at it. I look at it as huge cost savings to business owners, not a hit as far as the city goes.

So, but, but as long as we're covering the cost of the program, I mean, the goal is fire prevention, fire education. As long as we're breaking even with that, I think that's what you're saying, right? Yeah, I would, I would Guess the old program tried to take into account that we weren't going to be able to collect 100% of this charge. And our collections amount was actually ended up being worse than it was initially projected. So by streamlining how we bill and decreasing the price and showing the value.

We can have an overall improvement in the budget covering the costs. And this really is a new program. This, um, inspections have been around, multiple communities do it, but Orem's really never done it unless there was a complaint from a customer that went in and saw a violation and reported it. We just have never had the focus or the manpower or the drive to tackle being proactive. We've just been in a reactive mode, and it's, it's not, it's not the organization I want to be. I'd rather be proactive and supportive and reduce the emergencies, even though that's what the guys love. That's what we do is we love fire. It sucks when your business is on fire. So if we can shut them down before they catch fire, I might not be so favorable with the guys because they got a job for But our citizens and our business owners will appreciate this service.

We can do some control turns for them. Can I clarify one thing with you, just so we make this clear? As our fire chief, you are okay with this reduction of your budget for this particular program? This is not anything that we as a city council are doing to your budget. We're still— you're Full support of this suggestion in favor— in order to help our businesses. Absolutely. And still cover your costs. Perfect.

Thank you. Are you going to collect $173,000 from us?

We're going to do our very best. That's what I said, is we're going to try to come up with a process that the business owner doesn't feel like when they renew next month, and we just did an inspection 2 months ago because it was 10 months into the calendar year. they feel like they're being hit again. So there's a few fine details, but the program as a whole, I feel, after one year, we'll be— we're seeing this changing of the guard for 12 months.

And after that—

So with that, I mean, if they just had an inspection, let's say this fall, and passes, would you consider maybe halving what that was last year, or are you going to wait and see? Because I can see why, yeah, they feel like we're double dipping.

Yeah, I think that's what I just need to sit down with Wren. We need to work through an educational process so that as we roll this out to the business community, we're going to change that letter. And I mean, we're going to share it on social media. I want the entire community to see what we're trying to accomplish. I feel like that's the benefit for the mayor and the council, especially as you're receiving calls from You're in the businesses and you have to fully understand this program to be able to talk to it. And from your leadership, then it makes us all look like one giant team.

Thank you.

Okay, any other questions?

Any other questions? Okay, sorry, thank you for that. Thanks, Lewis.

Thanks.

Oh yeah, so this is what we're going to do.

Um, the transportation could take a little bit longer.

If I take—

we can take a 5-minute break, just grab our food and come back and keep going. Okay, somebody like to offer a prayer? Our Father in heaven, we're grateful for the food that's been provided for us and the chance we have to partake of this meal. I see that God will bless us and be able to partake of this meal, use our time wisely here in a cooperative way. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

I did see you at the summit yesterday.

Did you stay for the second one too?

I did, yes, I did.

Well, the shield's not a big sign. The shield's going to block it, just structure.

Oh, and that's what it is. It's a physical barrier.

So this is metal.

I thought it—

I thought it went in. That's what made the light look down. Did they make sense to me?

I can't believe we got a full plate just for like a $60 value. All right, we're about to start.

Sounds like she's got We're ready to go. I'm ready.

We're gonna get lights on.

It'll be lit up.

Okay, we'd like to turn this over to Sam Shelley. I'm going to review our transportation master plan.

Yeah, we'll address them.

Yeah, it's just the initial— I saw I got pictures of them putting it on. Okay, are you ready?

Getting there.

Close.

Okay, uh, thank you, Mayor and Council. Um, I'm going to start my presentation on the updates to the Transportation Master Plan. This plan is an update to the plan that we did in 2015. Part of the basis, part of the items that we updated in this plan were the existing data for current conditions. We updated base traffic counts. We looked at roadway levels of service, roadway cross-sections. The State Street Master Plan elements that were in there were removed. We also then updated our travel demand modeling, 2040 population projections to 2050, and then we've also included their TransPlan 50 recommendations for projects, as well as updated some of the cost estimates for our capital plans. High level, What this master plan does is we take WRFC, Wasatch Front Regional Council. They have a travel demand model that spans from Payson to Brigham City. We look at population growth, we shine the crystal ball as best we can, and try and figure out where there's going to be some congestion points. From that level of modeling, that's where we create our master plan. Once that master plan has been created, And projects are identified, then we get into more of a detail where we look at our microsimulation, VISM or Synchro.

That's—

it's more of a smaller-scale modeling software where we would actually go out, collect data, calibrate that data with the model, and then look at growth projections and kind of look at what that project will do if we're looking at corridor widening or intersection widening. This map shows where we took some trap accounts.

Probably hard to see the difference between the blue to green.

But with this plan update, we went out and actually collected some more data to make sure that what we had projected through UDOT's counts and our permanent count stations were actually correct. This is our existing roadway network. We have signalized intersections, a few roundabouts, our HAWK signals, our pedestrian signals. This also is identifying some of our larger roadway classified roads being urban collectors, minor arterials, principal arterials, and I-15. Levels of service. This is just a brief update, I guess, a refresher what level of service means. Typically in these, it's going to be an LOS is what's going to be referred to in our document. Excellent is a Level of Service A. Our acceptable that we have is a Level of Service D, with the level of service F being severely congested. Some of the roadways like State Street during the PM peak is going to be at a level of service F, and that's essentially what level of service F— kind of a degree of level of service as far as time. There could be some things that could be done to reduce the grade of F to be, say, from 120 seconds of delay to 100 seconds of delay, but still would be Here's our existing level of service map. I identified on there the main ones that are level of service E or worse are in red. There's a portion of 800 North, there's State Street, 16th North, University Parkway, a short stretch of AD East. We also have level of service D, which is at our Acceptable levels, we have Center Street, University Parkway, State Street, and a portion of 12th West. I think the only 2 on there that would be city responsibilities for level of service. E would be 8 East. And then the D, where we're right on that cusp, you got 1420 South, that kind of goes behind Krispy Kreme, and then you have a portion of 8 South, Center Street.

And it looks like a portion of 16.

Are they Level Es?

Those are Level of Service D, right?

Is that acceptable?

That's acceptable right now, current conditions. This is that travel demand model. What MAG does is they take our census data, they look at population, try and break down population groups of 3,000 or less, and then from the census data they look at Notes here, you know, place of work, journey to work, and they try and figure out, okay, if they live here according to the census data, this is where they're traveling. High-level model, they take this data, they being Horrocks, they calibrated it somewhat with our planning division, looking at current zoning, making sure that it's as accurate as can be. And this is how we develop our transportation model, our MET traffic model. So right now, if we were to not do anything in 2030, this kind of gives you an idea of level of service in some of our corridors. Really isn't much of a change, as you can see here, between what we have now in current conditions versus 2030 if we want to do anything. I guess I would note that 8 South around the campus looks like it goes from a D to an E. 8 East is still an E or worse. Other than that, it does— Center Street is still— I believe Center Street is still there. No, it's at D, so it would actually go to—

Is that 8 East between Center and 8 South?

Yes.

And understanding too, this isn't a 24-hour time period. This is typically the PM peak.

This is your peak hour.

If it's a level of service E or worse, you're going to have a lot of congestion. And if you choose to do nothing, essentially what happens is that PM peak hour is going to be extended. It's not going to be an hour, an hour and a half.

Like 5 PM to 8? What's your time?

This time, it just kind of depends on where we're at. It's interesting, at 8 South, there's kind of a PM peak that's around 5:30 to 7. So it's, it's kind of dependent on where we're at in Orem. For those actual times. If we go to 2050 on a no-build level of service, you can see that level of service starts to creep a little bit further to the east on 16th North, for example. 8th East at 8th North now, both north and south, starts to creep up to a level of service D. 8th East is still there at Actually, it creeps a little bit further north to 4th North. 12th West is still there. Center Street is still there. And actually, it looks like Geneva Road is as well. But that's under current no-build conditions. We all know Geneva Road is going to be widened.

We're going to have Lakeview Parkway.

So likely that portion of it will be— So from this Transportation Master Plan update, these are some of the recommendations that came from our Transportation Advisory One being, we cannot build ourselves out of congestion, that they realize that we need to probably live with a little bit of congestion. One of those main components would be no 7-lane road widening projects. We see what State Street does. It creates this big boundary here within Orem between the east and the west, and we wouldn't want to have that happen. So specifically, that comment is towards Center Street.

Thank you.

Doesn't seem to make sense to make Center Street a 7-lane facility for I-15 and State Street. They also wanted to balance the needs of all users. Those users are cars, cyclists, pedestrians, probably transit as well. Another comment is good planning and transportation encourages active transportation, and from the other comments or from the presentations prior to this, there is going to be an emphasis on health, wellness, and things like that. And that's where we probably should be putting some dollars into active transportation.

Does that translate into bike lanes or trails?

It's bike lanes, it's trails, it's probably enhancing lanes. I think there's more and more of a movement to try and separate bike lanes, and not necessarily with paint, but with some sort of a vertical barrier there just to bring some attention for drivers and, and And for cyclists. And then we have to be fiscally and socially responsible.

And it's not— that does not imply cars from the road. That correct? Or did they talk about that?

They didn't specifically say that. I think they're just saying that they just would like to see some planning that encourages active transportation, be a little bit more proactive, probably enhancing some of the features that we have. And I think part of that too, even from the Planning Commission is, is the next time we go, we look to update this master plan. We also need to bring in the bicycle and pedestrian master plan that was done in 2010. There's a lot of things that have changed, and we probably need to have a very robust process and update this plan overall.

So facilitate better active transportation opportunities, but not at the expense of people who want to drive their Yeah, I think what there's—

if we can provide more bike routes, for example, canals, trails, things like that, that encourage people to ride, they'll naturally come more.

Great.

And I think that probably it was— I think some of the points were too, as well. And I've Started to create a sheet of advantages and disadvantages of removing projects or doing certain things, and those are active transportation. If we don't have the dollars necessarily to purchase right away, then the other cost is possibly removing parking. Those are just things that we should think about as those opportunities arise.

According—

as we brought the transportation master plan to Planning Commission, They agreed with what the Transportation Advisory Commission recommended, but they also had some other considerations. One would be removing the following projects: widening the 8th East corridor, widening 16th Northwest of State, the 8th South overpass and 8th South widening to 5 lanes, the 12th North overpass, as well as the 800 West.

widening.

All those will have to be identified in the Transportation Master Plan, some as projects, some also as areas of concern.

So I think—

what's that question?

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think the resolution— yes, yes, yep, that's right.

They also wanted to modify some language concerning connectivity, and they also wanted us to spend a little bit of more time discussing future items. Some of the connectivity in here, mainly there's, there's a philosophical statement in there about balancing the needs between developers and neighborhoods. It's there bolded. And then they also wanted to remove some of the language we have in there that talks about must and converting that to may, wills, and could. And I kind of associate it with our own MUTCD that has shalls and shoulds. Essentially, it's eliminating the—

what do I want to say? I want to put this—

the need for it and having it be more of a subjective type of thing where we could say, yeah, it's good, or we don't want to, and it kind of I think it kind of gives itself more of a political nature when maybe we don't necessarily want that. Um, some of the future items were bike lanes, find a better solution than being in traffic, perhaps wider sidewalks, update those plans. Striping gives a false sense of security. Some of the other items was UVU connectivity, as well as the connectivity in general, which is what I—

Do you have any idea how many people on Murdoch Canal are commuting versus recreating?

You know, I don't have that number. I know there's about— seems like there's about 220,000 people that use that annually, and Saturdays seem to be our most heavily used at about 1,800.

Assuming that they are not commuting Saturdays, right? Because, you know, I'm on it occasionally and I don't—

okay.

it's not a statistically valid sample. So I give you that.

But I don't see a lot of commuters.

I see mostly recreational use.

So I don't know how that—

how lightly on State Street alleviates any cars, right? Because if I'm a recreational rider, I'm not going on State Street. Even if I'm a commuter, I'm not going on State Street. 80th is busy, but not as busy as that, right? So I don't know how you take that into account. I just don't know how many cars we remove by putting more bike lanes on highways that I don't want to ride on personally.

No, I completely agree. And I have conversations with bicycle activists regularly. And, and like with vehicles, we have a metric that has warrants based on volume. And I've asked if there's anything in there, NACTO, and I don't even know what that stands for.

It's like National Transportation something.

They seem to have some guidelines, and they're growing in it, and they're starting to become a little bit more data-driven. But, but that's one of the biggest points that we bring up during our Transportation Advisory Commission is that we spend the dollars to put in a bike lane, but then Chris might drive it, you'll see 5 folks on it. Ryan will drive it, you won't see anyone on it. He's going to wonder, why are we spending the money on it?

So we'll see some more Right.

And that's, that's, that's part of the, that's part of the active transportation plan update. Where do these e-bikes, e-scooters fit in that now can exceed 20 miles an hour? Should they be on sidewalks? Do we want to have sidewalks? Do we want to have a vertical barrier?

Do we want—

so there's all kinds of things in there that we need to sit down and discuss and bring everyone to the table, find out what's, what's the best solution.

Well, and to Tom's point, I don't want to ride a bike on State Street, so putting a bike lane on State Street is just, you know, not necessarily a good use of that space.

Right.

Because you would take up a lane. You either take up the parking or you take up the travel lane to add the bike lane. So, is— I mean, is that on our plan? I remember our bicycle transportation plan. as old as it is, was really— I remember asking, why don't we have one on 1600 North? And the response I got was, well, because you don't want bikes and cars together on that street. That's a pretty heavily traveled street, so we're going to put them on 12th North and connect it on 4th East and that type of thing. So is that strategy still one that we abide by there?

Yes and no. I mean, we have in our, in our old plan, it calls for lanes, routes, On 8th East, on 16th North, on 12th North. And that's part of that discussion that we need to have is, this is a generalized update. We're looking at projects. From those projects, we figure out how much it's going to cost. We develop that matrix and we look at our 10-year window, we develop impact fees. But to your point, what really needs to happen is, because active transportation has changed so much, and the thought is, it doesn't make sense Even though if you're a commuter with a bike, you would like to go from A to B the shortest route possible, that might, that might be State Street, and there might be in this whole room one person that wants to do that. Everyone else would like to commute, but maybe they prefer a boulevard because it's slower, they feel a little bit more safe. So we have to engage those conversations with UDOT because UDOT right now is willing to spend a lot of money on active transportation infrastructure. But we need to work together on that. So yeah, because for me, I used to bike.

My wife doesn't want me to.

She thinks I'll get hit, which she keeps telling me to raise my life insurance, so I don't understand. But, uh, but yeah, I would rather not ride my bike on State Street. I'd rather be on a different corridor.

And I think on the State Street, uh, lane, you'd like the State Street to be We're all about safety, right? And, you know, and you get the guy on the e-bikes and stuff, that's just the—

An accident waiting to happen.

Yes, and I think that we need to be smarter and say, you know what, that's not a good use of a bike lane on Station Street. But, you know, the question is, you know, what are we trying to do? I mean, you know, bike lanes are necessary, but how often are they used, right? And with the e-bikes and everything, they come really fast.

And I think it's just gonna make safety more of an issue.

We have to watch out for— I mean, that's our goal, to make sure that this is safe, right?

I think it's police and fire lanes everywhere. Oh, we'll use them every day, all day long.

I'm just gonna bring them We need to make sure that we don't put medians down the middle of the state— the station, because police and fire cannot get over. If they have— if there's an emergency, they can't get over. Houses are burning down and we have a median and their trucks can't go. It's going to ruin their trucks. So I think that's something we really need to look at and say, I don't know if state— the government or the state of Utah wants to put medians down Station, but I think that's a bad idea. Because you're going to limit safety. People are going to die or houses are going to burn down because they can't cross lanes to get over and get around when there's a traffic jam or something like that. So I think we need to look at that and safety is, I think, our number one goal. So no medians, take them off.

But isn't State Street— it's a Utah road, so yeah, it's the state of Utah. So I mean, do we have much say?

So, UDOT has— they have performed a mobility study. They've identified essentially all of our major intersections on State Street to have a median component, similar to what we did here at Center Street. The plan would be to do that at 8th North, 12th North, 16th North, and then go down to 4th South, 8th South, University Parkway, So that's the plan. Now they don't have a— I mean, I think from UDOT's looking at accidents, they would rather have— not have— they would rather have a median because then you don't have to worry about someone going into that middle lane cutting across all that traffic. So they have their own reasons, they have their own safety concerns. But right now they don't have a plan to go all the way from 2000 to 2000 with immediate, but they would like to see some of those because there are some safety concerns.

The bike lanes, they're the ones that are, you know, the bike lane thing.

I have a hard time with that too, because even when I was out of Magby, their active transportation person was there wanting to— she was asking me why I wasn't proposing to put them on State Street. I said, well, it's not comfortable. You got cars going— I know it's posted 40, but they're going 50, 55. And it's not a controlled access roadway. You have access points sometimes every 50 feet, every 20 feet, every 100 feet, and you're not worried about the cars that are going 50 miles an hour on this side, even though you should be. But it's the folks that come out— again, this is probably a contentious thing— but there's cars parked there. Those cars can't see to get out. They're going 50, so that car eases out. Essentially, the front end of that car is going to be the bike lane. So it's not a good recipe for anything. Even though she looked at me like I was just like everyone else, I'm like, no, it doesn't make sense. It's not a good spot for it. Now let's look at other areas. I fully support that, but there's just not a comfortable spot on State Street to ride a bike.

And Cougar Boulevard in Provo, you know, you know what we're trying to— yeah, that is just scary. I don't— just as a driver, not only am I so close, the lanes are 10 feet, right?

Wide, probably 10 or 11.

And they're narrower than normal. And so that, plus I gotta watch for the drive, the bike over here and watch for the cars coming out.

It's—

Making a right turn, wondering if there's a bicycle over there.

Yeah.

And so people on their bike aren't quite to their full frontal lobes development.

That's right. Talk about building yourself into congestion. Yeah, that kind of design. Yeah.

Well, just heard Lane we need.

Yeah, exactly the same. So it sounds like we need to keep into account essentially experience and practicality as we try to plan.

Yes.

Are we allowed to do that? That's how we stop our feelings.

I think I feel like it would be dangerous. I feel like it would be optimistic.

So that—

I think our hope is to learn from our experience and grow in our plan.

From all of the meetings in this process, it's taken us a year to get to where we are today. We agree with removing 8th East, 16th North from those— from that plan. We also agree with Center Street, removing that component of it. Simply what I will do is I will just create a list of advantages and disadvantages to the other projects. You guys can go ahead and look at those, and you guys can decide whether you would like to go ahead and keep those as, as a recommendation from Planning Commission, or if you would like to go ahead and leave them in.

16th North Wyandotte, that's—

He means East.

I mean East.

I put West in there.

Twice.

The other—

yeah.

Okay.

The one by you.

West of the mountains.

Yeah, no, it was east. So any other questions, concerns? We'll be bringing it forward next week on Tuesday.

So, Sam, I just— I said these meetings with the Planning Commission, and they, they took this very seriously, just so everybody knows. Hours and hours of meetings. I had special meetings with Sam separate from the normal scheduled meetings, and, and they had a 7-0 vote concerned about widening any of our streets just to make us more of a thoroughfare to get to other places at Provo and the canyon. So, uh, that— there's not a lot of 7-0 votes from Planning Commission. So that was pretty impressive. And they took a lot of time with this. And it's nice to see the staff on board with their concerns.

But I just want everybody to know that was not taken lightly.

There was a lot of discussion. Terry, if I may, they were willing to accept a little congestion rather than widen these roads to be these commuter lanes.

Absolutely.

And what I heard was concerns about taking out neighborhoods. Yeah, you know, 16th 8th North would be a tough one. You're going to take out homes on one side or the other. 8th East, you've got a lot of homes. I mean, yeah, so that was the major concern. Yes, exactly. They would prefer to say we'll deal with— You got an A/B choice, and we'd rather have a little more traffic than wipe out neighborhoods. Because a lot of this, a lot of these roads are not getting people home to Orem. They're going on Center Street to the canyon or the Provo or going from 16th to 8th to center. So anyway, that was— but it was a great discussion. So the conversation is to not widen them, they're taking off. Where's the conversation on the overpasses?

So the overpasses, I guess that's where I'm gonna go ahead and develop a list of the advantages and the disadvantages. And you guys can decide whether or not you would like to do that. Personally, when I look at the data, I look at our grid network, to me it makes sense to have an overpass at 8th South. It makes sense to have an overpass at 12th North. You're providing the citizens of Orem— I mean, there likely is going to be some through traffic, I'm not going to deny that, but if I'm living in the northwest part of Orem, I got to go to Pleasant Grove. I can use 12th North to go over, I can go to Geneva Road, and I can go up and go to where I have to without going to 16th North at that intersection to try and make a left with a lot of congestion to try and get on I-15, or I have to go through all those signals to get to Geneva Road and get there. It's just providing another avenue to get there. Understanding too that 12th North and 8th South, those overpasses Those are likely going to be fully funded by UDOT. It's a UDOT facility. UDOT's going to look at those as, if I can take 12,000, 15,000, 8,000 vehicles and go to these overpasses, I can reduce those from 16th North, I can reduce those from Parkway, I can reduce those from getting on the freeway. Now they use Geneva Road. It's a benefit for them. It buys them some time. So that's part of that cause and effect of growing economy, advantage and disadvantage.

Sam, can you explain what overpass, what does that mean?

So an overpass, we have 2 underpasses, we have 4th North and 4th South where they go below the freeway. It doesn't connect to the freeway at all. The overpass would just essentially that we just go up and over, we wouldn't connect to the freeway at all.

Do we have any currently?

We don't have any overpasses. No, we have underpasses.

So my question, if Vineyard gets built out like their new Utah City plan would be, I'm assuming that we have to look at the traffic there on 600 North for sure, because they're going to build a whole new city. Um, so those overpasses may make sense knowing what our neighbors are going to be like and all the construction. So I just think that's a really good variable we need to Considered, right?

Any pros and cons? Is there a way to figure out what that translates into as far as traffic crossing just through Warren versus being useful for the citizens of Warren?

For these overpasses?

Yeah, the overpasses.

I mean, it would be a guess, guys. It would be a best guess. And just kind of a— if you don't have a lot of other connections out there, you're just connecting Geneva Road to State Street. It's essentially going to service just that small area there. And I can do what I can. I I can talk to the consultants, see if they can put together some numbers and see how it would work. 8th West is another one. There's a section of 8th West from 4th North to Center Street. That's at 34 feet of asphalt. Our current collector cross-section that we have in the Transportation Master Plan is 50 feet of asphalt. You're looking at something that carries a lot of traffic. It would be— if we could widen that just to our typical collector width, which would be anywhere from 46 to 50 feet of asphalt. You could get a typical travel lane in there. The bike lanes could go ahead and continue to go north and south. Cars could park there. It's, it's a direct conduit to UVU. And now I know they don't want to have 8 West connecting to UVU, but if you can take the traffic off that's going to UVU, off of 4th West, off of State Street— I mean, understanding that, yes, it's going to another Point, but that's going to be a direct connect. And right now, this, this piece of 8th West, when you're looking at parked cars, there's a school there, and garbage day, it's pretty unsafe area because people are trying to put their garbage cans out outside of their parked cars.

I mean, a little bit of widening in this area would go a long ways.

You're not taking out homes or businesses?

Well, you have this area. it might be homes, or, or it's that tough pill to swallow of saying, you know what, we're going to take away parking. Or it could be a strip take on each side. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, yes, hey, we want to look at this, let's initiate a study and move forward. And that's kind of how that project is. This, this would be 8th West from Center Street to 4th North. So if you guys want to go home and drive it today, don't take Center Street though.

It's going to be a mess.

So 4th North, and you can reverse south, and you guys can see the tank project.

Yeah, so our new signal. But if you take away parking, which is the strip in front of the home, basically you're talking about, right? You shoulder, just shoulder, right? So you're seriously affecting the value of that home.

We have—

I mean, the homes we—

I have—

we have neighbors, right, that 1600 North, the Polleys, they cannot get in and out of their house. They cannot have people come visit them. They have to pull around the corner. Thankfully, there's a corner there, right, for people to come and visit with them. Parking on 1600 North?

It's a turn pocket.

They turned it into a right-hand turn into our neighborhood.

Okay, that far.

Okay. Yeah, so they lost their—

It's her private turn.

Yeah, it's my private right turn to get home, which I love it. Because the other way where we were on the left side and had to cross over, that was just scary, that other version. But I guess so, I think that that's kind of what the Planning Commission is talking about, right, is the impact on the home.

Right.

And I mean, I fully understand that. And I mean, I'm just going to be pretty— I'm just going to put the pros and the cons and you guys can decide whether we keep it or we don't.

Yeah, I think a key takeaway is that you want to make sure that providing good information, quite open on reviewing where it's currently at. And it also sounds like we need to, as we're developing some of these advantages and disadvantages, keep in mind forum-specific traffic movement versus, I guess, commuter.

Yeah, because I would say that the Lakeview Parkway Got to be probably one of our biggest ones, at least since I've been here for 21 years. That's a really nice big regional facility. When Center Street was punched through, that was a huge regional facility. When Ryan was a wee lad and did 8 South, I mean, that was another regional one.

Chris was—

Chris had hair.

I didn't have kids.

Now they're married.

When you send this out to us with these projects right here, it would be really good for all the council members to go drive all these different areas just to get a feel for what we're talking about.

Yeah, great idea.

Can you just kind of remind us of a time frame when those things would possibly— like you talked about 2 overpasses, are we talking 2030, 2040?

Yeah, yeah, maybe the soonest that could happen.

Yeah, because if you're applying for grants or money to do some of this stuff, we need to know, right?

And really, all of the easy decisions have been made in the last 100 years.

Well, what we're looking at now, these are really tough decisions. I guess case in point, like right now we just had a chance to submit a form to prioritize all the projects that are in the UDOT TIP that have been identified and they've been ranked. Can you explain that for them? Yeah, the Transportation Improvement Projects. So the state goes through and we— and UDOT themselves takes all— they take this MAG, the travel demand model, they look at the choke points, and they look at the ones specifically that that are on state facilities. And they themselves, staff, rank them, they bring them to the Transportation Commission, they go ahead and rank them, then they move forward with this plan. And as time happens, they bond, they do the projects, and those things slowly move up because some move off. Well, then every— I think they're going to be doing it on an annual basis. They'll actually allow local governments to submit a form saying, hey, we would like to see our projects moved up.

And these are the reasons why.

This year I asked for the northbound direct connect to UVU as well as an overpass at Sand Hill Road and University Parkway to be considered, because I think there— those are huge congestion issues that, that are happening. If Provo is going to wait on 820 North, they're going to do their thing, well then let's take the money and do something here and help us out. There were those 2 projects. Provo asked for support to widen Geneva Road to the remaining 3-lane facility all the way down through—

what's the other one?

Center Street?

Oh yeah, then I asked for Center Street, for Center Street from Geneva Road to I-15 to be funded as well, because really it should be, it should be jurisdictionally transferred and they could fund that instead of having—

Well, so that's That's the point, right? So to get these, we have to transfer the streets. Is that what UDOT is requiring now?

That one was— Center Street is the one that I've gone back and forth with UDOT for a long time trying to get them to take over responsibility of that road. But the other ones have been identified as UDOT facilities, and they've been on that list. They've been part of our list. So that's when I added those, supported them. So right now, the 8th South overpass is on there. if we removed it, they may not necessarily ever see a need. I think it's— they're looking at $80 to $100 million, and if it wasn't ever important to us to move up, then they would just take that off and they would take that money and go somewhere else or move priorities of projects.

So this to me, um, is a reason why we want to meet with our local legislators that represent us, um, you know, Mike Kennedy, Curt Bramble. I mean, all those can so that we can voice— because what happens is most of the leadership, let's be honest, are more north, north of Salt Lake. So we need to have our own delegation who's advocating for these, knowing our priorities. I just think it's time that we meet again with, you know, Marsha and Nelson and, you know, Keith Grover and all these people to kind of say, these are some of our priorities. Would you help shelter these or make sure they don't get lower priority? I don't I just think if you don't— if you're not advocating with our people, then they don't, they don't know what we want. And I think we should make a point— another, other city issues too, not just transportation. Yeah, I like that meeting we had. Yeah, we're first elected, right? Yeah, I think it's time to do that again.

And you know, it's aware of our request initially for 12th North to have an overpass, because when they widened I-15, they lowered it in that area.

be a huge cost.

So there was some, some pre-planning for that one specifically.

And maybe someone like Val Peterson needs to take this issue because he is in leadership and he does work with you. Maybe he can help us try out. I'm just saying, let's meet and let's talk to them. And you're going to get serious without a lobby.

Yeah, I agree. So Sam, when we approve this master plan, how long does that go for before we sit in front of you again?

Usually it's based upon the impact fee cycle. But quite frankly, I think that in a couple of years from when you approve and adopt this update, that we should probably go out with a major overhaul. Because likely, if we're going to engage our active transportation plan with it, which is going to include probably some of the components of parks, it's going to be a long process, a big process. So I would say in a few years, let's plan on Coming back, spending $200,000-$300,000 and doing it, having a very large, robust— maybe, I guess, to your point, we'll try to do it not during an election year so it helps you guys all out. We'll do it between, because this will be a big item that we probably want to try and do.

So are you saying because of the pressures on transportation you see, because typically they're 5 years Every 5 years you renew these master plans.

We do the impact fees for sure.

Okay, so you're saying this one is more likely going to see a 2-year cycle?

I— this is just an update to it. I think to revamp the whole thing, I mean, we can wait and go 5 years. It's entirely up to you. But there's, there's so much growth happening here, I would think whether we would want to revisit it sooner than later.

So the 2 years would be reasonable to— Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I think an additional pressure that we have is the rate of inflation.

So if that continues to be an issue, another reason why we want to get it updated.

Construction costs, right? That's the, that's the whole key is there's a lot of cost to waiting.

It's And you will, when you send this out to us, give us a timetable of if we approve these different parts, when they're likely to potentially be implemented.

Right. I mean, and I guess too, to understand, just because the project is in there doesn't necessarily mean it's going to have to necessarily be— we're going to be widening. We could very well understand that these projects are, are in this plan. We understand that there's congestion there. And we might go out and study and realize that, hey, everyone's comfortable with having this level of service and we're fine with where we're at. So I think that's one key component. I think there's been a lot of fear that, oh no, my corridor, you know, you guys are planning to widen this corridor, you're taking my home. It's like, well, not necessarily, because 16th North was a great example of that. There was, there were some pamphlets handed out to all the neighbors there saying that The city's going to take your home. We held a meeting, explained to them, no, that's not how this is going to work. We turned around and generated 4 different alternatives: level of service, just leaving it where it's at, a small little strip widening, then widening to one side or the other. We gave them the dollars, how much it would cost for each one of those, and just explained the process. of if it's a project, it's, it's appraised. If you don't like that value, you have the option to go get your own appraisal. There's moving costs, there's relocation fees and things like that that you're afforded. But no, the city isn't just going to come in and condemn your property. And we went through all that and everyone was very open. And so far, I think they're still the same way. I think there might be one gentleman on the corner there in Linden at 12th West and 16th North.

He's—

I think for Linden, he's always been a thorn in their side. So I think that might be the only property that's going to be of contention. But other than that, all the residences, they felt very like they were treated fair, they were heard.

It's a great process.

And you're speaking 1600 Northwest?

West.

A choice.

And most of them didn't stay in Orem because there's not homes anymore.

So, you know, if every, every house around you is being bought, you don't have a lot of options.

Well, what we found is standing there and talking to those folks, they said, yeah, during the PM peak, it's taking me 15 minutes to get out of my house. And if I move 15 minutes away and I can ingress and egress, and you're giving me— and you're giving me a fair market value, not discounted because I live on this road. That seems like a win-win. And then you're going to pay me to relocate. Gosh, I mean, as much as we like it here— and that's the thing, most of those folks wanted to stay in this area because Farm has a lot of amenities. They have all the shopping, so they want to stay here. They just didn't like having to wait, you know, 5, 5 or 10 minutes to get out of their driveway. They'd rather move a few streets over and just still stay here. That was from the folks that lived there.

Sam, one thing I heard from you was that sometimes there's aspects in the plan that are really trying to just keep an option, an opportunity open for further consideration, not necessarily saying this will absolutely happen. Right, that's right. I mean, dealing with MAG all the time in all their meetings, they've got these endless lists of priorities. And so really all you're doing is you're putting your priority into a spot on that list and trying to work its way up through it without getting bumped out. So there's no guarantee of when anything's going to happen.

Right.

Lake crossing, it's always on there. It's been on there.

That's why I was curious as far as timeframes, because in the MAG stuff it's like 5 years, 10 years, 15 years.

Most— there's a few of these that were Phase 1, but most of them are further down in the phases.

So any other questions?

Okay, thank you, Sam.

Let's run through the agenda.

Okay, so we'll start with item 1. Doing right now, uh, it's going to review kind of previous city council reports, and I can do that one every time. Okay, okay, yeah, we'll just run through this. Let me do that, and then we're We got item number 3 called Order in the Council Room. Item 4, we've got inspirational thought. It's Chad Lewis.

The Chad Lewis?

The Chad Lewis. This is a friend of Terry's.

And Terry kind of—

Terry went through some extra work to put this together tonight because it is Constitution Month, and he's kind of wanted to up the game. of what's going on. So he's got time to give us our inspirational thought.

Through his connections. And Kelly, he's our most patriotic.

Yeah, Kelly Kirkpatrick for the Pledge of Allegiance. And then we'll go into— they will do a full flag ceremony. They'll bring the flags in as part of that. And I will, uh, once we get started, I'll turn the time over to, uh, Introduce these people and kind of play this out for us. And then, uh, this is gonna be pretty good because I heard some of these speeches, but this is, uh, Freedom Festival essay winner Bronson Bishop. I didn't hear his, but, uh, the other ones were phenomenal. But he's gonna do the same speech he gave for the Freedom Festival, um, just to find out, like, 2 or 3 minutes or how long?

It's 5 minutes.

And I'm going to use those 5 minutes to the second because this is a speech competition.

So has he already won stuff, or is he— Yeah, he won it. Okay, that's right there.

Winner. Mayor, I think we had a little insert during this period, perhaps after the essay, um, Oh yeah, yeah, okay. And where's that gonna be?

Potentially goes somewhere.

We just go 6.2. Here's the information. Okay, thanks, Pete. Did anyone, um, know Mayor Willis?

I knew him and I know his daughter very well.

Okay, I'll probably have you do this.

Okay, happy to do that.

Just tell me when.

We'll do it after the speech. I'll make it item 62.

Hey, Mayor, I just want to point out as a side note, granddaughter Lizzie is one of our administrative assistants in the office, and our fire administration attended the funeral services yesterday. And so we got to meet the family and support Lizzie while also supporting the mayor. So it was a good day.

Oh, cool. And Lizzie's mom is my dear friend.

Well, so anytime you have—

Can I ask a question? Because he was on the city council and mayor, and he served 2 terms. If I do the math, 8 on City Council, 9 and a half as mayor.

Has anyone said—

I think there was a mistake in the fuel. When I looked on web—

on the website, it said 4 and a half.

We can look at it.

Okay, well, this is 9 and a half. I'm just saying, is he one of the longest serving as a council mayor that we've had? I mean, has anyone had longer service than him?

I'm—

maybe it's not—

no one knows that, but In their, in their life sketch, they said he served 2 terms as councilman and 1 term as mayor, and then ran against Mayor Welsh.

Okay, so, so it wouldn't be 9 and a half years, it would be 4 years as mayor?

No, 12.

So we have 4 on council and then 4 as mayor, so 12? 8 on council. Okay, well, let's—

it was 4 and a half.

4 and a half. Okay, let me— I'm gonna switch that.

Yeah, 8 as a councilman.

Yeah. Okay, so I rescind my— it would be the longest.

It doesn't matter.

I'm just saying, I think that's okay. Thank you.

We'll move on to personal appearances.

And then we've got consent items, approval of meeting minutes. It's a consent item. And then we've got scheduled items.

Item 9.1, Canvas.

Teresa will take care of that.

I assume the county sent you the latest update, whatever.

Now that Canvas, are we going to be asked individually to vote on that as we go through? How does that work? We do, yes. There should be a motion there, um, and with a vote, there's a motion to accept and the certified— the 2023 City of Warren primary elections as presented.

And then you get a second, then you get your ayes.

I do have a motion written on the paper.

Mr. Mayor, when you convene your city council meeting, you should convene before the Kansas School Teachers Guild.

Because—

so when we start—

or do we do it before?

So we can start, or do we do this before the vote? I think we can start, but also before. Okay, so do it double. You can do it concurrently, or you could probably do it at the scheduled item, whatever, however you'd like to proceed. I see. I'll probably just do it at the beginning, just So, Mayor Council, also just throw out there that. Assistant Attorney General Sommers and also Attorney General Riddle, they've kind of been in contact with each other on what, what the bounds of the law are in regards to canvassing. And so if questions or concerns do come up, they've already kind of been jointly doing research and work on that, on this subject.

Okay.

We've got communication items, number 10, and then we've got C, Andrew, information items. No, I just have one thing that I could, I could just share quickly right now.

We have—

we just finished up our employee giving campaign that we do annually, but this year we had our best participation ever.

We—

I'm not sure how much we notified Provost, but We're always competing with them on how generous we are. And we've beat them in the past.

And we had our best participation this year than ever.

And so I think we can probably beat them again.

So we've had— we have 92 total donors. So you have, you have selfless, generous Part of your staff here at the city, and over $20,000 was accumulated during this year. So pretty neat. That's awesome.

I love the Day of Sharing too. That was fun.

Yeah, yeah, we love partnering with United Way of Utah Counties.

Day of Caring every year goes over We find good kind of win-win projects that are good for, good for businesses, good for nonprofits, good for the city and open spaces.

And I think you'll see Matt join you next year in the day of service. There was talk of us coming out and I said, I'm joining the warm, so you'll see that coming up.

So, uh, I'd like to make some comments. And, uh, should I do that after the city information items and before we adjourn? Yeah, you could take the spot of that city manager. I mean, you could, you could, you could still talk about that. I mean, that's cool.

Sure. Yeah. Okay.

And then I'll just go after that because I've got some things I'd like to discuss.

You got it.

And then after that, we would adjourn. So any questions?

Nope.

You ready for me?

Okay, yeah, go ahead, Debbie.

Okay, so I, I sit on 3 committees: Farm Fest, Arts Council, and the Natural Resources Committee. So we'll start with Natural Resources. Um, they will have a booth at the Harvest Festival on Monday. There's going to be a water-wise landscaping parade on October 7th at 10 AM. Sorry, Cascade. They're going to try to go to some homes between 8th North, 8th South, corner east of Carderville Road and see some of the water-wise.

That's true.

Um, there's going to be a community group hike, and I welcome any of you to come out October 14th at 8:30 AM, Tippinogos Park. It's going to be 2 miles, take about 1 hour. We have some great representation on this particular committee, as you know, Sarah Bateman as well as Hillary. So there's a UVU sustainable tour that we could take. Sarah Bateman coordinates that. Warmfest next year, they're going to try to do a bike valet. Well, they would— you could ride your bike and they will valet your bike during the Warmfest. Some ongoing projects are bike rack initiative, communication planning, energy and water consumer rebates, utility authority management plan. And then some of their past activities this year were the Earth Day event booth at Orem City, kindness event held in April. And some of you have known that we do a rain barrel distribution event in May, and we help subsidize that, and there were 130 rain barrels given out. So I think they're very active. They have some very professional people on there. They're excellent. I know that Jeff has served with them and he can probably say—

Yeah, yeah.

Arts Council. I don't know if any of you attended the Wednesday night concerts that were in conjunction with the farmers market. They were a success. We felt like it set a really good ambiance for the people there. The discussion was to add 6 more of those, and maybe even try to, you know, continue on along the farmers market. We would probably start those in July after Summerfest. I mean, I'm sorry, Armfest. And so add 6 more summer concerts. Not just— they were kind of mostly older rock bands, which I like, but a little more variety on those. There was also talk of adding some winter concerts to times here over at the library hall. Not just music, but perhaps dance and, and other venues, because we don't want to be known just concerts, right? We have other great arts-oriented things. So there, there's some very experts also on that particular committee. bring a lot of visual arts and music and, and, you know, sounds of freedom and things like that. So, freedom, whatever Scott's Lane does, what is it?

Kryze Krieg.

Kryze Krieg. That's it. Warm Fest, I thought was very successful. I think the main thing that you will see, 2 changes, we are going to start buying some barriers that we will put up along the street so that we don't have people running out. as candy. So there'll be some— we hope to maybe even sell names on them. I don't know what our budget is, but the idea is every year we'll buy some more barriers and kind of crowd control. And I think that's a positive thing for safety and making sure that, you know, we don't get kids coming out.

So I have to jump over the barrier if I go over?

I think there'll be a place where you'll have to go around. The other thing is, I think it was very successful having the car show on Monday, and I think the idea is to keep it on a Monday evening. The car person is available, and we think that was a— that's just better for a lot of people to have it on the Monday night.

So that was a knock it out of the park, that car show.

Yeah, it was awesome. And then they talked about doing an exit parade. What parade? Exit.

Oh, we talked about—

we talked about when they go to leave, just kind of having them all leave at the same time.

That's still in the plans.

Okay, okay. Um, I think we're gonna give some more attention to the actual parade. There's talk of maybe having 4 different people in charge of different components. And I personally volunteered for the cleanup and volunteers, so If you approve me to come back next year, I may be helping with the parade. But I think the idea is that parade is very complicated and it's going to take more than just, you know, one volunteer. It needs some more substantial people. So I think that it was very successful. There's always talk of getting drones for fireworks. I don't know if we'll, you know, if we'll ever implement that, but that is kind of the wave of the future. And I think Ken did a masterful job with all of her fundraising and donors, and so we really need to say thanks to her because I think we put that on price. Was there any cost to the city as far as, or was it all paid by donors?

Direct operating costs were covered through donations and through fees throughout the week.

So just, we just paid for manpower and salaries, right? I think that's great. I mean, that's spectacular. I can't remember what it was. I want to say $80,000, $90,000 of individuals, Smiths, you know, different— the hospital, I mean, different organizations that have contributed. Really do appreciate it. So good job on the committee, and I think you'll see even having Karina as our event planner will even help us improve that over the years and make sure processes are good. So thanks to all of you who participated, and any suggestions Give them direct on that particular— and then can I nominate Jeff to take my place? Because he's, he's actually been a parade—

did you do the parade?

I did the parade for probably 8 years.

Yeah, so I did— we did the parade for 6 years. I would nominate him to take my place if you so feel that way, and he gets reelected.

Oh, it's good when someone else volunteers. Yeah, well, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Um, one last thing, I just want to give a big shout out to, uh, Brent and Chief Sanderson and Development Services. We had a situation about a month ago where Wilkerson Farms called me up and they had all kinds of issues to get to being open, and there were a lot of concerns. And, uh, got with Bren, and they took a real can-do attitude in helping citizens to empower them and get where they're trying to go. And, uh, anyway, through that group, they did a great job and made it happen, and Wilkinson Farms is open and going. And these chances wouldn't have been there if we had not made that big effort.

So Because we almost lost them for this fall. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, it was close. Yeah, we helped them be safer and help make sure they didn't hate us by the end.

Win-win, right?

Took a customer service approach and just walked through it with them and made a ton of necessary improvements. It was good all around.

And Brent specifically, Paul Ashton, and then Derek and Brandon. They were instrumental in site reviews and just working really close.

It was awesome, right? They went above and beyond to make it all happen. So Jason, right? So, okay. All right, well, let's adjourn and on to the next meeting. Thank you.

I'm gonna need a check. If the other room is as cold as this room, I'm gonna need a check. Horribly cold.

Yeah, why is it cold all of a sudden? It's our old HVAC system that never catches up during the changing of the seasons.

Should I go get my blanket out of my car?

Hey, thanks for staying at Jay's tonight.

You're all right.

Well, he does the behind-the-scenes stuff.

Oh no, he was totally part of it.

No, you're good.

I just dropped the ball.

No, he's terrific.

Test, test, test. Yeah, you got the prayer?

Yeah, go ahead, just stand right there.

Yeah, yeah, yep.

Thanks for coming.

Yeah.

Oh, there's a lot of prayers.

He's not going away without a fight.

No, that's for sure. Sounds good. If I get to see with my family, then that's that's good enough. That's funny.

Yeah.

We're just gonna film. I can't ask you until it's finished. I'm sorry though, just give you a little warning. I think it's Sunday, Sunday general session.

Superintendent. Wow, how long have you been here?

We'd like to welcome you tonight and call this meeting to order. We're also going to— because we're going to be canvassing the vote, we're going to convene as a board of canvassers as well.

We've—

Terry has worked on putting together a special presentation for you tonight in lieu of being Constitution Month. And to start things off, we're going to have an invocation by Chad Lewis. I'm sorry, yeah, an invocation by Chad Lewis, a Pledge of Allegiance by Kelly Kirkpatrick, and then a presentation from Bronson Bishop, who won the Freedom Festival with his speech. Terry, would you like to introduce your friend?

Before Chad stands up, I'd like to introduce Chad, and we'll also introduce Kelly and the gentlemen that are with him, and also Bronson. So Chad Lewis, many of you know who he is, played football for the NFL for 9 years. He's with the Eagles and also the Rams. In fact, those that know their football, he had 2 touchdown passes in the NFC Championship Game, which then made them qualify to be playing in the Super Bowl. He was elected to the Pro Bowl 3 times. And if I remember right, Chad, I believe you were a walk-on at BYU. So, uh, this guy didn't get noticed at BYU, ended up being one of the greatest tight ends ever to walk through that campus, represented the NFL as an ambassador around the world. And that's kind of interesting. He served his mission in Taiwan and speaks fluent Chinese. And so the NFL has used him as an ambassador. And that really means he's an ambassador for the United States. And there's— that's a real significant part of this. We're honoring Constitution Month, to have someone like Chad being represented to us as he represents the United States and the Constitution around the world. He's been an ambassador to China, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Hawaii, and Tunisia. That's why I didn't go on a mission to a foreign country. I went to England. So he spoke fluent— speaks fluent Chinese. as well. He wrote a book many of you probably read back in 2009, Surround Yourself with Greatness. He hiked Kilimanjaro with 4 wounded soldiers, wounded warriors, which was an amazing feat. It'd be interesting to hear about. He was with Jeff Fisher, who's an NFL coach for the Titans and then also the Rams, and ESPN analyst Ted Bertschy, Teddy Bertschy, that also won a Super Bowl championship for the Patriots. So Chad is married to Michelle Fellows. Michelle was an All-American volleyball player at BYU. So you can imagine the genes their kids have. And Chad says that she's the best athlete in the home. But anyway, she is a very good athlete. They have 7 beautiful children. 3 grandchildren. He's currently employed as the Associate Athletic Director over Development for Brigham Young University. And one of his greatest accomplishments, an Orem resident, born and raised here, at least raised here, and a proud Orem High School graduate. So thank you, President. Chad Lewis is also a stake president currently. So after his prayer, if he sneaks away, It's not because he's extremely bored at what we're doing. It's because he does have a church, uh, call, or does have responsibilities he has to leave for. But thank you, President Lewis, for coming. And we'll turn the time over to Chad for the prayer.

Our dear Heavenly Father, we're so grateful to gather at this city council meeting for, for this beautiful city of Orem.

We're thankful for the good people here who serve to keep it that way. We're thankful for the citizens of this amazing place. This is a month where we honor and remember and recognize our Constitution and the Founding Fathers, the— our heroes who put their lives on the line for our freedom so many years ago to create this Constitution that still serves us today and still Keeps us who we are as Americans, and we're so grateful for thy hand in our lives. We recognize that.

We acknowledge thee. We acknowledge thy Son, Jesus Christ, as our Savior.

We're so thankful to start this meeting with prayer and to live in a free country where we can do so.

We love thee, and we ask thy Spirit to be with us and to continue to bless this group of individuals who spend so many hours to keep this a beautiful city.

We love thee, and we pray in humility and gratitude, and do so in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Amen.

Thank you. I'd like to now introduce Kelly Kirkpatrick and his companions he brought with him this evening. So the American Legion was, was chartered in September of 1919 by some World War I veterans to take care of others and the communities they lived in. Our Orem Post, Post 72, was chartered in March of 1948. They currently have 88 members 20 that are active in the Honor Guard.

They—

and the things that they do, we've seen them at different events. They do military rites for deceased veterans. That's in 7 different cemeteries in Utah County. They perform patriotic programs in schools, retirement centers, Boy Scouts Court of Honors. They sponsor a Boy State and also a speech contest for the youth. And I know that Kelly sponsors a Boy Scout troop and a Cub Scout pack through the American Legion. So they offer probably between 200 and 500 service hours in our state, city, and nation every month. Vice Commander Kelly Kirkpatrick has been with the service for 19 years, and if any— I hope you all remember that they— we honored them as the grand marshals of the Orem Fest this last year. So we'll now turn the time over to, uh, Vice Commander Kelly Kirkpatrick to do the flag ceremony and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Thank you, Mayor Young, City Council members, Brother and Sister Lewis, and all who can hear my voice. I'm going to ask you all to stand up, please.

Do we have anyone here that has served in the United States military besides our American Legion people?

Congress enacted a law in 2005 that says you may salute the flag whether you're in uniform or not.

You've earned that right. So I'm going to ask all of you to place your right hand on your heart.

Color guard, stand hut. Present the colors.

Forward march.

Our post commander Rodney Gardner will lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Ready?

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

Post the colors. U.S. flag right.

Face.

Forward.

Halt.

Detail, halt. Dismissed. You may be seated.

Thank you, Kelly, and thank you, gentlemen. We appreciate you very much, and we honor your service to our country. So to continue with our part on the City Council meeting this evening to honor our Constitution and recognize the great freedoms that we have. Well, I'm going to introduce to you a young man named Bronson Bishop. Bronson's a 17-year-old high school student who lives in Holiday. He was this year's winner of the American Freedom Festival speech contest, and I heard his speech when he won the speech. Fantastic. And I, I listened to it again last night, and we were grateful for him to drive down to Orem from Holiday and he will deliver his speech. This was a very competitive contest, and there's a number of people that participate in the contest, and there— then there's a group of judges that judge their speech, and he was the winner of this year's contest. So we will turn it over to you, Bronson, to give your speech, and we appreciate you so much coming down.

Now, many people believe that because of our circumstances, because of the government, because of the system, we can't have freedom. And they're right. We can't have freedom, but we can be free. Now, these 2 statements, they may seem pretty similar, but upon closer examination, we find that the 2 are worlds apart. Because freedom, it isn't something that can be had or owned. It's not something that can be locked in a drawer, tossed in the back of a closet, and forgotten about. Because freedom is an action. Freedom is something that is won, that is earned, and that is fought for. And freedom isn't preserved by the appeals of politicians battling at the pulpit, but rather by the simple everyday heroism of people like you and me who are willing to stand for what we believe in. President Ronald Reagan once cautioned us, quote, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream, and the only way for them to inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, And then hand it to them with the well-taught lesson of how they, in their lifetime, must do the same. And if you and I do not do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.

End quote.

But that is not the future that I see for our nation, because freedom stands as an indomitable wall between America and tyranny, shielding us from the relentless threat of oppression and slavery. We are free as long as we choose to be. So the question we now must ask ourselves is, How do we best preserve the liberty we enjoy? And the answer is outlined very clearly by our founding fathers. The First Amendment may appear to be a list of freedoms guaranteed and protected by the federal government, but in reality, the First Amendment is much more than that. The First Amendment is a set of guidelines designed by our founding fathers to aid us in the retention of our freedom, designed to help us navigate the oppressive systems that can be found everywhere else. Freedom is a choice, and it's a choice that our founding fathers gave us the ability to make. You see, It simply doesn't matter if the government stops us from speaking, from publishing, from petitioning, from assembling, or from worshiping. If we the people aren't willing to speak our minds, to publish the things we think, to petition for redress, to assemble with our fellow citizens, or to worship, the God we believe in. And people who would abuse the system that we enjoy, people who just want power, they understand this as well. And they realize that the only way they can take our freedom from us is if we willingly relinquish it. Harriet Tubman once said, Quote, I freed 1,000 slaves, but I could have freed 1,000 more if only they knew they were slaves, end quote. Now, that's the predicament that our nation is in danger of falling into today. Many of us simply don't realize that in order to preserve our freedom, we have to use it. That we have a responsibility to our friends and our families, to our fellow citizens, to fight for the freedom we hold dear and to fight for the cause our ancestors died for. Einstein said, quote, freedom in any case is only possible by the constant exercise of it, end quote. Our liberty is preserved by those who are willing to stand in defense of their faith, their family, and their freedom. So I urge you all to speak and to publish, to petition, to assemble, and most importantly, To worship. I implore you not to have freedom, but instead to be free.

Thank you.

Bronson, thank you so much. I'm going to make a few comments and a couple of quotes from some of our founding fathers, and then Bronson, the mayor, has a presentation he wants to give to you. So I'll turn it— I'll make a few comments and I'll turn it back over to the mayor. But a quote from Thomas Jefferson, and this kind of relates to what you were saying, so, uh, thank you. The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are a gift of God? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. And then that was Thomas Jefferson. George Washington said— this was his first year as president— it's the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor. So when you're talking about exercising our freedoms, it's interesting, and we Appreciate Chad Lewis, who had to sneak away, for saying the prayer. You know, our Supreme Court has a prayer when they start the Supreme Court sessions. Our federal government has prayer, the Senate and the Congress, when they start, they start with a prayer. Orem City Council, we start with a prayer, as we did this evening. The local school districts, when they start their meetings, they start with a prayer. Then why is it our kids can't have a prayer in school?

The school—

the people that run the school boards have prayers, but the children aren't allowed to say a prayer. Anyway, I find that interesting. So I want to end with just a quote from Irving Berlin, a Jewish man who was involved with World War I, wrote a song. He actually revised it during World War II. And I just want to quote a couple lines from this song, then I'll turn it back to you, Mayor. This is our big Constitution event, but this is what Irving Berlin said about America. God bless America, land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from above. From the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam. God bless America, my home sweet home.

Thank you, Terry, for putting that together. That was amazing. And Bronson, we've just got a little token of appreciation for you. I'll come out and give it to you.

I need a picture.

I'd like to say he might have a career as a politician.

That was impassioned and excellent. Good job, Terry. It was really good.

Thank you, everyone. Next on the agenda, we've got item 6.2. We had Mayor Blaine Willis that passed away. And Debbie knew— knows him and his family, and so I just asked her to say a few words about him.

Yes, thank you, Mary. I am good friends with his daughter Laurel and of course the rest of their family. We'd like to take a moment to honor and remember former Orem Mayor and City Council Member Blaine Willis, who passed away last week. He served 2 terms as a City Council member and 4 and a half years as the mayor. from 1986 to 1991. His service as a mayor was interrupted when Governor Bangerter asked Blaine to serve on the State Tax, Tax Commission, where he eventually became the director of the Property Tax Division. Mayor Willis's entire life was full of service. In addition to serving the city of Orem, he also served in the LDS Church, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Utah County Jail. His legacy of service lives on here in Orem as one of his granddaughters, Lizzie Curtis, works in the Orem Fire Department as a fire service specialist.

And I've talked to her and she loves her job here.

We send our deepest condolences to the Willis family as we remember the great things he did for Orem.

Thank you, Debbie. We'll move on to item 7.0. And this is personal appearances. And this is where our citizens get a chance to exercise their First Amendment rights. And this is a time that's been set aside for the public to express their ideas, concerns, and comments on items not scheduled as public hearings on the agenda. Those willing to speak are encouraged to show respect for those who serve the city. Comments should focus on issues concerning the city. Those wishing to speak should have signed in before the beginning of the meeting. And please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. So we'll start. Looks like we have 6 people tonight that have signed up. First on the agenda, we've got John Barrick.

Hi, Mayor and City Council. My name is John Barrick. Appreciate the time. I want to start my comments by thanking 2 of our City Council members, Debbie Luray and Terry Peterson, for their service, in case I don't get an opportunity to thank them publicly in a public forum before they finish their service this year. I've known Debbie for a long time, probably over a decade, and served with her in a number of places outside of, outside of the City Council. And while we haven't always agreed on issues, I know that she is always been fair and impartial and followed the law. And I appreciate that. And I appreciate her service and her family who I've known for a long time. I've known— I met Terry more recently. Terry, when he was running for city council, had a goal to knock every door in Orem. And I don't think he quite accomplished it. But I think he got most of it. He knocked on our— he knocked on our door and my wife was picking blackberries in our backyard. And he came and and sat down and had a long conversation about the issues with him and quickly won her over by his knowledge. And we appreciate everything that Terry has done. I would like to speak tonight quickly about the Stronger Together PAC, which is a political issues committee formed to fight against a proposition in Orem that has already run its course. The Stronger Together PAC has a number of violations which have been reported to the Lieutenant Governor's office, and they have issued a notice of dissolution for that PIC. The first, they failed to complete an accurate year-end financial report as required under UCA 20A-11-802. My understanding is they are filing an amended report for a material violation of that report. They failed to file a statement of reorganization by January 10, 2023, as required under UCA 20A-11-801. PICs are not allowed to make expenditures or direct their political activities beyond a single ballot proposition, which ended in 2022. Yet, and a political purpose means an act done with an intent or in a way to influence or tend to influence directly or indirectly any person to refrain from voting or vote for or against a candidate or a person seeking any municipal or county office, UCA 20A-11-101. Additionally, a significant violation is defined as a violation that, known by voters before the election, may have resulted in a candidate other than the candidate certified as having won the election, UCA 20A-1-802. This PIC has numerous violations which have been reported and we believe are significant. This PIC has pushed for 3 candidates in our most recent municipal election. None of those 3 candidates have reported any benefits, in-kind or otherwise, from this PIC, which has regularly and systematically advertised and, and campaigned for municipal candidates, which is against the law. We're grateful for those that have stood for the law and And we'll continue to do so, and I thank you for your time.

Karen Adamson.

Hi guys, I'm Karen Adamson. I live here in Orem.

And I am here tonight also about the Stronger Together PAC.

An official complaint was sent to the state's lieutenant governor, as defined brilliantly by a previous speaker, and she gave a response that the PAC should dissolve and stop its activities, and that she was going to send the complaint on to more local authorities to pursue it.

I'm here to find out what we can do to get this pursued.

This PAC was formed to campaign against last year's Prop 2, and there were many dubious tax tactics used during them, or by them during that campaign. And I don't know if there were official complaints at that time, but I am very aware of this official complaint. My concern is that we have rules in our society, and when someone or some organization bends or breaks those rules, we need to follow through with rational, legitimate consequences. That doesn't seem to be happening here. This group continues to do things that are quite questionable, and so far they have no consequences. This is super frustrating to be watching and to, and to be a part of. There are people on all sides of this issue who believe that they are right. How will we ever know what is right if we don't have someone willing to get to the bottom of this?

Thank you for your time.

Heather Frye.

Hello, my name is Heather Fry. Thank you all for your service, and thank you, Bronson, for your words. They're truly inspiring. What can any person do when there are those with a level of power that emboldens them to act with arrogance and impunity? Money is a driving force behind establishing power, and once power is established, there is a ferocity exerted to maintain that power that twists virtue into vice, advocacy into hypocrisy, changing good, well-meaning people into corrupted pawns who resist dialogue, reason, logic, and the most fundamental values of liberty, justice, and equality. Sadly, there are powerful forces at work amongst the residents of Orem. In August, an official complaint was filed and sent to the Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General, and it provides abundant evidence exposing the illegal actions of a political issues committee named Stronger Together. At a minimum, there have been tactics used that exploit fear among residents, nurture mistrust and divisiveness against our current administration, and that reveal a total disregard for the legal standards governing the actions of PICs and PACs. While the Stronger Together PAC declares no monies were given to any candidate to aid in their campaign, Jeff Lamson, Jen Gale, and Chris Kilpack were exclusively provided with the massive influence of all the resources established by the PIC. And according to Utah code, a PIC cannot do that. As a named beneficiary of the alleged violations, committed by the PIC, and believing that he is a good person, I ask that Jeff Lamson recuse himself from any and all actions connected to the Orem elections. There have been assertions by the leadership and members of the PIC that they did nothing wrong, that they broke no code governing a PIC's actions. I assert here, there is the spirit of the law. And the letter of the law. Their Facebook page declared 3 candidates in May, not the Stronger Orem Facebook page, which has maybe 200 members, but through the Stronger Together page. Because they continue to function as a PIC beyond the election for which they were organized, they already had in place over 2,000 members who would follow whomever they endorsed. Again, according to the Utah Code, a PIC cannot do that— anything that advocates for or promotes candidates— and they did so for months across all avenues of access: email lists, text— texting, promotion through social media. I implore the city attorneys and city council to insist the investigation be pursued by our Utah County prosecutor. As the renowned humanitarian Albert Schweitzer Said, the great enemy of morality is indifference. What can anyone do in the face of power and control? I am standing here risking the darts and vitriol that come to any who strive for truth and transparency and justice to be applied under the laws that govern this city, this state, this country. As we honor the Constitution this month, I plead with you to uphold the oath when you took office, whether as a council member or as legal counsel for this city.

Thank you.

and demand that the prosecutor and Attorney General commit to a full investigation of the violations committed during this election.

Thank you.

Mike Carpenter.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak. As a candidate in the race for the Orem City Council, I was unduly affected by the illegal actions of the Stronger Together pick, and potentially the candidates Jen Gale, who was a founding member of Stronger Together, Jeff Lamson, who was a participant of the pick during Prop 2 and is a city member of the Orem City Council, and Chris Kilpack.

who actively worked with this illegal pick through the primary election, utilizing the pick's established Facebook page and people network, sharing of large mailing lists garnered from school resources from within the city of Orem, utilizing PTA ties from Prop 2 to get messaging spread throughout the city, and taking advantage of coordinated events propagated by the pick.

They created an insurmountable hurdle in the election that garnered them privileges that I had no way of gaining access to.

I hear on the news repeatedly that we have a two-tiered system of justice, so I ask you to demonstrate this is far from true and actively pursue justice and accountability. The complaint from the county official has called for the discontinuation of all picked media, financial reports covering in-kind contributions to candidates to be submitted, a prohibition on organizing and operating PICs in the future, covering costs as well as investigating candidates for their culpability in working with the PIC, which then determine their eligibility to hold public office or continue to be an eligible candidate in the general election.

It is incumbent on you, our elected officials, to ensure that this investigation is pursued and the actions are followed through with.

Thank you.

Greg Carlisle.

Thank you for this opportunity. I've got some notes here. I'm not amazing like this young man where he can just go right at it. So I thought I would, I would write them down and be a little bit fast, you know, ramble. So I've been a homeowner, Norm, since 1979. I personally have served, volunteered, and rubbed shoulders with many city council members and mayors since the early 1980s, especially the past 8 years. And I'm wondering how our recent primary elections have come down to one issue: whether a Norm city council candidate voted for or against Prop 2, or to allow Orem citizens to vote like the City Council did, or whether the candidate favored an Orem school district or not, how their view about it. Seems like what that was always about, really. Take, for instance, what they've mentioned here, the Stronger Together pick, which was legally organized just to represent and get information about Prop 2. Fine. For the past 3, 4 months, maybe 6 months, what I see that they're doing constantly is using their resources resource and website and Facebook page to campaign for Jeff Lance and Jen Gale and Chris Kilpatrick. We don't really know if Jeff or Mr. Kilpatrick really even met with them. We don't know all of this. But what we do know is they started so early and picked candidates. Why am I mentioning that? Well, this has nothing to do with Alpine School District. I view it as their being— them being upset with Orem City Council for even doing their Prop 2 viability study and trying to create an Orem-only school district, so they want their candidates elected. What about the real issues in the city like police and responders, first responders and high density and, and different things like parks and recreation, UVU growth? From the emails and articles I've read the past few days, they, the Stronger Together, have been asked to dissolve their PIC by the governor. But what about Spencer Rands and Heather Frye and Matt and Crystal and Mike Harbert and others who have been in the trenches working hard and not getting a fair chance by the thousands and thousands of parents who are so influenced by the Stronger Together pick. And they're only 3 candidates to consider. I've gone to tons of these candidate meetings. They're great candidates. And to see some of the top 3 candidates get thousands of votes when they don't show up to hardly any candidate meetings or out and campaign. I say some. And don't presume that I didn't vote for any of the top 3 candidate vote-getters. And don't presume that I'm against school. I volunteered my time for over 20 years with statewide and local school district organizations. I just feel this election was way different than all the previous ones. When I first, say for example, met you, Debbie, 8, 10 years ago, I heard you, I watched your video, you ran, I picked you on your merit. Or how about Terry and Jeff? When they— I call you first names because I know you real well. I know how hard you worked for just basic things and not having a litmus test like Alpine School District. So to finally say, I know how hard you're working, and I know the incumbent Jeff is running, he's— I've seen him in many candidate meetings. I'm just wondering how it came to this, just this one issue where it's all about Alpine.

Thank you.

school district. Thank you.

The final comments will be by Scott Wiscombe.

Good evening.

So I became aware of the county— the complaint against the Stronger Together pick. Through that Stronger Together Facebook page and the Facebook group. It was there that I saw the official letter and the complaint were posted, and I took the time to read them all myself, every word, and then continue to further research on my own. As has been stated, right, support and promotion of candidates by a PIC is a violation of Utah code. And I think to me it's been pretty clear in what I've been seeing that there was support and promotion, not necessarily financially, perhaps, But— or direct financial support, but support and promotion nonetheless. Um, I believe if there were nothing done in violation of Utah code, I don't believe that the Lieutenant Governor would have sent a letter at all. Um, there would have been no reason to do so. I think we hear what's going on in our country a lot. We hear the words election integrity. Um, let's make sure that in our city that nothing untoward or no improper benefits to been gained through this primary election because of the actions of this PIC. And this should be in everyone's best interest to ensure the complete election integrity, know that the results are not tainted.

Thank you.

Thank you all for your comments. We're going to move on to item number 8. This is consent items. We only have one consent item. It's item 8.1, approval of meeting minutes. Would someone like to make a motion?

I'll make that motion. Mayor, I move that we approve the meeting minutes from August 22nd, 2023.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. The motion for the consent items passes.

Thank you.

Next up, we've got item 9. Number 9.0. This is our 9.1. This is our canvas for acceptance and certification of the 2023 forum primary election. Theresa, our city recorder, will present this to us.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

All right. Okay, this is super fun. It's my first one. So before you, you each have 2 forms. One is like the spreadsheet and the other just has the final numbers. And I just wanted to go over a couple of these reports. There is one correction that we need to make in this official um, the general statistics, ballots not counted was not 216, it is 206. So I have corrected that on the one we will sign, but I just wanted to make that note for you because it's not corrected on the ones in front of you. All right, so we'll just go over some of the, um, information here I got from the county. The primary election was on September 5th. It was a vote-by-mail Election, and we had contracted with Utah County to, to run that election for us. The City of Orem had 45,366 registered voters. There was 12,747 ballots cast, which gives us about a 28% turnout for the primaries. A couple of the other statistics. That are on your second page of the spreadsheet is there were 206 ballots not counted. 31 of those were returned unsigned, 74 were signature discrepancies, 102 were returned past the deadline, and then there was one that was an empty envelope. And so that's where they get the 206. We did have 100 4 voters who chose to vote in person, and we had 6 provisional ballots issued and 6 ballots counted, or 6 provisional ballots counted. So all of those counted. And so this spreadsheet will—

they—

the county sent it to me, and it's like a 55-page document. So I did it like they did last year. We did on a spreadsheet so it could be on one page. And you can quickly see those numbers, but we will also have that available for people to look at. I just want to explain why I'm doing it different. Did you have a question, Tom?

Yeah, I understand 28% is better than most of the cities surrounding us.

How does it compare with— I'm talking about the percentage who voted, obviously awfully low, 28%, even if it's better than the cities below around us.

How does it compare to previous city elections?

If I remember right, and I didn't bring it with me, I think it's a little lower than we were 2 years ago because I was running off of the 2021 report.

Sure.

And I think I want to say that one was— I'm just kind of going off my memory, but I want to say it was a little bit closer to like the higher end of the 20s, maybe closer to 30%. But I can always get you that number for sure. In fact, it's probably on my computer if you really want it.

So this is the primary election, correct? So generally speaking, you have more people vote in, um, the, the regular general, and if I remember correctly, it's 32-35-ish. Is that correct? Am I remembering?

We would expect more people to vote in the general election. Um, of course, we have no way of knowing for sure if that's going to happen, but that is Generally what happens is you get a better turnout for the final.

So are you thinking somewhere between 5 and 7 or 8% more that will vote?

I don't know, but I'm hoping we would be up in the— there's quite a few districts that were really good, they're close to the 40%, but we also have some districts that were 8%. So it would be hard for me to estimate. This is my first election, but Yes, I would just be— I am very hopeful that we would be mid to high 30s.

I'd just be interested to know what we were last year.

Yeah.

Do you want me to grab it?

It's okay. You can do it later.

I'm like, it's right on my computer.

I might be able to provide—

I've got the—

Oh, he's got it for me.

The Utah County numbers from 2021. In the mayoral race, there were 16,335 votes cast. For the final? In the final, thank you. And in this primary, we had 12,747 ballots cast, so just approximately 3,500 ballots more in that general election. And so you would see probably about a 7% increase in that general election.

Okay.

Thanks for the backup, Jake. All right. So now it's up to you. On the form here, I do have the motion, but what we are— we need to take the 12 candidates down to 6 candidates for the general election.

Do we have any questions, comments?

Mayor, yeah, I have a question.

Oh, go ahead.

Go ahead.

I was just gonna ask a stupid question.

I'm so—

I'm getting 2 numbers here. So our thing says ballots counted were 12,825, and yet you're saying this 12,747 number, which is what? So, so see on that second page, it has ballots counted 12,825.

Yes, that's the amount counted.

What's the 12,747 number?

Though that's—

I don't know where you're getting the 12,700.

County document.

Oh, on this page. Oh, my guess is that I wrote— I— so I had written this up with— on Monday. And then I think this final account just came in right after, and I think I updated all of the list and just not that number at the top. So the 12— so I will correct myself, 1,274.77 is not the amount of ballots that were the final count. The 12,825, that is the final count.

Perfect.

Okay, thank you. I was confused at what you were asking.

When it's on here, it's on here too.

Can we—

we good, Terry?

So I've got this form in front of me, and Teresa, the Board of Canvassers certifies the above results, and then we're supposed to sign it. Is that correct?

Yes.

So I have listened to the citizens that spoke tonight. And I do have a concern. For me, putting my name on a document— I received a complaint, which I think we all did on the City Council several weeks ago, that was filed with the Lieutenant Governor and, you know, the Lieutenant Governor and also the Attorney General for the state of Utah, a complaint against this pick and against these 3 candidates. Jeff and, and Jen and Chris. It's a criminal complaint. I'm concerned about me signing my name to a document when I don't know the results of that complaint. And my understanding is an ongoing complaint. So I want to know what— I guess I'm not asking you, Teresa, I'm asking you, Mayor— is what's my obligation if I put my name on this and these people are found guilty of committing crimes?

Well, I can speak a little bit to it. My understanding is all you're doing is you're verifying the numbers are correct from the county, not whether or not— like, I think that's the— because you're just verifying kind of the count of the numbers, not necessarily if there's going to be some action afterwards.

So yeah, I've actually been talking with Jesse and Jake about this. Jake, can you add to that? And Jesse, if you have anything to add.

So under the code, under Utah Code 20A-4304, it outlines the obligations of the board of canvassers. As the municipal council, you are the board of canvassers tonight to certify the results of the election. As we go through the statute, It is your obligation to go through the numbers, the report that Teresa has prepared for you, and to ensure the accuracy of the numbers of how those votes were counted.

If those—

if that report is accurate, then the Board of Canvassers shall nominate those that have the highest number of votes. And then seek to have the certificates for the candidates be issued by the city recorder. The Utah Supreme Court has reviewed the statute on point in the past, as early as 1908, and there the Utah Supreme Court ruled that the duties of the Board of Canvassers are ministerial in nature and that under the law of the state, the Board of Canvassers has no judicial or quasi-judicial powers. The Supreme Court went on to then say, nope, the canvassers have no power to inquire into either the legality of the nominations or the legality of the votes cast at the election or into the regularity of the official ballot. Their power is exhausted when they have canvassed the returns and have ascertained who has received the highest number of votes cast for a practical office. So tonight's purpose is to review the accuracy of the count and to certify the count. Any pending inquiry into allegations made to the Lieutenant Governor's Office will run its course through the Lieutenant Governor's Office and the Attorney General's Office.

If any—

there are any references or referrals for further investigation by the city, we will refer those to the Utah County Attorney's Office. office for them to conduct— continue that investigation and screen for any potential violations.

Just another question about that, because I'm— as I look at the numbers, the top 3 are all within about 500 or 600 of each other, which kind of reflects what I've heard from the citizens about what the impact of a pick, uh, you know, the second and third person, you know, one is at $6,489, the other one's $6,323, and the other one is at $7,000, but that's an incumbent, so you'd think they'd get a little bit more. I want assurance that if I'm signing something, that if this comes back and it's ruled that this was illegal and these candidates did things that were illegal, I want assurance from Orem City, if I'm putting my name on this, that I didn't do something that's wrong.

You are not doing something that's wrong. By statute, it is your obligation to verify the accuracy of the vote, not the legality of the votes obtained or garnered.

You see my concern, because I mean, if all of a sudden this blows up and there is criminal, uh, there is criminal actions against these candidates in this pick, uh, I signed a form.

Correct.

Okay.

I'd be interested if Jesse agrees.

The memo that Jake wrote, I shared with the mayor and with the city manager, and it's your duty as a canvasser to take the record provided by your election officer and determine who has the highest votes. It's not your duty to question how those votes were obtained.

For example, if I, if I filled out a ballot And I'm forgetful and I forgot— I got—

I felt I forgot about filling the ballot out and I went down and voted. The second vote would be an illegal vote, but that's not what your concern is. Your concern is to look at this record and determine who has the highest votes. I appreciate the other concerns, but that will be, as Jake has mentioned, that would be resolved in a different forum, not by the City Council. So I'm in concurrence with what Jake has said and what, what the law is, what the Supreme Court has said.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I think I appreciate that opinion.

Thank you. Any other comments or questions? Okay, Theresa, tell us where we go from here.

So you— we would have to propose the motion, which is written just below your numbers.

Okay. So, someone like to make the proposed motion?

Mayor, first of all, I'd like to thank you for investigating this further on our behalf.

And then I would like to make the motion that we accept and certify the 2023 City of Orem primary election primary election as presented.

Didn't— oh, I'm sorry. Thank you.

Let me read a more complete one.

The city—

I propose that the City Council, acting as the Board of Canvassers, move to approve and certify the 2023 primary election results as presented and declare the 6 City Council candidates with the highest votes eligible to be nominated to the general municipal election on November 21st, 2023 as follows: Jeffrey K. Lampson, Jen Gale, Chris Kilpack, Crystal Muelstein, Matt McKell, and Spencer Rands—

Rands with an S, sorry, Spencer, if you're listening.

Do we have a second?

I'll second.

Okay.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye. Aye with Jake. My comment that I said, if this blows up, if there is Anything that happens, I was opposed to supporting this. I understand that my obligation to sign this, but I want that noted.

Aye. Aye.

Okay, thank you. The election is certified. Thank you, Teresa.

Right after, we'll just have you guys quickly sign.

Okay. We've got a couple more things to go. Item number 11, city manager items.

Yeah, just real quick, we, we just finished as an employee group a what we call our employee giving campaign.

And this is something we do annually where our employees choose whether they'd like to donate to local community causes and not-for-profit organizations. And I'm pleased to report that we had our best participation ever this year.

We had 92 total donors and over $20,000 raised out—

that is out of our city employee pockets. So we always like to have friendly competitions with our neighbor to the south, Provo, and we've—

you have more generous city employees here at Orem.

And with our wonderful participation this year, I'd be willing to bet that that tradition continues.

So just appreciate once again our not only capable Thank you, Bren.

The question— should we have a friendly wager on that year to year?

So far, I might add, gambling is against the law in the state of Utah.

And aren't you leaving the council, Debbie? Okay, then how about an ice cream bet and I'll pay?

It would be fun to do something a little more obviously friendly but formal.

With, with Provo.

Actually, we can just give them a bunch of Orem items. I don't know, Orem hats, Orem swag, Orem cups, just Orem, Orem.

I love it.

We give it to Provo if we win and they have to wear Orem swag, right?

That would be awesome.

I'll propose it.

We'll see if they accept the challenge.

Throw in the ice cream. It'll sweeten it.

Okay, thank you. I've got one last item that I'd like to take a little bit of time and go through. This is a concern of mine. And I've been told by, you know, public relations type folks that I probably shouldn't go down this path, but it's gotten to a point to where it's overly ridiculous. We come here, we work hard, we work hard all week, and we're doing amazing things for the city. Our city workers are phenomenal. The city is humming. But yet we come in here a couple days after some extremely off-the-rails articles that keep showing up and our local newspaper called the Daily Herald. So I want to make some comments about a news article that Janelle Pugmire from the Daily Herald put on the front page of her newspaper last weekend. Now, this non-news event was pushed to front page status on their highest readership weekend paper. And I wouldn't make a big deal about this, except it just keeps happening and happening. And this keeps coming out of this paper, and we just have to keep going along, and it's just not right. And I just want to give you a few examples to, to help us understand that this is not an isolated occurrence. And, and I've pulled some articles here, just a few of them. Um, if you guys want to stay for several hours There's a lot more, but this is just to give you a taste. Here we have Wednesday, June 14th, 2023. Orem City Council adopts the 2023-24 budget. Fees to rise. That sounds kind of ominous, doesn't it? I mean, of the options available, everyone wants to hear they've got all these fees rising and that's a problem. It's got a nice picture of the city council here and the fees to rise. I mean, this could have been Orem City Council adopts a balanced budget. Orem City Council, unlike most of its sister cities, has no tax increases in the face of high inflation. And they also have the lowest fees in Utah County. But no. Warm Springs City Council adopts a budget, fees to rise. So let's just go and, you know, it takes a while to find the fees that are going to rise. You have to go through the entire article till you get to the very end. And at the very end, here's the fees to rise. Rates will increase for Tier 1 and Tier 2 water use by 1 cent per 1,000 gallons. While Tier 3 and 4 rates are to rise 2 cents, sewer rates will rise 1.2% in a, in an 8% inflation environment, and stormwater fees will go up 2.5%. My point is, is if the headline and what's actually going on in an are completely opposite. Here's another one. This was right after our retreat at Midway. Headline: Orem City Council looks at changing form of government. Okay, we looked at changing form of government, but now we're front page again. We're all about it. It goes all through it, but it neglects to talk about the other dozen things that we talked about at the city retreat.

retreat.

And you might have noticed, but we haven't really had a chance to even look into form of government. It was just one of a dozen things that we, we were considering looking at this year. But you read this headline, it looks like Orem City Council looks at changing form of government. Then you move into the more ridiculous ones. Okay, here we have— well, and I just want to preface this, this was The day before Thanksgiving. I mean, we're going into the holidays, people putting up Christmas lights. This is a happy time of year. So what's the headline on November 26th? Library accused of censorship over removal of displays.

Huh.

I remember when this came out, and this, this nice picture that they use in their front page article, that was from like a year and a half earlier. Another similar type article they wrote. So the picture they're using in the article isn't even from anything going on in the library currently. But, you know, the way they position this— library accused of censorship over removal of displays— when there is no censorship and there was no official removal of displays. It would take some time to go through this article. I encourage you to look— well, I'm not going to encourage you to look at it. It's a waste of your time. But it's shocking what goes on in here. Because it talks about, you know, they're trying to put out the censorship, censorship. There was no censorship. So where does that go? Oh, that takes you to February 14th. Because of that article and that narrative, Utah groups lambast Orem City for handling handling of library materials. Okay, well, if the Utah groups are lambasting Orem because of the article that they read, the previous article, then there's a problem, because there was nothing going on in Orem to justify this story. And then that moves on to group warns Orem leaders to cease library censorship. Okay, it's tough, you know, as a city council, It's really difficult for us to cease censorship when we're not censoring. I mean, it's a great request on the front page of the paper, but it's an impossible task because it's not happening. And then you get to warm civil liberties group feud over public library policies. Well, this is where we drag in a civil liberties group because they've been told what has been told what has been told, which is what there's no basis in. And so this whole thing is on a foundation of fantasy, but it's on the front page of our local paper. Now we go back to October 19th, 2022. Here's a good one. Utah Attorney General investigating complaints against officials. That sounds scary, doesn't it? Well, was the Utah Attorney General really investigating complaints? Well, actually, what happened was there was a group in a campaign that sent in 30 or 40 identical complaints to the Attorney General. And the Attorney General looked at them and thought, what are you doing? There's nothing here. But the newspaper says, the Utah Attorney General investigating complaints against officials. You know, if there was an investigation, I never— I mean, I heard it from the paper, but no one ever called me up and said, you're being investigated. No one ever called up any of the city council members. No one ever called up anyone except in the Daily Herald that says Utah Attorney General. And all these articles happen to be by the same person, Janelle Pugmire. And then here we go. Good. So this goes really well. This one gets a lot of traction. And so on November 5th and 6th, you know, we talked about interfering in elections. Okay, November 5th or 6th, right before the vote. Oh, let's put out another one. This one says Utah Attorney General continues investigation into Orem mayor. Okay, I've never been investigated where I've never been talked to. So it's It's just mind-blowing, the disconnect, what's going on in this newspaper versus what's going on in reality. And that takes me to— and like I said, I could go a long time on this, but I don't want to, you know, take your time. But what took me down this path is because over the weekend, we had another one of these articles, but this time they were attacking me directly. And I'm not going to sit back and just take it because it's wrong. And there's— I've done nothing wrong, and there's absolutely nothing to it, but it continues. Now here we go with the first one. Let's just back up. Um, so just to define this, because I'm sure everybody goes, what the heck is even going on? So there's a case. It's about a $140,000 business transaction between my son Sean and his friend. I had nothing to do with it. Obviously, I disagree with the decision of one judge in an Alabama trial court, and I'm in the process of appealing it. I look forward to this matter, this matter, which is Alabama Supreme Court, to resolve this matter. I just want to take a step back and say, you know, because this is all cute. I mean, these things are completely misleading, these, these titles. But let me just take this to a church talk I heard one time. What is a lie? Let's define it. And I still remember this. It's any communication with the intent to deceive. That's what a lie is. It's any communication with the intent to deceive. And are people being deceived? Well, all you have to do is go out, look through Facebook. I don't look through Facebook, but people always show me things from Facebook. But all you have to do is, is look at the things on Facebook. And you can see that these kinds of articles promote extreme divisiveness. So whoever is pushing this is promoting extreme divisiveness, the opposite of what we really want in our city. Now, the initial court hearings on this case were back in May of 2022, so 16 months ago. So 16 months ago is when this went to court. Probably 3 or 4 years before that was when, when it was an issue. There was no media coverage that came from Alabama where this was an issue. Interesting. So 16 months ago, this happens. There's no media coverage in Alabama. Well, but it's such a big story. Apparently not. There was no media coverage in Utah. That's what you expect, because there are civil disagreements that normally get no press. Anyone who knows anything about anything knows that. So, almost 8 months after the fact, in December 2022, The paper that Janelle's affiliated with came out with a story that was really odd, as normally you don't figure— you don't consider breaking news 8 months after the case, after it happens. I mean, you see breaking news, it like happened today. But no, this is 8 months after the fact, and this is breaking news. But in real life, most breaking news happens within 24 hours. So the 8-month-old breaking news happened to come out at the same time we were rearranging city leadership. That was probably coincidental. At the same time, I thought it was kind of odd. So this first article— and I will actually give kudos to this person's name, Mark Schenefeld or something.

Hang on.

Yes, Mark Shenefield for the Daily Herald. And he wrote the first story 8 months after the fact. This was the one that broke the story about my son. So, it's Ora Mayer's son hit with $1 million civil suit judgment. Well, it's a whole story how we go from $140,000 to $1 million in real life. But that's why we're at the Alabama Supreme Court. But I will say this guy actually called me up and asked me what I thought and what my side of the story was. I think he worked for the Ogdham Standard Examiner, but he was doing it for the Daily Herald. So he puts out this article. And like I said, I'll give him credit because at least he asked. And at least we had a conversation, which made me feel a little better about the whole thing. I disagree with the article, but he acted like a real journalist. And so if we go now to last weekend, September 15th, 2023. Now, this is 9 months after this Daily Herald initial article. And the Daily Herald was who brought this to Utah. Now, here we are, 9 months later, nothing significant has changed in the case. It's still at the Alabama Supreme Court. There's nothing different. So my question is, why would Janelle Pugmire work with Danny Evans, the attorney representing the other side in this case, and write this article? So Danny Evans, the, the attorney that we've been working against for the last 16 months is in cahoots with Janelle Pugmire writing an article in Utah. And there's no reaching out to any other side. There was a slight attempt to reach out to me, and I'll get to that in a second. But who on earth works with an opposing attorney if you're trying to find the truth? So if you're going to put out information from an extremely biased source, one side's attorney, wouldn't you want to verify it, or at least talk to the person that you're attacking? Is it morally okay to put out sensitive personal financial information that's— that has been previously submitted to the court under a protective order? Is it morally okay to drag family members like my wife into a story that has nothing to do with them? Is that okay? So apparently Janelle sent me an email that I didn't see until after the deadline. She said she sent it to me Thursday. And I didn't see it till Friday at 4, about 4:30. I'll just, I'll just read my email response to her. I said, our email is being changed over from orm.org to orm.gov, which seems to be delaying some emails. I was out of the office today hiking temp, so I'm seeing your email now for the first time Friday, September 15th, at 4:37 PM. You say you want me to respond. And I'm reading this to you because this finally does make it in the electronic version of the paper after she's printed it without my response. I don't know when the electronic version went in. But I'm just reading this because she didn't— even when she finally put it in the electronic version. She only put parts and did dot, dot, dot and connected it with that. So I'm just going to read you the actual thing. It says, you want me to respond to whatever material Danny Evans, the attorney for the other side, has sent you? I have no idea what he sent you because the case has been argued but is still pending in the Alabama Supreme Court. It's very difficult to respond to something that Danny Evans told you that I've never seen. That's what she wanted in her email, and it was a response to Danny Evans, and— but I, but I didn't see anything that he had sent to her, the, the documents he had sent to her. As I've said before, the entire— this entire case is about a business transaction between my son Sean Young and his friend. I've never involved— been involved in it or had anything to do with it. Unfortunately, it appears to be a desperate money grab that I'll continue to defend myself against. Nothing has changed since your company's last article on the subject, the Daily Herald. The case is still under appeal at the Supreme Court of Alabama. We look forward to having unbiased judges review the material because we believe the lawsuit wrongly targets one of my 4 companies and me. Please confirm that you received this. I never got a confirmation. I do have a question for you, Tom. Did you know anything about this story with Janelle?

She asked me about the, um, .com—

no, .oregon.gov—

on the Saturday after you replied.

And earlier she told me she was investigating.

I said I don't really want to know anything about her or make any comments.

So I did know something was up, but I thought she was going to reach out to you, Mayor.

Okay, but she did talk to you about this article? Because I never talked to her about this article.

Yeah, she told me she was working on an article. I had no comment and thought she would reach out to you.

Okay. So I'm not going to carry this on. We've dealt with this long enough. But in the article that she printed last weekend, I've got 13 issues regarding the items stated as facts in that article. I want answers from her as to why these inaccuracies were printed and spread throughout Utah. I've kept questions as to why my personal financial information was distributed and why my wife's information was compromised. As I said, she has nothing to do with this. So why would someone do this? It's anybody's guess, but we do have an election coming up. similar to when the AG article came out. But you'll have to ask and answer that question yourself. The bottom line is, it's sad when people work so hard to increase contention and divide our community for political gain. It's pathetic, and we should all push back against it. In the real world, in the real world, there are great things happening in Orem. Orem is a model for the state. I talk to my friends in different cities all the time, and everyone's looking at Orem because Orem is the model. And I, I could take the time and go through 20 great things that are happening in Orem right now because of this city council, and because things have changed and they've moved in a much more positive direction. Dave Spencer's told me repeatedly that in the last 2 years, the city council has done more than the previous 8 years for Orem moving in the right direction. And we'll continue to work with that. We'll continue our mission. The reason we do this, and the reason we put up with this, is because our— my belief is our mission is to create an environment where families can thrive regardless how hard some people continue to work against our efforts. Orem is better than this. Let's work together to end the misinformation and division. With that, I'm going to close this meeting. Thank you.

You need a proposal.

Mayor, may I point out a booklet in the back? This is called Why I Love America/Orem. Anyway, it's in the back. It's a great book to take to your children, grandchildren, and for yourselves, tying in what we talked about the Constitution today. And, uh, you can draw a line through America and write Aurum because a lot of these things they talk about, what's great about America is great about Aurum. So thanks, Mara.

Terry, where can we get those books?

They're in the back.

Oh, in the library. Okay, thank you.

They're on the— they're in the back room here.

Oh, back room.

Okay.

Is there a limit? Because I got 30 grand.

They're also being provided in the Aurum City Library. But there's more, there's some in the back and I'll get you more if you need more.

Okay, thank you.

I'd like to make a motion that we adjourn.

Second. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.