City Council · 2023-09-26

All right, we'd like to welcome everyone back, and we have a new flag. Thanks, it's exciting. Took a few meetings to figure out, but worked out good. It looks beautiful, and these are so cute.

This is Karina Brandt. Is this you who did this? This is wonderful. Thank you.

I think this is under the influence of Karina. I thought this would— what would Karina do? That's what I have to ask myself. She would provide small flags. It's wonderful.

Exactly.

She would also put a succulent with a quote.

So I just started in her training program.

So we'll go into item number 2.

Pete and Theresa are going to take us through a virtual tour of our ballot center. That's right. So to save a little bit of time with the field trips, Theresa and I and one of our interns, Melanie, went down to the Ballot Center and we met Tony Lara, who's here. You'll see him in the video, but he's also here to answer any questions you might have about the Ballot Center.

So it's about 11-minute videos.

We're just going to watch it together, and then if there's any questions about what happens at the Ballot Center, Tony is here, the expert. Oh boy, expert. What is your title there? Uh, so my title in the office is election specialist. A lot of my focus is on voter outreach and education. So one of my favorite things to do, uh, is to bring folks into our ballot security here. The first, the first step in our process, uh, once we receive Excellent.

I have a question on your envelopes.

Are they sorted by like zip code? If you need to go back and find an envelope, do you have to withdraw them or should you be able to figure it out? Uh, well, it depends. So When we initially get them in, once we—

Hey, Debbie, why don't you come more by the mic so we can hear you?

Right, so the question was, do we have them sorted by zip code or some, some other means? And so generally what we'll do is after we have finished processing or verifying the signature, we're moving towards opening them. That's where we'll have them sorted. Generally, like for the municipal elections this year, we'll have them sorted by city, but then also for like federal elections, we'll have it separated by congressional district. So it makes it a little easier to find a specific envelope, but if there was a situation where we had to track down one specific one, then we'd have to at least know, okay, well, they're from— if they're from Orem, then we can go find the batches that were Specific to Orem, but then we would still have to look through— what was it this year, 12,000 ballots? So—

So the hole, you can see whether there's a ballot in the envelope. I noticed, I think, when I was looking at your, um, the sheet that lists the ones that weren't accepted, there was one that was an empty envelope.

So when does that get picked up?

When— after the envelope's been cut and there's no ballot to pull out, or That one, that one in particular would have been caught at that first initial pass when we first ran it through to do signature verification. The machine that processes those also has variances built into it that we set as far as width and dimensions, and so that one would have been rejected initially because it was too thin. And so we would have looked at it, realized it was empty, and then set it aside to contact the voter.

How often?

So I'm curious about this, um, because I've talked to a lot of people who— there's like 4 people living there and they get like 12 ballots, right?

Because people have moved or had kids that live there and grew up and moved away and they still get their ballot.

I'm just curious, I got a few questions on this. So how do— how often do you pick up ballots that, you know, are incorrect or the signatures don't match? And doesn't it depend on how tightly you set those parameters? That's true, yes. There is initially an auto signature recognition system that looks at all of those, so the ones that the staff are looking at are ones that the system had determined didn't match. But as far as ones that are at households where maybe, you know, residents have moved Or sometimes, you know, we'll have folks that have gone to college, go on missions, and so that is what we like to think is— that's the responsibility of the folks at that residence to let us know. We don't really always know when someone moves, and so we do try to take steps to ask voters that if you do get a ballot for somebody that no longer lives there to contact us so we can spoil that ballot in the system. I guess I'm just asking you proactively, you know, you have 12,000 ballots come in, how many of those ballots would you get something saying these signatures don't match or they're not close, and then what would you do? That would be a situation in which we would set them aside and then reach out to the voter either by email, phone calls, postcard if we have to, and those, those would be represented in your stats. for canvas as the ones that were Cures. So that's, so that's the situation. So my question is, how many of those did you get? What percent out of 12,000?

Can I tell you what, when I—

my election, when it was neck and neck, there were about 120 of the thousands that were lacking signatures or something.

So I don't know how many thousand But, and then they went down the list and they even, you know, we were able to contact anyone that I knew to say, make sure you contact the county to do that, because you remember, for Sam and me, it was so close, it ended up being a 12-vote vote.

And I guess that's the question, is that a stat that you keep track of that you report?

Um, it's one—

Uncured ballots basically is what they are, right?

Yeah. Yeah, so that's, that's what you would see in the stats that both we have online and then also in the— I'm trying to remember the word, I suddenly blanked on it.

Canvas.

In your Canvas statistics, the ones that are the uncured ballots would be the ones— if you had uncured ballots and cured ballots, those would total the number of ballots that were rejected initially. That separation then is who was able to call in or came into the office and was able to cure their ballot. But those 2 numbers in total would be the number of— out of those 12,000 ballots, those would be the ones that didn't pass that initial, that initial phase. So I'm still not clear though.

I mean, I understand the process, I understand how it works.

My question is What percentage, what number, 12,000 ballots? Do you have 500, do you have 1,000? And I'm trying to understand how aggressive your system is at catching these discrepancies because it's not that uncommon for households to get ballots that nobody, you know, those people don't live there anymore. So I'm just curious how it works. I believe, I want to say this last election The number of ballots that weren't passed through automatic signature verification, I want to say, and I, I can double-check, I will go back and look and send you guys an email later tomorrow on that just to get a specific number, but I would say, I want to say it was around 40% didn't pass that initial automatic signature. And so of those 40%, then we had to go through and manually check. And when we check those, we have years of signatures we can go through. I have previous ballot envelope signatures, driver's license division signatures, ones from your voter registration. And so I can look through all of those, but I would say it's not, it's not set so high that almost everything gets passed. It's actually something that we'll have to look at a significant amount of.

And of those, how many are you able to humanly verify?

A good, a good amount of them. The system— I mean, the ones that we'll see, you'll see ones that are very closely matched. It's just a matter of where that— where the algorithm sits. That one isn't quite a match, but everybody that does that in the office has been trained by the Lieutenant Governor. on signature verification, signature matching. So they're looking at all the different loops and styles and the ways that you do things. It's, it's actually really interesting. But feeding into Mayor's question, if 40% don't make it through the first shot, how many don't make it through the second? Right. That I think would then be represented by the number of cheers, because if we haven't— if we're not able to determine it in that second pass when we're looking at it, that's when we reach out to the voter. So again, that would be In maybe single-digit territory. I want to say overall in this election, not just Orem but overall countywide, it was something like 48,000 ballots if I remember right. I want to say we had in, in the hundreds of ballots that didn't make it through that process all the way. So it narrows. Have you either looked at them Verify them, or you call the people to see if this is what they did, and just kind of work your way through all that, right?

So do you have 2 people adjudicating those ballots, then those signatures, or one person?

So we'll have one person look over the signature. If for some reason they also question it, then that goes to another staff member that then looks at it, so it gets escalated further. And then at that point, if we can't determine one way or another, then that's when we reach out to the voter.

And if you—

you may not know this, but okay, so let's say it goes through and there's a ballot that clearly doesn't match anything.

You contact the person and, you know, someone has sent the ballot in that shouldn't have sent the ballot in. Is there a consequence to that person? I mean, I know there should be. I'm just curious if in practicality— In the sense of like in that scenario that somebody has sent in a ballot for somebody that doesn't live at their house anymore, but they've— Or they're on a mission.

Forced signature.

You know, it kind of— I think it really depends situationally too, because a lot of the signatures that we see that aren't matching are sometimes if they're the same residence, it's husband and wife who signed for each other. Or the biggest one that we see is missionary moms. who are signing for their kids. And so in those situations, I think it's, it's down to discretion of the clerk. But I mean, technically you can't sign someone else's ballot, right?

Right.

You can't even do it with power of attorney.

That's correct. You can't even have power of attorney for it.

So, I do want to make a comment about the multiple.

So this year I got a call from your office saying you have many ballots, you're going to go. So they went over one by one by one by one with me, who lives there, who doesn't.

So we were able to, you know, they moved, they're here, you know.

So someone is looking at the multiple ballot problem that the mayor was talking about.

And mine was—

I bet I had 8 ballots, but cleaned it down to 3.

So when do you cull the voter rolls when, you know, someone didn't vote last presidential election, last municipal?

Well, that, that all happens during what I would refer to as off-season. Not that there is one in elections, because I know Aaron said he would have loved to have been here today, but we were still busy working on the ballots for November's election. So there's not really necessarily an offseason, but throughout the year we have staff that are full-time that are checking national change of address weekly, going through vital statistics and, you know, removing deceased voters. And so, and we've also got that partnership with ERIC. So if you say move to one of those states that participates in ERIC and register there, that system will let us know to take you off of our voter rolls because you've now registered somewhere else.

Okay.

So it's kind of an ongoing process. It's not necessarily a set time that we manage it. It's kind of a constant. Also, my question is though, and I appreciate that, that's a, that's a good answer, that's informative.

If someone, do they have to not vote in 2 elections before you drop them?

I want to say it is 2, it is 2 presidentials.

So 8 years? Yeah, before you drop them off the rolls?

Correct, that, that's according to statute. And so, um, but we do— I mean, we do that. That is a report that gets generated weekly also, and so those ones automatically get put into a holding where they're then removed.

And then I'm just going to tell you my experience.

We had one voter in our household that did not receive a ballot.

All the rest of us got it. We all voted in the last municipal election. But this one voter did not get their ballot. What do you do in that case?

Well, I mean, definitely reach out to our office. We would, we would have to look into it. It sounds like it may have been an address issue because a lot of that is pulled out by the precinct that you're listed in as your residence. So there may have been an incorrect zip code, so we might have put that in wrong or something.

Well, my child— this is one of my kids—

they had received 2 years ago, they got their ballot. But they didn't get it this year. Yeah, I mean, in that situation, I'm not sure, like, specifically what that particular issue was, but I would say in circumstances like that, the proper course would be to contact our office. We can investigate it and then send out a ballot.

So is there a deadline for that?

There is. I want to say it's a week before. No, no, you're okay.

Provisional ballot.

Yes, you could also do a day of. I would—

that was just very curious. We kept waiting for it to come.

How does Utah County compare?

When you see—

look at the, uh, like the last presidential election and you saw the chaos and insanity and accusations and everything, what you got down there looks very organized, very modern.

It looks cutting edge.

I mean, can you give us a comparison of what Utah County is like compared to Anywhere else? Well, I mean, being a Utah County employee, having only worked with their elections division, I want to say gold standard, fantastic elections. I think we do a great job. That being said, I know that there are other jurisdictions in other parts of the country that use similar equipment. I know Pennsylvania, for example, has a lot of the DS-850s that you saw there. The poll pads that we use to check in voters at our vote centers here are the same ones that they use in Georgia. So my assumption would be that a lot of those jurisdictions also follow the same best practices that we all do. So I would say that as far as comparatively, a lot of us all follow the same processes and procedures. But in terms of, I think, ability to organize and meet a challenge, I think that we're better than most. Thank you.

So we have a 3-week return your ballot window, correct? Right. Um, you're in from in your server. Does anyone check the numbers throughout that time? How specifically do they— is it just so many voters, or is it who's ahead?

Right, so thankfully we don't have to, uh, because you're right, we are not like some other states where we have to hold all of those in a cage and wait until Election Day to start processing. We can start processing them as we get them. However, the way the system is programmed, we're actually not able to view those results until 8 PM.

And then how are they released?

So those ones are pulled off, so we'll print— we'll generate the reports in the system once that's unlocked, and then we will transfer it to a USB. There's some folks in IT that will put it online for us, and we just take those results, those PDFs, basically across the hall to IT and have them uploaded.

And are there procedures in place to where that's the only way the numbers are released? No one makes a phone call and says, guess what?

Oh, you know what I mean?

I mean, I don't know if there's a, if there's a policy specifically written into code about it, but I know we generally— nobody that I know of would do that. So, okay.

I know this year we had some sort of app that I could trace my ballot, find out where it was.

Thank you, that was nice to know where it got counted. So that was new. Yeah, I'd love to take credit for that, but that shout out goes to the Lieutenant Governor's Office for that one. But you're right, BallotTrax is, is fantastic. I love getting those text messages myself. But I have a question. So at the very beginning, that very first process, um, when you bring those ballots in and go to that first machine, Are those all ballots from the same city, or are those just a bunch of ballots that have been collected together? They get sorted out through the process? That's correct. Yeah, they're all, they're all brought in from various locations, and so then they're just ran as a whole batch. The sorting happens after the fact.

So one bag at a time, like I've seen them take it from our ballot box, you run the whole—

Um, well, with those pickup teams, they're, they're picking up OREM, but they're also picking up The Provo Library, they're picking up Lindens, and so when they get back to the ballot center, they usually have 6 or 7 locations worth. Now, each one of those bags is individually sealed with a serialized zip tie ahead of time, with the number given ahead of time, so that way we have that security in place to show that that seal matches that location. But once we verify the security of all those ballots, then they're all just put into one large set of trays and then ran through that way. Again, the, the end result of them being sorted through doesn't happen until that second pass. And I saw a group picking them up once, 2 people, right?

And I kind of watched them to see what— then it looked like they had pretty good protocols, right? They pull it up, they hide it, they had a clipboard, they were both verifying everything.

Can you explain how that Track My Vote application works? To a degree. Just as far as so people can understand how they get the app and just what it does. So yeah, there is an option on our website. So you go to utahcounty.vote and there's an option there to track your ballot that redirects you to the state website that signs you up for what's called BallotTrax. And what that does is we've got that connection with our print vendor. So when those ballots are generated and mailed out, You'll get a text message that lets you know that your ballot is on the way. Once you've sent that in, once we process it through that machine, that first sorting machine, once we have verified that that is ready to open, that second pass also sends that information to the state system that then will let you know that we've received your ballot and gives you voter credit for it. So a question, uh, election ago, I believe it was, there's, there's a man working in your, in your office that also runs campaigns.

Is he still an employee of the— I mean, that seems very bizarre to me.

You'd have somebody working in an election office counting ballots involved with that that also runs campaigns. I, I want to say I think I know who you mean, and if it's Taylor Williams, then no, he no longer He was Josh Daniels' chief deputy at the time. Yeah, no, he's, he's no longer employed with the county.

Did you put policies in place so that doesn't happen again?

Not that I'm aware of, but then that's a little outside my purview, so I'm not— I don't know if we've changed that, but I mean, it's definitely something we can address with the current county clerk. Any other questions? You're going to get those percentages to Mr. Bybee, he can share them. Yeah, the numbers that you were a little bit uncertain of. Is that okay for him to share? That would be great. There's one comment. Uh, the code provides that the city council can come down without being in a forum. They can come down and Look at your process, look at the ballots. Do you schedule that if a city council member would like to come down? How does that work? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we do publicly post a schedule of events. We include ballot center tours, but if none of those times work, I encourage you to absolutely reach out to me and we'll get you scheduled. I'd be more than happy to take anybody down there, show you guys up close and personal how all the equipment works and answer any other questions you have. So yeah, absolutely. And if the public wants to volunteer to be involved in the election as far as poll watching and all that sort of thing, how do they make that happen? So for poll watching, we basically have a sign-up sheet there in the ballot center. So I would just encourage folks to come down on election night if they'd like to see the process, or at their vote center, they can also do that there. As far as volunteering, if they want to be poll workers or help out in the ballot center, we have an application on our website under forms. And yeah, honestly too, if anybody would love to help out, uh, you know, we have an election coming up that's 2 days before Thanksgiving. I'm not sure how well we're going to get volunteer turnout for that, so if you know anybody that would like to, I would, I would definitely encourage you guys to sign up. Yeah, that's one more question. I know, you know, you get some, some ballots in a week or 2 or 3 before, because as Lenee said, there's a 3-week deal. And you release what you have at 8 PM. But my guess is none of those are the ones that get dropped off, you know, here, or that get mailed in the day before, you know, all those kind of things.

So as we saw this time, it was a pretty—

there were quite a few that came in or were counted by you after that fact. But normally by Friday or the next Monday, it's pretty well a sealed deal, you know, as far as, you know— Then can you give me To some verification of what I just said. Hey, by Tuesday we normally only have whatever, 60% of them counted. Maybe you'll have to get this number to Brennan. And then by Friday we have probably 90-95%.

Could you give us some idea, or am I just spitballing?

You'll have to get back. I mean, I would have to get back as far as like specific percentages and actual numbers, uh, but in terms of, um, where we're at in unofficial counts It depends on turnout. This one was a little lower, so we were able to get a majority of that done. But you're right, usually that first release at 8 o'clock at night doesn't include a lot of things that have been dropped off that day. It should include a lot of what we had from the vote centers because the digital sticks that are in those tabulators are brought at the end of night, but that's usually when polls close, and so there's travel time, obviously, from, say, the Eagle Mountains Vote Center to Utah County admin building. And so those ones we try to release later on in the night, closer to 10 o'clock, maybe midnight if we can. And the problem this time is heightened because of Labor Day not being a mail day, right? So you have more in the day after, right? It's my guess. Yes, no, that's— you're absolutely right. That definitely changed up how, how that process, not necessarily how the process works, but the end results of how those numbers get tabulated and how they get released at a certain point. It can be reshaped later, that's all. Right, yeah. So, but thankfully we've got that 2-week canvass period after the election so that we can make sure that everybody gets— every vote gets counted. It also gives voters a chance to cure their ballots still during that time frame. And so we're curing them up until the day before the canvass is released. Okay, well, thank you.

Question, do you do 8 PM, 10 PM release, just the 2 tranches, or do you do a 3rd one at midnight?

Um, it depends, really.

I think it's, it's more based on turnout.

So if it's, if it's a heavy turnout, if we're looking at, say, 2020s or even 2022, you know, even the midterms were Probably double what we had this primary, then yeah, we'll probably do an 8, 10 o'clock if we can, and then probably midnight if we're still processing. But in cases like this primary where we have lower turnout, we don't have as many ballots, so we've gone through a good 80-90% of everything that we needed to tabulate, then we would usually be good at just stopping at 10 and then releasing the next day. So how many states are on that software? The Access?

You said Access?

Eric?

Eric? I don't remember the exact count. I want to say it's in the 20s.

I'd be interested in that one too, and the stats on that.

I know recently I think Louisiana and North Dakota dropped out of it, but I still want to say it was More than half.

Okay, well, I appreciate you coming to see us and informing us on all that.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Theresa.

Thanks, Tony.

Yeah, thanks so much for the question, guys. I appreciate it. I appreciate Tony saving us some drive time. Absolutely. Yeah, we got it all on video right there. Right. Okay, let's move on to item number 3. Yeah, I mean, we've got an hour. I don't anticipate taking the full 30 minutes.

That was a lot of—

yeah, we should eat while we're talking about sewer. Yeah, they will leave after this.

All right, it's good to be with you today to talk about, uh, to take care of some, uh, some updates that we've needed to do at Public Works for, for a little bit of time. Um, if you'll recall, I presented, uh, several months ago to talk about our pretreatment program and local limits. We presented at the previous work session some updates, or some updates to the pretreatment ordinance. All the next slide will review what exactly pretreatment is, because it may be a little, a little fuzzy to you. But in that presentation, we recommended that we remove portions from Chapter 20 which address pretreatment into Chapter 11, which is dedicated to health and sanitation. We also presented updated local limits, which are numbers which I'll explain on the next slide, both of which were endorsed by you. Then we told you that we would come back at another time with updates to the 40-page Chapter 20, which deals with the Water Reclamation Code. So we're coming back to you to follow up on the updates that we are recommending to Chapter 20. So let's quickly review what we've already talked about when it comes to water reclamation.

First of all, pretreatment.

Pretreatment is a federally required program for POTWs to regulate pollutants at the point where they're created, in particular for industrial users. What this does is it protects the environment, and it also extends the life of our infrastructure. If we don't put it in the sewer system, we don't have to take it out. It won't cause any problems. So the city and all municipalities should have a pretreatment program. We developed ours over 30 years ago, and the ordinance that we discussed with you last time is patterned— it was included in Chapter 20. We've taken that out and patterned it after a model ordinance that the state recommended using— recommends using for pretreatment. The ordinance as drafted simplifies our reporting process, makes it more efficient, and the proposed changes that we've put in that we recommended at that time and still do should not adversely affect businesses. Now, local limits is required as part of—

by the EPA.

in the 40 CFR, which is the Code of Federal Regulations, and what it does is it defines how much pollutants are allowed in wastewater discharge from certain industrial and commercial users. So certain pollutants like heavy metals, copper, aluminum, things like that, we want to keep those numbers down because they're difficult to remove from from wastewater flows. So we determine how much our treatment plant can handle, and then we allow industrial users to discharge a certain amount, an amount that we know that our treatment plant will be able to handle. What this does, like the pretreatment code, is that it protects Orem's infrastructure and ensures that it will treat water effectively according to the permit limits that we're given. Now, all POTWs or treatment plants are required to evaluate their local limits on a regular basis, and the limits that we proposed, that we, that we will be adopting, should not adversely affect any businesses in Orem. So That gets us to the update of Chapter 20, which is the Water Reclamation Code. So what are we doing? What are we proposing to you that we do? We're not making drastic changes. For the most part, it's general housekeeping. We've updated some definitions to be a little clearer. We've standardized on terminology throughout that particular chapter. As I mentioned, we've removed references to most of the pretreatment regulations, so Chapter 20 had a lot of regulations related to pretreatment, but we felt it was necessary to take those regulations out and put them elsewhere because EPA would have—

I'm going to let Giles explain this because he knows it better. With pretreatment codes, the jurisdiction for that is EPA through the state of Utah, so Division of Water Quality. Having the pretreatment code inside Chapter 20 gave EPA and the state of Utah access to all of the requirements in Chapter 20. So for instance, If we have 200 restaurants in Warren, they fall into this pretreatment category. We have to sample them 4 times a year. If we miss one sample in that, in that year, EPA can come in and fine us for that. So by separating these out, we give EPA jurisdiction over the area of the code that they need jurisdiction, which is our industrial users, and we keep the rest of that under Warren's jurisdiction so that we can manage the programs.

So it makes— it gives us more flexibility by pulling the pretreatment out of Chapter 20 and putting it into Chapter 11. So that shortened Chapter 20 a bit. We also, with this update, defined sewer requirements for for ADUs, for the auxiliary—

auxiliary—

accessory dwelling units. And what the— what we've done there is if there is a parcel that has an accessory dwelling unit on it, we— and it needed— and it was subdivided at some point in the future, we require them to hook on to the sewer if they have not already. As it's Currently allowed, they could tie onto the sewer system of the home that's in that—

on that particular parcel.

We've also added specifically prohibiting flushable wipes. It's a term that we don't really like because by saying it's flushable wipes, it says, oh, this can be flushed down the toilet. Technically, it will go down there, but it does not help our sewer treatment plant and collection system. So we've added—

we've simply clearly stated in there that flushable wipes would be prohibited from discharge into our sewer system. And so for that to be effective, you have to have a pretty good PR campaign to get that out, right? Because I don't think Exactly.

And would we be able to catch them? Probably not. We did have an issue where we were able to—

Probably not.

DNA sample.

We did have a situation where there was a backup in the city and there were just a few users that were on that line and we were able to track that down. and target a group of 4 or 5 homes and say— target them and say, hey, somebody's doing this, don't do it because it's causing problems.

Okay.

But if that was to happen on a mainline somewhere, there's no way that we could target it. So, as the mayor pointed out, a public outreach campaign to let them know would be something that we could do, and many municipalities do, because this is a common problem. Throughout the world. We also have provided some requirements for acceptance of a private sewer main to public ownership. If there's a sewer main in a subdivision that's been private, we're providing a way for it to become public. And then we're also enhancing the Fats, Oils, and Grease program, which regulates restaurants and auto shops.

If I may, I'm told we do do a PR campaign related to the flushable wipes. And as you might guess, bathroom humor gets a little extra attention. I noticed you did say doo-doo.

Well played. The fats, oils, and grease program is similar to the pretreatment program, with the pretreatment program focusing on industrial. This makes sure that restaurants and auto shops aren't discharging fats, oils, and greases into the system, because as you can imagine, those cause problems for what we're doing, what we're trying to do at the treatment plant. So, uh, the next steps, uh, that we will be doing, we will be finalizing these changes, uh, working with the legal department to make sure that the document's buttoned up and tight, ready for public comment. Once that happens, we will go up to public comment for 30 days. We'll be working closely with the state of Utah and has to notice the public about any changes that we make to our local limits and pretreatment program, we'll likely piggyback on their effort in doing so. So we will be public— out for public comment will be the updates to Water Reclamation Chapter 20 of ORM Code, as well as the addition to Chapter 11 of for the pretreatment code, and then also the local limits establishing the amount of pollutants that our treatment plant can handle. After the 30-day public comment period, we will review all of the comments that, that have been— that are submitted and consider those prior to seeking final approval from you. And we plan to bring this to you before year's end.

for final adoption. That's good.

Yeah.

Timing was perfect.

You know, we toured the facility a couple times. But one of the things I found out that eggshells are a pain in the neck too, and maybe other garbage disposal things are. Do we ever want to share that with the citizens as a whole? Like, if you have, I'm not aware of it. But hey, it's easier if you don't throw your potato peels or your Or your eggshells or other things. I think we could have— I think it would have some positive impact, but I don't know what we've done there or what your thoughts.

Yeah, I would— I had to force-feed that.

I don't think I've ever done anything about food. It's just always been about— So there has been a statewide campaign coming from the wastewater section that basically says only 3 things belong in a sewer system. It's the 3 Ps: pee, poop, paper. That's it. That's the only thing that should go into the sewer system.

We're not—

we as a city have not actively done so, but could.

But to Tom's point about eggshells, I mean, anyone who has a garbage disposal is going to get more than the 3 things you talked about, right?

Right.

So how do you bring that together? So you encourage them to put it in the regular garbage, right?

If you don't, if you don't put it in the sewer system, we don't have to take it out. It saves the city as a whole money if you, instead of putting those potato peels or the eggshells down there, just scoop them up and put those into garbage, regular garbage, and then rinse your sink out. I know that my family had, had a habit of taking leftovers to the sink and just washing them right down the garbage disposal. It's a simple solution. When you're cleaning dishes, but it's not best for the treatment plant. If we could just simply scrape the plates into the garbage, anything that's left in the sink, catch it in the little strainer and toss it— toss that in there. If it doesn't go down—

It's better for composting.

So any— if we don't put it down the sewer system, we don't have to take it out. We don't have to take it out. It makes us more efficient.

So you're saying generally nothing significant should go down the garbage disposal, right? Except a few.

Ideally, yeah, just rinsing things out. You've got, you know, you've got a half a can of tomato sauce that you can't use yet. I'm gonna put it down the sink.

I'm not, uh, if I was real particular, maybe I'd freeze it. Yeah, those types of things, the sawdust, that's not going to hurt the sewer system at all. What's going to hurt the sewer system are the solid particles that you're trying to put down those garbage disposals. Anything you have to grind up has the potential to hurt your sewer system. So somehow we have to clarify that, right? Because I think it's mushy in everyone's heads as far as what that means. And so if we're going to educate people, if we care about that, then yes, until I do what I do. Yeah, yeah. So we were like, I'm assuming 90% of households just run the things down the disposal, right?

It's easy to get rid of.

Now we don't because I'm informed, but I'm one of very few. We are 120 of them. So, Mayor, just, just a suggestion.

I think—

are you the senior, senior singer? Dave and I are the same. So maybe Tom could do a video showing those disposable wipes and what you should not do. And then he could show some of these other things about what's important.

So because he's a senior, unless these guys want to—

If you assign it to the juniors, is that okay? I'll be happy to do it as one of my final acts. I need Pete to be clever on what I'm supposed to say.

It's got to have humor.

If you'll jump on YouTube, there's an actual video. It's called What Not to Flush.

Okay, we might defer to that, Debbie.

That might be more distinguished exit.

You don't need to walk on eggshells around Debbie.

I'm willing to see what the campaign is and then I'll—

I have plenty of time. I can be memorable. So, Mayor, Council, so we actively and aggressively promote this, this educational effort with all of those restaurants and other industries that are heavily regulated. So they know when we go out there on a regular basis, every year, every few months, we say your BOD is really high. In other words, you're probably discharging too much of your food waste products down. This will help you if you scrape everything and put it over here, you can rinse off everything else over here. What I'm hearing from you is that we need to probably extend that effort citywide, and we can work with Pete in doing that. There is a product that is out there that is called— excuse me the language here, but it's called Shittens. And what that is, it's a mitten that is a— it's a real product.

I'm not kidding.

I'm not making this up. But it is something that people buy and then they can wipe and flush. So that's something that the industry has actively promoted not to use and to not use in there.

What do you do after you use what?

You flush it.

Oh, flush it.

I thought there's multiple uses. No, it's a one-time use. Yeah, for the extra frugal person. So in this industry, there's a variety of strange things like this that We can actively promote this. I just— if there are no more questions with this, I'd like to make an announcement. And that is that our dear friend Giles Demke is retiring and resigning from the City of Orem, not retiring.

He is—

he's committed to, to continue down in this industry, and this path is going to be working for Mount Olympus Special Service District. And we're going to miss him dearly. We have a commitment from him to continue to work with us on an as-needed basis, and I've committed to at least, what, 20 hours a week on your behalf, right? So for the next 15 years. 15 plus minus, you know. No, he is actually committed to helping us through a few significant challenges that we have. at the facility and with our water reuse plant and project that's going on right now. His heart and soul is into this industry, and I can't say that everybody that leaves an organization has that level of commitment that Giles has. So I'd just like to say thank you, Giles, for committing to getting us down the road at least another year and a half or so. With that said, also I have Brian Terry back here and the mayor, Ryan Johnson is— was just announced today as he will be Giles's replacement. So have 5 weeks to do some job shadowing over this next month or so before Giles leaves. Ryan has come to us with over 30 years experience in the wastewater field and industry. I've known Ryan for 29 years, and he is a highly motivated self-starter who has excelled in so many ways and is very capable, and we look forward to working with, with Ryan. He has our full support. So just wanted to make you aware of this change. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we've got a lot going on in the next few years on this, in this area, right?

We'll be coming to you with updates for this, uh, For this code update, we're also finalizing updates to our master plan, our master plans on both sewer, water, and stormwater. And you'll recall that we presented the capital facilities plan for the water reclamation facility, which is another reason we want Giles close. He's been so influential in making it, working with the engineers who drafted that plan to make sure that we are upgrading and improving our plant to meet current standards, as well as to make improvements to what is an aging facility. And so we'll be— you'll be hearing more from us near the end of the year, beginning of the year.

Christine, I asked what's the timeline on our water tank?

Are we on schedule? Are we—

Yeah, we are on schedule. And in fact, I'd say about 20% of the walls are up right now, around the perimeter. We're going to be taking you on a tour of that in about 2 weeks at our next council meeting. If you want to go, we can provide a virtual tour, but it wouldn't be as exciting as going down there. We can drive you down into the hole and show you that, but it's on schedule right now. There's a lot of ancillary projects associated with that, including major trunk lines and drain lines and water lines that are going in right now in 8th South and 6th West that are underway. And then the well is developed. Of course, the building's not done. The building and the pump house won't go in until after all of the work is done. at the tank in the underground there. So what's the estimated completion date? It's at least a year and a half for the entire project.

Are you worried about weather slowing you down, or?

You know, it's been— we've been very— we haven't had any challenges or delays with respect to weather. We had a wet spring, but we were able to manage through that. I think they're making good progress, and so they're on track right now. We're putting in place the work.

Same with the water reuse facilities, moving right along as well.

So we're on schedule for that. Last time we took you to the water reuse facility, there was nothing happening. You'd be amazed at what's going on there right now. So we can give you updates, maybe pictures or videos or a drone attempt, providing a virtual tour there as well.

Looks a lot like this hole out here. Only no foundation yet.

We have several of those around town.

Yeah.

Okay, well, I appreciate that.

Thank you.

I think what we'll do is, uh, our agenda is pretty simple tonight, so I think we'll just run through this, uh, and we'll take a break.

Just running through this.

Okay, we've got item number one, the city council review items on the agenda. That's this. Item two, city council reports, boards and commissions. Opportunity for the members of the city council to raise issues of information concern. We don't have anything, right? I think we just end up doing that once a month so we can get it last time. Yeah, I recorded last time. Okay, and so we'll just start with our regular session, uh, at 6.

There'll be a call to order, invocation, and Teresa's gonna do that, right?

I am.

And then Carson's gonna do the pledge.

Yes.

And then we've got the mayor's report, item number 6. There's a recognition, 6.1, Why I Love America.

Pete will present the winner of our Constitution Month essay contest. And then item 6.2, we have a presentation by the Library Advisory Commission.

They'll update us. There's been a lot going on with that over the last several months. We'll get updated on that. We'll have personal appearances for 15 minutes. Well, there's 15 minutes allotted for it. Um, item number 8, we're going to have a resolution on a healthy Utah community. We talked about that last work meeting, right? We got item number 9, uh, resolution adopting the transportation master plan. Sam Kelly will present that to us. Uh, we'll see where we are on that as far as how the council feels, if they feel like they've got enough information, and, uh, and we'll decide if we're going to take a vote on it tonight.

So, Mayor, should that say incumbents or should it say everyone that's— anyone that's elected?

We just wanted to fill that out on this 9.2. It's a requirement for incumbents. If someone's newly elected, that would be a similar requirement for them as it would be an incumbent, correct? Right.

So it's—

yeah, I don't see what— And how far back are we going on that? First of this year?

What—

how far back?

The last report you filed.

And so for some of us, 2 years. 2 years. Some— what, because they would have just got elected again or not?

Yeah, so that—

I don't know if, uh, Jake— it says before incumbents on him, it's for every elected official, right?

Yeah.

Yes, I think it was just intended to not conflict with the campaign disclosure requirements for those that are running. But if you're elected, you were elected a year ago, you're not an incumbent, they still need to comply with—

Sitting members.

So for, for Terry and Debbie, they go back 4 years?

Yep.

That's the intention. I don't know where Jake is.

Didn't he explain that last fortnight? That's what he said.

I thought it was an annual thing. Unfilthy youth, and a good-looking villain you are.

Do you know how far back we're going on this?

Well, it's from your last pre—

last pre-report. And so, and then after it's—

And then thereafter, it's annually October 15th. You— well, you would—

October 15th is the date to kind of do the makeup report.

Then annually on August 1st, you would do a report of everything in the intervening time.

You'll create a form of some sort? Well, yeah, it'll probably be similar to the one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Okay, so the concern with the term incumbent is someone who is already elected and running again rather than just having to have— can't face financial exposure for city elected officials. I don't know, does it say in the code or just in the title?

But I—

we weren't able to get the code out to you in time for the things that happened with you. So I— that's why I put the code on everybody's spot.

See if it says there elected officials.

It says elected officials, but maybe you'll be sitting in the title. That's right. Annual contribution disclosure. Okay. All right, then item number 10, communication items. There are any city manager information items, anything you want to go over tonight? Yeah, I just had a few things that basically just wanted to thank for those of you that were able to make it to our Harvest Festival yesterday. It's always a well-attended event, and in the fall we always have a handful of events that are really quite well attended that just wanted to remind you of. So coming up in a couple weeks. On October 9th is our fire prevention night. October 14th, we're doing an Orem Eclipse magic show. Both of these are at Seesaw Park. Orem Truck or Treat event, which is super popular, which is kind of a combination of touch a truck trick-or-treating event. That'll be on October 21st this year. So on a Saturday. And then our Lights On is currently scheduled for November 27th. This will send us all calendar invites. Absolutely. And then I just get it with what— how we're recognizing the contest winners with Constitution Month and with the Why I Love America contest that we did. video, you'd like to know that we, uh, we had enough interest, enough positive interest in this effort that all 360 copies were at our library. Positive, well accepted. So is the contest an essay, or is it— what was the contest? It was an essay and an art one. So that was all I had other than we also have Councilmember Dave Spencer's birthday coming up this Friday on the 29th. We heard from many of you that you thought it might be nice to moving forward to recognize birthdays just during our meal break.

So is our dessert part of dinner?

Is dessert part of dinner?

New little thing.

No way. It's giving them a little gift. It's over $25. That comes from our fleet department. Okay. And can you see? You and Taylor Swift. You guys made it before Taylor Swift. Well, thank you. That's awesome. So happy birthday. Thank you.

So how old are you gonna be?

I'll be 62. Oh my God. Oh, my good friend Skip McCord, or best mate, 63. We're glad you could just remember where to come tonight to find some information. My wife pointed me in the right direction. All right, we'll go ahead and adjourn this meeting, and then, uh, we'll have some food, and then we'll be back up at 6 o'clock. Council chambers. Somebody like to say a prayer? Our Heavenly Father, we are thankful for the opportunity to meet together this evening. We pray that this food will nourish and strengthen us. We pray that we'll be sensitive to how thou would have us be and the things we should do to make Orem a better place. We're grateful for the opportunity to serve, and we say this in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, amen.

That's what I thought.

Perfect.

Thank you.

But we started out real slow. One of them was— It's okay. I mean, I got a butterfurry button on that. Grand Slam, your sports.

You see that?

Look at your little thing.

It's all red.

Someone really thought of you. Oh yeah, I'm not really— I'm not a big lover of modern, but whatever. It was sort of like about— I had to run.

I ran away.

And they're running, they're running.

All right, are you ready for the moment of truth?

Yeah. That's a good sign.

That's a really good sign.

Do we know the password to this TV— this computer? Uh, what's the login? You were saying she is, so that's cool. Way to go.

James.

That would be awesome. They won't separate. I see you here. Look at the crack in my teeth. Also, I didn't bring— we're gonna need your charge cord. This thing's not gonna make it. I'm just juicing it up for a minute. I've got— so you saw that, right? But it's gonna have to be on. I mean, it's been around for a long time. I read it. Well, no, we can just put it over there. Is there power? I think that's one of the ideas. I think we'll be okay. I gotta move this thing back. This thing is way too close. Have we gone too far? How's that?

Test, test.

Test, test. Hi.

Test, test, test. Test, test, test.

Okay, so they talk about a stroke.

You've seen that one?

Oh yeah. And so I thought that was really important.

Test, test.

Less than a year. He was in trouble for a long time.

Yes.

Went to—

so you have to retire for over a year out of the system.

So what would happen is here, so for about a year or a few months, paid at billable hours, took a gap here.

Okay.

Yeah. So what are your thoughts on the transportation master plan? I don't think we ought to ever have a freeway exit off of there. I don't care about the overpass. Yeah, but there was also talk about interchange there. It's just crazy. 4 blocks. Yeah, I think so.

We'd like to call this meeting to order, and we'd like to welcome you all here tonight. We're going to start out with an invocation by Teresa McKintreck, our city recorder, and then a Pledge of Allegiance by Carson, Carson Hardy, that's an analyst here at the city. So we've got a couple of our great city employees helping us tonight.

Our dear Heavenly Father, we're grateful for the opportunity to gather here at City Council, and we're grateful for our elected officials who work so hard for our city and, and give of their time. We're also grateful for the employees that help to make— keep the city running. We ask for thy guiding hand as we go through the agenda, that thought and careful consideration will be taken into the matters at hand. And we love thee very much, and we say in his name, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Please rise for the pledge.

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.

Okay, we'll move on to item 6.1, and Pete Wolfley will make this presentation.

All right, thank you, Mayor and Council. It's my honor and privilege, honor and privilege, honor and privilege, honor and privilege, honor and privilege I really mean it when I say it's my honor and privilege.

I mean it.

And I apologize about that.

Don't we have great employees here at Orem, right?

The—

so what I'm here to do today is it's been Constitution Month all of September, and we've been celebrating it in different ways. And 2 of the things that we did was we had an essay contest and we had an art contest. And so we're going to present both the winners for the essay contest and the art contest tonight. And we're going to start with the art contest. So first up, we'd like to welcome Abigail Hunsaker up here. Abigail, come on up.

Over here, over here, Abigail.

So we have a certificate for her.

She—

her—

we'll hopefully be able to pull her art up, but she drew a picture because the thing that the Constitution means to her is the ability to express herself.

She loves the freedom that she has to write. She wants to be an author when she grows up. And so she loves that she lives in a country by the Constitution that allows her to do that and to express herself through writing. So congratulations, Abigail.

And here's your little— we have a little certificate. Surprise me. And just go ahead and have a seat. And then we'll take a picture with all the winners with the council.

And then so Abigail was our kid winner. And so for our adult winner in the art contest is James Sands. And he's here.

Come on up, James. And James is a photographer, and he has this really cool photo that he took of the American flag on the side of kind of an old barn that's titled That Our Flag Was Still There, right?

And so he was our adult winner. So certificate and some prize money for him.

Congratulations.

Okay, now we'll move on to the essay contest winners, and these were judged by the council, so I appreciate your participation in looking through these essays and reading them. So first up, we'll start with our 3rd place winner, Rio Barney. So the topic, the topic was how the US Constitution affects, essentially affects your everyday life. And so Rio had a great, a great essay.

Thank you.

Our, our second place winner is Leah Collins.

She here?

Thank you, Leah.

One of the, one of the great things about Leah, I was chatting with her and she did this as a— to show a good example to her 7 children. And so she's here showing that when you participate in things like this, you can win. So congratulations.

Thank you for your participation.

And then our first place winner for the essay contest is McKenna Epperson.

McKenna here?

Oh, come on up, McKenna.

And McKenna, as you know, McKenna's essay was excellent, and we appreciate all of our winners. So let's get together, we'll go up and take a picture with the council and document this awesome moment.

Go up there on that. So we will post the essays and the art on our website, and it'll be there on the homepage.

And then we'll also do some social media stuff about it.

So thank you all for your participation.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you for that, Pete. All right, item 6.2, we have the Library Advisory Commission that would like to make a presentation. Bryce, you're going to come up and lead that.

Thank you.

Mayor and Council, thank you for the opportunity today. It is also our honor and privilege.

Yeah, just one.

All right.

To be with y'all today. And really, I'm just excited for the opportunity I have to introduce our Library Advisory Commission Chair, Jonathan Wyas. And the library has had such an incredible And very busy 6 months. And so obviously we're not going to try to recap everything, but really we wanted to spend a few minutes sort of recapping a couple of our most popular and busy programs from over the summer. I think it really communicates the impact that the Orem Library is having on our residents and how many, you know, this is not just a few families, this is thousands of individuals coming together for some of our, our reading programs, our summer reading program and everything like that. And so I'll turn it over to Jonathan.

Thank you, Mike.

Jonathan, to walk us through here just a couple of slides as soon as we're ready from— get the okay from Pete. All right, good evening, Mayor and Council. It's a great honor to be here to represent my fellow commission members. library administration, librarians and staff, and all the hard work that they do. Like Bryce mentioned, we want to highlight today just some of the great work that the library has done, especially with the summer reading program and the adult reading program. The summer reading program went from June to August, and we had over 1,000, close to 2,000 participants from all different age groups. They're not showing up here on the top, but I'll just kind of run through some of this information we've had. There we go. So in all age groups, we had great participation. Of course, the younger age group, 0 to 5, many of those are being read to by their parents. This is also a great thing— parents, grandparents, and probably brothers and sisters— but we counted those minutes that they were being read to, and some of the maybe 5-year-olds maybe also reading as well. And we had great participation across all age groups, especially that 6 through 11, as far as kids, was our greatest age group. They had great participation there, almost a million hours read. It went down for the teen years, which is understandable because they are very busy with work and, and other activities going on this summer, but they actually had the highest completion rate of all. And the adults also had great participation. most minutes logged, which is great to see across all age groups. And because of the success of the summer reading program in years past, many adults in the cities, myself included, were a little jealous and wanted our own reading challenge. So the library listened and presented that to us this year. That's a year-long challenge. The summer reading for the children is just for the summer months. But this adult reading challenge has been going since January, and the goal is for those participants to read 15 books from 30 different categories, I believe. If you want to be a completionist, then you can do all 30, but it's just 15. And just, they did a really good job, the librarians, in planning this to really highlight different authors and genres. For instance, you could read, like, reread your favorite book was one of the challenges, or find a book in the library with a green cover. Like, so it's a very wide range of activities that participants are able to do. We've had over 1,000 participants, and they've read, probably at this point now, over 5,000 books have been read by these adult participants. And that leads us into our Orem Reads. This is a program that's been going since 2007 here in the city, and we will be starting this. The kickoff will be October 2nd, which is Monday, and the book this, this year will be Frankenstein. And completing this book will actually help you complete one of those 15 categories. One of those categories will be completed if you complete this, and this is just an activity that's been great. And it's been shown to really be a uniting activity for this, for the city. So that happens— the kickoff is, is on October 2nd at 7 o'clock here at the library hall. And there will be just a, a great different variety of events throughout the month. As you can see, it's kind of small there, but they're from the kickoff to the, to the closing event on the 30th, which will be a book tasting, which I've been told is, is not eating books, but to learn about— if you like Frankenstein, to hear about just different books that are similar that you may also want to read. And you may have also noticed that there are council members and mayor that you have your own copies, so if you— we'd invite you to participate as well in this event. That's what we have. Is there— are there any questions from the council or mayor?

I just want to say thank you for your, your work in getting people to read more books.

I was in the publishing field for years, and, and books are something very near and dear to my heart. Like, the beautiful thing about books is you can travel anywhere in the world without actually leaving.

And so I just want to say thank you for the great work that you're doing there.

And I'm looking forward to reading Frankenstein.

Thank you. You're welcome.

I too wanted to say thank you. I have participated many years in your ORAM Reads. I have, I don't know, The Ballad of Frankie, whatever, and the other ones. And I appreciate the emphasis and then the fun events. I think it's great to have an annual book that we all read and then come together to discuss and have events. So I think, I think we have a great library, and I want to give kudos to your committee as well as our librarian who curate all these great opportunities and events.

Yeah, I'll just say thank you as well. I know we've had a lot going on in the library, and the Library Commission has been really integral to getting the library to where it needs to go. So I think you guys have put in a lot of time and done a great effort. And thanks to Bryce for spearheading that too.

Glad to do it. We are very fortunate to have a very talented and passionate Library Advisory Commission. And it's been fascinating to meet with them and learn from them and the rest of our residents the issues that they're seeing.

Councilmember Lamson, you mentioned, you know, the importance of reading, and I've been fascinated to learn about the trends in illiteracy, not necessarily that they can't read, but that they don't. And so I love seeing things like Orem Reads and our ability to add these social elements, these community elements that really help the books and the material come alive. It's been fascinating to see that balance of the materials that we have and what we're able to do, but also how we can create access and remove barriers to participation. So very fortunate to have such a talented staff and a dedicated and enthusiastic commission to support them.

And as the council member that serves on this commission, I'm the liaison to this commission. It really has been a joy to serve and to see the passion for learning and for books. I love books. My husband wishes I would take them all to thrift store, but I just love the book in my hand. And just to hear the engagement that's happening at the library, the different programs, you know, our makerspace. So many things that enrich our community, and I just want to thank you, Bryce, for your leadership and our Library Commission. I see some of you in the audience too. Thank you for your time. It, it makes a difference in our community and educates our community, and when our community is educated, we're all lifted and have a better place to live. So thank you so much.

Well said.

Well, thank you all for your time today.

Appreciate it.

Okay, thank you. We'll move on to the personal appearances part, item number 7. And I'll just read what we're supposed to read. Time has been set aside for the public to express their ideas, concerns, and comments on items not scheduled as public hearings on the agenda. Those wishing to speak are encouraged to show respect for those who serve the city. Comments should focus on issues concerning the city. Those wishing to speak have signed in before the— should have signed in before the beginning of the meeting, and I've got their names on this list. And it says, please limit your comments to 3 minutes or less. And we'll start out with Justice Thomas.

Hi, thank you. I'm just going to be speaking on regarding the transportation master plan and my experience as both a bicycle commuter, one of those referred to in our pedestrian and cycling master plan as a fearless bicycle commuter. I'm riding most of the time, all weather, all kinds of roads. And also, I won't be speaking officially regarding my job, and I— but my personal experience speaking with parents as a routing coordinator for Alpine School District, I get to speak to a lot of families who do not qualify for buses, and I get to hear these parents' concerns. And how they feel about their child moving throughout Orem City when they're not inside of a vehicle, which we know the children cannot drive. We know that parents aren't always able to drive their, their children to school. And we as a school district can't always bus them. So what, what do these children do? How do the parents feel about them getting to school on their own? And I can say that my general experience is that parents are pretty frustrated with me as a routing coordinator, with the district, and, you know, just secondhand with some of the, the safety concerns that they have for their child. Most of the parents that I talked to, they live probably— while they don't qualify for busing, their kid probably could bike to school and Less than 10 minutes, sometimes less than 15 minutes, but they— when I suggest that as an option, a lot of them are pretty concerned because they either don't feel that there's adequate safe cycling routes for their child, or they feel it's too far for them to walk. Because we do have great sidewalk in the city, but you know, that's going to be a 30 to 40 minute walk for a lot of these kids when it could be a 10 minute bike ride. And I, I volunteer with the— I've just recently started volunteering with the bike bus where we go through the neighborhood and we pick up kids and we're taking them to Cascade. And that's been a really fun experience, but it's also been a little spooky. Even with a bunch of grown-ups on big bikes with lights and a whole gaggle of children, there's some cars that go pretty fast, there's some cars that go pretty close. These kids are pretty wobbly. And comparing my experience just biking through the neighborhood with the bike bus with these little kids and going on the Murdock Canal Trail, which is just a fantastic biking asset that we have in this community, I see all kinds of little children riding their bikes up and down that because, you know, parents feel pretty good, I think, about something that's disconnected from the road and that has clear crossing sections. So I'd like to see that focus on— focused on for the transportation master plan and made a priority. Thank you. Thank you.

Jason Jolly.

First, want to say thank you for having the public comments. Last time I was here, the screen was shut off and couldn't see anything until it was posted later, so glad that hopefully it's running live.

Um, yeah.

So one reason that I've wanted to present is in support of the library. And efforts that it's made in the past that have received criticism from a lot of different sides, particularly displays with heritage months, that I benefited. I've attended this library since I was a kid, and I've had a lot of opportunity and exposure to things that I normally wouldn't have even thought about reading. Like, I went out there before the meeting, and there was a mental health section. there's a display on the Constitution for the month of September. Also happen to notice Hispanic Heritage Month, and there's nothing for that. And so I, I've kind of wondered, you know, what's the purpose of the step back? I remember reading an article about a little girl that was quite impacted by seeing a display that represented, you know, people that were more like her and just being very welcome in the city. And I think that that's a huge point, uh, point of the library is it welcomes a lot of different types of thoughts and it welcomes, uh, exchange of thought and liberality. Um, and so I'd like to see the library continue to move in that direction. Um, it's one reason I continue to patron the library as an adult, and I want to raise my kids here, and part of that would be fostering And they're going to come from different backgrounds, and I want them to have the opportunity to learn about people like them that are different and different ideas. And so I'm hoping that that can continue to be a point of coming together rather than a point of contention, and that when people bring up, you know, concerns, that that can be taken seriously as opposed to discounted, because I think all of us feel pretty lousy when our point of view is discounted and just seen as a, you know, fairy fluff. And so I appreciate all that you guys do, and I'm glad that this place is still here. There's a lot of people that I talk to and they don't even know why we have a library now. You know, they, they want to rip it down or they think it might be a waste of taxpayer dollars, but obviously it's doing a pretty good job. So I'd rather see, you know, of the ideas of different librarians and staff taken seriously, and I appreciate those of you that champion that. And even if we can't see eye to eye on everything, that we can, you know, if we can celebrate the Constitution, I hope we could celebrate the people that it protects and defends, because it's just a piece of paper without the people. So thanks.

Thank you.

Bennett Cookson.

Okay, I'm talking in support of investment in, in making Orem more bikeable and more walkable. And a lot of things like it are addressed in the— there's a bicycle plan from 2010 that has a lot of really good ideas in it. I try to ride my bike as often as I can. I enjoy getting around outside, exercise. I think it's a good way to get around. Also in support of e-bikes. I think I used to ride my bike before I had an e-bike, but Having an e-bike allows me to go a lot further and more often. And I think it opens up to a lot more people that can ride bikes. So, as far as making it better, I support what the first, the first gentleman talked about as far as having isolated roads. Murdoch Trail is, is like the perfect trail. I think that's the ideal that we would seek for. And I think that Something like State Street, even if you added more of a bike lane, you did things, there's not really any way to make it very good for bicycling unless you can reduce all the traffic that goes across all the entries. I mean, someday if it was just, you know, sidewalks and grass, that would be great, but it's not. So I think the focus would be alternate routes. And I think even to the extent of— I've even made a proposal for things like Orem Boulevard. If you could make it a one-way street in some sections and take that other half and make it a dedicated multipurpose lane, you know, or anyways, think out of the box. I think whatever we can do to make dedicated spaces throughout Orem, I think that's good. Let me just mention 2 things that probably no one's thinking about as far as that. One thing is about having neighborhoods. It's good to have— I have local orchards in my neighborhood, um, and there's— they're threatening, uh, I know that Orem City doesn't really have any authority over the water with the canals because you don't control the canals, but if they— they're threatening to reduce the water, and if they did, it would eliminate orchards in the area of local shopping in my local orchards, and then also eliminate maybe some of the big trees I have on my property. I have irrigation water and they're probably not going to survive. And so I think Orem may want to speak up on that because I think it's a public good to have that irrigation water. And the other issue, probably the other biggest hazard with biking, is the thorns that grow on the sidewalks. And I don't know why they're so dominant, but there's— they grow over the sidewalk, go over the roads, and that's one little thorn will take out a bicycle. So I may be extra attention in maintenance to spray out those thorns throughout. I've gone and pulled some, but there's a lot.

So thanks.

Ashton Jensen. Hello, good evening. I'd also like to talk a little bit about active transportation and just a quick story to illustrate a point. A couple weeks ago, I live right by WinCo and another friend of mine lives right on the opposite, opposite side of 8th North, so I crossed walking to go visit him. As I was crossing back, I came up on a little old man who was kind of shuffling towards the intersection, and I said hello. And then he arrived at the intersection, and I was surprised he didn't keep going along. And I said, are you going to cross the street? And he said, yes, I'm going to WinCo. And that worried me a little bit because he was shuffling very slowly. But the light turned, the walk sign came on, we started to cross. I walked really slowly because I I wanted to be kind of close to him and I was concerned about him. I reached the other side and there were 7 seconds left on the counter and I look back and he's, he's halfway across. So I kind of panicked. I run back, I offer him my arm, and together we shuffled a little bit faster together across the remainder of the street. The light turned green while we were still 2 lanes from reaching the other side, and credit to all the drivers, nobody moved. And they let us reach the Wind Coast side without pressuring us at all. So number one, that was a testament to me that drivers can be very respectful of pedestrians and cyclists, and that safety is important to everyone, even more important than the rush that everybody is in nowadays. Those cars respected us even as we were in the middle of 8th North during their green light. But number 2, it made me realize that some of our infrastructure is failing pedestrians. This old man can barely get to a grocery store to buy some of his essential needs, even though he lives less than a quarter mile away. I bike almost everywhere as well, like some of these other gentlemen that spoke. And without the barrier of being inside a protective steel vehicle, I would venture to say that I can observe the behavior of other drivers better than most. And one thing that I see all the time that scares me is, is drivers are using their phone so often. Just crossing 8th North again, to get here, I was waiting at the corner waiting for the walk sign, and I just watched 2 drivers come up to the red light on the right turn. They have like their hand, their phone in their hand the entire time. They make the turn, and immediately as they're making it, they're like back on their phone. And that scares me. And it's not just for pedestrians, but that's endangering other drivers as well. So I'm wondering if we can't do, do something to encourage safer driving. When the right signals and the right infrastructure is there, drivers can be so respectful of pedestrians. So many people drive in Norm, but, but we are all pedestrians at some point, and putting some of those safety features in place would protect us all. So that said, I throw my support behind updating the active transportation plan, which has been mentioned. It's been years since an update. Um, we're all pedestrians at some point, and I encourage infrastructure to to protect us. Thank you.

Romy Allen.

Hi, I'm Romy Allen. I live here in Orem, been here for a long time, love it. Thank you all for your service. I appreciate each of you. I've been able to meet most of you. I know Jeff, I appreciate all of your service and hard work for our city. I have 2 petitions here that I would like to ask the City Council, the City Planning Commission, and the boards to evaluate, see if they would be valuable for the city. The first one is to reduce some light pollution and some of the bright flashing light signs that we have in the city. There's 4 that are really problematic and make it— at least 4 that I'm aware of— that make it really difficult to see at night. And I've come across people walking on the sidewalk or walking on the street and crossing, and the lights are so bright it's very difficult to see pedestrians. So if we can put in an ordinance to reduce the amount of brightness at night after dusk, we've got a lot of signatures. I have 78 more signatures on my online petition, but my My computer crashed before I could print them out. So, second petition. I've been researching this topic for the last 7 years. It's about the telecom companies and their overreach into cities. Right now there's a bill called HB 377— or 357— 3557, sorry. And it is the federal bill to give telecom companies complete control over how many cell towers they put in, the mini towers they put in. They don't have to notify residents. It precludes cities from having any say in where they're placed, how many are placed, how powerful they are. It takes away some of the environmental concerns. The FCC just lost a lawsuit because they are ignoring the last 30 years of research. There are over 3,000 studies proving harm not only to people but especially to children and to bees and trees and all of that. There's 3,000 different studies that they're ignoring because it's a billion-dollar-a-day business, and they put a lot of money into our state legislature. Our state passed legislation that limits how much the city can say and how— and how— what we can do. But I have a document here that I would like to have the city review. It includes all the different ordinances that other cities have put in place to protect residents. There are, there are locations where cell towers are safer. They should be in industrial areas, not in school grounds where kids are, because kids absorb 10 times the amount of radiation. So I—

my—

our request is, with the 2 petitions, is that you look at this. I have the top attorney in the country who's willing to We'd ask to meet and do a working group with the city to just educate and to help with the wording on the ordinances if they— if you choose to put them in place, we'd ask that you do that. I have one second.

Thank you.

Who do I give this to?

Thank you.

Next, Thomas Cook.

So I prepared these several weeks ago, but because of family situation, I wasn't able to make it in to here until today. So with that, hello, my name is Thomas Cook from Orem. I want to start with apologizing that I'm reading my comments. I always try to look a person in the eyes when I'm talking with them, but I do not want to miss any of my comments. And by the way, these are my comments and was not encouraged by anyone other than my wife. So with that, I want to thank— well, I'm sorry, my first and foremost comment goes to the mayor and city council, as well as the city manager. Thank you, thank you very much for doing such an outstanding job of serving, serving our Orem community and citizens. Y'all are truly attempting to keep Orem as a Family City, USA. The fact that our city taxes have not been raised while parks, buildings, water resources, and a plethora of other benefits have come to pass during your administration is nothing less than phenomenal. And any Orem citizen that cannot acknowledge all the good that has been done is not paying attention whatsoever.

Second, I want to thank—

I want to thank you for giving all Orem residents the opportunity to vote on our own school district. I know this is kind of a dead horse, but I prepared these a few weeks ago during the primaries when it came about then. If someone or some group thinks it's a draconian move by the council to give the citizens their constitutional right to vote on such a significant issue as this, they do not fully appreciate living in a constitutional republic. And by the way, by the way, yes, I did vote for it, and it lost on the ballot. But that was determined by all voting Oremites, and not a Council of 7 or, or a special interest group. The fact is, they gave us our constitutional right to vote, unlike 45 state legislators and a governor that told 3.38 million Utahns they're changing our state flag. So again, I thank you. This last comment is for my fellow Oremites. I beg all Orem residents that can vote to pay attention to the upcoming November City Council election. If you truly appreciate living in Family City, USA, and all the good that you experience and find here, do your research, make sure you're registered, and get out and vote. Otherwise, there's a tide out there that wants to change what we have, and it's not for the good. So get out and vote. I beg you. Thank you.

Okay, um, just before I forget, Gary, that information that, uh, Miss Allen brought over to you, if you can make sure that gets out to the council. That'd be great.

I will.

Thank you. Next, we've got Heather Fry.

Hello, and thank you to Jimmy and Abby and all of those who participated in the Why I Love America contest, and thank you to our Council, our mayor, and all the city staff who serve us so consistently. I also love America, and I love the freedom to speak as a concerned citizen and resident of Orem. I had one thought about us, or Ashton's comment. I think you should talk to Miro and do another public service announcement to help us understand and learn about bike safety and lane safety, because Miro our woolly mammoth mascot, would be a lot of fun. I think I liked the public service announcement about the parking on a cul-de-sac. So that's just a little pitch. Last week brought Orem into the spotlight across the state and nation. The incivility exhibited afterwards through social media revealed a well-orchestrated symphony of complaints, accusations, and insults That presented a disdain for open dialogue, no respect for differing views, and an egregious lack of truth. I express appreciate— appreciation for the mayor and city council and city staff. I especially want to acknowledge the continuous efforts of all who pursue truth, even when it goes against our biases. My statements last week addressed truth. And the need for the pursuit of truth. I was not the only one. Not one person later has sought to approach me through dialogue, just attack through social media. There was a whole lot said online, and it is heartbreaking and demoralizing. Mayor Young, you are not perfect. I know, shocker.

Thank you.

None of us are, but I believe you care for Orem and for the truth. And that's what you were pursuing. I am so sad for what you and Miss Grant suffered last week, and what our city has suffered over the last 18 months. There are people in our community who say their goal for— is to bring us together. But they are the ones who are tearing us apart.

Thank you.

Hi, thanks.

Um, like many of you, I've lived in Orem for a while. I enjoy going to parks and entertainment and UVU.

Probably different than, than some of you, I do most of those things by bike.

I have my 3 kids on the, on the back of my fancy e-bike, which just allows us to connect to things so much faster than regular biking. So I'm here representing Bike Orem. Our goal is to improve the social and physical health of Orem families by making Orem more accessible safe and comfortable for walking and cycling. Basically, we advocate for family-friendly streets. If your kids and your grandparents can bike and walk and feel comfortable doing so, it's, it's gonna work for so many people. As we share this goal with folks, many reminisce about their younger days and taking off for hours to their friend's house on their bike, or someone had a newspaper route on Main Street.

What?

And that's something that we can have again.

If I could get a number to stick in your head, I know numbers kind of go through my mind all the time, but 50% of all vehicle trips are 3 miles or less.

That is a leisurely 15-minute bike ride.

That's, that's half of all trips on the Wasatch Front. The transportation master plan update has some wonderful information and thoughtful plans for the future. But like the Transportation Advisory Committee has said, we can't build our way out of vehicle congestion.

But what we can do is perhaps get some of those people out of vehicles by making it safe and comfortable for them to, to bike or walk. Biking— bike infrastructure is way less expensive than vehicle infrastructure.

I mean, 2,000-pound bike plus person versus 1,500 pounds of vehicle. It's less expensive to bike, improves physical health, and it improves social health and independence, especially for our kids. So it's to Orem's credit, they had the first bike transportation— sorry, bike plan in Utah County in 2010, and it's really time to give that a big overhaul.

Thank you.

overhaul and make it part of the transportation master plan, so that instead of being a nice thought, a little plan that kind of sits on the shelf over here, it's something that, that we really integrate into all of our planning and budgeting.

So I think that there are many things that we have in common, and so let's find that common ground and create family streets for family city.

Thanks.

Timo Christensen.

My name's Timo Christensen. I just had a few thoughts with the transportation master plan update that's on the agenda. First, I want to say I agree with every point the Transportation Advisory Committee made in their cover letter for the plan. We can't build our way out of congestion. We need to prioritize active transportation, and our transportation network needs to be managed responsibly, both fiscally and socially. That being said, I had a few thoughts of issues that need to be addressed with transportation in this current update to the plan and an existing street network and past work. I think that safety seems to not be a high priority or concern in designing our street network and help people get around, especially for non-vehicular road users. In 2010, there was that bike and pedestrian master plan, which included a great solid vision for better plans for maintenance for Streets so that people can more safely and comfortably walk, bike, take a scooter, wheelchair, however people get around. I think it needs an update. It's been a while since that went in. I personally bike just about everywhere. I'm one of thousands of people in Orem who do. Um, and a fair number of those people, not an insignificant portion, are children or their parents who are needing to get to school. Uh, in just the past year, there have been plenty of stories of kids who got hit by cars on the way to school. There have been dozens of people who have died on Orem streets in the past few years. And I think there's an issue that needs to be addressed there. It's pretty clear that we need to care more about safety for all road users, because safer streets for anyone make safer streets for everyone. And I mentioned kids getting to school, because any street a kid can walk on is a street anyone can walk on. I would like to see support from the council for every to implement a new transportation and active transportation plan to reprioritize safety in our street designs, so anyone can get where they need to, how they need to. I'd like to see building family streets for family city.

Thank you.

Stacy Golding.

Hi, I'm Stacy Golding, and I love Orem. I attended high school here, graduated from UVU, taught school here for 10 years, purchased a home, and now I'm raising my family here.

I'm proud of how Orem has changed and improved its amenities through the years to meet the community's needs. My family enjoys the incredible parks, library, splash pad, rec center, mall, and farmers market.

We travel to all these places on my cargo bike. That fits my 3 boys in the back.

More and more young moms like me are choosing cargo bikes over the minivan. We're seeing the incredible personal and societal benefits of transporting our family by bike. As we are out riding around Orem, I hear the same reaction time and time again: wow, what a cool bike! I would love to do this, but it's not safe to ride here. Orem is sadly known for its terrible traffic and congestion.

We have all—

we have all these amazing amenities, but they're being overshadowed by our crazy streets. Orem has a huge opportunity to be known for our family streets and Family City USA. I realize your job is difficult as you try to appease many interest groups. You have to sift through information to know which, which changes will move the dial in Orem's well-being.

And I get it, not everyone is a bike person. However, tonight I would like to share the research on how creating bike infrastructure positively impacts everyone, even non-bikers.

So first, biking infrastructure boosts the economy. Cyclists tend to spend more money locally compared to motorists. They are more likely to stop at local businesses. Biking paths increase our property value and attract businesses to the area.

It reduces traffic congestion and reduces travel times. It reduces crash and injury rates for all road users, which is wild, you guys.

It reduces it for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists just by having protected lanes. added to the streets. It improves our air quality. It creates a healthier population. When you have those safe bike lanes, people do bike, and then everyone's emotional well-being and physical well-being increase, and that decreases our healthcare costs. It reduces the demand for parking, so it frees up space for green spaces and for, for more commercial use.

It helps with equitability and accessibility for people who don't have the chance to own a, own a car or drive a car. It impacts the climate in a positive way, and it increases tourism and recreation where people travel to our city to bike and to experience that.

In summary, investing in bike infrastructure, which costs pennies compared to road projects, doesn't just benefit those who ride bikes. It creates healthier, more vibrant, and more sustainable communities that offer a better quality of life for everyone. Thank you.

Alyssa Merrill, or Morrill, or correct me.

Yeah, my name is Alyssa Morrill, and I'm also making a comment in support of a new active transportation plan. I have 5 kids. 11, and we all bike almost every single day for transportation. Um, I wasn't a biker for most of my life. Uh, I got a cargo bike 3 years ago, 3 or 4 years ago, and it really changed my life. I mostly bike for the mental health benefits. Um, I'm a completely different person than I was before. The, um, the way it freed me from a lot of like helplessness and depression, uh, to get out in my community with my kids. Um, really was— I can't overstate how life-changing that was. So I'm a huge supporter of people getting out on their bikes. Um, and I am going to read my comments so that I don't waste our time going all over the place. Um, so a lot of areas in Orem are a delight to bike in, but most of those don't connect to utilitarian destinations yet, and we bike for utilitarian purposes. Um, State Street in particular is a nightmare as a pedestrian or on a bike. All the cities around here use Orem State Street as an example of what we don't want in our community. It is unsafe and it's very unpleasant. Drivers are often super aggressive when people are confused about to be— about how to behave because of poor infrastructure. They can get nervous and angry, so it's not uncommon for drivers to cut me and my children off intentionally, to honk, to drive very fast and close in threatening ways, to make threatening gestures, and to yell things at my children. when we're not doing anything wrong. They're just like, these people are rude, period. But this is a product of bad infrastructure. And if we had good infrastructure and people— it was very clear how everyone is supposed to behave, then pedestrians and bikers are going to behave in ways that are not offensive to people, and cars won't feel that nervousness that makes them aggressive and unsafe. So on State Street, a bike thoroughfare with a curb that is fully separated from the sidewalk and from cars would be ideal. We also need crosswalk lights, and obvious painted roads where cars intersect the bike route, and a tree buffer between cars and sidewalks or bike walks would be ideal and excellent. Lots of people have to walk or bike on State Street to access bus stops, to access necessary stores, and we should be able to get around safely. Making State Street safe and accessible for those of us already out there will benefit all people who would like to walk and bike but don't feel that the risk is worth it. So, um, as has been stated, making this investment would be good for building community and good for local businesses. I, I'm here in a space that I've never been before. I've— I'm, I'm studying how to be involved in the city and that kind of thing because of being on a bike. Like, it's made me care about Orem. I frankly didn't care about Orem before I was biking, but now that I'm out in it, um, I care and I'm invested in what, in what happens here. Um, so it'd be really good for everyone here. Um, I know lots of people who leave Orem to walk around the Riverwoods or downtown Provo because they've made it inviting and safe, and it would be really great to have that option here. So please support a new active transportation plan. Thank you.

Last, we've got Jessica Isabel.

Hello, I am a new resident of Orem. I just moved here about 3 months ago. And my daughter attends Cascade Elementary. And the first couple of days of school, I was going— I was planning on driving her because there's no bus in our area and it's only half a mile away. But when I realized how congested the school is, there's only 2 ways in and, you know, 2 ways out to get to the school. I had met some friends in our neighborhood that said, hey, just ride bikes with us, we're gonna do that. And since then, we have changed our route 3 times because we were taking 800 and we were almost hit by cars. Cars were swerving around us.

There's cars parked on the side of the road.

And I'm from a community in Ohio where biking is a new thing. So I'm also a new member to the biking community trying to teach my daughter bike safety and, you know, get out and be active. And so with cars parked on the side of the road and no bike lanes on the 2 main roads that lead to the school, there's no safe way to get to the school, so we go 4 streets away, go around the neighborhood, and it just doesn't seem feasible when there's clearly ways that we could do that. So I just, I don't know much about the transportation plan, but I am a part of the bike bus on Cascade, and we do have a lot of kids that are just learning and trying to be safe and learn bike safety, and I know the schools are trying to promote that as well to, to help with congestion with dropping kids off and picking them up. And so I would just suggest that you guys look into that and maybe bike lanes or no parking signs during specific hours on some of these specific bike, bike routes to not just Cascade, but maybe other schools are having the same issues. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, thank you for all your comments, and those are heard by the council, and we'll take those into account. Let's move on to item 8.1, which is our consent items, which on the consent agenda is just a resolution to have a healthy Utah community. Someone like to make a motion on the consent items?

So moved.

I can, Mayor. I move that we approve the consent item, a resolution of Healthy Utah Community.

I'll second that. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the consent items pass. Thank you. Now we'll move to item number 9 as far as our scheduled items, and we've just got 2. The first one's fairly involved. We've got item 9.1, which is adopting the updated City of Orem Transportation Master Plan and amending the Orem City General Plan to include the updated City of Orem Transportation Master Plan and Appendix F. Sam Kelly, would you like to present that to us?

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'd also like to introduce John Dorney. He is the— he was the consultant with Horrocks Engineers who we hired to help us update our master plan. And also, just as a word of announcement too, he's also going to be our transportation engineer come Monday. So he'll actually be our full-time transportation engineer. The, the presentation that I've— I just brought the same presentation that I gave to you guys in the work session last, last week. If you'd like me to go through that again, I can. In, in the meantime there, I have given you guys the resolution that Planning Commission had forwarded to kind of be a little bit more specific on some of the items they wanted removed. from the Transportation Master Plan. Ryan Clark and I also developed that list of advantages and disadvantages to some of those projects that we had discussed in the work session. And at this point, I can go through the presentation, or we can go ahead and I can entertain some questions, because I— there really hasn't— much hasn't changed in that last week. So.

What would be your preference, Council? Would you like to go through this presentation or I'd like to do some questions because I think we did thoroughly go through it.

Mayor, if I may, perhaps you could point out some of the differences since his last presentation, that which the Planning Commission recommended and those which you agreed with or perhaps didn't, so we could focus on those because you did do a great job a week ago presenting this, if that's good for you, Mayor.

Okay, let's, let's just go high, high level on the presentation, just high level.

OK.

But then let's talk about different questions that everyone has.

Perfect.

So just to refresh, this is an update. We started this in 2022 of the master plan that we started— that we initially passed in 2015. We updated the data to current conditions. We did some updates of base traffic counts, looked at roadway levels of service, some cross-sections. We eliminated the State Street master plan elements out the plan. We moved up the travel demand model from 2040 to 2050, incorporated some of the MAG TransPlan 2050 recommendations, then also did what we could to update some of those costs. And those costs seem to be changing every month, so I'd imagine the costs we have in here are going to be less than what they are right now. High level, we look at the WFRC's travel demand model that's coordinated with MAG. We take their model that essentially spans from Payson up to Brigham City. They look at some hotspots, intersections, and roadways, mainly the, the higher classified corridors, and they look at some choke points. And then with that, they develop projects, and then those projects are identified in the plan, and then Once we get to where we feel like there's a level of service that's failing, which is an E or an F, we'll go in and do microsimulation where we use BISM and Synchro. Here's where we have traffic count locations. There is the blue, red, and the green, and it is hard, hard to see where we had some of them updated in the same areas just to verify that those counts were good. Here is our existing roadway network. where we have classified your principal arterials, essentially State Street, 8th North, as well as University Parkway, minor arterials, and urban collectors. We also have identified some of our— all of our signalized intersections and the HAWK signals. We talk about level of service. That's one thing that we talk about a lot in transportation. We go from A to F, and our acceptable is going to be D. Anything below that is where it's going to be congested, and then it gets to a point where maybe it's F, and then we look at how much it's actually delayed beyond what it is right there at that minimum threshold. Here's our current existing level of service for our corridors and our signals, and they're identified with green being C or better, D is the acceptable, which is yellow, and red is going to be level, level E or worse, and that's both for the corridors and the intersections. Here is a population map for TransPlan 2050 when we looked at our 2050 projections, and these are our TAZs, our Transportation Traffic Analysis Zones. And that's your, your to-and-from trips, and then a lot of that data is collected from census data. So we take that map, and then we coordinate that with our own planning folks to make sure that the zoning, population, and things like that correlate. So we kind of calibrate it and make it specific to Orem. Here is your 2030 no-build level of service, looking at current rates that we have right now as far as growth rates and current counts and identifying your acceptable and your not acceptable.

levels of service.

Then you get to 2050 with more growth, and you can see I can kind of go between both of these, and you can see some of the— some of them are on state facilities like 8th North, University Parkway, and State Street. Some are going to be on some of 16th North as it creeps to the east, as well as 8th East as it goes to the north.

So can I just— because you said something that's very interesting. As we get more growth. So that growth is not Orem growth, necessarily. It's growth around us, because we're pretty much built out.

Not necessarily. I think they're, they're looking at population centers. And I think there's, there's a guess in a crystal ball that there's going to be density in Orem, possibly, if I had to guess. I don't know if— I think they're, they're looking at current zoning. But we're also, I think, projected to build out to how much in population? Ryan, do we have a— I mean, we have a build-out capacity of, I think, 130,000.

Yeah, I thought it was like 120-something is what the state's projecting. So that's what number's used in the model. But there's also, with the growth in Linda and Vineyard and Provo, will continue to come through Orem. So on those state facilities, we're going to still see a lot of pass-through traffic.

Okay, so it is outlying cities. And under the model that Mag is using, that there will be high density in Orem.

I mean, I think to Ryan's point, I think there's a projection of how much growth is going to happen. Then I think to his point too, as the other communities around us grow, that pass-through traffic— if their growth increases, the percentage is going to stay the same, but we're going to have more volume. And then as that volume is on those state facilities, you're going to see Orem residents using some of the other corridors. Some that used to use State Street to go north and south and commute, maybe they're going to go around on 8th East. So I would think the traffic patterns are just like water. If there seems to be a little bit of a choke point, it's going to figure out a different way to go. And some of that pass-through could go to some of the other corridors as well.

Okay, Councilman Mallett, to your point, it is a projection and it is based on what current zoning is, so If there's undeveloped land in Orem, that's been taken into account. So like the southwest area that hasn't developed yet, or, or vacant parcels that are in the city. But we've now learned that through the new census data that Orem's population actually dropped. And you and I have had that conversation, but we've actually done some research and kind of confirmed on our own that the numbers the US Census has come up with are looking pretty accurate as people have aged out of Orem, you know, they've grown up, they've moved out, and The elderly are still in their homes. So, we actually have seen a little bit of a decline.

So, that's because we're in this trend, right? That old family, you know, I'm an empty nester now. I used to have a bunch of kids in the neighborhood that I contributed to the neighborhood kids. So, that's what you're talking about then?

Yeah.

And, and who knows what, how that trend will change? It could continue the way it is, or it could, we could get young families moving in as The elderly move on. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

And just the unscientific pushback on those numbers is just the traffic doesn't reflect that at all.

Yeah. And I think a lot of the traffic in Orem that people are frustrated with is the growth that we're seeing in Vineyard. If you go down to 8th North, Center Street, 4th South at 5 PM, all you have to do is see the backup going into Vineyard to see how many people are coming to shop in Orem. So as a former economic developer, I love traffic because it means they're all coming to Orem to buy products and get sales tax in Orem, which means we don't have to raise property taxes. So it's kind of like a, you know, good and bad, right?

So Mayor, I'd like to go back to Tom's question that he asked Sam. What's the difference between the Planning Commission's proposal And what the, what the study is proposing.

So what, what the planning— the only thing that we have changed or we have added to was, was this sheet of projects that we wanted to go ahead and pose the advantages and disadvantages. Staff agreed with the removal of 8th East and 16th North, those projects east of State Street. I'll get that correct this time. And then also the corridor of 8th East, but we do feel like the other projects have some merit and we just wanted to show you those options if the projects were to remain in— remain in the plan and if the projects were to be removed. And if you so choose to remove those and agree with what Planning Commission said, we're fine with that as well. So.

So what's the difference? What are you proposing that they didn't propose? There's the 2 overpasses. I mean, just—

Yeah, so, so what they had asked for is they had asked to remove the 8 South I-15 overpass. And that was actually a project that was listed in the TMP, a Phase 1 project that is at $116 million cost plus inflation. Typically those projects, even though in the plan it showed that there really, really wasn't clear on how how much would be in there for a soft match. But a project like, like that over a state facility, the state's going to recognize that it has a benefit to their corridors that are neighboring. They will participate in a large amount of that. So that's why on that sheet I put in there to be determined, because right now that, that project's in, in limbo because the city right now is— we're deciding whether or not to keep that. The state, it actually ranked pretty high in their priorities. It ranked high. It's a Phase 1 project, and they see where it's going to add some benefit both to their facilities as well as the city of Orem. 12th North, that was considered a hotspot in the TMP. Back when we widened I-15, we worked with UDOT at all of the underpasses, both 4th North, 4th South, 2000 South, and we wanted to make sure that those were built such that if there was growth in Vineyard, that those could be widened to a 4-lane facility. Part of that as well was to account for an overpass at 12th North. So when they built I-15 through that area, they lowered it so our structure would not have to be so tall.

So where does 12th North go to?

12th North would cross over into the area that is now being developed in in, in the Williams Farm area. So essentially, it would be— it would likely serve because Vineyard in that area is looking to zone it as an industrial or commercial type area. You can have folks that live in Orem that would use that route to commute over. And/or the other component to having this, both 8th South, 12th North, is it now affords those folks in those areas to utilize Geneva Road to go north and south instead of having to go to State Street to go North, if they needed to commute, say, to, to do doTERRA, they, instead of having to go to State Street, now they, they could go down to Geneva Road. And they could have direct access. They wouldn't have to go to 16th North. They wouldn't have to go through the interchange and/or go down to 8th North. They can go up and over to 12th North to a signal and go straight. So you're utilizing some of the other corridors versus going to our major ones. So essentially it would just be servicing citizens of Orem. That's what both of those are for.

Is that the major differences between the Planning Commission, and are there other differences too?

The other one too, they also talked about 8th West as, as a hotspot, and I've identified in there, there is an area of 8th West between 4th North and Center Street that is narrow. It's not even to our collector standard. Considering some of the comments that were made earlier, there are bike lanes north of there and south of there, but this section is, is substandard. It's built more to a local street standard, even though it's a collector. It's pretty dangerous in that area, especially on garbage day. You have a lot of parked cars, 34 feet of asphalt. You get your garbage can out there, there's a school close by, so that's really an area of Orem that it would be best to suit Orem and widening that at least to 46 to 50 feet of asphalt. And that could be done by property purchases or by reducing parking, but it's one of those items that is actually kind of a choke point in Orem. So that's why I chose to keep that, that one in there. The 8th West connection to UVU, it just affords another connection to UVU. That's, I mean, That's probably the easiest way to put it. And when you can do that, then it takes traffic from other spots and just helps spread out some of that traffic load. The other comments in there were to connectivity. Essentially, we have it the way it states in our transportation plans is that we would like to see stub roads and other properties connect. It helps with traffic circulation. There's also some side benefits. For utility connections, even though we can do that through easements, it just allows that utility to be in a roadway so we have access to it. Not just for cars and residents in that area to have different points of access, but also for our emergency folks, if they can get in and out and respond a lot quicker. So instead of, instead of keeping that in there saying that they shall do this and they must It's, it's reducing that language to a may, and it's making it more, more subjective. And, and, and for us, we want to have things connected. I mean, the, the beautiful part about Parkway, as I've been told, is that you can go ahead and access all those businesses because all those parking lots connect. You don't have to go out to Parkway, and you can come at it from a side street. And, and the opposite of of that is State Street. You have a lot of businesses that, that don't connect. So in order to go and access from one to the other, you have to pull out to State Street and come back in. And to the comments that, that were made earlier, you have all those access points. And as much as it makes sense to have some sort of an active transportation facility there, it's quite dangerous with all those driveways. There's too many conflict points unless you were to put them in in the middle, which is a challenge as well. So in order to make something safer, we need, we need to have connectivity. So that's why we support having those, having those things as they're defined there in, in the TMP.

So then I make one quick comment about your connectivity on State Street. So is that something— because I've talked to you about that, right?

Yes.

Is that something that Magwood Fund, because what we're looking at here is we're looking— we're not looking at a street issue, we're looking at connectivity between businesses. So we can mirror that same thing that's on University Parkway, which is business agreements, businesses agreeing to connect their parking lots or to connect their business, their land, basically.

You know, it's interesting because Ryan and I met with the director, I can't remember what her title is, but the state now has $45 million annually to put towards active transportation. And that's one of the things that I thought about is it would be great if those dollars could be used to exercise some sort of eminent domain or incentivize these businesses to connect so we could reduce access points to make these things safer. There's, there's a big push for it, but it, but it's going to come at a cost. And, and that's one of those things. If they have dollars and we can put, put together a project, we work with planning to reduce parking restrictions, because obviously to go ahead and make those things connect, you're going to have to eliminate parking stalls, right? Because right now both of those properties line up back to back and it's parking. So in order to make those connect, you got to remove them somehow. So yeah, it would be great to see these things and actually be able to use that Can I just make one comment too?

I don't—

just kind of to make the public aware. So what's almost been a year and a half now, 2 years, when we replaced— we stopped the State Street Master Plan as a council and replaced that where we returned it to a commercial, you know, professional office retail sector. One of the things that Debbie and I were quite passionate about was beautification. And to the point of the person, Alyssa, I think, who spoke about adding more trees on State Street, that was our goal. We added an extra— I don't know, remind me, where's Jason— 10, 8, 10 feet, was it, Jason? 15 feet of setback from the street, so State Street could evolve into this area that was safe for bikes and was beautiful with trees and and landscape between State Street and the buildings versus the State Street Master Plan, which had this concrete jungle of, of just the building right there, the sidewalk, and then State Street. So to me, the, the piece that fits into that is just what we're talking about. If we can get MAG to help us to create this connectivity between our businesses, to add that active transportation, There, we'll have the beautification, we'll have the active transportation and the separation there. That's where I would like to see us go after the money right now, is to help us revitalize State Street and create these better connectivity and better opportunities for our residents. Does that seem like something that they're— you say you think that money's there. Are we going after that?

The money's there, but I just don't know what sorts of criteria. And right now, the way it's written, there, there aren't any eminent domain rights with trails yet. So that's, that's one big hurdle that they have to come over.

And I'm just going to stop you because I don't like the word eminent domain. To me, I think we just, you know, seek out cooperation. We can— if these businesses see us assisting them revitalizing their properties, it's a win-win.

Sure.

If I could add, Councilmember. Yeah, I wanted to say we're not advocating for eminent domain. We've never done eminent domain in my 25 years here. But what we can do is if we have backing in our transportation master plan for that connectivity to take place as properties redevelop, we can require those connections or those future connections. So for example, down where they're putting in the new Quick Clack on 800 North. We have worked with that developer to have them stub out a future south connection to the properties along 800 North on the north side. So if they redevelop, then we can get that connection between parking lots so that people can visit those businesses without going out onto State Street or 8th North. So that, that helps us have a little bit of teeth when they redevelop.

Sam, last week you said something. I'm just— I was kind of wondering what that meant. You said these are politically sensitive. You were talking about the transportation plan. What does that mean? It was politically— it's politically sensitive?

Well, I mean, for me, I work with numbers and data, and when I start seeing congestion, when I start seeing levels of service dip and get below, and, and I see that there's going to be a problem, I'm always looking for a solution. When I looked at 8th East, there was obviously some planning in mind, knowing 8th East from 8th South to Center Street has been on MEG's RTP for quite a, quite a while, and it's been identified in Phase 1. When the church sold the farm there and they redevelop, we made sure that they set aside some property for us to go ahead and continue that corridor to the north. And that's probably going to happen. But all of a sudden, there's folks that get scared or whatnot. So to me, I guess when I see the numbers support support that a project needs to be there. I'm always looking for a solution. Now, I don't need it to go to 7 lanes like Center Street from State Street up to— or from I-15 to State Street. But I think a 5-lane or a 4-lane corridor isn't necessarily a bad thing, understanding that there's obviously people that probably would disagree with that. But I look at what 16th— I mean, and I, and I relate this all back to my experience with 16th North and what I've seen on 8th East and 8th South in those areas, and they do move cars. There are gaps. And, and I think ultimately I'm trying to provide a good service, you know, to the citizens of Orem. I understand that there's a lot of pass-through traffic on State Street. I understand that there's a lot of pass-through traffic on Center Street. I deal with it coming to work and going home. But when I look at some of the, the other corridors north and south, and it's just being able to provide the folks here other ways to get around within the city without all of a sudden, oh wow, 8th North or 8th East is becoming way congested, now I'm going to go to 4th East. Now the folks on 4th East are going to feel that pain too. And then it just seems to move and move and move, where if we were to go ahead with some of these projects, As they're identified, I just, I guess that's just my thinking, just because I look at that corridor already has a lot of traffic, and I'd hate to see them go ahead and push that on to other neighborhoods, because then I think you go from— I know there's a concern about how it damages neighborhoods, but I think if you let it go for too long, I think the damage goes a lot wider.

May I have several comments?

comments.

I let others—

do you want to go first?

No?

Well, if others want to go, let's, let's just spread it out a little bit. But then we'll come back to you, Terry.

Tom.

Hi.

A lot of east-west spots— east-west traffic has bigger lanes, i.e., Center Street, 8th North, 16th North, 13th South, and 8th South and 12th North are both fairly narrow roads. So I assume that was part of the Planning Commission's concern, to do an overpass there and create more traffic on those relatively narrow roads. Is that a safe assumption on my part, Sam?

I, I would think, yes, that there would be a concern for additional traffic utilizing those areas.

Yes.

Okay.

And most of the comments today were not from car drivers, they were from bike riders, and I think some of them I don't know if all of them are still here. I know a couple of them had to leave. Does this plan take care of bike riders? We talked about some of the streets, and we talked about this last week, and some of them echoed that they're not particularly safe, and they're not all going to go clear up to the Murdoch Canal and drive, which only goes from 8th North to the end of the city anyway. Are any of the— would you say this plan takes care of bike riders who want to go north and south?

I'm looking at the corridors that, that we have. 8th West would— the project that I added here, the widening from Center to 4th North— that would actually connect those, those lanes through that facility.

Anything on the east side of town?

The east side of town, I look at— there's nothing off the top of my head. Most of those facilities are wide enough. I guess the consideration would be when you're looking at active transportation, It's going to be looking at removing parking. It would be because in order to create somewhat of a buffer for that bike lane, you would have to do some sort of parking restriction. If not, then you would have to widen the road.

And I'm guessing I have more time in the saddle than any of my contemporaries up here on a bike, and I feel pretty safe going north and south on 8th East or 4th East. State Street, I'm as scared as many of you for riding on, but any of the other corridors, 4th, 8th, whether east or west, I'm fairly comfortable riding on.

Would that—

is that fairly echoing? No, you don't take as many risks as I do. Thank you. You have children on the back of your bike. I just have me, and I'm well insured, so my wife's fine with me driving on those streets. So, so I just hope we do something for Bike stuff. Sorry, I know I got 4 applause and many don't care, I get that. But we got to do something for bikes along the way too. But I'm not sure bikes on State Street makes a lot of sense. I realize trees, etc., etc., would be lovely, but it's not an inexpensive solution. So if we had a north-south solution that wasn't State Street, I'd feel great. I'd feel good about that.

Right, but Tom, they've asked for State Street. Street. I know that's why we put that beautification in, is because they've— Shawna, I have conversations with her, several conversations where she has wanted active transport. I like separating cars and bikes and putting them on different roads, but maybe we need to give that option if we can get MAG to help us create this connectivity.

Anyway, that's all I had.

Thank you. Say, Debbie.

Couple thoughts. Um, I live off Geneva Road, and right now it's fine as far as getting on and off. But as Vineyard develops this new Utah City that I know they've been looking at for 6 years, the congestion will get— I mean, it's going to be a lot of cars. Even though I think they want to make it more walkable, more transit-oriented, there's still going to be more cars. People still have cars. So I'm wondering if overpasses would deal with that future concern we may have connecting I guess I want to make sure that Orem is not as impacted as it could be. If it all funnels to Geneva, then I'm gonna have a hard time getting on Geneva. Do those overpasses solve part of that problem?

So it's been modeled for, for the 8th South overpass. I believe it takes anywhere from 11,000 to 12,000 trips a day is how many would be on that, which is similar to some of our collectors and arterials. So it's not going to take care of a lot of pass-through traffic, but it would take care of the order— I mean, of your citizenry is what it would do. And to put those overpasses in, we would have an active transportation component to it. The one at 8 South would have the BRT on it. BRT would not come around and up Parkway, it would actually use 8 South. So—

Okay.

To answer your question, I think as Geneva Road, it's, I think, designated to be a 7-lane facility is what they planned at least to go from 16th North down to University Parkway. South of that, it's going to be a 5-lane facility. So it has the potential to be a very, very busy corridor, but I— but instead of having to use Geneva Road to go to where there's already existing underpasses and then having to funnel up Center Street or funnel up through 8th North, something like 12th North and 8th South will go ahead and help with some.

Well, I can tell you, 800 South gets very bogged down a lot in the mornings. It just does. I mean, it's—

8th South does?

Or maybe it's 4th South. Maybe it's 4th. Yeah, it's probably 4th. I want to echo— well, first of all, let's, let's update our bike plan. It was 2010. Yeah, can we not do that and engage the public or whatever we need to do? I think that's an important component. If that's 13 years old, we all know things have changed, and e-bikes are revolutionary. I own one, I love it. So I— can we get that on the docket at some point to update that? And then, and then maybe a later date, add an addendum to this program showing some of the bike. And then, if possible, I mean, I don't mind putting some of the bike traffic on Oren Boulevard. But if we're not going to do that, then I would like to beautify State. I would like to make it safer. We did talk about, you know, improving the look, the field trees. Renee and I worked a long time on that. And so I guess for me, let's find a way that we can increase the safety, whether it's on Boulevard or State Street, and make it more, more accessible to people, as, as I think more people with the cost of inflation, I think more people are going to be looking to low-cost ways to get around. You know, high gas is going to force people either public transit or bikes or walking. And I think, I think I don't see that going down in the future. So those are my thoughts.

Thank you, Sam. I just want to point out too that, that there are some avid and active bikers on the Transportation Advisory Commission.

And they've weighed into this.

They've been very open in sharing their opinions and their thoughts about the safety of getting around on a bike. And, and so obviously something that we want to continue to improve and make that safer.

Sam, would you mind just kind of going through the timing of this?

That's something that we've talked about before.

But I mean, we see on the screen 2050 no-build level of service. We're in 2023.

When are you kind of predicting that these different items of concern on your, on your list would actually be taking place if they were to take place?

Are we talking 2030, 2040?

Likely, right? If we were to start any of these projects, it would be around the 2030 mark before we would be able to do anything. Any of these larger projects that, that we've identified are going to cost a lot of money, and they would be a multiple-year ask with MAG, multiple years of funding cycles. With the cost of inflation, property values going up, construction costs going up, It's just going to be out further and further for us to do a project like 8th East. Just to go back, like, like I've said to my previous— 16th North, we were probably looking to finally be able to do something with 16th North maybe in 2030, and we had started that process 5 years ago where we were asking for $5 million from MAG for right-of-way purchases, and we were utilizing corridor preservation dollars and buying properties from willing sellers and willing buyers. And that's how we would have proceeded until we had enough money for the project, which would have taken probably 10, 12 years. It's just going to be a long, long process. But having it in the plan, knowing that we're moving in that direction, it does afford those folks that live on, on those corridors a way out. instead of having to sell their home at a discounted value because it's on a busy street, they actually get to have fair market value and their home is worth just as much as a home in a cul-de-sac. Currently, right now, with our transportation— with the Technical Advisory Committee with MAG, we every month we're having a project come in and exercising the county dollars for corridor preservation and people are selling. So, so back to your point, Jeff, the corridors, we would probably target one. I would bring that forward, get, get the advice from Council, and if it was, say, 8th East from 8th South to Center Street, then we would start that direction. We would start with the study that would likely take a year to identify what is the preferred alternative. And then once that has been selected, we do a pre-environmental, look at the actual— assess the lane widths and some of the amenities that we would have on there for active transportation, whether it's a multi-use path, separated path, bike lanes, whatever it is. Get that adopted into our plan and then start moving forward, letting folks know if you're a willing seller, we are a willing buyer, and then And we just buy properties as, as we had funding, and once the funding was exhausted, then we'd wait till the next funding cycle. So you're talking 10, 15 years before one of these could actually be built, probably, unless it's 8th South and/or 12th North, where the state realizes, hey, there's a lot of benefit for us putting in this overpass. This project's been on this priority list for a while. We have some money this year. Let's go ahead and build that. And those projects that are directly tied to state facilities could be accelerated a lot sooner, but ours that are homegrown and our projects like, like the ones I identified, they would take a while. So I know I probably talked way too long on that, but it would take a while.

Say, Terry, do you have some more questions?

I do. A couple statements, and I sat in, you know, I represent City Council on the Planning Commission. So I've sat in on all the Planning Commission meetings, and they had some special meetings where Sam came, just, you know, separate from the regular Planning Commission meetings to discuss this too. And some of them, I'm just shaking my head.

12th North.

Are you kidding me? Drive down 12th North. It's a little 2-lane road. And how many homes are we going to take out? How many families are we going to destroy as we're going to buy their homes and you say you don't have to sell. No, the neighbors on both sides just sold and the neighbor next to him, the neighbor next to him, you don't have to sell, but you're gonna be stuck there by yourself as the road goes around your house. But to put an overpass on 12th North, I think our portion would be about $8 million, Sam, if I remember the numbers we were hearing.

Yes.

So it's going to cost Orem $8 million to put a Overpass over the freeway on 12th North so that we have better access to industrial area on the other side of it. Really? Now 8 South is helping Vineyard because that's the Utah City— well, both, you know, these are, these are working with Utah City. So Vineyard has a, you know, we have another road going on 8 South, an overpass. So Shawna, Stacy, and some of the others that spoke. I'd be a lot more interested in a pedestrian overpass on a major road in Orem where you could ride your bike over State Street or some other place than I would sticking an overpass on 12th North and taking out families. You know, some of those— I talked to a man who grew up there, and he told me some of those families are 3rd and 4th generation on 12th North. We're going to buy their homes because we'd like to widen the road. 8th East, the same thing. I watched a whole ward get gutted when Aston Apartments were built by the mall. And don't tell me that in this current market, you're— we're going to give you a check. Yeah, go find another house. Yeah, best of luck to you. 16th North, the people on 16th North still live in fear because they're just waiting. When is Orem going to widen 16th North and take out the parking in front of your house? It's not like if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. We know it's on the master plan. So we're going to widen 16th North, we're going to circle around, widen 8th East, and hook it on to Center Street. We're going to wire Center Street. What for? So that— so it's easier for the people from Salt Lake to go up Provo Canyon, or the people from— they're coming from Salt Lake to get home to Provo. What is it? How does it benefit all those people we displace? So I'm really concerned about this. It is a political, political, politically sensitive issue because there's an election going on right now, and the Utah Realtors have gotten very much involved with this, supporting candidates that, you know, how are they going to vote? Well, there's a— it's a big deal if all of a sudden you're, you're changing the master plan, you're sticking apartments up and down State Street. You can see, you see my concern. Where does it stop? Widening 8th East, widening 16th North, all it does is make us a thoroughfare for other cities. Let's protect the homeowners, let's protect our community. And I just, I just listened to go, man, I can't believe I'm hearing this, but I did. I walk in the morning and at night. It started because of some health issues, so I'm not a biker. But I almost got hit on 8th East as a car made a left turn and I'm walking across on the intersection. So I now— I drive to cross 8th East. I don't cross 8th. So I can understand the bikes concerns. Anyway, my concern is what's the purpose for all this in Orem? Because our population, by the way, we've grown at less than 1% the last 10 years. We've gone from 90,000 to 98,000 or 99,000. That's less than 1% a year over the last 10 years. So where's all this growth and why would we— why do we need widened? I'm hearing 7 lanes, 5 lanes. I don't, I don't get it and I don't support it. And the only thing I would support would be I would support what the Planning Commission did. I will strongly support that. If there's anything added, overpasses, all that kind of stuff, I would vote no.

We have any, any other comments?

Um, we didn't really talk about 8th West, um, with the Center Street to 4th North. That is a choke point. Terry, would that be— that particular segment be okay?

Sorry, say that again.

Oh, the 8th West, because there was that choke point.

I need to look where they're talking about. Yeah, I think I know where it is, but that's just connecting it with the width of 8th West already is. I think I'm— if I understand that, Sam, I'm probably okay with that. We're not— but how many homes are you taking out to do that?

We'd have to study it, Terry. We wouldn't actually—

You did say maybe parking.

I mean, if it's a project that we want to move forward with, we do a whole public involvement in a study. And I mean, and that's the thing, you have to realize this is one of those things that's on the list. We would go ahead and look at it. support it, then we wouldn't move forward with it. I mean, these— the only thing that this plan has done is it's taken the data that, that we have and identified areas to look at. And if it's— and if it's something that, that we want to do, if we want to connect active transportation, we don't want to buy homes, but we want to make a statement and make it safer for biking, that might be one of the first spots that we look at reducing parking and doing something, allowing folks to have a circular driveway or letting them park in their front yard or something like that, something creative. But we're going to go ahead and connect those bike lanes and make it safe.

I'd have to look at that, Debbie. I don't know that, but—

Well, look, my kids attended Mazer Prep Academy and we would use 8th West a lot and then turn up to go and just very congested. There's people trying to get into the school. So if, you know, we don't want to do the overpasses, I think 8th West Northwest is really a place that we need to really study, figure out what makes sense, you know. And I think buying homes would be definitely the last resort. I think maybe moving the parking off, but adding bike lanes, because that getting to Maser is a— that is a very difficult area when you're coming off Center, or if you're having to get off, you know. I've, I've gone to and from— I mean, I had, I had 2 daughters there, and I did it from I don't know, 6, 8 years. I think they were there from 7th grade to 12th, and it was at the bowling alley in Linden, and then it was moved there. I mean, I've ridden that a lot, so that is a choke point, and that's one I would definitely want to at least study.

So this will be an interesting vote. It'll kind of tell you if people on the City Council are supportive of protecting neighborhoods, or are they supportive of high density and widening roads and expanding. I mean, that'll be an interesting message.

Okay, so—

Well, yeah, what, what are we voting on?

Yeah, no, I mean, are we taking the overpasses off?

You're getting me a new car is what you're doing.

Well, I just want to know, I mean, if the overpasses are a problem, I think we could take them off.

I mean, you guys, I mean, I guess I'd probably refer to Gary, but, but you guys could actually vote on and make a motion that you follow the recommendation that Planning Commission had forwarded, that the positive recommendation removing those certain components, or you could say, are you, you know, keeping all those? I mean, I think you adopted as the Planning Commission proposed.

I mean, what was the vote in the Planning Commission?

It was a 7-0 with conditions.

Yep.

And as far as those changes, they eliminated both the overpasses. What did they do with 8th West?

So in, in, in their recommendation, they had to remove the overpass 8th South, 12th North, remove the widening projects related to 8th East and 8th West corridors, remove the 16th North project east of State Street, 8th West connection to Campus Drive. They wanted to amend the language outlined in Exhibit B, and I gave you guys this handout that kind of goes through all that. And Exhibit B talks about connectivity, and then Exhibit C was just talking about some things to further discuss, which are— one of them is active transportation, you know.

I did not hear a comment on Centre Street to 4th North on 8th West, only Going to the west.

Yeah, it had 8th West on there, and I just— for me, there's no need. I know the plan may have identified 8th West to go to 5 lanes as a hotspot. It may have, you know, identified 8th South to go to 5 lanes as a hotspot, but there's really no need there. I mean, even right now, looking at the— you look at this, the 2050 no-build level of service, it doesn't make sense to put a 5-lane facility on there when And the color doesn't even represent that. So, so for me, I know that there's some choke points. There is a choke point on 8th West, and there is a choke point on 8th South, but it wouldn't be going to 5 lanes. It would just be making it a more consistent cross-section so we can tie in all the other facilities.

And just to clarify, that's, that's what we're talking about leaving in. I mean, the Planning Commission wasn't pushing back on that spot in 8th West. West, that was not on your list.

I think, I think the way it's listed in the TMP, it calls it out as a 5-lane facility as a hotspot or recommendation.

Is that B that it's under on in this resolution?

2B?

Actually, on page 1, 8th East and 8th West, it's at the bottom of page 1, letter B, remove the widening projects related to the 800 East and 800 West.

So is it, is it just the widening that's the problem? Because I don't think widening necessarily needs to be our solution. I mean, you just said we can remove parking and other things, right? So if it's just the widening, buying the homes, you know, making it wider, I think I could get— I could do all the recommendations, but I still would like to look at that choke point on the center to 400 West, taking the word widening, maybe we can put study, see what what would be neighborhood approved. I think the widening is what's scaring, adding more lanes, getting the homes. I think that does not— that doesn't have to be something I want to— I mean, what I'm saying is, if we study it enough and make a reasonable improvement without having to buy the homes, I think that would make more of us comfortable about that. I don't know. I don't know how everyone else feels, but that's what I'm thinking.

And just to be clear, that's all part of the process, even though it's identified in it recommends a widening to 5 lanes or it recommends these things, that there's still a process where we are going to have public involvement and we're going to go study it and look at it. And to Terry's point, if the data has dropped and we don't have those counts there, then we don't have to do it. It just puts it— it's a mechanism so folks understand, but we can do however you guys want us to dictate it. Change the verbiage in the plan.

Okay, so, so as far as this 8th West, I'm still not clear though, because we've got a— we're talking about going to 5 lanes, we're talking about just cleaning it up to make it more manageable. I mean, to me, 8th West seems like a viable conversation just because that's within our city without crossing into everywhere else. to improve that, but I don't know what that looks like.

So, Sam, Gary, Ryan, John, since, since you're still on probation—

Technically hasn't started yet. I guess the question that I'm hearing, if I can summarize it, is there a way that we can word this differently to show that we would look at ways to improve and Well, improve some of those corridors, but essentially change the threshold, change the limit, change the top end.

So essentially not necessarily look at 5 lanes, but, but study out and look at all other kinds of improvements, you know, maybe, maybe turn lanes, maybe bike paths or painting, maybe taking out Some parking or allowing a different kind of driveway. Anyway, point being, can we look at other stuff before we get to the point of widening?

Right, and I think to that, maybe it could just be as simple as understanding that the hotspots of 8th West is a choke point, that the city will look at options to mitigate vehicular traffic in that area to be consistent with both the north and south portions of that corridor. And essentially, I think in the TMP, it actually calls out at being 5 lanes, and we can just take that component out of it and just maybe we just look at hotspots to make sure that we have our arterials in a consistent roadway cross-section.

I like that.

Yeah, so we could put in language that said make it consistent on 8th West and 8th East, consistent as it is north and south. And address choke points and look at other alternatives.

Well, I'm not comfortable with 8th East being on there.

Yeah, that's fine.

And I want to say something else. I think I made my point that the 16— so I just have a problem, and I said this in our May 16th City Council work meeting when we talked about this, and it was, oh, we leave it on there, we're just planning for the future, we're not going to do it for 10, 20, 30 years, but You know, we're just saying where we could go. I just have a hard time voting for yes, let's restripe 1600 North, East 1600 North, or let's widen, or even restripe, because then that leads to widening. When you take away the parking in front of someone's home and you put those cars going 40 miles an hour right next to the curb, you are creating a situation where you are truly taking away the value of that home. And you're— it's just one step towards our opportunity, I guess you want to put it that way, to widen the road. You know, you're really creating a difficulty, a hardship for that homeowner, and you're setting the stage for their home to be turned, you know, for the road to be widened. So I— that's where I'm kind of pushing back on this, having it in the plan. I just think it it's very problematic to, to say, yes, I'm in favor of that, because fundamentally, I'm not in favor of destroying home values and making people move. Like Terry says, I had a friend that she's like, yeah, Woodbury wants to buy my house, but whatever they give me, I'm gonna have to go move to Saratoga Springs to buy a house. You know, I like where I am in Orem. I like my home. So I don't know. I guess that's— I'm just saying, that's where I am on this. I feel like if we're really talking about creating places where families can come and purchase a home, and then we're reducing the number of homes in Orem. That's, you know, you look at supply and demand, right? You take away the supply, the— I actually appreciate the work that the Planning Commission did on this. I think they were very forward-thinking as far as preserving Orem as a city. I look at Murray. Murray is a past through city. And it kind of looks like it when you drive through it. So I think we really need to decide what we want Orem to be and how we want to preserve that for our residents. Let's put in bike lanes, let's, let's improve Orem. But I agree with some of the comments that have been said here. Why are we negatively affecting our neighborhoods? So You know, people can get to Provo 2 or 3 minutes faster.

That's my comment.

If I may.

So, Sam, if I'm interpreting the tea leaves right, many of these things are studies not to be done. You know, we don't know what's going to be happening, but the 2 that seem pretty significant are bypass over 8 South And an overpass— excuse me, an overpass over 8 South and overpass over 12th North. And if I understood the Planning Commission, those were 2 significant oppositions. Can I get a head shake from the Planning Commission member I'm looking at? So thank you. So those, I think— again, another head shake— are your 2 major objections. Is that correct, or am I missing one or more? You had 5 or 6 objections, but I thought those were your 2 major ones.

That and 8th.

Most significant. I'm sorry, I realize they're all your babies.

I get that.

But these are your 2 favorite children.

Okay.

Issues.

So I don't know how we're going to go about doing this. It looks like maybe our attorney wants to talk, but those are the 2 that caused me the most concerns because the rest are still to be studied and still to be approved. in the future. Is that fair, Sam?

Yeah, I mean, they're, they're all the same. I would say that. Yeah, I mean, looking at all these here, I mean, staff, we agreed with removing 16th Northeast of State Street. We agreed with, with 800 East, and we just brought forth the other options with the other projects. So yeah.

Okay, thank you.

So, Mike, would you like to just come up and tell us from the planning perspective, Commission, or yeah, just give us an idea of what the main issues were that you were concerned about. You don't have to go through the whole thing because we'll be here all night, but as far as just the highlights of these were the things that we're concerned about in order and why.

So one of the biggest concerns was widening, you know, taking out residences and neighborhoods needlessly.

For external traffic and making us a throughput for everybody else.

So that's, you know, the 8th East, 8th West, 1600 North is about just widening it for other people, not for the residents of the city. The overpasses, same thing. We will end up widening 12th North and 8th South if we put these overpasses in because you've created a 5-lane corridor into a 2-lane road, and it's got to go somewhere. So you're going to destroy 12th North, you're going to destroy 8th South, just to put those overpasses in so that Vineyard can get in, UTA can get over the freeway easier.

You know, we could alleviate a lot of that 8th South problem by pushing for UVU to put in their own dedicated on and off ramps.

That would mitigate all the traffic on 12th South. University Parkway wouldn't be such a congested mess any longer. They just have to have the drive to do it, but nobody's pushing them. So those are some of the big concerns, you know. 8th West, it does have a choke point between 4th North and Center. I hate to break it to the bikers, but it was the bike lanes that did it. You know, it's made it— it is kind of an unsafe space. ride my bike down there because it's so tight. But you can't take away the parking because it's all old homes.

They don't have a lot of parking in the first place. They'll just go into the other parts of the neighborhood if you take away their parking. So your only alternative is take out houses or remove the bike lane.

So because that is a choke point, and Sam, I mean, would that be worth a study just to evaluate that? I mean, it's a choke point. It's within the city. It's not taking us anywhere else.

Yeah, I, I'm not opposed to study, but you know, we were opposed to making a 5-lane road in a very well-established long-term neighborhood. Yeah, and it's one of the earlier neighborhoods when Geneva came in.

That's where most—

What is it? Is it 2 lanes right now?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, it's 2 and then bike lanes on both sides and parks.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, through that section is 34 feet of asphalt and most, most of our— both north and south of it, you have 46 to 50 feet of asphalt, so it's very substandard for a collector.

Okay. Does anyone else have a question for Mike while he's up here?

So you're not, you're not opposed to us studying the 8th West?

No, absolutely not. I think we need to actively look for new solutions.

I'm a big proponent for what these people are asking for.

I think we need safe streets for bikes. I think we need to make great causeways. I think there's better ways to do it that are safer and cause less friction between the bikes and the cars. So I—

Maybe your committee can give us some unique creative solutions to fix that choke point.

Yeah, I'm more than happy to spend the time to try and come up with good answers.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, Mike. So let me just kind of— I'm not sure how we get to a vote if we just push this next time. Um, as far as the priorities that I see, uh, one thing that sticks with me is, is Lynette's comment about money available that you were saying for State Street. So if whatever we do, we can we can go after that money to see if we can use that to improve State Street, make that better. There is a— there is coming down the pike, and we've been working on it for the last year and a half, but there is a push from us to reinvigorate State Street, and we're going to be working on that and coming up with ideas on that. So any money that we can get for that would be really beneficial because our goal is to have you know, fast forward 10 years or whatever to have a State Street that everybody's proud of. So, um, one just comment is, you know, we've stopped the apartments. Uh, we haven't stopped the apartments that, that already were pre-licensed to go, um, but we've stopped any new apartments from coming in, uh, in the last year and a half, 2 years. And to me, when you look at all the different things we're talking about, when you drop apartment buildings everywhere, it kind of blows up everything. And no matter what you do as far as your— all your different transportation plan goals, with all your different transportation goals that we're working on, working towards, if we drop thousands of apartments in, it just is like dropping a nuclear bomb. And so I think that's a really important piece of this puzzle. And I know you guys were talking about Orem Boulevard, and I come out of my neighborhood and turn onto Orem Boulevard. I used to be able to do that for, you know, 20 years, 25 years. And ever since they stacked Orem Boulevard with apartments all the way up and down, you can't turn out on that. I've given up on that. I just go to 4th West and hope I can get out on that. So I think we've got to look at the whole picture, the big picture. I agree completely that we need to update the bike plan. I think, you know, it's time, and we should take a look at that and see what we can do. So that's something I think we'd be for. I do agree with the concerns on the council as far as the overpasses. There is kind of an— if they build it, if we build it, they will come. And so if we open those up, those are They're gonna— if we build it, they will come. And if they come, that just means more traffic, more congestion. In my mind, it hurts the family neighborhoods that are in those areas. So anyway, so as far as— are there any other issues? Well, as far as the 8th West, I think, you know, we're in favor of looking at trying to figure out something better than what we've got right now.

Thank you.

Okay, so can I say, is there a way to encapsulate that, or do we need to come back and, you know, vote on something like that in a couple weeks?

Looks like Gary's drafting it up right now.

Well, I've been trying to pay attention, and let me go through— I think you have in front of you a copy of the Planning Commission resolution. And on that first page at the bottom, the Planning Commission recommended a positive overall approval of the Transportation Master Plan with some concerns. And the first one, what I'm hearing is the Council would agree with A, remove the overpass interchanges 800 South and 1200 North. That the council agrees. I'm hearing from everybody that that makes sense. Then in B, widening the projects related to the 800 East and 800 West corridors. What I'm hearing on that is, is that widening is problematic and that we shouldn't widen. We should take out widening the projects and rather further study projects related to 800 East and 800 West. Not that we're approving the widening project that's in the Transportation Master Plan, but what the Council would be approving is for staff to further study that and bring that information back at a later date to the Council. And is that not—

We don't want 800 East.

Just 800 West.

Just 800 West. Okay.

Okay.

So, so we would study 8th West, but not 8th East.

Okay.

From the plan, not overall.

We like the residents on 8th East.

And so, and then, so we can go through And then C, if we can keep going, remove the 1600 North project east of State Street. I think everybody agrees with that one. Then if we turn the page, at the top of the page we have D, the 800 West connection to Campus Drive should remain closed. And I believe what I'm hearing is that the council would want that to remain closed at this time.

That's correct.

Then, uh, E— I almost said C, got to put these on. All right, E, amend the language in the plan as outlined in Exhibit B. We haven't talked about that, uh, but if you turn 2 pages in the document, you'll see paragraph 2 of the executive summary has some red line in it, and then, uh, section 4.9 with connectivity. If, if I heard right, I think Sam was supportive of this language being added.

No, no, I would actually keep it as it is just there.

And keep that as it is. Yeah. Oh, that's right. This was the Planning Commission's recommendation. And then staff, we would recommend that it— that the Red Line not be included that it would just remain as is, and the council hasn't had really a discussion on that aspect of the plan. Then, then F, going back to the second page of the Planning Commission's resolution, at the top of the page, F is consider other recommendations outlined in Exhibit C. And so if you go to the last page, that's Exhibit C. And that's really to— Planning Commission talked about— oh, I'm sorry, did not everybody have one?

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I just look very confused. I thought you were looking for it.

On that, bike lanes, I think everybody agrees we are— our plan is 13 years old. We really ought to come in and take a look at that again, and, and staff— the council would like staff to begin that process. I don't know that that's necessarily important to be in the resolution. Staff, we're hearing you, and we want to follow up on that and begin that process. And the UVU connectivity, Orem Center Street, and then the connectivity In general, those are things that the Planning Commission recommended we have continuing discussion as a city with the TAC and with Planning Commission and with the Council at future times. And so those, I don't know, necessarily need to be in the resolution. They could. So now coming back to the resolution. So what I'm hearing is that the council could approve the transportation master plan, but would remove the overpass interchanges at 800 South and 1200 North, and then make sure I get this one right on B, that remove the widening project related to 800 East and study 800 West corridor. Then remove the 1600 North project east of State Street. In that, remove the 800 West connection to Campus Drive. Keep that closed on our transportation master plan. And then, well, if we skip E for a second, go to F, that we begin the process of studying the other items listed in Exhibit C from the Planning Commission. And as staff, we begin that process. Now, if I've done my job correctly, I think I've thoroughly confused everyone.

You've done it pretty good. I'm confused. I do have one question, if I may, Mayor. What is the difference between, between studying the 800 West corridor and the 800 West connection to Campus Drive. Aren't they connected now?

No, no, they're not connected right now. It just goes down to 8 South and then it goes south into—

What's that road called?

It's, it's 800 West, but it's the Steele family owns that area, but it doesn't connect further south.

You know what, I'm confusing 12th West and 8th West. I'm sorry. See, I was confused without you, Gary. I did it all by myself. Thank you very much. I'm sorry about that.

Can I say, actually, like Exhibit C, because it shows that we as a council are working on the bike lanes issue, and we are, you know, adding that to this resolution to find some— I mean, this is how it stated, you know, bike lanes find a better solution than being in traffic. Perhaps wider sidewalks. I mean, this is like the the brainstorming. You know, let's let's start addressing these issues. I I think that that kind of really represents our discussion tonight.

And and having Exhibit C included in the council's resolution tonight on transportation master plan, it would be perfectly acceptable. Would be a good approach. Would give clear. Direction to staff.

Say, Sam, is there, as far as the issue that you brought up earlier about getting money for State Street, is there a way to incorporate that into this, or—

Um, I'm not sure. I think we would obviously look at studying it, and then, because that's going to be one of the first things I do is contact MAG and the state and figure out what options are available, what are the nuances with it, how can— I mean, right now we do have a funding cycle. And it might be sitting— a function of sitting down with the staff at MAG and just looking at how can we leverage some active transportation dollars, understanding that this funding cycle isn't going to be— we won't be eligible for 3 or 4 years, but maybe this is one of the things we bring forward and look at getting money. And these are the reasons why to build this facility. So yeah, I'll automatically start that right away.

So I'd like to add it in somehow, just articulate that we, we're going to do that.

Let's see.

So Gary, to put that in as part of the resolution, something like Will, will pursue potential funding for State Street business connection opportunities.

And can we kind of bring in what is dear to Debbie and I's hearts, that with, with an attitude of beautifying State Street and creating safer active transportation options.

With nice trees.

With nice trees.

But I think the whole council wanted the beautification of State Street, so it wasn't just Debbie and—

We did come up with the idea.

We did, right?

You guys all supported it.

David and I have really pushed for that, so please.

However, it was our baby. You have to admit it was our baby.

But you did support us. Thank you so much, Councilmember Spencer.

Okay, state pursue funding opportunities for State Street business connectivity and beautification and active transportation.

Perfect.

Okay, is everybody good that we can have a vote on this? I think we've covered everything.

Yeah, who's gonna word it?

Gary gonna help us?

Yes.

What I would suggest as a motion is, uh, in, in the packet we have a sample motion, and in that motion it says, uh, resolution by the Orem City Council amending the Transportation Master Plan and adopting the Transportation Master Plan update as Appendix F of the Orem General Plan. With the following additions and deletions. And—

As outlined by the Planning Commission, we have to articulate each one.

Well, we, we've added several things.

We've added a few things. Well, we could say the Planning Commission. The one thing that I'm still unclear about is Exhibit B, that draft language in there. Staff has recommended keep it as it is. Planning Commission is recommending what you see in red.

Page 4 or 5.

Yeah. Yes, thank you. Page 4.

No, I, I think Sam and the Planning Commission both recommended that, right?

No, we actually— staff recommends keeping it without the text in red. Just because when you add the, the red component to it, it's more of a subjective type of language versus we having some teeth to saying, no, you need to make connections, you need to be able to have pedestrians and vehicles connect both in a residential and commercial retail type zoning application.

Would you read what the red is so it's on the record?

So yeah, go ahead.

Sorry.

So at the beginning of the page on Exhibit— on page 4 of 5, which is Exhibit B of the Planning Commission's resolution making a recommendation to the Council, what they would suggest is adding in paragraph 2 of the executive summary some language. It reads now, due to growth within the city and the large growth throughout the county, a comprehensive transportation master plan must be developed and regularly maintained in order to combat congestion. And then they put in safety hazards and traffic's impact on neighborhoods.

I like that.

So staff recommends you take out the red part of 4.9, is that what you're saying?

And so that section, I think we're okay with.

Yes.

Yes. So that section staff would be okay with. It's down in 4.9 on connectivity. That's what Sam was addressing about as developments coming in. And, and so now it says Orem desires a connected street system. For all new developments, minimizing the use of cul-de-sacs. Then there would be a sentence placed in here that says, yet greater connectivity may compromise the integrity of Orem's neighborhoods and in certain circumstances increase safety risk to pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists. And then another sentence they would recommend adding: connectivity and traffic flow will be balanced with these needs, preserving Orem's neighborhoods and safety moving ahead. Then another— recommend another sentence saying developers should be made aware of the proposed transportation changes that open residential neighborhoods to commercial and high-density areas with flow-through traffic are inconsistent with the direction of Orem's future growth period. So they would add in those 3 sentences, then it continues infill parcels. Staff had— will— this says may be required to provide future street stubs to adjacent parcels with the potential for development. And then dealing with the next sentence, retail and office development, rather than must, It says may provide for cross easement access easements to create circulation patterns to adjacent properties to eliminate multiple access points to the major street system. And I think that goes back to what Sam was talking about. When you're on State Street in the businesses there, there's not a lot of interconnectivity between parking lots and different businesses. like there is on the Parkway. You know, the Parkway, you can, you can go to Lowe's and then end up going all the way down to Honey Bay Camp without having to get on the Parkway and, and do things like that. And so I think staff is looking that by saying must provide crossings, it's a little more— we're looking at that. The council also Wants us to put in that we would pursue funding for State Street business connectivity and beautification. That would be a part of this motion already. Um, then continuing on back on that Exhibit B, it says consequently this rather than will could reduce travel time, that interconnectivity.

Issue.

And then an example at the very last sentence, it now says an example project to improve connectivity in Orem is the 1600 West extension to Geneva Road. So we need to figure out what we want to do with Exhibit B, and I think we have a motion. That would have the support of the council.

So I'm okay with these redline changes through here. The only one that I would push back on a little bit is retail and office development must, may provide cross-access agreements. I think we've gone from must to may to try and soften it up, which I think is fine, but I mean, to me, retail and office development, if there's a way we can put that so it's strongly encouraged unless there's no other options. In other words, so we— because our State Street is a lot— it's not nearly as wide as a lot of the areas on University Parkway, and there it may not be possible. So I don't want to block businesses out, but we want them to create those cross— access easements if it's possible. And that's different than must or may, right? I mean, it's—

Is there a reason we can't use his words, strongly encourage? I mean, that's kind of in between.

So, Mayor, this is getting so marked up, I'd suggest they rewrite it with what Gary's saying, and then we, we vote on it next time. Because right now we're getting lines and crosses and—

You want to continue it?

It'd be easier, I think, if we all see the cleaned-up version. I mean, that'd be my proposal. And I don't see the urgency that we have to do it tonight, but a cleaned-up version next time would be cool.

Yeah, I'm fine with that.

Is there an urgency? Are we okay if we wait another few weeks?

At this point, no.

We've done this since 2015, right? Okay.

No, I think we've made a lot of changes and a lot of things going on. So ideally, we could get this back in a finished form in our packets and go through it and then vote on it. We wouldn't have to have the whole discussion next time, but we could—

Would you be okay, Mayor, if we put it on the consent agenda next time if we have everything lined out correctly?

I'd be— I'd be—

No, I still want to talk about it. I think this is such an important thing just to— I don't know, I think we want to talk about it. Now we've done most of the fleshing out, so it may not take too long, but just going on consent, I'm not comfortable.

I agree with Debbie.

Okay.

Are you ready for a motion of continuance, Mr. Mayor?

Dave?

Oh, sorry.

Dave, I was gonna make a motion to continue.

Can I second it if you make it?

Continue 9.1 till October 10th City Council meeting.

I'll second that.

Wait a minute, I was gonna do that. Go ahead.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Sorry, Tom.

The motion is continued. Thank you for that conversation. Okay, we're almost at the finish line. Yes, thank you, Sam. And okay, we've got item 9.2. An ordinance. This is called Campaign Finance Disclosure Requirement for Elected Officials. Gary, would you like to explain this?

Yes, this ordinance amends and adds into 2-3-4, campaign finance disclosures. Section A of that ordinance already requires candidates for office to follow the state code with their disclosures. Then B sets out an annual contribution disclosure by elected officials, and it requires that on August 1st of each year, an elected official has to file an annual financial statement. Or while they're in office. Or while they're in office. And it has to have all of the contributions they have received or expenditures that they have made prior to July 15th. From the preceding cycle, then in three, if an elected official fails to do that by the deadline, which is August first, then the city recorder can accept it late up to ten days with a late fee of fifty dollars. If the elected official fails to comply, it's considered an infraction and there could be a fine of no more than $750. For elected officials who now hold office as of today, the ordinance says they would need to file an annual campaign financial— file their campaign financial disclosure by October 15th of this year, and that would get all of the elected officials up to date. Some of you may have to do 2 years' worth or 4 years' worth. Yes, that's right. And that's basically what this ordinance does. Any questions?

Any questions?

Oh, and I had some comments.

Well, go ahead, Mayor. I'll let you—

No, I, I'm fine. I mean, we've—

So my thoughts were, Debbie and I were chatting here and we thought, you know, Debbie's like, I'm ready to file mine today. And that was from 4 years ago, right? You're catching up from 4 years. It's zero because it's zero. We really don't do anything, right? So You know, we were saying maybe we do October 10th. That's a Wednesday. And then if you miss that deadline, October 13th is your last chance before you have to pay $750. Or was it a Tuesday? It's a Tuesday. Yeah, well, that's right. That's our council meeting.

Tuesday.

And then, right, and then give it for this one-time catch-up provision. And then just do the Friday and then we're done with it. We don't have to— Drag this out. Is that a problem?

No, this could be amended to read October 10, 2023.

But the recorder would have to send out some form, but correct, and we want to give that recorder time to do that. You can modify the state one. Okay, I just wanted to not have pressure on you.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah.

That's fine.

So, so Debbie and Renee, you're gonna go plant trees now too?

I'd be happy to have donations for trees.

Yes.

Okay, so, so Renee, tell me, because I've got several things on here. Tell me your suggestions.

Just, you want to give her the—

what's the sheet?

Gary, do you want to just reread it based on what I said?

Do you want—

so I don't— no, we left our— that's a different one. than they gave us, unfortunately.

It's what's on the screen.

The one, the one in the— yeah, we need to use the one on the screen because the one on our dais here is not correct. Oh, so what we're trying to say is the first blank— this is the catch-up provision— so the first blank is October 10th. And it's through, um, September 26th. Isn't that what this red one said, the one we got in the work meeting said?

No, it says if you are an elected official as of September 26th, but it is, uh, for financial disclosures, uh, through, uh, contributions received or expenditures received through September 30th.

2023.

So we'd take it through the end of this month.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then you've got the honor before October 10th.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the first blank on the screen that you see would be honor, uh, before October 10th, 2023, and then this last blank would be September 30th, 2023.

Okay, so I have a question. Since I just filed a financial disclosure, um, do I— would I still need to do this?

Just if you have any— if you have any, yeah, you have to just say zero if you didn't get any.

So I just file a zero. Okay.

Yeah, you would just catch up with the zeros if that's what it is.

Unless—

yeah, unless there was something.

Yeah.

And then you would just do your normal So, Gary, you need a motion made?

Well, I'm sorry, I got a different exhibit here. Yeah, this is a different document than what's on the one that we had in the work meeting. Yeah, so Teresa, this is the one you just gave us in the work meeting, right, with the red lines?

I think so.

So the one that was on the dais here does not have any of these. It's different.

Oh, okay.

So I took those out and then I met with Gary.

So the ones in there, the correct updated ones, we've had to make changes since Jake was not here. So that's what Jake sent me, but then I met with Gary and I gave him yesterday's.

So this one is throwaway?

Yes.

So use the redline one. You have the redline?

Yes.

So the other recommendations that I thought of, I spoke with Jake, I think, and he was saying You know, maybe a good thing would be to put it under B1, our fiscal year. So no later than June 30th. So this is the— this is not the catch-up provision. This is for going forward. So June 30th instead of August 1st. And then we— you change that then to June 15th in number 2, in the second one. And then Dave, you said this one.

So I don't think we need 10 business days because we all know what we're doing. So I just limit it to 5 days. If you can't remember that, then something's wrong. So I don't think we need 10 days.

And then the question is on—

so my only request with that What my only request with that is, if we're going to say, okay, this is the date and now you got 5 days to make sure you did it, in a perfect world the recorder would notify us well before that 10-day, just so it doesn't sneak up on somebody and they're out of town, they're on vacation, whatever. So maybe, you know, June 1st. Well, I, I would, I would do something like a couple weeks before the deadline or 3 weeks before the deadline.

Okay.

Okay, go ahead.

And then you have just 5 business days after the deadline to— you get charged $50.

And then on the—

if you fail to do so, it's a $750 fine.

And what is that?

Is that a misdemeanor? Or what is that?

It's an infraction. Infraction. Similar to Like a parking ticket or a speeding ticket.

That'd be like parking across 2 handicap zones.

Is there a reason we couldn't limit that to maybe $250? $750 seems more than a parking fine.

Well, I think it's— is there any other penalty if they don't file?

Uh, no.

So that's the issue, right? You know, this is a gentle transparency push. But if someone chooses not to be transparent, they decide they don't want to reveal something.

Well, then just make it like $250 a week until they file.

Oh, can we do that?

Yes.

They will pay.

They will. I like that.

Okay, is there anything else on this that needs to be fixed? Okay, are we good? Gary, are you good?

If we could just go through the numbers just one more time, make sure I've got everything down. In this Exhibit A that you have, that's as the red line, That was given out in the study meeting. In B, uh, sub 1, it says all elected officials who hold office in Orem City must file an annual campaign finance statement no later than— and I have June 30th.

Correct.

Okay, then in 2, the annual campaign finance statement filed by an elected official must disclose all contributions received and expenditures made prior to June 15th of the preceding reporting cycle. Okay. Then we go to 3A. The city recorder shall accept a late filing up to I have 5 business days after the filing deadline, the fee of $50. Then in B, any elected official who fails to comply with this section is guilty of an infraction, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than $750. Uh, did we—

Change that to $250 a week.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, we just want to compel it to happen. And $750, you can just pay $750 and not worry about it. But if it's $250 a week, then you can support the rest of Orem.

And then in 4, any elected official who holds office on September 26th shall file on or before October 10th, 2023. And we're leaving September 30th as the date on which they need to disclose through that date. So a motion to approve A, an ordinance by the Orem City Council amending Section 2-3-4 campaign finance disclosure of the Orem City Code to adopt the new transparency regulations as amended. And then we'll draft this and put it into form.

I've got all the dates.

I'll do it if you'll coach me. So give me the first line. I move that we by ordinance adopt—

That the Orem City Council amend—

The Orem City Council amend—

Section 2-3-4—

Amend Section 2-3-4—

Campaign Finance Disclosure—

Campaign Finance Disclosure—

Of the Orem City Code—

Of the Orem City Code—

To adopt New transparency regulations.

To adopt new transparency regulations.

As shown in Exhibit A, and I will draft the appropriate—

As shown in Exhibit A.

Yep. That's the motion.

Okay.

Second.

Second.

Oh, Jeff.

Second.

Okay.

Aye.

You have a second?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Resolution passes. Thank you. All right, we're down to item 10. There are no communication items. Item 11, Bren, if you have some comments.

If I can just express appreciation for Assistant City Attorney Gary McGinn filling in.

Jake Summers had a family emergency, and so appreciate him stepping in sort of last minute and walking us through some of these extra involved items tonight. I thought I'd just remind you, I think I've told all of you, but just as a reminder, tomorrow is when we'll have the installation entity come in to install the new audiovisual system here in our chambers. And then again, just because we had some presentations regarding our Constitution Month and from our library.

Just thought I'd publicly kind of give some kudos.

We had over 360 copies of the Why I Love America book available in our library, and all of them were requested and well received.

So kind of a fun effort.

that, that has been included part of this month.

So other than that, we'll be sending out some on your calendars, a series of fun fall events coming up.

Okay, I do have one question. The Constitution Month seems like a good idea year after year. Is that something you're going to continue next year in the month of September? And if you're not, I think you should.

You're welcome.

We need to do a resolution for that to always be on the calendar, or how does that work? Maybe next council meeting.

I think we did a proclamation.

Did we?

Yeah, it was by proclamation.

We did a proclamation.

Yeah.

Was it for just the one year, or was it—

yeah, we just did it for this year, but it would be something that would be easily done for future years.

I just think it's such a fundamental to our government, and I'm excited to give booklets to my family, so Awesome. I won't be on council. I think it's a great idea, though.

Okay, sounds good. Would someone like to make a motion to adjourn?

I move to adjourn.

Second. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Well, let's adjourn.

Thank you.