City Council · 2024-06-18

All right. Is there something else that's going to get on there?

Oh, yes.

All right.

I apologize, I'm running a couple minutes late, but I think we're ready to go. And we'd like to start out with the, uh, Utah Renewable Communities presentation.

All right, good afternoon, Council, Mayor. Thanks for having us. I'm Council Member Dan Dugan from Salt Lake City, but here today I'm, uh, representing the Utah Renewable Communities as the chair.

I've been the chair I think 4 years.

I took office as city council member in 2020 and just had reelection this past November. So I've been on the agency board for a number of years. And we're here to kind of— the program's been able to open up this last year for the legislative sessions. So we're going out to reach out to other different communities, introducing ourselves again to the communities, giving us some information on how you could possibly join the community. And right now I'm going to turn my time over to the Salt Lake City Senior Energy and Climate Program Manager, Christopher Thomas. He's the brains behind the whole program, so I'd rather have the brains do most of the talking. So Christopher is going to walk you through. If you have any questions, just feel free to shout them out. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Dugan. My name is Christopher Thomas. Again, we're here to talk to you about Utah Renewable Communities.

Thank you for the invitation.

Carson, thank you for helping to get it set up. So we'll go ahead and dive in. I'm gonna try to work through these slides pretty quickly and then leave good time for questions, because I think that's probably gonna be the most valuable. And I just wanted to say at the outset, I'm happy to be here talking to you about Guitar Global Communities because it is by far the most inspiring thing that I've been able to work on in my career. And I think it's a generational opportunity to do something good for ourselves and for future generations. So anyway, we'll go ahead and dive in. We are a coalition of 18 communities, and we are partnering with Rocky Mountain Power to design a new clean energy program. And this clean energy program was initially authorized by the state legislature back in 2019. We aim to offer customers a choice. to supplement their current energy mix with additional clean energy at a minimal cost increase, with a goal to achieve net 100% by 2030. And we work to empower our community members to be the change for a sustainable tomorrow. So I'm going to talk to you about our renewable program, but first I did want to mention Rocky Mountain Power has been in the news quite a bit recently. You may have noticed. A lot of news about wildfires and liabilities that's put the company in a kind of a challenging position to be able to invest in new power plants. They also announced in April that they were scaling back their clean energy plans and delaying a lot of them after 2030. And that was a concern to clean energy advocates in the state because That year 2030 is a really important one for those, you know, who follow the climate science. But nevertheless, our communities, our 18 communities that are part of the Utah Renewable Communities Initiative, we're still moving forward. We're still working with Rocky Mountain Power, and we see more than ever now our initiative as a really important way to bring new clean energy online by 2030. So why create this new clean energy program? I think for most of our communities, it's really about creating another choice. Usually when you're served by an investor-owned monopoly utility, they make all the decisions. They have all the decision-making capability of where our energy comes from. This would provide one other choice for our communities. I mentioned, for those who care about climate, 2030 is a really important year by which we need to have made quite a bit of progress reducing pollution. And our program is designed to do that. It allows people to support more clean energy development, people who just feel really strongly that, you know, there's a new technology, and this is a way that they can help deploy it through their energy bills. It will reduce air pollution, both climate pollution and other air pollution. And no other program that is out there right now is as impactful for as many people as what our program hopes to be. So just a little more about reducing air pollution regionally and locally. So when you add new clean energy to the power system, it reduces pollution because it means that the other power plants don't have to produce as much. And so we've taken a look at this using the Environmental Protection Agency's models. And so if we add about 400 megawatts of new Utah solar, that would prevent about 700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually throughout the whole region. And in Utah County, it would prevent around 1,500 pounds of other types of pollutants. So that's PM2.5, NOx, SO2, and VOCs, volatile organic compounds, that— and those pollutants are precursors to PM2.5 and ozone in summer. So it reduces air pollution. And primarily that's by reducing the dispatch at the Lakeside and Nebo power stations in Utah County. So how, how would our program accomplish these things? Well, primarily because under this state law, Rocky Mountain Power is authorized to acquire utility-scale clean energy on our behalf. Now, of course, our program has to be approved. It hasn't been approved yet, but once it's approved, that's the goal, is to acquire utility-scale clean energy. And net 100%, I mentioned that earlier. What that means is simply that we would match the consumption of all the people in the program with clean energy by 2030 over the course of a year. It doesn't mean that, you know, we're not still connected to other types of power plants, gas plants and coal plants and so on. It just means we're adding a big slug of renewable energy in an amount that matches how much we're using every year.

So—

And is there a plan to accelerate that as population grows?

Yes, the goal would be that over time we keep that match. After 2030? Yes. Great question. So we are— so unfortunately, one of the bad pieces of news we got from our perspective was Rocky Mountain Power in April said, you know, they've been running this big solicitation for new resources. And then they suspended it and then they terminated it. That was a bummer for us because we thought we were going to get our first tranche of clean energy through this solicitation that Rocky Mountain Power was already doing. So they canceled theirs, but then we decided, okay, we're going to try to prioritize running our own solicitation for clean energy resources. So we hope to host that this year. In fact, I was just on a call with our outside counsel and consultants about trying to finalize these documents. So we're really eager to get that finalized and published. These resources that we're soliciting for will need to connect to the PacificCorp transmission system. And when I say PacificCorp, That's really the same as Rocky Mountain Power. Rocky Mountain Power is just the name that PacificCorp does business as here in Utah. And I mentioned our 2030 goal. So we're looking for resources that can be online no later than December of 2029. We're really excited about this. We just need to finalize the documents and Rocky Mountain Power needs to submit them to the Utah Public Service Commission for review. So I talked about the Pacific War Transmission System. This map gives you a sense of where that transmission system goes. It's those gray lines. So the Pacific War power plants are all across the West. And so technically, the resources that serve our program could also be anywhere that connects to any one of these gray lines. However, for practical reasons, it's most likely that the resources that serve our program would be in the eastern side of the Pacific War Transmission System. So that would be Wyoming, Idaho or Utah. So that's likely where, where our plants will be located.

Can I just clarify, that's not PG&E then?

Correct.

Correct.

Not PG&E.

Yeah, that's California.

Because they have big problems.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Of course, uh, Hathaway owns PacificCorp, and Rocky Mountain Power is a subsidiary of that.

Perfect. Thank you.

So, to give a sense of how much clean energy, new clean energy, this could mean, it's about 1.2 million megawatt hours annually. And of course, it's— we don't usually speak in terms of megawatt hours, so it's hard to visualize, but that would be equivalent to a 200-megawatt solar farm in Utah and a 200-megawatt wind farm in Wyoming. Now, that doesn't mean that's what we have to acquire. It just means to give a sense of scale. We're talking big, very big tranche of new clean energy that this program could help bring online.

And if you just— the small print in the bottom. So we've already assumed that 80% of the residents would be part of it, 30% of the commercial, and just 5% of industrial. So we've already said, hey, not everyone's gonna be a member of it. And those are the numbers we estimated and how much power we would need.

And what's your acreage for each one of those?

I'm sorry, I don't have that.

You don't know what the acreage needs are?

I don't. I'm sorry.

When we do this solicitation, they'll probably give us the acreage, but there's—

exactly.

And wait, we have a list of places that are already on the—

on those.

But here.

Okay. Yep. Great question. So, um, there's something called the interconnection queue. Basically, these projects have to get in line. to connect to that Pacific transmission system, because the transmission system has a limited capacity, right? It'll only take on so much new energy before you have to do a bunch of upgrades and stuff. So to manage that, they have this thing called the queue, and you can actually go online, look at the queue. I've learned more about the queue than I ever thought I would want to know. But basically, these projects right here total 3,000 megawatts. They're primarily Utah solar, but there's 2 geothermal. on here, some Wyoming wind. There's the 2 Idaho solar and battery storage projects. These are projects that are out there looking for what they call offtake agreements so that they can move forward with their projects, and our program can help provide that offtake through Rocky Mountain Power. So there's a lot of desire out there in the market, especially when Rocky Mountain Power said we're canceling our I mean, you had developers who were ready to sign agreements, and Pacifica or Rocky No Horse said, nope, we're terminating. So they're looking, you know, they're looking for people right now. So we're— the good thing about that is we may see now the very most cost-effective projects, which means the cost to participate in our program could be much lower than what we had forecast.

Can we stop right there on that slide?

Sure.

So when we talk about the solicitation, what's interesting is Rocky Mountain Power put a pause on this solicitation. So we were using Rocky Mountain Power, would be procuring the resources for us. We pay for it, but they would go through their system, their solicitation program, and they would— as Rocky Mountain Power, they have a goal on this blue dots here. They have a goal of also increasing their renewable energy and their clean power. And so with that goal, they're going to always pick the least expensive, the best program, and the right program in the right place. for their system, and then we would get the leftovers and we'd have to say, do we want that or not? Now, because Rocky Mountain Power has put a pause on it, now we have a list of all these companies that want to provide resources, and now we go to the top of the line and we're picking out the cream of the crop here who are also going to be competing against each other to provide us with solar, wind, and solar, wind, and battery power. So in a sense, this solicitation, losing this solicitation from Rocky Mountain Power, but a lot more work on our side because we had to go through the RFP process and the scaling process. But the bet on the flip side allowed us to probably get energy at a less expensive price.

Yeah, you made a comment a moment ago that you assumed 80% of residential.

I think that's a lofty goal. They have to pay something for this. Have you seen this elsewhere where 80% will pay? Extra to do this?

You know, um, it's been hard to track down quantitative data like that, but yes, we have seen high, high participation in similar programs in California. The 80% in particular came from a scientific survey that Salt Lake City did, and Ogden also did one. And we looked, we asked people, we said, well, if the program costs this, this, this, or this, at what point, where's the breakpoint? Where's the breakpoint?

And that's what— and then we We scaled our program to that, and we'll get to the slide where we talk about the price at that point and what we're doing with low-income side of the house too, because that was our biggest factor right there. And we'll touch on that here in a second. But yes, great question.

And basically, the Salt Lake City one said, as long as the price per month were $9 or less, 80% still said they would likely participate. And same thing with Ogden, which is really interesting.

And we do study it a little bit further.

So just to clarify, you're saying that Rocky Mountain Power had this— had a program, they put it on hold?

Basically. So yeah, so Rocky Mountain Power over a number of years has said they want to reach net renewable energy by some goal, and by 2030 they want to be at 60% net renewable. That's what— that's the— on this chart right here, that's the blue. the program would be the green side half. So Rocky Mountain Power said, hey, this is back in 2019, and over the last couple of years they said, we want to be at net renewable, or Rocky Mountain Power overall, 59%, and we're going to do that by procuring renewable energies over the time frame to get to that goal. Well, this past year they said we're going to put a pause on any procuring any renewable sources.

What was their justification for that?

Their justification was funding because of the lawsuits in Oregon and some issues that they had there. They said, hey, we're not sure if we have enough money.

So you're saying they ran out of money because of lawsuits?

Yeah, I think there's 2— I mean, there's several things that they've said. So, as we were doing— I mentioned this is part of Berkshire Hathaway. So it's Pacificor, and then they go roll up into Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and then it's Berkshire Hathaway. And that's Warren Buffett. And at their last investor conference, he basically said, until these wildfire issues are resolved, they're not going to be putting investor money into big power plants. And that's because they were found— there was a big, big multi-billion-dollar judgment against them related to some Oregon wildfires.

So that's the same as PG&E in California, right?

I mean, you know, and Warren Buffett does have kind of a point that And it, you know, I mean, because the climate is changing, right? We've built infrastructure that we thought would operate within certain tolerances of temperature. Now those tolerances are out of whack. We're seeing temperature scenarios that we didn't plan for because we didn't think—

Right.

But I lived in California and PG&E was not getting the investment that they needed. They came to the public and to the government numerous times for rate increases. Never approved those. So they were not able to keep their infrastructure up to date because of the penny-pinching. Yeah, because they wouldn't let them increase rates to increase their infrastructure, to improve their infrastructure.

So just carry it forward. So they stopped their program. So now you guys are starting a program where you're going out trying to acquire what they were talking about acquiring, and then you're trying to build a bridge to them.

Basically, basically, the way I would think about it is, you know, they've got a certain— like, I would say right now it's about 30— they're about 30% renewable. And they were looking at building it up to 59%, and we haven't crunched the numbers yet, but now it's more like, I don't know, let's just say 40%. So as their renew— as their clean energy ambition changes, and it will change, they redo their plan every other year. Then we'll look to fill in the gap to bring it up to net 100% by 2030. So if their ambition goes a little lower, our ambition will go a little higher. And then let's say in 2 years they revive— they go back to their old plan, we'll scale back a little bit and we won't have to acquire as much energy.

But I think— but I think I want to get— I think your one point here is Rocky Mountain Power. We were the agency and the communities was still gonna procure and have the financial means to purchase the renewable sources for our customers. Rocky Mountain Power wasn't gonna do that on their own. They were— they, the blue side of the house, they were gonna procure renewable resources for the entire Rocky Mountain Power customers. We were gonna procure— we're gonna procure resources for our customers. That's why we, we just need a 200 solar farm and a 300 wind farm, because that would generate enough energy for us. And we are still planning on doing that. That's still the plan. And we have— we can touch on some federal grant money that we're looking at so we can backstop that. So that would— that's why the additional funding is there to pay for that renewable sources that we're going to procure. So the nice part about it is, Again, as I said, these are the top-notch. You're also going to want to say, hey, we're going to lower our prices so that we can actually get some solar energy. But yes, we're just the agency and the community. We're still going to be purchasing that renewable power.

Yeah. Are you a state agency? Like, what controls you?

Yep.

Yeah.

Oh, it's back.

I can— I've got a slide on that. There it is. So we are not a state agency. We're an interlocal cooperative with 18 communities that are part of it.

Right. So they— but it was, it was born from an ordinance in the state side.

Exactly. So let's talk about cost. So we estimate that the program will cost between $2 and $7 extra per month on average for for the typical household. So that falls within that $9 range that I mentioned earlier, where Salt Lake City residents were saying, well, yeah, I mean, up to $9, still about 80% said, hey, we're, we're game. It's very similar numbers in Ogden. Now, that indicates to us that an extra $2 to $7 per month is affordable for the vast majority of our residents. However, we understand that is not true for all of our residents. And so, as part of something that the state statute requires called a plan for low-income assistance, we are planning to offer an enhanced bill credit up to $7 per month for qualifying households. And the way this would work is it would just stack right on top of the existing bill assistance that is offered through Rocky Mountain Power. That's called the HELP program, or it's also called Schedule 3. This $7 enhanced bill credit would be paid for by a surcharge on all the other participating customers' bills, but no more than $0.70 per month. So there's, so there's a subsidy there, but it's capped, right? And there may be— so I'm going to talk in a minute about the process here of how people are enrolled, and then there's a opt-out period and a cancellation period. After all that stuff, there may be a termination fee to leave. We've been looking at something that's pretty affordable, again, for most households of $30. But for these customers that are on low-income assistance, that termination fee would be waived. So basically, we're just saying we're doing what we can to try to make this program accessible to households, even if they're on lower incomes.

And we have a whole committee that is designed on the low-income side of the house to making sure that we get the word out to the low-income households on how they can— we can support them on this need. The interesting part, when you— over the last couple years that we were kind of researching who is using the help program and the subsidy, this support, and very small percentage of residents are using the support. Like 3 or 4% of the residents are using the support, but 15% could use the support if they actually would sign up for it. So, and we're trying to target that other percentage. Hey, this is a way to— if you want to be on the clean energy side, here's a way to do it. And here's a way we can support you by increasing that visibility for those low-income families. And that's across all different communities because there's some communities that majority of the population, some of these smaller towns, are all on the low-income side.

Just out of curiosity, is this the path you were going down before Rocky Mountain shut down?

Yes, yeah, we've been going down this path since the beginning.

Yes. So the way that the program works is that every— so once a community decides they're in, and that's pretty far down the road still, but once they decide, then when the program starts, everybody is automatically enrolled with the chance to opt out of the program if they want to. Why is it this way? And I know that some people don't like this.

That's exactly—

it was the—

you're automatically in, you got to opt out. I mean, we had the same with recycling back in the day, and everybody opted in.

And we had a lady die of a heart attack, and her—

she wasn't able to opt out because she was in the hospital. It's a no-go for me on that. Like, you're not going to opt everybody in and force them, and then they have to opt out. It should be other way around.

And we'll go through—

how open are you to it?

Well, this is, this is what we did here was it's over a few months period of time where they can operate.

That's why it died last time. Just, we weren't in favor of that at all.

It's like, yeah, and to say, hey, it's only gonna be this much money.

I mean, I mentioned Utopia, you know, Utopia said, oh, Utopia is great. We're in debt $116 million because it wasn't supposed to be that much money. You know, it's To me, it's, it's got to be an opt-in instead of an opt-out.

We had, we had a long discussion with the, uh, the members at that time, and, and we went the, uh, all opt-in method. And, and I understand your point, and I was using it as such a great deal, everybody's going to opt in because it's going to save. And we also, yeah, we also talked about the whole side of the termination fee, you know, and having, making sure there is waivers if you are to opt out and have those special, special circumstances. I was looking at from the idea that, and I don't want to derail this, is, hey, you have a 401 program. Everyone's opted into the program because we want people to save their money, and it also helps them on their taxes. And if they do that, they don't even see how the benefit of it is. But if they—

if there's a—

you have to opt in, very few people did opt in. And I'm just talking about the hourly wage people that I had working for me. Very few opted in because they had to make that work. But when we automatically did it, a lot of them opted in and they stayed in the program. So that's how we—

That's saving and the other is spending.

But I had— but I had it right.

I had it.

I get your—

I get your example.

Yeah. Yeah.

So anyways, well, and I get— I have to understand, people have strong feelings about this. I will say it's a requirement of the Community Clean Energy Act. So the state law requires it, the program to work this way. And it does reduce the cost in the program, primarily because it allows us to build at scale. So a 200-megawatt solar plant will produce cheaper energy than a 20-megawatt solar plant. So if you're— and it also reduces advertising costs because instead of having to pay to go out and reach that 80%, the 80% of Salt Lake City has already told us, hey, we're interested. And so we're spending our money on energy that's more affordable.

Wow.

Advertising to try to reach individuals directly. And I think, you know, I think about this is that it really treats clean energy and positive climate policies as a public good that, hey, our community has decided we want clean energy, we're in. But unlike things like, you know, garbage collection or whatever, it is optional. So if somebody looks at their bill and they said, what, what in the world is this? I don't want to be paying, you know, $3 extra, then they— we're going to try to make it incredibly easy for them to opt out, just as simple as picking up the phone and calling Rocky Mountain Power or going online. We're talking to Rocky Mountain Power to make it so that they can just log into their account and opt out of the program. And like, like we said, after that, a small termination fee may apply. And so basically, the requirement of the law is everybody has to receive 2 notices from the utility. That's the opt-out period. Then the program starts, and then the following 3 billing cycles, if they look at their bill and they don't want to be in, they can also cancel.

For free.

It's only after that full 5 months that there might be a termination.

Helps.

So I'm going to speed through some of these slides because they're probably not as important as leaving some more time for questions. This is a depiction of a lot of the steps that we've had to go through. The law passed in 2019. And it basically laid out a whole series of steps that we had to meet, and we've been checking the boxes on those steps since then. Um, we are looking to file our solicitation documents with the Public Service Commission soon, within the month, and then file the rest of our program application by the end of the year. If the commission approves it, then we should be able to launch the program next year.

So those Communities that you said already signed up?

Yeah, those are all the original. There was originally 23, and then 18 signed the, uh, agreement. And up until this past, uh, legislative session, our doors would close at that point. After 2020, only the 18 could stay online. The legislative opened this, the, uh, window for other communities to join, and that's why we're here at this point.

But is that—

but so they signed up They're signed up.

They're not— you haven't built anything or done anything. They're just signed up.

They're signed—

they signed up, and you'll see the cost of it. We had to have money to pay for the attorneys and the energy consultants, and they— that's the money that we've raised so far. Raised— we've all put in, and it was all— that funding was all based on size of your city and energy consumption. And you'll see how much it would cost to form based on your 2020 Population.

But this is just putting, putting it all together. You haven't built anything yet?

No, we haven't built anything. And also, uh, the program hasn't started because there is a, a bill that if you want to do the— if you signed up and after the, uh, agreement has been passed through the Public Service Commission, if, uh, at that point you can say, hey, we're not going to join, then you don't have to pay for the, uh, uh, the mailers because you have to also pay for— you send out the mailers to your number.

There's a lot of steps that the legislation required us to go through and to negotiate with Rocky Mountain Power. So they have to agree with how this program works in order for it to move forward. So it's been a pretty complex and technical negotiation.

Rocky Mountain Power is not an easy company to work with from the negotiating standpoint.

So yeah, let me just talk about some If I may, so then would it be Rocky Mountain Power who would charge the customer?

Would it be Rocky Mountain Power?

So even though they put a pause on it, they would still buy this renewable energy from the URC and then charge?

Let me close.

Rocky Mountain Power would sign a power purchase agreement with, say, a solar developer, and the extent that causes an increased cost, The participants have to cover that cost, not anybody else in the system. So that $2 to $7 that we estimated extra, that's to cover the extra cost of that energy and administrative costs.

How locked in is that?

How about over time?

It's not locked in. It's our best estimate. We have to procure these resources through a competitive solicitation. So right now we're using the best information we can, which is from Rocky Mountain Power's planning process. They, they look out and they say, what do we think solar costs? What do we think wind costs? So we're using their information, but the actual cost will be determined once we have bids through the solicitations evaluated.

Public Service Commission sets a tariff.

Yep. And just like our regular bills, you know, though, that rate can be updated at least once per year.

By going through the Public Service Commission?

Yes.

So they're your oversight?

Yes. Oh yeah, we have to, we have to, again, for our application, we actually, we fill out the application, Rocky Mountain Power submits that to the Public Service Commission, and they go through their full process. And that, that takes 6 months or so. And then they can say, yes, we agree with it. They hand it back to the communities and say, here's how much we're going to charge you, and this is, here's all the rules that you guys got to abide by. And then the 18 communities can at that point go, we like it, we don't like it. And then they have an agreement point.

Prior to this last state legislative session, it was the 18 communities were the only ones locked in. The state essentially opened up the possibility for additional communities to consider this.

And, and so then about how many communities have expressed some kind of interest since then?

I would say 5.

From very small Helper to West Jordan, obviously.

And you got on there Utah or Salt Lake County and Salt Lake City?

Yes.

So the county takes in all those cities or—

Unincorporated Salt Lake County.

Just the unincorporated.

Yes, on the county side, it's unincorporated. Summit County, it's unincorporated Summit County, and then Park City. So there's a number of Salt Lake, uh, Salt Lake County municipalities, but the county is just the, uh— and that's— and Salt Lake City is the largest customer just from city size and population-wise.

So can you tell me what the, the bill was that they changed this to?

What's the—

what bill number was that?

SB 214. Senate Bill 214.

It's a very, very— who did it?

Higgins.

Higgins.

Very small bill.

I mean, my, my, my personal opinion is I think we're It's the same thing we dealt with back in '98, and I think it's putting lipstick on a pig and we think it's not a pig, you know. So I don't know, I just, I don't think you're getting the draw. So now they're trying to regurgitate, dress it up a little bit and try to do the same thing. I don't see it, but maybe I'm missing something.

What's your plan on homes that already have solar on their roofs? They're pretty much taking care of their own needs.

How do you—

what are your thoughts on that?

The way the law is written is that the very earliest solar adopters are not eligible to participate in our program. They will not have the option to participate. For the later solar adopters, they can participate.

And I—

the way— and I have solar. The way I would think about it is for the part of my energy that I'm supplying with my own solar, That's great. The part that's coming from the grid, I can match with renewables through our program so they can do both.

I couldn't join because I had solar panels before that, so I had 100% renewable. But anything—

that was 6 years ago.

So if you had solar over probably the last 5 years, you could probably join. If you had solar that's probably 6 years or older, then you get 100% dollar for dollar from Rocky Mountain Power, so you wouldn't be able to join at that point. But there's very few of us.

And let me say too, I mean, we don't need— it's a good point, but we don't need other communities. We really don't. We fully funded our effort. You know, we raised $700,000. The reason we're here is because the more communities that join, the bigger impact we'll have. So, so we've— I mean, just speaking for myself, I would love it for you to consider Joining us.

I will say, there's a slide here. There's a lot of steps to go through. I mean, we've, we've had the 18 communities had a couple of years to go through the low-income plan. There's a thing here that you have to map out your city and your city boundary. Well, that seems like a really easy thing to do. It was not an easy thing to do for the 18 communities, especially if you had some federal lands, you had some state land. It's like, where's our boundary? And we had cities that There was confusion on what— where the city boundary was. So that was not like you just do it easy. The low-income plan took a little time.

So all that—

we're, we're here to help that side of the house, but we're also realizing that, um, there's, there's work to be done in, in a very short period of time.

So you said that you, you raised $700,000. I mean, that's like nothing in terms of what you're trying to do. Where does all the money come from?

cities like Salt Lake City, I think, was— because we were also the largest energy user with the largest population, we were, we were the higher bill.

But I mean, so that's how you raised the $700,000?

Yeah, yeah.

But beyond that, I mean, this is going to be a multi-million dollar deal, right?

Oh, so the grant money for procuring the resources, that part of that was how we used it to do $7, but also we submitted, uh, an application to the feds for $49 million to provide a backstop for the resources because Rocky Mountain Power didn't want to have that liability of having a resource on the grid without a financial backstop to pay for that if this program didn't succeed.

Beyond that, are you just—

are you going out and raising it through bonds or No, no.

So, I mean, I think our vision has been we would raise this initial $700,000 that would pay for all of the program design necessary. That's our law firm. We felt we did hire probably the preeminent energy law firm in the state because they work on this world, and they could help guide us through these negotiations with Rocky Mountain Power. That's our primary expense. We also do have to cover the cost of our state agencies to hire their consultants. So anyway, that's the startup cost. After that initial startup cost and the program launches, our vision is that the program is entirely self-sustaining. We don't have to keep going back to the communities for more money. So we're designing the program to that standard.

But I guess I just don't understand, but you still have to build these 2 big power plants and you need money to do that. You can't do it on a monthly pay-as-you-go basis. How do you put that all together?

It, it, well, it will either be this grant or it will be the bill, monthly $270 per resident.

So you would have financing then, right?

Right. And pay it over time, monthly.

So you get as far as you could with the $49 million grant and then you would pay it over time.

$49 million grant would pay for I think more than just what we need right now.

That would be about 200 megawatts is what we'd scale to.

So you do one and then as you've got—

right, right. Because we don't need to do all of it by 2030.

We don't—

I mean, we don't need to do it all today.

Right.

So, Tom, do you remember it wasn't like $120,000 or $130,000 that they wanted us to—

Oh, I've got that here.

It is. What was it before you, or were you here, Brent? I mean, it was— here's the price.

5, 6 years ago.

Yeah, it was a long time ago.

Here's here's where it's on. You put it right there.

So the $71,000 is more than over 2 years.

I think it was more than that.

I, I, I think it was like in the hundreds, $120,000, but I'm going off memory. But this is, this is just going off the population based on how we calculated everybody else's city.

So what could have been different back in the day?

So I'm sorry, because we had also, we had a couple cities that we called anchor locations that, uh, uh, put in more money. There's, there's 5 agencies that put in more money.

Oh, and this should just be Orange's share of the $700,000?

This is Orange's share. Yeah, this would be Orange's share. Yeah, all based on the population.

The only other cost that the communities all need to pay for is the noticing cost, um, and that's because we thought that communities should pay for their own customers to be noticed. Um, but that cost is only incurred if you go all the way through to the final step and join the program, which is the adoption of the ordinance. So the commission will review our program application, they'll approve it, they'll tell us what the initial rate is, and then we'll all— we'll have 90 days to decide, do we adopt the final ordinance or not? If we don't think it's a good deal, And we won't adopt the ordinance. And so anyway, if a community doesn't adopt the final ordinance, they don't have to pay the notice and costs.

And we were trying to— Rocky Mountain Power, we have to— we could get it over with Rocky Mountain Power. Why can't we do all our noticing by electronic? Because everyone does a lot of bills by electronic. They required us to do a mailer notice and cost.

And that's to every household.

Yeah, yeah, yes, adult household, yes. We were trying to get— hey, can we just do electronic? Because a lot of people get their mail.

Do we have any other questions?

Because we're about—

Yeah, so can I ask just one, just kind of real quickly? So is there anything tied to this that prohibits Rocky Mountain Power from continuing with any of their power plants now, keeping those functional? Because, you know, I mean, we all remember Texas, right? A couple years ago, my niece was there where everything shut down because the cold spell killed the wind, killed solar. They had no power. Yes, pipes broke, everything bad, horrible. So what, are you guys okay with keeping these backup power plants in place, or is that part of this 2030 initiative to go straight 100% solar and wind?

Right. So Back to the end. So we're, we're looking at 100% net renewable for these 18 communities, or these communities, right? So we're going to purchase renewable energy to provide the energy for this, these customers, for this, how much power they're going to use. So that's 100% net. We're basically taking our energy, put it into Rocky Mountain Power's bowl of energy mix, and then they're gonna, they're gonna make sure it's their responsibility make sure everybody's lights are on. So however they do that, they're going to do that. So you don't— when you turn your light switch on, you don't know where that power is actually coming from. It's come— it could be coming from all over the place.

I guess my question is more, is there any type of pressure going to be applied on them to adopt this 100% or to shut down some of their plants?

No, not from us in this case. This is just electric ratings.

Yeah, because the state legislation that enabled our program did not give our program any authority Over the thermal generation plants.

But to Nate's question, it could be market-driven. I mean, if they created enough energy, then Rocky Mountain simply shut them down.

Yeah, because, you know, up until just this past year, Rocky Mountain Power's goal was to be— I'm going to say, use the number 59% net renewable energy by 2030. That was their original goal, and they were going to continue on that path until they said no more resources. So now they've flatlined that, and I don't, I don't know where they— what that line is.

Now my next question, do you have, do you have the ordinance? Can you send— do you have a draft of the ordinance that you anticipate is going to—

you're going to have the final ordinance, final step? Yes, our board adopted a form ordinance. Now it doesn't have all the things filled in because we can't fill them in to have an approved program, but yes, we're happy to send that.

I'd like to see that.

And we have a, we have a kind of a timeline here also.

We'll send it to the And thank you very much for all the time you've given us and great questions and dialogue. Really appreciate it.

Okay, thank you for coming and thank you for sharing all of this. Appreciate it.

Yeah.

Okay, next up we've got Utopia.

Work if I plug in.

Oh, and, and we didn't, we didn't plan this on purpose, but the last time we entered into an agreement like this was Utopia. So here we go.

All right, well, uh, thanks for having me here today. I'm Roger Zimmerman. I'm the executive director in Utopia. Uh, we're an interlocal entity. That's that structure that the state has allowed cities to work together on projects with. And you guys are one of the founding members. That's both good and bad. I'll go into some of the history, good and bad, and then kind of tell you where we're at. Feel free to ask me any questions. But I would say we have mostly good news.

Almost 20 years now.

Yeah, so, so technically more than 20 years. It was created in 2002, um, but really the, the bonding and the pledges and all that happened in 2004. So we're getting— we're there, we're 20 years in. So we have this, this group of original founding member cities, uh, and you're one of them. Uh, there's actually more than that, but we really just count the ones that did move forward to pledge. Uh, at the time it was a sales tax revenue pledge to guarantee the debts. Uh, they went out there and built some projects, and I'll give you a timeline here in just a second. But just to note, here we have this other category of cities that partner with us. We don't have any ownership interests, but there are opportunities for us to grow the system. And what's important to us is it's an opportunity for us to grow the revenues, which are very helpful to us in our ability to pay our debts. So anyways, this timeline is maybe an oversimplification, but these aren't accidental colors. We have red for what we would call Phase 1. These were some pretty challenging years, and green represents what I would consider the successful years, although there were some turnaround years in the middle there where maybe it wasn't quite clear. Uh, the things we're gonna do dramatically better. So in the early years, uh, the conversations were something like, we don't have much of a network built, we have a lot of debt, and the cities are having to pay all of the debt and a major operating deficit just to keep the lights on. Um, now we believe there was demand, you know, there was people wanted better broadband. We still had that problem, but There wasn't a clear path forward. In 2008, really, I think the frustration with the contractors— Utopia at the time was really just a very small group of people overseeing contracts with a company called Dynamic City that became PacketFront. And obviously the project didn't go well, and we can say part of it was maybe their fault. Part of it was, it was bleeding-edge type stuff. Part of it was we had lawsuits, we had legislative obstacles put in our way. There was a long list of things that happened that caused overages in cost, shortfalls in revenue, and it was a disaster for that period of time. So in 2009, they fired the contractors, restructured Utopia, refinanced the debt to kind of give us a little bit of breathing room. And we went and we built some small areas just to show that we could. And at that time, it ended up being Tremonton. We built Tremonton, we got customers, we got revenues, and showed that we could take debt, build a network, and that that project could pay for itself. You know, meanwhile, we had this huge hole to dig out of, but at least the idea that the demand was there and the ability to do this successfully existed, which was under question based on the previous break. So the city said, all right, we know we can do this, you know, we can at least get this thing built, we can— we have a path forward if we issue more debt. Uh, it wasn't as simple as just, okay, let's do the next round. We had some cities, uh, namely it was Perry and, and, and some— I think, uh, Tremonton also was not a member of UIA, but There were some cities that would have actually hurt the credit rating to include them. So a separate interlocal entity called UIA, the Utah Infrastructure, was created with those cities that were in a position to back additional debt to see this thing forward. And Orem is also a member of that, but it's, it's a different board made up of the same city. So your question probably comes up, what is this Utopia and UIA thing, and why do we have 2 board members? You can kind of think of it as Phase 1 and Phase 2. Another way to look at it is one of them is like the people and resources and actual make stuff happen, and the other one is a financing entity. So UIA finances projects and Utopia builds and operates, and that's where all the people and resources exist. But we started doing some pretty significant UIA projects, and it was done incrementally. So, okay, you know, here's another $30 million of debt. That debt was backed not by sales tax revenue, but by energy franchise revenue. So you kind of have 2 categories of pledges that are out there. And UIA was able to build some new neighborhoods across lots of cities incrementally, get customers from those, and get enough money to pay for those. But it was still losing money. So there was a time operationally that you were still making some payments to UIA. And And then UIA did really well and paid that money back to the city. So there's no outstanding money either way with UIA. But we still have a big hole at Utopia. UIA has then continued to do that over and over and done it very successfully. Back in 2009, I don't know the exact number, but we probably— I would guess we had probably maybe 11,000, 12,000 subscribers. Today we have over 65,000 subscribers to give you a scope of how dramatically the system has grown. And I'll show you some charts with that in there. And then just in this timeline, you can see we've— the stacking of city partnerships towards these recent years. We've been building very, very quickly and expanding with these partnerships. The benefit of these partnerships is we don't have any risk with these partnerships. So a city comes and says, we want to partner with Utopia. We're not pledging money on that. Those cities have to come to the table and guarantee there's going to be revenue to cover the debt. And if we don't get enough subscribers and revenues off that system, they would fall back to those cities. But we also have in there our operating revenue that we charge the customers and service providers. So even in a situation where if those were to lose money, we would still be making money. We still have money for every customer. We don't put any money into those projects. Uh, well, fortunately this project's gone really well in addition to our original city projects. So let me just hit a couple of, of, uh, achievements from Utopia. Uh, we're the largest open access network in the country, uh, so that's— and we're actually largest municipal fiber network in the country now. Um, we just surpassed Chattanooga for covering more locations. Um, and we include 23 citywide projects. We also have fiber in over 70 other cities. We have We provide connectivity for the schools. The state of Utah uses us. A lot of businesses will pay us to go get to them.

We don't—

we're not a charity. We don't do that just for the good of it. We do it through our revenues and make money that helps offset our costs, pay off our debts. We offer the fastest speeds in the country to our customers with, I would say, 10-gig residential and 100-gig businesses. We actually have our first 400-gig connection in the queue that's being worked on for the education system. We're basically the backbone for the University of Utah to Internet 2 and to various data centers and things like that. So we have some really, really big connections. Not many homes would need that type of bandwidth. You know, I'd like—

I'd love that too. 10/10/10 is good enough for me.

We're the most competitive system in the country. So it's not like, hey, we had some options before and now you bring in this, this city option and now we have one more option.

Right?

When we have Utopia Fiber, we have all of these providers that compete and sell to you on the system, and there's 18 providers on. So there's no other system or anywhere else in the country where you actually have 18 different companies getting your service. Of course, you have 18 plus you have the non-Utopia options as well. Um, you won't force anybody to take the service. Uh, so we do bring in the most competitive environment. Uh, some people criticize us and say, hey, this is the place of private sector, not government. We're like, this is, this is a pro-private sector thing. Like, we, we have more private sector competition in Orem than anywhere else in the country. And, and all these private sector companies would say, we're only here in your city offering service because of this city infrastructure. So it's, it is really a nice balance to not interfere or, you know, compete with them, but to enable them. We are the number 1. These are all— it's hard to see that those are like number 1s, but we're the number 1 awardee from UETN, or I think they renamed back to UEN again. They changed their name a little bit, for new schools. So we continue to connect more and more schools every year. Again, we don't do it on a charitable basis. We do it because we like the money from it. But it is good to be the best option for them. If we're the best option, we generally are the best price too. So we are both getting revenue from the school system while saving them money, which ultimately helps the taxpayers with the cost of education. We were the number 1 provider of air quality sensors in Utah. I think we're over 200 sensors now. They're pretty low cost if you have a connection, and we have connections everywhere. So we put these low-cost sensors in every cabinet and hut on the outside. So if you go to purpleair.com or the KSL weather system to show air quality data, Our sensors are actually populating that data. Not all of it, like anybody can put one of those sensors in, but we do more of those sensors than anyone else. So we're proud of that. We do a lot of smart city options. I was going to show you the wildfire detection camera we have installed in Orem scanning your bench areas, but there was a miscommunication at some point. And I think your IT folks or somebody thought that, like, hey, what's this stuff? And it got locked up and there's We will talk about that. We got to get a key to that box because it got messed up, but it's there. But we have a bunch of these cameras that actually help us scan for hotspots. They're thermal cameras. We do Wi-Fi publicly. We do just a lot of really cool stuff for the city. We like to enable all these different applications with the connectivity. People like it. So net promoter score is positive 63. That's a metric that Pretty much any industry uses. You go ask the question, how likely are you to recommend this to your friend or colleague? That's sure you've answered that question because a lot of companies use that question. And that is calculated net promoter score. And we have the highest net promoter score in the state. We also have the highest Google reviews score. And you'd be like, what about Google Fiber? Don't they do really well? We're higher than they are. And we love using their own metric against them. So people, people really do like the service. Uh, and just a couple other things. So just a quick couple highlights here. It's a fiber system, but again, we don't provide the service, we provide connectivity. And these different companies all kind of share that system and compete, coexist, but we have technology that isolates them from each other and gives them each basically their own virtual network inside of the utility fiber system. So they don't have to all go in and tear up your roads and cause a mess. We do it once and we can tear it up a little bit, clean it up, and then all these companies can benefit from it. All fiber systems are actually not equal. So some people are like, well, you know, there's these other fiber options, you know, are they better? Is Zootopia better?

Whatever.

Ours is actually built to the very best standard. Every connection is a dedicated connection, guaranteed 24/7. Uh, all of the others, for the most part, except Spanish Fork is like ours. Um, but the other providers like Google and Lumen and, uh, pretty much any of them use what's called PON technology, where it's basically like your old cable system, where if your whole neighborhood's using at the same time, it slows down. A PON system does the same thing. You can still do that with fiber, and that's the way they build them, is your whole neighborhood shares one fiber connection. through splitters, and during peak hours it usually slows down. I mean, they're just like, yeah, that's just the way it is and that's normal. Well, that's not normal for us. Our providers who compete with each other don't think that's normal or good because, you know, you shouldn't get slowed down because of your competitor, right, on the system. So our system is built to much higher standards, faster, more reliable than any other fiber methodology.

So you have Ethernet Connect Direct?

Thank you.

What?

So you have Ethernet?

Yeah, it's Ethernet.

It's all what's considered Carrier Ethernet, so it's a kind of a telecommunications-grade version of Ethernet technology. So there's feature sets and stuff that kind of bring it to that level. It's really like if you were to go to the big guys like Verizon, and not on the wireless side, but like the carrier side for big enterprises and data centers and that sort of stuff. The standards they use for how they design those is what we use for our residential connections. So it's, it's really partly because it's awesome, but the other is there is no technical reason that any provider couldn't use this, right? If Comcast or CenturyLink or somebody like that says that doesn't work for us, it exceeds all of the standards we use. for their carrier services to third parties. And in many cases, Comcast and CenturyLink are using our network. They just don't know it because they're buying it from one of our providers. So they— it does work for them, and we can prove it, and they don't like that.

But we, we would love—

we always invite them to use our system.

We don't— again, we don't compete with them.

We build it and allow anyone to use it. Um, a few technology updates, things, you know, we You mentioned, you know, we've been at this for 20 years, right? Is it still relevant? Is it still, you know, does it need to be replaced or refreshed? Well, we're continually upgrading and refreshing the technology. The fiber is good. We really don't know how long. We know that it's been in for 20 years and it has probably at least another 40 years. And we're using fiber in some of our backbone that we lease or purchase that was put in even earlier than we started, maybe 30, 40 years ago. It just doesn't deteriorate. Glass, it's not like copper. So we have a very long lifespan out of this yet to come, and yet we continue to upgrade the speeds. And so we have now a 2.5 gig option for customers. We have the capability of 5 gig. We haven't launched that commercially. We launched 10 gig actually a long time ago for residential homes. But we did just lower the pricing, so it's much more competitive today. So we continually kind of adjust things like better and better speeds at lower and lower prices. So it's— that's been happening, and we do that regularly. Obviously, technology innovation continues to promote more broadband use. So we see artificial intelligence, we see more advanced virtual reality and augmented reality applications. A lot of things that just keep eating up more and more bandwidth. And what we see, the result of that is people just keep switching more and more to fiber. You know, we hear about satellite and wireless and upgrades to cable and things like that. And despite every enhancement and every new technology that's come, we have seen increasing take rates in every single city consistently for 20 years. So fiber just continues to outpace everything else that's out there. Here's our subscriber growth. So this is a pretty good chart. Like this one, we're up over 65,000 subscribers now. Some of those are not like full subscribers. I mentioned there's partnerships. So we have like Idaho Falls and Bozeman and some things like that. We don't have employees out there. But we manage the technology and NOC and things like that for them when we do get money from each of their customers. So there's a lot of benefit in those partnerships. This is by city. So these kind of stack, you guys are number 2 behind— you're the second one there. That's that brown line. So you're, you're number 2, but you're at risk of getting surpassed by Idaho Falls.

So the one that's growing fastest.

Yeah.

Layton.

I think you're gonna beat Layton. You know, you're larger, but they got a little bit of a head start. There was an option out there for a while for cities to kind of jump ahead.

Yeah, pretty quick. What? Linden built out pretty quickly.

Yeah, but they're just small. Yeah, I mean, they've done great from a take rate perspective, but they just— they're never gonna pass you because they don't have enough homes. Um, here's kind of your build-out timeline. So you remember, you know, there's 10 years before this.

Yeah.

Uh, this is availability.

So, you know, we have 20—

I guess 26,000 locations, like, where you could get service. Um, I think you have more households than that, but some of them are like apartment complexes. But where we would deliver a fiber service is 26,500 1,000. But for 10 years there, we only had about 10,000 of them that could get the service, right? So those are some pretty painful years. Orms paying on the debt, you have 2/3 of the city nearly that can't even get the service. It was pretty dire, right?

Is that just residential? This is everything. Everything. Yeah.

So this is our subscriber rate. So you see, as we built out the system, we saw subscriber rates grow to you'd expect. But what is very good and interesting is that we finished the build and there's not a lot of new development happening in Orem. You know, you're built out for the most part, just a little bit of redevelopment. But we're seeing strong subscriber growth still. So we're still seeing about 40 a month, which on a business day perspective is like 2 a day that we're out there installing. And that's not slowing down. That's been very consistent over the last year. And We've been built out for more than a year. We love seeing that continued growth in the city.

That's the growth that you're seeing just in Orange?

Just in Orange.

Yeah.

Yeah. Across the system, we're growing at about 600 or 700 a month. These are the customers. I tried to find a zoom level that wouldn't reveal too much.

I can see my house.

It's like, yeah, I got service there. Blue dots are businesses and residential. We have reports of take rate and those are skewed low because it's based on how many parcels are there. And there's a lot of parcels that just aren't a household or potential customer. So those reports show us like something like 35%. But when we actually zoom down and look at real homes and real potential customers, we're over— I believe we're over 50%, which means every other option is sharing some percentage of the remaining 50%. Now, I'd love to push that to 60, 70, and higher percent, and I think we will.

them.

But a lot of your city is like, it's for a service that's completely optional and opt-in, you know, people— there were some conversations about that at one point.

Yeah, that's what I like about YouTube. It's an opt-in.

You got a positive from—

oh man.

Back when they were talking the McQuarrie deal, they wanted to opt everyone in.

And I had So, yeah, $300 million, this build warm-up, $300 million, stupid, right?

I mean, when I came back to Utopia, it was one of my great pleasures was to cancel that McCoy deal.

So that was—

we all dodged a bullet there.

We did have one on the council who voted for it, but I won't say who it was.

Well, it was, it was a dire situation at the time, right? Look, they were looking for options.

So you— when did you come in?

Um, 8 and a half years ago, that was the executive director.

So 2015, '16, something like that. The McCrory deal was offered to us in 2014, shortly after.

All right.

So I, I mean, I— when that stuff was getting really ugly, I quit.

I mean, I, I didn't like some of the misleading information had been shared.

Didn't like the deal.

So anyways, they didn't like my opinion.

But I'm glad to be back, and it's— things have gone well. I mean, we've taken, taken it from there and obviously moved forward with some pretty good success. All right, let's talk revenues real quick. So this is the most recent 10 years. So, right, there was 10 years leading up to this. Sorry, those numbers are really small. So 10 years ago, we were less than $1 million a month in recurring revenue combined between Utopia and UIA. And it took us 10 years to get to that point. Here we are 10 years later at $4.25 per month. So our revenues have grown dramatically. The 2 lines here, this is UIA growth on the red line and Utopia's blue, green is the combined. So even Utopia has grown revenue some. A lot of these partnerships where we don't finance them are Utopia partnerships. If we do finance them, they're UIA partnerships.

just kind of categorically where we put these things.

Bountiful's the most recent one, and that one is a Utopia partnership, and that's a big one. So we actually expect Utopia's revenues to grow a little more dramatically than we've shown. But we don't have any of the debt, so we get— we have no expense and revenues. The UIA ones, we have debt expense tied to those, but we also have revenues, so it's Better and worse, depending on how you look at it. This is the UIA revenue with the debt obligations shown here. So this kind of shows you like, yes, we've grown our revenues dramatically, but we've also grown our debt. But the beauty of it is we've grown our revenues much faster than we've grown our debt obligations. So this delta between our revenues and our debt expenses is beautiful. Now that allows us to do some of, you know, cover a lot of our capital expenses and needs.

from cash.

Not all of them, but a major portion. We didn't used to ever do that. We have to come back to the cities. Everything's got to be paid for by backstops and bonds and all this other stuff. We still do some of that, but it is at a slower, a slower pace.

So with this chart, do you think you'll continue to add debt, or you think you're capped out?

Um, you know, it seems like, because like these recent cities like Bountiful, like if they wanted us to issue the debt for, you know, for the projects, and they just provide a backstop, and this would, would, you know, we'd have a debt obligation. But they— it seems like there's an increasing interest in them owning their own city or their own fiber. Um, from our perspective, that comes at a cost to them and a revenue to us. So we charge them more than we would if it was a UTO or UIA-owned project. And they were happy to do that. So it was kind of like, do we benefit on the long term as a UIA-owned project, or do we benefit on the front end more as a— we kind of act as a client?

You know, I guess I'm just trying to understand going forward, as far as the spread of what we get, we— it's been getting better and better and better, right, over the last few years. And that's that spread you talked about up there. So I'm curious, How much potential that has to continue to grow?

Significant.

As you know, if we just— if we stopped doing city partnerships and just continue to add customers in the existing areas, this would slow, but it would still grow. And the debt allocation would just be capped. It wouldn't go up at all. So as long as we can— like, if we continue to do city partnerships where we finance the project, that gives us enormous potential. A more status quo approach still gives us good upside, like we still have a lot of potential growth and customer— potential customers in our existing covered areas. But that could flatten out a little bit. So our current approach is to continue doing city partnerships, which is very good for us. Meanwhile, you know, we've got some of these bonds that are moving more aggressively into getting principal paid down versus just kind of in the interest periods of them. Um, the original Utopia bonds, uh, were refinanced in 2009—

uh, 2008, actually—

uh, for 33 years. Uh, so we got 20 years— no, not less than 20 years, sorry, 16 years. Then in 2040 is the last payment. So we're more than halfway through that. Uh, and at some point you're like, hey, this is really interesting because if we just keep our revenues and pricing and everything the way it is today, there's an enormous amount of money coming in to not—

I mean, to pay you back.

So the way we account for all of the payments you make against Utopia bonds is we account for that as we owe you that money with interest. And so Worst case, 16 years, we aggressively kind of pay that money back to the city or begin paying that. The good news is, and I'll get into that, is we're making really good progress now before that happens. So here's all of the bonds that we have done at both Utopia and UIA that are still in place. Some of them have refinanced. All of the green ones, and these are Really, that one that's yellow on the right should be at the bottom. That represents the original bonds, but we did refinance that in 2022. Not really to— it was a complicated situation. It was that, that was tied to the LIBOR index, and there was all these swaps that had us upside down. But when the interest rates went up, that was generally bad for everybody and our ability to do other projects. But for that specific problem, it was beautiful, and we were able to unravel that. and refinance it. But we didn't increase the pledge and we didn't extend the term. So it was— it's still, from the city's perspective, is the same thing. But we don't have this kind of ticking time bomb issue with the LIBOR index. That was a mess and a lot of people suffered through that. But we're real fortunate that interest rates went up for that one reason. It did, you know, obviously made other bonds cost more. So anyways, where we're at right now with that one, you see in the yellow category, I've described that one as the 20— the 73% of that is being paid for by the cities, and 27% is being paid for by Utopia. Uh, so again, we go back in time, there was— you used to pay all of it, and we've been making good progress every year, and every year we pay a little more. Uh, and now that we're all done with the build of the original cities, we don't have as many bonding needs, right? We used to be bonding as much as we could to get cities built out while trying to not increase your obligations. Well, now we don't have that as a priority. Our number one priority as an organization right now is to decrease your, your financial burden to you totally. So we expect that to change dramatically. The only issue is I've got a little timing with some of these bond payments coming online over the next 2 years. So we expect it to be year 3 when we're able to kind of dramatically increase the payments, because right now I got increased payments on debt because capitalized interest periods did run out.

I've got new payments coming in.

But we're covering all those payments. But on year 3, I don't have new bond payments, and all of that upside will be available to offset debt obligations. Let me show you some of the numbers specific to your debt pledges here. So this is all the cities. So you see, Orem, uh, your bond payments against that original phase project, uh, go up every year. We, we really hate that, but it goes up 2% every year. Uh, and so your payment was $3.485 million for 2024. Now what we've done is we've been able to make a portion of that payment back to the city. Uh, this year, in fact, this check goes out, I think, the end of the week or something is what I was seeing. Jason's working on it.

I'll hold you to that.

You're gonna hold me to that? All right, I'll make sure. So a check for $958,000 is going out to Orem, and that's this year's payment. We've budgeted a little more than that for next year, just over $1 million, um, to keep up with the annual increases. Uh, and then Expect the same thing the following year to go up a little bit. And then, like I said, that's where we really expect things to get interesting, where we hope to not just increase by the 2%, but hopefully another 15 or 20 or something, and then even more the next year. And so, so we want to really attack that debt building, that financial obligation, before we get to that end of the 16 years that's remaining on the term. Yeah, none of that would be possible if it weren't for the growth and the new partnerships that we have. We'd still be paying 100%. But we've found a nice balance with these new cities and growth to kind of— they get to avoid a lot of the risk and a lot of the pains that we went through in the early years. At the same time, we're able to make money off those partnerships. We see other cities kind of going it alone, even recently, and already having to budget for shortfalls like Well, you know, we wish for your success, but we told you so. You're learning that you're doing it the way we did back in 2004.

Um, so, so, so, so just to clarify, 2024 distribution is $958,000, then you're saying next year would be the normal increment? What in dollar terms?

Um, you start to go up by the same amount, so that goes up by about $70,000. It would go up by another $70,000 another next year. And that would keep up. If I go back to the previous slide, you'll see your, your pledge payments go up by about that much each year. So you, your net would be about the same. But the bond payments are going up every year. And, and again, some people, some cities just kind of see that expense line on your budget. You're like, man, we're paying all this money to Utopia that we don't, we don't get that money. I mean, that's a payment towards the bond. The money was spent 20 years ago, maybe 4, maybe 15 years ago. Um, but the things that have been happening over the last 10 years are enabling us to contribute towards that. Most of your city was built without this money. It was built with EIA money and is also paying for itself. Um, this is just a problem that mutually we're attacking and, uh, making good progress. Okay, um, that's all I had to update you on, but happy to answer any questions.

Any other questions? I think we've asked a lot along the way, but anybody have any more questions? Okay, I think to stay on track—

Mayor, could I say something really quick?

Yeah, Joe.

I have the opportunity of working with Roger, and I just want to say thanks to Roger and his team for their great, great work that they're doing as they continue to work on growing this system and, and thereby increasing the revenue and being able to repay that debt. And, you know, I think the future is brighter than it's ever been before with Utopia. So just wanted to, wanted to give Roger a shout out for his good work.

Thank you, Jeff.

We appreciate Jeff and, and Bren serving on the boards.

So yeah, okay, well, thank you, Roger.

Thank you. I appreciate the transparency too.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Okay, next up, item number 3, uh, North Point Solid Waste Special Service District, uh, Neil Schwendeman.

Mayor, Council, I'd like to introduce Neil Schwandeman from North Point Saltway Special Service District. Neil presents an annual, uh, report every year, and this is the time for that to take place. How long have you been with North White Mountains?

Since October of '20, so October of '20, close to 4 years.

Great.

So he's the gentleman, you're the special service district, and does an outstanding job. Have a good close working relationship with them. So turn it over to you. Thank you. Thanks.

I'll get trash.

That's right, I like to talk trash, so hopefully it'd be a little bit quicker than the the other ones, so my talk on trash can stand for itself. But, um, I'd like to come to the cities, just give an update. There's, uh, many of you, if you were here before, you see some repeat stuff, but I'd like to point out some of the history so we know where we've been and where we're going. So in 1976, the Utah County Solid Waste Special Service District was created In '84, Springville, Spanish Fork, Salem, Baker, Plano, Bridge, and Woodland Hills joined— created a district, the South Utah Valley Solid Waste District. In '93, our transfer station was built and the landfill was closed. I believe it was— everybody refers to it as the Orem City Landfill, now located in Lindon. But that was closed and we started hauling our waste by rail to the ECDC landfill in Carbon County. In 2001, the name changed to North Point Solid Waste Special Service District, and in 2006 we switched from rail transport to truck transport. The rail became unreliable, and then the waste was transported to the Wasatch Regional Landfill in Tooele County. In 2012, the district purchased the Cedar Valley Construction and Demolition Landfill out in Fairfield, and in '13 Interlocal agreements were updated consisting of American Fork, Cedar Hills, Highland, Lehi, Lindon, Orem, Pleasant Grove, Saratoga Springs, and Vineyard. So those are currently our 9 member cities. In 2014, North Point joined an interlocal group called NUEARA, the Northern Utah Environmental Resource Agency. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit. In 2016, NUEARA purchased the Bayview landfill down in Alberta. In 2018, we began shipping our waste to that landfill in Bayview, the Bayview landfill in Alberta. And in 2020, I took over as general manager. At that time, Brent was serving as the board chair for North Point, so I got to know him well during that time. He was a great asset to us. So this is a map showing there on the bottom right-hand Corner of the ECDC landfill. You can see how far away it is. North Point Transfer Station right there by the lake, and then Wasatch Regional Landfill up in the upper left-hand corner. You can see how far we were transporting our waste. With joining New Era and purchasing the Bayview landfill, buying into that, we shortened our transport by a great deal, making us more efficient. So what are some of the services and things that we provide as a district? Our municipal solid waste, or we call it MSW, consists of our residential curbside. So all of your waste management trucks that go out to your homes and collect the curbside trash from your residence. Commercial front load. So those are the trucks that pick up the dumpsters just from the front and dump it straight onto the truck. Roll-off trucks, the ones that have 30, 40-yard dumpsters that they drop off, leave until they're full, and come back and pick up. And then small commercial, and we get a lot of public self-hauls, all residents throughout the district that bring in their waste on their own. Our construction demolition site, we— is mostly commercial roll-off, small commercial, and public self-haul. We also have a green waste facility up on top of the old landfill. Most of that's Small commercial public self-haul. We have an agreement with a contractor to come in, chip and grind the green waste, takes it offsite, turns into compost, and then brings some of it back for us to sell. We also up on top of the landfill have clean concrete where— clean concrete meaning it's free of rebar. Our contractor there crushes it into a road base and a drain rock. He actually buys the concrete pile from us, crushes it. If there's some on site that we can sell, then we'll sell it and reimburse him for his portion of it. We also collect household hazardous waste from our residents. Residents are allowed to drop off items such as paints, chemicals, batteries, pesticides, all kinds of stuff. We take that at the transfer station there as well. Some of the recycling that we do, we pull out our tires, metals, Electronics and anything that we can find some value in.

We, we don't—

we're not able to pull out like your plastics and aluminum cans and stuff like that. The metals and stuff are the large items that we can efficiently pull out and still be productive.

So waste management takes care of that for us in our recycling. They take care of the— it's a curbside collection. So that material goes somewhere else.

It doesn't come to our transfer station, just Just the household garbage. So here's the history of our transfer station tons. I haven't figured out exactly why our 2012 number was so high, unless there's just some erroneous data in there. But you can see 2020 was our big year at 174,000, and this is just municipal solid waste. So the MSW— 2020 was a big year because of COVID People that were not at work were cleaning up their homes and coming in. Some of the other entities, garbage entities, actually were closed down to public, and so a lot of them came to us. Last year we did in MSW 170,500 tons. Our construction and demolition waste has continued to grow throughout the years. Last year at the transfer station, we did 130,600 tons. Tons. So it continues to grow with, obviously, with the growth and everything that we see building commercial buildings and homes. So our total transfer station tons have grown over the years, and we eclipsed 300,000 tons last year. So we've moved a lot of material through our transfer station. So this is our 2023 totals. Again, 170,000 of MSW, 130,000 of construction demolition, 12,000 of green waste, and 3,600 of clean concrete. So you can see the pie chart there. The curbside portion of the MSW there in the purple makes up about 35% of our total waste volume coming through the transfer station. This is our residential curbside fee history. So what we charge the city to bring in the residential waste. See, in 2010 we were $29. 2020 we did drop it back. I think that was due to, uh, changing how much we were charging our minimum fee for, uh, residents coming in. And then we slowly went back up from there. So we're currently at $34 a ton for your residential curbside waste. Uh, our tipping fee is $38 a ton. We give a $4 ton break for the cities and the residential waste. So some ORRM numbers of that MSW residential curbside waste from ORRM was 29,370 tons. We had 17,096 customers, so public self-haul, so it could be residents or maybe some small commercial as well. We did 3,022 tons of just Orem City vehicles, probably each of your different public work, most of it.

Yeah.

And we did 2,229 coupon customers. So many of the cities will provide the coupons to their residents, and almost 2,300 took advantage of that. And then direct green waste customers. So OREM also takes care, helps the residents by providing green waste for their customers. And we did almost 9,500 green waste customers in '23. This is the history of OREM's curbside tons. So you see last year was the biggest year, 29,370 tons. This is the green waste customers. So it dipped down in '21 and '22, but came back in '23. And then this is the coupons. One of the things I think you— why it's a declining graph on the coupons is we've gotten much better at eliminating people copying and taking advantage of the coupon program.

So we've—

most of the cities have now put an expiration date on their coupons, uh, and have done something to where people can't make copies of them and, and take advantage of that.

So, Neil, do you think part of it also might reflect the fact that we're really, um, promoting, uh, spring and fall cleanups, and we're pretty aggressive about that? And so people are calling in, perhaps. to the facility. I think so.

Definitely, the easier they can find a service that can take care of them throughout the year, they'll definitely take advantage.

I think those programs, those programs have been very successful and very well received by our community.

I just don't know how we keep producing so much garbage.

It's okay. I like trash. Yeah.

So what is the future of North Point Solid Waste? In '21, we were updating our master plan. That was completed in '22. That scope was to determine the feasibility to expand our current location in Linden versus finding a second transfer station somewhere within the district. And then if it was feasible to expand the current facility, to provide recommendations on that expansion and to determine the condition of the existing facility and recommend improvements, and then to provide estimates on all aspects of that plan. So some of the findings was we needed to install new stormwater infrastructure and paving repairs, replace damaged siding to the transfer station building. If you've been down there, you can see we got great ventilation. The air blows right through it. There's some structural issues in the building. Some of the metal beams are low enough that they can be hit by the loaders if we're not careful. And so there needs to be some repairs on that. Engineering assessment of the concrete tipping floor is needed to figure out how much of a repair we need to do or replace the concrete tipping floor. Our site operational improvements we asked them to look at was to relocate our household hazardous waste facility on site to make it more streamlined and keep the traffic flow going. Through the transfer station better, to relocate our compost bunker and add a push wall in the public building. So we have 2 main buildings, a larger commercial side and then the smaller small commercial and public. That waste is much lighter than the commercial waste, and so adding a push wall, we can push into it, smash the material up before we load it into trucks to improve our efficiency there. So 2 viable options existed to expand our current facility to handle the projected volumes for the next 25 years, and expanding the current site remained the most cost-effective option. Here are some of the pictures. You can see upper left-hand corner is some of the paneling. Unfortunately, without a push wall in there, when you start pushing some of that trash, it's unpredictable and some of it will poke through the side. So putting a push wall in, expanding the building, we'll make sure we have things in place to keep that from happening in the future. Again, the second one is just some of that siding, and the third top right is the concrete floor. It's hard to see with that shadow, but it's all cracking and whatnot. Again, some more of the siding on the bottom left, and then some of our drainage issues on the bottom right. That's over at our construction demolition. Everything seems upon there, so we regrade everything and get it to drain appropriately. But what could our transfer station look like? So the most viable option was to extend that public building. So it's the shorter one there on the left-hand side, and you can see that the tall expansion is expanding that back 30 feet in the length of that building. You can see the one tunnel. We already have a tunnel where trucks go through, get loaded. There's a scale in there. They get weighed, and then they go out. This would provide us another loading option where that, that red truck backing into that new expansion would provide us another loading option and increase our efficiency moving forward. So a little bit about New Era. In '22, we lined a new cell which was approximately 26 acres and should last about 5 years before another cell would need to be lined. We also installed a gas collection system which comprised of 19 wells. And on that gas collection system, we have an agreement with a company called Pine Creek Ventures for an RNG plant. So we'll take that, clean up the methane and the gas, and inject it into the pipeline. We recently acquired an additional 140 acres with the SITLA lease for the Bayview landfill and extended the SITLA lease through December 31st, 2082. And that lease will likely be extended at that time as there will still be capacity in the landfill.

Where's the Bayview landfill?

It's down in Alberta, so southwest Utah Lake.

So that's Trust Labs?

Yeah.

Sitla.

Cool.

So our current estimated life of the landfill is 99+ years, so we have lots of room to continue to put waste in. So summary, the cost of— the estimated cost of our transfer station expansion is in the range of $10 to $15 million. Uh, the district is currently in the process of evaluating timing for that expansion, working on— working with the county to obtain bonding authority. Uh, the county didn't provide the district with any bonding authority but recently passed a resolution to allow us to be able to utilize revenue bonds. And so we're working with our, our board now to update our bylaws so we can move forward in that direction. Bayview's landfill capacity allows us to control our disposal rates for the foreseeable future. Currently, we're paying $10.50 a ton to dispose of the waste at the landfill, which is the lowest rates in the state of Utah. And I'd like to say thank you to Orem City staff on a great relationship. Thank you to Chris for his time and effort spent on the board, and Brent for the time he spent on the board as well. And just thank you for being available and helpful when needed.

We really appreciate it.

I just want to show some slides of what a modern transfer station recycling facility can look like. So here's one in Pomona, California. This one is in Bellevue, Washington. On that picture on the right, on that wall is actual bicycle rims. They repurposed them to use it for decorations.

We'll give them to you.

Yeah.

This is a rendition of the inside of a Berkeley recycling transfer station. The exterior of that one. And this one here is actual one in Spanish Fork, brand new, built by South Utah Valley Solid Waste. It's 108,000 square feet. I'm a little jealous of the building, not of the price tag, but, but of their facility. So some pictures of it. It's It's a really cool facility. They built it for making sure they had enough room for the growth that's happening in southern Utah County. Inside here, they actually have a water cannon that they can control when there's fires. I don't know if, uh, the fire— probably heard about the fire I had on the way here. Every once in a while we do get fires. You need to call the fire departments. Most of the time we can put them out, but—

Yeah, they're down there currently.

Is that the end of the siren I heard?

Yeah, they've been down probably 2 hours down to the Linden facility.

Yeah, yeah, unfortunately we get stuff brought in. One of our biggest problems is lithium-ion batteries. Um, they'll start fires in our facility all the time.

So where do people—

sorry, where do people take their batteries?

Um, to the dump.

Yeah, so take batteries, take What are they supposed to take? Job security.

I just had a friend ask me that.

If they separate them out, bring them to us, then we'll take care of them separately.

So then we have options.

Neil, maybe that's an educational opportunity we could do, essentially saying, hey, look, we can still take your batteries, separate them from your other garbage so that we can dispose of them safely.

I'll have fire prevention get a message out.

Picture of South Utah Valley's new scale house and their awning. Unfortunately, within the first 3 weeks, there was a truck that did hit that. This is their tower that they can control the water cannon and help. They actually have cameras in there, infrared cameras that will detect hotspots, and they'll be able to to hit a spot before it becomes an issue. Unfortunately, in this fire today, we had just run the water truck for dust control and was only half full when the fire started, so we weren't able to knock it down and get control of it before it took off.

Again, thank you.

Any questions?

I'd just like to say I'm just— I'm glad to be alive because we had a Republic vehicle lose control and run right through the boardroom, like the day after we had our board meeting. So the whole board would have been eliminated if we were all in there.

Yeah, I think you were on the side of the table.

I was going to take the brunt of it.

Wow.

So, so yeah, there's, uh, waste is, uh, on the top 10 list of most dangerous jobs. Um, so there's always One, there's an organization called SWANA, the Solid Waste Association of North America, and one of their biggest pushes for this year is to get off that top 10 list. So we try to focus on safety, making sure our employees go home every day.

That's critical.

Any questions?

Thank you. Thank you, Milton.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Appreciate the time. In the future, I want to be earlier in the year so we can you know, anticipate, uh, there's any, any grade changes coming up, we can discuss those. So when you go into budgeting season, you have that right here.

Just—

Okay, well, thank you.

Yeah, thank you, appreciate it.

We're going to move on to item number 4, and we're going to have to pick up the pace just a bit. Uh, so we'll do 4 and then grab some, uh, dinner. And we'll carry on. We have Brandon.

So every year the State Auditor's Office requires me to go through a fraud risk assessment with you as the city council, um, identifying each thing.

And they, in my opinion, arbitrarily assigned a score, uh, to the assessment, as you can see based on the check marks.

And where the total points that have been determined for that. And so this is yet another year, it's exactly the same as last year.

We haven't changed anything in relation to it.

If you have questions, you're more than welcome now, but obviously, you're welcome to contact them and talk to them about any particular element if you have questions about it.

Thank you.

So that's it.

Is that it?

Nice work.

It will be a little longer in this meeting.

Do we have any questions for Brandon on that?

No, thank you.

Okay, thank you. All right, let's, uh, take a quick break. We'll come back at 5:20. We'll have to get through the rest of this, but, uh, would someone like to bust food?

Father in heaven, we're thankful for this day, for this food, for those who provided it. Grateful for the opportunities we've had to review particular presentations thus far. Help us in the remainder of our meetings. We're grateful for the opportunity to serve and blessings upon the food we and all who are in need. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

So we'll come back in 5 minutes. Thanks.

Garbage. That's why. Pork option or chicken option?

There you go.

Hey, you want my cilantro? Yeah, my wife wants it.

Oh, we're gonna have all these plants. We're turning the garden in. You know, I'm like, oh my God, the rosemary, all this stuff.

Girls, it's time to pull it out.

Yeah, we're recording.

Yeah, you are. Yeah, he's always texting.

All right, I think we're ready to start. You should all thank Brandon after this because doing his time the way he did allowed us to eat.

Thanks, Brandon.

Okay, we got item 5, uh, urine school safety.

All right, Neil, do you want to Come join me here. Um, so my name's Scott Speed. I'm captain over the police department. This is Sergeant Neil Skalgaard.

He's over our SROs.

We have 5 SROs in the city. Um, it's been quite the eclectic work session.

I'm impressed.

Good spread of topics. I'm not talking trash, which is probably a little bit unexpected coming from the police department. I'm not trying to sell anything either. I'm not trying to convince anybody that our debt investment was worthwhile either. So I've got an easy job. I was holding my breath there for a minute. I've lived in the city now for 13 years, and I have to tell you, it's a fantastic place to live. I mean, we, my family and all, my family and I love it here. I've got 3 kids, they've all, they're all products.

So we're not in decline.

What's that?

Orem isn't in decline?

Sorry.

I say Orem isn't in decline.

Not at all. No, not at all. Quite the opposite, in my opinion. And again, that's coming from somebody who works in my line of work. So yeah, fantastic. What we wanted to do, and my goal for this presentation, and some of the direction I got from Chief Adams, was just to give everyone a snapshot of how school year has gone. And that involves some 30-foot view aspects of things, some statistics. And interestingly enough, after hearing about, you know, 30,000 tons of garbage and however many millions of dollars we're talking with Utopia. Our numbers are quite small, but I think the important thing for me is to remember we're talking about lives, individual lives impacted. And so that for me makes it very real. But yeah, to start off, I want to get through this quickly so that we have a little bit of time for questions if anybody has any. So, this chart is kind of a linear projection of where we're going to end up, we anticipate, with our numbers. There's an upward trend, and this is looking at, again, just juvenile arrests over the whole city. And you can see we're clearly trending upward. That's not really a surprise. It's not anything that overly alarms us. It's consistent with the growth of the city.

It's greater than our population growth, of course.

Sorry? It's greater than our population growth, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that gives you an idea kind of, of, of the—

Are you sure of that? Did you, did you, is that, did you do those figures with population growth?

No.

Did you compare that?

Because I don't know that that linear projection is based upon the trends from previous years.

Okay.

And so it's not necessarily for that one.

Correct.

Correct. But again, we, I start out with this view so that we can see kind of the tone and tenor of what The community is and what we're dealing with, with the juvenile community and our kids. I guess I don't want to call it a juvenile community because that sounds detached, but we're talking about your kids, your grandkids, my kids. This is kind of what we're looking at. Again, the numbers aren't huge. So then here's, here's what we look at when we break things down by high school specifically. Again, interesting data. Um, when you look at the numbers of— on the chart below there, um, the Orem City High School arrest data. So those are, those are arrests we have per high school, remarkably low numbers. And when we look at those, they represent an incident that branched and was serious enough to where we actually had to make a, a referral to juvenile court. or there was some kind of actual police action taken. So I am pleased when I see those numbers as low as they are. And I think to— when I, when I, when I consider those numbers against the previous chart, I think what we see is kind of the result of having officers present in high schools. There's a— there is just massive amounts of research and data that supports the fact that mere officer presence is major deterrent for crime. And when we look at our high schools, and, and I know that this idea flies in the face of some of the popular ideas that we've heard swirling over the last couple years, I, I, I firmly believe, as does Chief Adams, that our presence is, is probably our first line of defense with, with helping to cure some of these problems. And I think this, this data reflects that. So here's some emerging crime trends just that we're, that we're looking at with our with our kids. We are seeing that our youth are, are both perpetrators and victims in sextortion cases. That is a concern for us. We are seeing an increase, or as, as one of the remedies that we are trying to exploit now is we are trying to focus our, our use of open source material as it relates to our gang investigations. And I know that sounds a little Maybe it sounds shady to some people, but we're talking about accessing—

What does that mean?

Yeah, good question. It means that we're accessing social media platforms that are available to us without the means of intrusive techniques, warrants, anything like that. So basically, I can log into Facebook and someone's profile is open to me. We're leveraging those more than we have been, and we're doing that in the interest of trying to map out the web of gang connections. That's something that we've always used as a technique, but we're trying to focus that and really, really constrict our efforts to kind of capitalize on those opportunities. There's a concern for what AI is going to continue to do, what it has done. I put that in there not because we're seeing massive trends locally, but because nationally that's something that's on our radar that we're monitoring. It's Yeah, it's definitely something that we will have to grapple with in the future. And on a state level, there's going to have to be laws that are crafted specifically to deal with some of the things that people are able to do. And I say people, but I say our kids are able to manufacture, you know, via AI. And a greater presence of gang-type behavior and criminal activity. That is an interesting dynamic at the high school age because it seems to ebb and flow. There are, there are years and trends where, because of a certain group, specifically a group of friends, sometimes we see an increase. And as they graduate and they go and they mature and successfully get out of gangs, a lot of those issues will kind of resolve themselves.

May I ask you a question about that?

Go ahead.

You're talking high school.

Oh, I see elementary. I had an elementary principal talk to me about how she's seeing Gang influence in the elementary schools. Are you going to address that in your—

Um, specifically, it's not anything I'm going to talk specifically about, but it's definitely a concern. Um, what we're seeing, and I love the way Neil has termed it, is these pop-up gangs ideas. And some of that stems from younger age groups just kind of wanting to mimic what they see. And we refer to it as pop-up gangs because we don't have a better description it because literally it is something that pops up like a weed and it kind of runs its course. It has a life. It has a lifetime. These are just some of the notable incidents we have that relate back to high school-aged and junior high-aged participants. And some of these can get concerning. The Midtown 360 incident.

Yeah.

A lot of you probably remember that. That was the shooting we had back in August at Midtown 360. Pretty dramatic incident. I mean, we had a massive exchange of gunfire. Some of the shooters were high school-aged kids.

Some of them were local high school kids.

Very concerning for us. Gang activity at Mountain View. That incident kind of relates back to this idea of pop-up gangs. We saw a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of kids at Mountain View. How do you describe that? I mean, they're just, it's almost like a fad and a trend. They see things, they establish their own gang, they try to get their own following. Sometimes it's success— it's successful. Sometimes, you know, it doesn't really last. Greenwood Elementary is actually in American Fork. That was an interesting case where we had gang involvement from high schools here in Orem. The violence spilled into American Fork, again, directly involved Orem high school-aged kids. The Geneva Park shooting, you had soccer players from Provo, soccer players from Mountain View, They actually happened to be playing futsal, and that's never a good mix. You had some gang affiliations with some of the players. There were guns present. You know, it's a different day and age than it was. Luckily, nobody was hurt there, but that was an investigation that was pretty intense, took a lot of manpower. The Orem Junior High incident there that took place in May, super interesting to me because you had a dynamic of junior high kids that were members of a gang that actually went to Mountain View and, and sought out a victim there, which kind of reverse order there from my day. My day was high schoolers picking on the junior high kids. So that was a bit of a train— uh, change in the trend. And then the Oak Canyon incident, uh, we've had— we had 2 incidences right now of, of, uh, threatened shootings. One was Yeah, so one at Orem Junior High and one at Oak Canyon. We had 2 which were incidents of threats of possible shootings, and I really liked our response. Our response was great. Um, those are some of the— some of the major concerns.

You can't take a threat casually. There might be just a kid blowing off steam.

I'm gonna bring my gun tomorrow.

He might not even have a gun, but you have to take it seriously.

No, thanks, Tom. And in fact Not to go into too much detail and waste too much time, but one of those incidents involved a very— how do I describe it? It was a student that really was relative— he's a relatively benign individual because of some physical conditions and things like that. And yet that, that person scrawled some, some threats on a bathroom stall, uh, pointed out the stall, tried to trump it up. Even though we got to the bottom of it relatively quickly and there was an admission that, yeah, sorry, it was just, just a hoax, We still took it serious. We still had to go through every step we had in the process, and we still had to notify everybody— parents, teachers. So, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a ton of manpower, a lot of effort, but I think that's the best way to handle it. Here are some things we're doing proactively. I am, I am extremely proud of what Neil has done. NASRO is a national agency. It's a National Association of School Resource Officers. They recognize Forum. They recognize Neil for his efforts specifically because of— there's 3 categories they look at, and Forum under Adam's and Neil's direction has excelled in all 3 of the categories that they evaluate us on. And we are one of the first Utah agencies to be recognized by this national agency, which was— I'm very proud of that. We have Detective Hanson, who is the SRO for Timpanogos, took the initiative to try and provide bikes to kids who were struggling to get to school on time. We found there were parents that just struggled to get their kids there, and that created an issue for their education. We, we did what we could to actually provide bikes. And then there's a food pantry, which is kind of modeled off after what we do at Mountain View. Mountain View has one, but Detective Christensen took the initiative to get one going at Canyon View Junior High. These food pantries are fantastic because they're just no questions asked access to food anytime a kid wants something, and they're a great addition. So another thing that we've done, some other outreach programs. I love Chief Adams' direction because it says it's important that we are building bridges to kids in a safe environment when they're—

when they feel safe.

All too often we're interacting with them in the middle of chaos, and it just doesn't do a whole lot of good. for us to try and build a relationship in those, in those dynamics. And so what we've done is we've started to reach out to the schools proactively. We have a reading program. We take turns. We read with kindergartners and we read with 3rd grade classes. We have officers come in. The teachers pick a book that we read. We read that in front of the whole class. We let the class ask questions about what it might— what it's like to be a police officer. Cookies with kids. We estimate that we've been able to reach out to 4,700 students in the city. And again, the reading program, we estimate we've hit about 700 kids. So huge part of what we're trying to do is, if nothing else, establish those relationships early on in the engagement. So we think it pays dividends. That's pretty much all we have. Does anybody have any questions on any of that?

I just had a question, and this is probably something you'd have to get back to us on or send to us, but the numbers you showed at the beginning of Orem, as far as Orem kids and the different high schools and arrest rates and all that. I'm just curious what that looks like compared to other cities in the state and even nationally.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd like to follow up on just how's your youth justice program going, that alternative way to help kids defer and help them?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a fantastic opportunity. It's, it's, uh, yeah, I mean, it really pays dividends. Like, you kids Kids at that age group, the high school age group, are notoriously going to be kind of confrontational, but being able to level that playing field and give people that open opportunity to establish relationships is a big, big deal.

Huge deal for us. Thank you for all you do.

Yeah, and if there's any questions about anything here, Director Naveen, go ahead.

Um, Monday, the School Safety Committee of the legislature held a hearing and they were talking about, uh, panic devices that each teacher is legislatively mandated to carry now. Uh, is that going to be something we're bringing into the Rome schools?

So, well, yeah, no, fantastic question. So that's in reference to House Bill 84. House Bill 84 was an interesting piece of legislation that, that hit us. There's so many caveats to it. I mean, I think we were talking near 5,000 pages in the bill, and it's just— it's fraught with issues, and it's fraught with things that we're all struggling to wrap our heads around. Now, that being said, one thing that we found that we were really pleased with is we were ahead of the game by about 4 years on a lot of their requests. That panic button idea that you're talking about, that's something that falls specifically on the shoulder of the district. Now, I'm grateful for the fact that we have a Fantastic working relationship with Doc Group. They are partners with us. We see eye to eye to them. Structure and management and the philosophies at that higher level don't necessarily jive with everything we do, but here locally, we have a very, very good working relationship with them. And so I anticipate that that will be a talking point that we continue to flesh out as we go forward, because yeah, there's a lot of questions we have about how that's going to look like. How does it function? Um, what is our response protocol to something like that? What if there's a false trigger? There's a lot of questions that we have to have answered with that. Yeah, so excellent. Appreciate everybody's time. Any other questions?

Thank you, Scott.

Appreciate that.

Appreciate it.

All right, item number 6, Tiger Barn interlocal agreements, uh, Proposal 2000 South.

You only have 2 minutes left now. You want to email it to me? Yeah, freeze it. All right, we got one more after this, right? All right, we're here to talk today to the council about this interlocal cooperation agreement with our neighboring city, Provo City. That's called the 2000 South Road Street Project Cooperation Agreement. I'm forming it in. I'd like to focus on the orange area here. 2000 South. There's several projects going in, going on in the southwest area of Orange. There's a Geneva Road widening project, which is in green. That's from this intersection here at University Parkway and Geneva. Down, and then it curves away from the existing Geneva alignment to a new intersection. And then it curls back and ties in around 1800 South. And that's currently around 90% designed and working through right-of-way lines to bid that. And it was in July, a little bit behind schedule on right-of-way, so it's going to be more in the fall. Now I'm going to push that back. So blue here is our Orem Lakeview Parkway project. We've hired JUB Engineers. They're doing the design for that. And we're trying to follow the same timeline as UDOT with 90% to bid out on the same time. We're also working with property owners, 8 owners total for right-of-way. And then the Provo portions If you look there, you can see this blue line right here. That's the boundary line between Farm and Provo. Boundary is actually— if you look at the cross-section of the 2000 South design, the boundary is the north top back of curb between Farm and Provo. So this road is all in Provo. And that extends from Geneva to the new Lights and Winters section. And then this red section is, uh, been, uh, road base has been installed and they're in the process of installing utilities this year. They're hoping to start— they haven't started that yet. So that's also a program. So that's just a background for you on, um, but we're going to focus on 2000 South, the one section, or the section for this, uh, agreement. So legal staff has worked with us to prepare a resolution. We'd like to propose that the City Council approve that resolution, uh, to enter into this agreement with Provo. And, uh, so this page here just shows cross-sections from the Transportation Master Plan of what these roadways, uh, when they're built, the the lane widths and what they look like. This top one is— if you go back, it's the green section from University Parkway down to this new intersection. And then the second one here would be this piece here from the new intersection back to Geneva. And so that section will have 3 lanes. The portion, um, that connects to Lakeview will have 5 lanes, but a wider section. And then this section down here, 2000 South, is orange, indicating that the orange line is 3 lanes, a little bit narrower.

Where'd you—

show me your bike. What are you doing with about bike and walking paths?

So bike lane, how wide are they?

Are they separated, elevated? What'd you guys decide?

For the Lakeview section, we have a bike lane that'll be separated by a buffer and stripe section. Be a separated bike lane in the roadway for 2000, and then in Lakeview Parkway, as well as UDOT.

All—

and then we have this multi-use path that's here on the east side in the UDOT Geneva section.

And then—

How wide is that?

It's 10 feet wide.

What was that?

Uh, sorry, 10 feet wide. And that matches the cross-section of the sidewalk where the town will put in concrete right through that again. And then through our portion of the project, it's going to be— I think we narrowed it a little bit— it's about 12 feet wide. It'll be, uh, on the west side of the road, so it'll transition from the east side to the Okay, thank you. So Provo, um, as we were working with JAB to design the blue area, Lincoln Parkway, we coordinated with Provo on this intersection, which is down here, 2000 South, for timing utilities and So we worked with Provo, their engineering staff, to design. They did all the design and bid out earlier this year, what they call the 2000 South Roadway Utility Project. And the items included in that bid were— let's go through these quickly— a 54-inch and 48-inch shared storm drain line would be shared by our own program, a 12-inch water line, 12-inch Provo line, and then we separated out the area through Geneva Road as being a lot more expensive or impacts to traffic as a bid alternate. So this is kind of hard to see the notes and everything, but the dark blue line, this would just be— this intersection is at Lakeview Parkway, and then this is going south into Provo. The dark blue line here is the 12-inch Provo water line. The purple line is the 54-inch Harris stormwater line. And then that's not— that's pretty hard to see. The light blue line right here is the Forum 12-inch water line. And then this is the other half of that project. And then there's a Geneva Road intersection. Then you can see the laterals right here. And so Provo agreed that they would install the laterals, that Orem wants to— sorry, that Orem will pay for the mainline, Provo will pay for the laterals. So Provo received bids. They bid it out earlier this year. In March 2024. Uh, the bids were a lot higher than expected. That's just been a trend. The low bid was incomplete, non-responsive. So after reviewing the project, the bid schedule with firm staff, and decided we should rebid it again. And so just got bid results last week. The total is $2,074,145. Which actually came in about $220,000 lower than the second lowest bid the first time. So that ended up working out pretty good if you look at it that way. Um, so Provo will work with the contractor to create an agreement to install utilities. It would include Provo utilities and Orem utilities, and That's the reason for this interlocal agreement, is so that we can work with Provo. They're going to be the main point of contact with the contractor, but we'll work closely with them, with our construction engineers and, and public works and engineering staff, just to make sure everything goes smoothly. And Tiger, what's Orem's portion of that, uh, the project cost? But this is actually Ormond's portion, million.

So that's the cost for the Ormond infrastructure, the Ormond storm drain and water lines.

Yeah, so about $400,000 of that is water, and then the rest is storm drain.

So we usually like to try to do work session and a meeting.

You've got it on your consent agenda today because we need to get some impact fees and comfort and spend by the end of the month because we're running out of time to spend them and make Brad in here happy. So, so we apologize for the last minute notice, but trying to get that project out, get that money spent.

So do we have the money already budgeted for this?

Yes. Yeah, he's paying for it. So we appreciate Chris's utilities for setting up. Christian, he's got some cash. So about $90,000 in impact fees that we've would lose if we don't— if we didn't take this today. So it's really, really great. Well, I really appreciate, uh, city staff, Public Works and Engineering burning so quickly to get this thing put together, and then Neil with helping us to get a resolution so quickly from when it was just real intense.

So basically, it's, it's something we need, and it's something you guys recommend, and we have the money Board, and it's on the consent agenda right now.

Okay, it's also on our master plan projects to post from Leyline in the future, and because of the timing of this, it just works out that it fills that role too. Yeah, and then just a final note here is Provo plans to— so we separated the first bid that Provo put out was utilities and the entire roadway Because of how high the prices came in, they decided to split it. So we just did utilities, and then the roadway portion will be just Provo. We'll bid that out next year.

Okay, we have any questions?

Thank you.

Anybody concerned with that being on the consent agenda?

Thank you. Okay, I think we're good.

Thank you, Tiger. All right, we've got item number 7. We also got to go through our agenda with item number 7. Uh, Renee, is this going to give you enough time to—

Absolutely.

We're going to keep it simple. Okay, we're not going to use the computer. We just decided keep it simple since we're kind of last on the agenda. Uh, we just wanted to introduce our program to you. My name is Renee Flitten, and I am the Victim Advocate Supervisor, um, over the Victim Advocate Program here in Orem. I've worked here for 23 years, and, um, I enjoy working here. Um, I'm going to have each advocate introduce themselves I'm Heidi Francis.

I started with Orem City almost 5 years ago as a dispatcher and moved to Provo to dispatch, tried that for a year, and then in October I was able to come back to Orem City and pick it up. It's been good.

My name is Aiza. You guys mostly know me as a handler of Hoku.

I've been working with the city for about 2 and a half years.

my first big girl job after graduating.

Um, Hoku here, she's doing well.

She's about a year on— well, she's a year old on, um, July 11th. Um, super successful with her. She's already been part of a trial with child abuse case sitting on the stand. So, um, we're just excited to where she's going with her job.

So we just wanted to kind of introduce our program. Not a lot of people know who we are. I think we're probably one of the smallest programs maybe that ORM has, but we have a huge impact on the community. And, um, we are civilian workers, non-sworn, housed with the police department. And what we do is we work with victims of crime. Most of the victims that we work with come through the police department, through police reports, incidents that happen. We do have walk-ins from the community with people that might have some problems with resources. We do a lot with housing, financial help. Um, we do safety and shelter, especially with domestic violence. I think a couple months ago, you— I guess it's been more than a couple months— you heard from, um, Lieutenant Johnson and some others from the police department about our domestic violence caseload. Um, just to give you some ideas of some of the crimes that we deal with, We have, um, adult assault. We, we keep those separate from the assault to children. So for July 1st of last year to actually today, we have assisted 886 people in the community of Warren. Mm-hmm. And, um, of those, we've helped 138 of them that are assault victims. 621 of them domestic violence victims. Um, child physical or sexual abuse is 89, and stalking, we have a caseload of about 90 victims.

Yeah.

And so we just kind of wanted to give you an idea about our department and, um, how we can assist in the community. We do a lot of with Um, referring people out to resources. So the shelter, um, housing, um, but we do a lot with the transient bishop. Um, we help people find ways to go on if they have to be separated from family. And so there's a lot of what we can do to help within the Did I hear the number right?

There were 621 domestic violence issues in our city last year?

That's just the ones I know.

That's the ones who we know about.

That's the ones that we know about that we've assisted.

Thank you.

So, um, our numbers continue to rise. In 2020, we— when COVID hit, we had already started to see an increase before COVID We were— we served 703 people in that year of 2021. And it's increased so much that we're up to nearly 1,000.

Yes.

So it's an area of concern for us. We enjoy working with the senior board. The positive about our job is that we meet a lot of good people, and Orem City is a good city. And so it's good to have resources so that we can have the people go through maybe a traumatic experience that they have or don't know where to get the resources. So, um, we just appreciate you taking the time to get to know us and know our program.

Thank you, Renee.

Thank you.

We appreciate that. Appreciate all that you went through.

Do you have any questions for us?

Thank you for helping those in need.

You need to—

is there—

what I, I mean, is the communication there? Do people know that these services are available?

You know what I mean?

It sounds like we're missing some of them because it's reported, non-reported, right? So how do we Some don't want it.

And so, yeah, these are, you know, there's probably a number maybe a little bit bigger than that of actual domestic violence cases, but that's just the number that, that they're— that's so—

well, bless you guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Part of our SOP.

Okay, we're going to, we're going to speed through this so we can try and make it on time.

Uh, we'll go to the general review.

Teresa, so Tom wants you to go next time, so could you move him to report next time?

Excuse me.

Yeah, you guys share some time.

If you can give us the time to make—

so we make that. Okay, so 6 o'clock. We'll have a call to order. Location— who's, uh, your people done? Okay, so I'll let you introduce them.

Okay, that's Douglas Olson and Craig Carter, right? Oh God, you're a loss. It's okay.

All right, we've got item 6. Uh, 6.0 is something we're going to add to the agenda. Bren would like to, uh, tell us about something. Um, item 6.1, the Babcock Scholarship. 6.1, that's Terry. 6.2, the Senior Center, LB Gina Earlson. 6.3, the Warren Pass wrap-up, LB Karina. And then item 7 will be personal appearances. We've got a lot of consent items, so if anybody has a problem with any of these You'll want to be aware, uh, we've got approval of city minutes, approval of the council schedule 2024, 8.3 ordinance, water information, that's what we're talking about. Um, I have 8.4 resolution on interlocal agreement that we just talked about on 2000 State South. 8.5, reappointment to the Transportation Advisory Commission, Kathleen Turner. Jeff recommended her. And she's a reappointment. And then 8.6, the Appointment Planning Commission, uh, Dave Spencer put that out there and everyone agreed, uh, that I heard from. Uh, item number 9 is scheduled items. Got a public hearing to amend fiscal year budgets, would be granted. 9.2 is another public hearing, revised fund transfers. Brandon, I have an actual 3, Brandon. So that's why you were so quiet today.

Make a request.

Public comes and they hear us approve this budget fairly quickly.

They don't know for the last 4 months we've been getting reports twice a month and in this in detail.

Maybe before you welcome Brandon to take this, the stand, you say, hey, we've been studying this.

This isn't something we're approving in 10 minutes.

We've been approving it over 4 months, just so the public's aware, if you would, Mayor.

Right, no, that's a great suggestion. Yeah, because there's a whole lot more that goes into it than—

There is more that we sleep through. I mean, that we listen intently to.

Again, uh, item 9.4, public hearing, ordinance to adopt the fiscal budget. Item 10, it always says that, but what the heck.

Oh, sorry, I should have taken it off there, right?

Okay, um, item 11, City Manager information items, that's Brent. Um, then we'll adjourn to the RDA, uh, and then we'll have RDA consent items, RDA scheduled items, uh, 15, and we'll adjourn to a meeting in the form Budville School District Lighting District. SSLD consent items and SSLD schedule items. And 17.1, a public hearing. Uh, my goodness, we're having a lot of them tonight, and Brandon's here a lot tonight.

Take some water.

And then we've got item 18, adjournment to a meeting of the Municipal Building Authority. Uh, so you guys can have lots of resolutions to adjourn here tonight, it looks like. MBA consent items. And then finally, I have a funny attorney.

So good.

Enjoy this meeting.

Thank you.

Let's see, is this me?

I always forget where I am.

This out.

Test, test, test.

Are you gonna go to, um, today's event that we got?

Thanks for being on that committee. And then that's what I was thinking. This first, and then, um, but I might write that.

But anyway, give it to these guys.

Isn't that fun? That tastes great. He's got coordinates as well.

Is that just for the old guys?

We'd like to welcome everyone here tonight and call this meeting to order. We're just a touch delayed. We had a lot going on in our work meeting. We'll start out with an invocation with Douglas Olausson, and a pledge from Perry Carter. And these are friends of Jen's, and so I'd like to have Jen introduce them.

Thank you to both Doug and Perry for coming. Doug has served as a chaplain in the United States Navy for the last— well, I guess, how many years? 30 years?

28 years.

28 years. Yeah.

And Perry Carter has served as a teacher at BYU, a professor at BYU for a lot of years, and they both have rendered Just tremendous community service to our city, and we're really grateful for both of them.

Thank you.

Our Eternal Father in heaven, we come before thee with a great—

with a grateful heart for the liberties and freedoms we enjoy in this great country, in this great state, and in this great city.

We pray thee, Father, that we will do thy will.

And whatever we do, we pray that we will do our best for the children, for their education, for their growth. We pray for Thy Spirit in general to guide us with common sense and with the Spirit, that our city will grow and that we will be blessed for living here. We do love Thee and we praise Thee, Heavenly Father. We're grateful for our Savior, Jesus Christ. We offer this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Thank you, Doug. Now we'll have Perry Carter with the pledge. Please rise.

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

Thank you, Perry. We'll move to item number 6. This is the mayor's report and items referred by the council. We'll start out first with item 6.0. This is a report from Bren, our city manager.

Yes, thank you for letting me report on this item here at the beginning of the meeting. I thought it was noteworthy enough to share with you last night at the end of the business meeting. Business Day, we received a report from the Government Finance Officers Association, and they indicated that the city was awarded the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for, uh, to the city for its annual comprehensive financial report for the fiscal year that ended June 30th, 2023. And this report has been judged by an impartial panel to meet the high standards of the program, which includes demonstrating a constructive spirit of full disclosure, to clearly communicate its financial story and motivate potential users and user groups to read the report. This Certificate of Achievement is the highest form of recognition in the area of governmental accounting and financial reporting, and its attainment represents a significant accomplishment by a government and its management. And we have obviously a lot of reports from Brandon Nelson, our finance director, today. And, and one of your areas of emphasis to us is, is transparency and, and communicating in, in very clear ways to the public. And so, uh, that's why I thought sharing, uh, this achievement was noteworthy to you and, and to the public. So, uh, please continue to, uh, join with me in thanking our finance department for their great work in that regard.

Thank you, Bren. And as you mentioned, we've got a lot on finance tonight, so this is a very timely award to receive this right in front of this. So that's, that's great. Uh, next up we've got item 6.1. This is the Babo Ambassador Scholarships, and Carrie, Carrie Rugg and Amy Peterson are going to present that.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Uh, just to give you a little bit of history behind these Babo Ambassador Scholarships, in 2021 the city began the Women in Leadership Scholarship, and since that time, with your support of the, of the council, the city awarded 22 employees during that time. And of those 22 employees, 9 of them promoted in the organization due to their ability to go to school. So we know that it's a very successful program, so this year we wanted to expand it, and instead of just offering it to women in the organization, we expanded it to all employees. So we are now calling it the Babbel Scholarship Ambassador Program, and I'm excited to announce that we will have 8 new awardees here tonight. for the 2024-2025 Ambassador Program. So I'm going to introduce them each individually quickly. They will come up and then we'll, we'll get a group photo with you. So the first one, Mackenzie Phelps, uh, MacArthur. And come up when I read your name. Mackenzie works in the finance department as a customer service agent in 311. She plans to use her scholarship to earn her associate's degree and is interested in studying public relations. So Pete's not here.

Look out, Pete.

Okay, next one is Matt Kammerer. Matt works in the library department and is an associate librarian and will use this scholarship to work on his master's in library science.

Jet Buxton.

Jed is a GIS analyst in the Public Works Department. He will use the scholarship to work towards a bachelor's degree in GIS. Jeremy Jameson, he's in the hallway. He's not— he went on a cruise, so he's getting over his cold, his cruise cold. Jeremy is a lieutenant in the Police Department, and he will use this scholarship to continue progress towards bachelor's degree. David Manzo. David works in the Management Services Department as an HR generalist. He will use his scholarship towards his bachelor's in HR management. Next is Brandon Stevens. Brandon works in the Library Department as an associate librarian and will use the scholarship towards his master's in library science. Annalise Langs, and I think you should bring your baby up.

I do.

She's the epitome of an awesome working mom here. Annalise works in the police department as a senior police officer, and she is using this scholarship towards her master's in social work. And last but not And last but not least is Kevin Kreiman. Kevin works as a facilities maintenance technician in the Development Services Department, and he will use his scholarship towards facility management courses. So let's just give everybody a big round of applause, and then if you don't mind, we'd like a picture with everybody.

All right, 1, 2, 3.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thanks. Okay, uh, just before I go on, I just going to mention that Jeff Lamson, uh, one of our city councilmen, is online and will be participating in the voting. Um, he just was a little under the weather tonight. So we'll go to item 6.2, our senior sitter. And Gina, if you'd like to tell us about that.

Mayor, council, And distinguished guests. You can see the row right there wearing their cool shirts. Like, where are all the people? I can tell you where the cool kids are. They are at Orem Senior Friendship Center. And I am here to just let you know, number one, we are so grateful for your support from the council. We know we are loved, we are seen, we appreciate all that you do For us. For those of you who don't know, who haven't been to visit us yet, and I know Jen has been there for other reasons years ago, but we are the largest, most active senior center in Utah, and I would guess probably in the Mountain West. We just crested 4,000 members. Fortunately, they don't come all at once, but we do need some more parking. Just put that on your list. Um, but I've created, um, just a little 3 and a half minute video of kind of some highlights of the last 12 months that I wanted to share with you. So I was going to bring you some popcorn and I thought, hmm, that's probably going to be messy. So, um, pretend that you have popcorn and enjoy. There's sound.

Nothing.

Those new stripes are so dang amazing in our building. They are so inviting. You walk in and I've had so many compliments from people. Like, I had someone from Senator Lee's office there today, and she had been here, um, earlier in the year, and she said, when did you have the stripes painted? Because wow, they're cool. So she even noticed them, but it just feels So welcoming. It just pulls you throughout the building to see all the wonderful things. We're preparing to have flooring done. Thank you, Bren, for making that happen for us. We're very thankful. We've actually created a little bit of design to complement the stripes within the flooring, and I think it's really gonna just, just pop. And if you would like me to design your new building, just get with me. It's on my resume now. Anyways, I'm just really thankful we have a great commission, we have great liaisons, and again, just the support. Thank you so much. Do you have any questions for me?

I just think we should have that drum ensemble— drum dance at our grand opening for our new building.

If you would like us to recreate that, we fringed everyone out. I, of course, was Tina Turner. If you want my autograph, I'll be in the hall. But it was so much fun. That's how we introduced it to them. We told them it was a super special top-secret performance. They didn't want to miss it. And so we got everyone there and the staff and some of our great volunteers. We practiced quite a bit before we did it, and then we presented it to everyone. They had so much fun with it. And we said, do you think this would be a lot of fun? They're like, yeah. We said, you can sign up for a Oh, I want to sign up for a class now. They headed right over to the office to sign up for a class. And you saw the pool noodles. If somebody doesn't want to come up and work, do the drumsticks, or their hands can't hold onto the drumsticks, it's more adaptive for them to hold onto those pool noodles. So we have probably 30 sets of those. So anyone who wants to even just sit at their table, we do it right before lunch, in the dining hall. So, I mean, you hear the music and they just— everyone's moving whether they like it or not. So yeah, any other questions?

Yeah, Gina, I, uh, I have a question. I, I think that we are privileged to have you in Orem and at the Orem Senior Center. So I think everybody in the audience there just loves dealing with you. And I think you can give her a round of applause.

I warned the officer we were going to raise the roof. Tonight and just thought I'd put him on notice.

I mean, to have Orem, uh, have the best, you know, senior center in— we do basically in the state— is awesome. And it's all under your leadership, so we appreciate you.

Thank you so much. I love my job.

I just want to add thank you for showing us that video. It was really fun to see what you've been up to, and thank you for coming.

Thanks.

Yes, thank you, Gina. And, uh, like everyone says, thanks for Making that senior center amazing. You do an amazing job. Thank you.

We don't want to leave you alone, but we're probably gonna go.

Hey, we're gonna go through the budget. You might really enjoy it. All right, next up we'll have our Orem Fest wrap-up from Karina. And it says Pete, but I'm guessing— and Bryce is going to come up. I'm guessing Pete's passed out, right, from Orem Fest after no sleep for like a week?

Mayor, council, thank you for the opportunity to, uh, come and, uh, present on Orem Fest today. Uh, we just wanted to take a minute and talk about the event. Most of y'all were able to join us for significant portions of the event, significant portions of planning the event, celebrating it on social media. And all in all, we just wanted to come and talk a little bit about what the event looked like from, uh, from the event organizer standpoint, uh, share some thanks to a number of our residents, our commission members, our businesses, uh, y'all, everyone that made it a possibility and made it such a successful event, and talk about what we can expect moving forward. So I'm going to turn over to Melanie to get us started.

Awesome. We were able to take several photos, several videos, and so we wanted to share one of those with you guys today to get a little bit of a feel of what it was like to be at ORM Fest this year. Awesome. Well, we wanted to first start by giving a little bit of a feel-good story that came out of Orem Fest this year, and it actually happened with the, um, Orem's Got Talent event. If you were able to go and attend and see that, we— if you remember, one of the contestants, his name was Aaron, and Aaron is somebody who is using music to turn his life around. He is currently struggling with some mental health, and so he knew that he wanted to use Orem's Got Talent as a vessel to propel his mental, mental health forward in a positive manner. And he knew that the positivity that would come from that would really be beneficial to him, but as well, it would push him out of his comfort zone, which is really what he was striving to do. And so, Aaron, if you remember, was actually able to win 2nd place. This was his 1st year competing. He was one of our vocalists that competed. Aaron just is such a great example of why it is so important to have these positive community events that bring people together to motivate them for their different reasons, whether that's like in Aaron's case to improve his mental health, to cheer on some of the younger kids in the community who are getting up there and being so brave and sharing their talents with us. And so we were so grateful that we were able to have Aaron perform and experience what it really means to have a positive community. community event come together. Last year, I mean, sorry, last week with Karina and the communications team, we were able to send out a survey to our residents to see what can we do to improve, but also what was the success of this year that we could celebrate. And so I have a few examples for you that I wanted to read that came out of the survey that we just got back. The first example says, I love everything about Orem Fest. I even have family that comes from out of town to attend. The Orem Fest Orchard Jam with the Kids Entrepreneurship Market was my favorite event this year. And lastly, we have loved that Bike Orem offered a bike valet service at the carnival this year. It was so nice to just be able to ride my bike to the park, drop it off, and not have to worry about parking. And so we were so happy to hear that there were so many different areas that received such positive feedback, so that we know that we can not only continue to improve it, but to continue to implement these things that resonate with our residents. We did receive some other feedback that we are working to improve on for next year, and really a lot of this feedback came surrounding the carnival and the parade. And so part of that was, one of the examples was the carnival is so expensive for that time of— for that, I believe it's meant to say that type of rides. And then also couldn't find parking. And so these are just a few examples that, you know, we try to accommodate as many residents as we can in each event and each area that's happening each day. And so as we continue to work as an events team and as a communications team, we're hoping to help these residents so that they can have an even more positive experience at Orem Fest next year.

Okay.

Oh my goodness, Orem Fest. It was a great week. It was such a great week, and I'm so grateful that I get to be a part of it and be able to like Melanie said, you know, we added a lot of new things to OremFest this year and we got a lot of positive feedback. And then we got some feedback that we're working towards to improve for the following years because that's how we do events. You know, you can't always make it perfect, but you can always improve from there. But it takes an entire city to run OremFest. And, you know, there's constant communication, constant collaboration and teamwork. And I wanted to share Some of my favorite collaborations that I had, because I wish more people got to be in my position, because I have a really unique opportunity to work with so many different departments within the city. And so, you know, you go from our public safety, fire and police, communications team, rec and library, public works, legal, management service. There's so many departments, and I get to see the little things that make such an impact for OM Fest. For example, I worked with Lieutenant Ben on— we added extra cameras that went into the park for security and safety. And, you know, a carnival that big, you're bound to have a lost child here and there. And so being able to have those extra cameras, we were able to locate those families, those friends a lot quicker and put them back together. Our communications team, a big effort on putting, being creative with the content that they created and then pushing that, pushing that out and making sure people knew and were aware of what was going on. Trevor Bell was a really big help. I can't even tell you how many agreements and contracts I sent his way to go through the approval process to make sure that we're doing everything legally. And our liability and everything like that. And then lastly, a big shout out to Jason Adamson. He usually avoids OremFest, but I think I convinced him to stay around every single year. And, you know, he looks out for not only the participants, but he looks out for staff as well. And so we're, you know, the list just can go on. And then a big shout out to our council and exec staff. I think you guys play a really crucial role in Orem Fest. I mean, you guys helped us judge in the car show, you passed out dilly bars, and you cheered on our stage performance. And so, you know, that unwavering support and presence at these events really does make a big difference. And so we're grateful for you guys' assistance and for being there. And then additionally, just You know, our committee members are amazing.

They—

a huge gratitude because they dedicate their time, their valuable time, to coordinate and help provide input to make ORM Fest the way it is. So we have a lot of photos, a lot of videos. So I'm just going to go through these quickly so you can kind of feel like you were back in ORM Fest. And then I'll be going over some of the successes of the new additions that we had to OremFest. So we— a new addition that we had to the OremFest Orchard Stand was that Children's Entrepreneur Market. We had over 100 booths with the idea of even next year having expanding it and making it even bigger. Our Sports Fest and then OremFest Fit were 2 brand new events that were very, very popular. OremFest, we had a Beat Bus. 10 instructors, and then 60+ participants. Our HI-FIT regular class that happens on Thursday is usually a 20 to 30 participant. And so to have— take it outside and have 60+ there was really, really awesome and really a lot of fun. And then Sports Fest, we have 7— cornhole, we had 17 teams, pickleball, we had 19 teams, kickball, we had 17 family teams, and then donuts. We had 500 people participate in the donut eating area of Sports Fest, which we were really excited about. And then just Orem's Got Talent. It was a great year. We had— we moved the baby contest over to the Hillcrest building, and that was a huge success. I think it created a bigger layout, and then we were able to also have character interactors and then our Orem Express there as well. And then here's just some photos from the hot dog and pie eating contest, which is a popular one, and then the carnival as well. And then for the Bike Orem, we actually got an email from the committee and they told us that we were able to cater to 120 people who rode their bikes. to the park, which I thought was a pretty cool number to— and I only hope that we can increase that for the following years. So those are the kind of the new events that we had for OremFest. And just again, really grateful that you guys were able to be a part of it and then to have the community come out and celebrate.

As we look at the totality of OremFest, it represents almost 20 unique events as part of one community celebration, and we like that. We like the idea of an event for every resident. Not everyone is going to want to participate in the same event, and so to be able to bring the community together in a number of different places is really fun for us. We had 25 business sponsors, uh, that resulted in, uh, over $80,000 of cash donations, uh, in addition to a number of in-kind donations to help offset the cost of a community festival like this. We had over 20,000 residents at the parade 3,500 at the car show, and tens of thousands more spread out across the carnival, our Rotary pancake breakfast, the baby contest, each of these different areas to bring the community together and fun in different ways. We consumed 3,500 hot dogs at the car show, but perhaps the most important hot dogs were the 13 that Chris Moreno put down in less than 10 minutes at the hot dog eating contest.

Oh yeah.

As we look forward to 2025, Um, which planning started about a week ago on that. Um, we, we were able to use those hundreds of surveys that we had back from our residents, dozens of surveys that went out to our commission members, to our staff, to get an idea of what it looked like behind the scenes, to what, uh, really how our residents prioritize the week. We do a lot of things, and not each of them are equally as important or impactful. And so we want to sort of evaluate that and say, you know, we have finite time and finite resources. How can we deliver the best Orem Fest experience. We'll continue to build on our robust year-round event schedule that we're building here in Orem now. And so you consider the Taste of Orem event that we'll have at the beginning of the fall, the Touch a Truck event that we'll do later in October, the Lights On in December. You know, we, we hope to leverage the experience and the input from our commission, from y'all as council, from our residents to make each of these a better event. We get chance to test some changes. You know, with the rich history and tradition of Orem Fest, we want to be a slow-moving change on anything that we might introduce or change or take away. But we have other events that are new, and we might be able to make some of those changes or test them out. Even I think of Bike Orem and the valet parking. You know, it's like that's an easy one that we can test at a number of different things, the location or the way we do it to make something like that better. One of the other great changes, uh, you know, we, we mentioned, uh, parking and we mentioned lines and we mentioned congestion. You know, those are things that a staff team can spend a lot of time thinking about. That energy towards some of the, the theming and the actual resident experience, uh, we really benefit, uh, from passionate committee members that come in and get involved with us. But I think some of those day-to-day logistics, you know, we need some time to work work on those and they really can. If we can remove those things from the thought process of a resident who did or didn't enjoy part of Orem Fest, then the emphasis will be on our, you know, our parade, our grand marshal, or it'll be on the actual activity that we're there to do. And so our hope is to find creative ways around parking and parades and carnivals and some of the really challenging logistics so that people are thinking about, again, hot dogs and picnics and Parks and Orem's Got Talent. So we'll be working with our commission, we'll be working with y'all as council to test some of these changes and make sure that we're able to continue to mitigate the concerns and deliver on a really wonderful Orem Fest. But again, thank you to y'all. Thank you to our many friends and our, you know, our Orem royalty, to the many organizations, the nonprofit organizations, the volunteers that made this happen.

We—

no way that we could do a comprehensive Massive list of everyone that was involved to make it a success. But we're grateful to, A, have it in the rearview mirror for now, and we're grateful that, uh, it was such a wonderful event. And thank you for the support that we're able to continue this wonderful tradition. Any questions for us today?

Just well done. That was an amazing event to participate in and watch part of the planning and participate in the way of just support. And so all those who participated, just make sure that they're Extended that gratitude from the entire community for that tremendous effort that we saw all of you all week long, all day, all night. That was a busy time for all of you.

Thank you.

And I just want to add, I, I love that you guys are doing surveys post-event and that you're not shying away from the hard stuff either, that you're sharing that with us as well. So well done, good job, keep going.

Thank you.

So, Bryce, did you, did you say how many people you think were at the parade?

Uh, our estimate was 20,000.

I was gonna say easy, because it was, it was almost double. I mean, it was huge.

It was bigger than normal.

It was massive.

It—

and, uh, we, yeah, the— we don't have a lot of the, uh, technology to track some of those things, uh, but I think conservative numbers put us at 20,000.

I mean, just coming around 8th East onto Center Street, that was, you know, probably 10, 15 deep. It was unbelievable. So excellent job. Kudos to you.

And I was just gonna say, I told Bren this earlier, but so when we were done with the parade, because I know there were questions about the parade and are we doing this as good as we can and all the rest. So once we, we left the parade and now we're over in Smith's unloading our stuff, this lady came up to me and she said she— I didn't know her, but she said she was from Modern Display. And she said that as with her job and her company, they're involved in all kinds of parades throughout the state. That's one of their big things they do. And she said, I just want to tell you that this parade was the most well-run parade we've been involved in ever. So anyway, very good job.

Which is good because we experience a lot of stress. And we do genuinely have spaces to improve. It's nice to know that sometimes our internal chaos and stress is not translating to commotion for our residents. They're there with their families. They are there for a wonderful Saturday evening. They're there for the right things, and that's what they come away with, not what we come away with.

Yeah, no, it was an incredible event. It was— there's so many moving pieces, and I know behind the scenes, because I talked to a lot of you, there was just so much going on, but you guys pulled it off great. and, uh, had another very successful Forum Fest. So it was amazing.

You guys are the swan on the top of the water with the feet going crazy underneath. Well done, well done.

I'm glad you thought we were on top of the water.

That's good.

Okay, thank you, thank you.

All right, last on the mayor's items. Uh, Chris Shirkey was going to come up and pay some respects to, uh, Stephen Russell Brown.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Um, so in light of the last 2, um, presentations on like celebrations and so forth, this one's going to go a little bit differently. However, the last line of this obituary says, and a celebration of life and friendship in honor of Steve Russell Brown will be held tonight from 5 to 9 o'clock at Canyon Glen Park. So Steve Brown passed away 2 weeks ago at age 66. He was the chairman of our Metropolitan Water District of Orem, and his father was Russ Brown, who passed away not long ago. He had a daughter who's Cassidy, who passed away about 2 or 3 years ago, and his mother passed away about 5 years ago. And so their family has experienced some extreme loss in the last 5 years. Steve Brown will be sorely missed. It's with heavy heart that I come before you to, to make that announcement. I know that you, you probably are all aware of that. I just wanted to share a few thoughts. Steve Brown was born in 1958 in Provo, Utah, and he went to Orem High School. Some of you may have played basketball with him or knew that he played basketball a little bit. He had— some of his passions were animals, dogs, canyoneering, hiking, biking. He was a civil engineer. The more I read his obituary, the more I thought, I have a lot in common with Steve Brown. Little did I know.

He was very quiet.

He didn't share things freely and openly very much. But he was— I knew that was very intelligent, very capable, and a very wise, uh, person and leader. Um, he was married for 35 years. He served in our community, uh, for, for a good portion of his life on the Metropolitan Water District of Orem. He served for almost, uh, 11 years or 12 years. So, um, Steve and I were appointed about the same time, and we've worked closely over that, uh, those 12 years. And so it's been an honor and a privilege to really get to know him and to get to know how he would lead quietly, yet very wisely and compassionately in his own way. I also learned that he had a dry sense of humor and he had a love and appreciation for music, much like I do as well. I did not know a little bit about his profession, though. He didn't speak much of it. He was a geothermal energy executive. He was a an engineer, and he oftentimes, we would try to get in touch with him, he'd be out of the country, he wouldn't respond and so forth. He served in many places like in Kenya, Egypt, China, Iraq, and Israel, and throughout the world. His most recent passion from a career perspective, I would say, was developing geothermal energy solutions in the western United States, including Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. He honored his father's legacy, and he had a great family and great parents. And it's a great loss that we have suffered, but we look forward to working with a new board member. We're gonna bring a new name before, not before long, to you.

Thank you.

It's going to be hard to fill his shoes, of course. Um, but, uh, this— so yesterday we had a board meeting and I was the vice chair, so I was asked to lead the meeting, and all of our votes were 6-0 in favor of everything that was approved, including our, our final budget. Just to let you know, I'd like to say the votes were 7-0. One of them was a virtual vote, much like maybe Jeff tonight. So, um, just wanted to share that with you and let you know that, um, he is gone, but he'll be sorely missed, and, uh, we're looking for a, uh, replacement for his vacancy.

So thank you.

Thank you, Chris. We'll move on to item number 7, personal appearances, and tonight we only have one personal appearance on the agenda. And that's Holly Sweden, if you'd like to come up.

First of all, just want to comment, uh, Steve Brown is a neighbor and friend for many years. Um, we'll be heading on up to that celebration of life soon. Um, shout out to Aurum Fest. We had a wonderful entry in the parade, and, uh, just what a wonderful week and events. So my name is Holly Sweetin. I live here in Orem City, have for the past few decades. You may know my husband Rod Sweetin, who he and I have served in this community for many decades. He runs the Orem Youth Baseball League and has for several years. It is one of the premier programs of Utah County. I want you to know they have nearly average, I don't know, 1,400 kids signed up and teams that they, they run in and out. And it's just, it's wonderful to be able to be part of the community like that. Well, I'm running for House District 58 and hope to be your representative soon. I work for Congressman Burgess Owens and have for over 4 years. I work in Salt Lake, Utah, Juab and Sanpete Counties on all of the local issues that really matter. And so I have the privilege of working on many issues here in Utah County, some of which have to do with small business and school districts and Utah Lake and roads and infrastructure. Many of the things that we care about here in Orem. Although I don't serve because this is in Orem, as this is CD 3 and not CD 4, we do share Utah County. And so I have— I work with many, many mayors, the Utah County Commissioners, and the legislators up at the state. And so I am in the trenches right now doing the work. I don't know if you voted already or not, but I know this: if you didn't vote for me and I win, you will not be disappointed. I will advocate for this city. I will collaborate with you. I will stay in touch, and you with— you can with me as well. And I hope that each of us can work together to make this community even better than it is. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Holly. Okay, we're moving on to item number 8, and these are the consent items. There's a few of them tonight. We've got item 8.1, which is approval of the meeting minutes. Item 8.2, approval of the updated City Council schedule for 2024. Item 8.3, an ordinance for water reclamation, pretreatment, and local limits code updates. Item 8.4, a resolution for the interlocal agreement for— between Provo and Orem on 2000 South. Item 8.5, a reappointment to the Transportation Advisory Commission of Kathleen Turner. And item 8.6, An appointment to the Planning Commission for Rod Erickson. Is Rod here?

Yeah.

Okay, Rod, if you'd like to just stand up and wave so we can— people can see who you are. Thank you, Rod.

Mr. Mayor, I approve— I move for the approval of the consent items.

Second.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the consent items pass. Thank you.

So, so, Mayor, I'd like to make a comment on, on Rod Erickson. It was, uh, I didn't know him at all, and I went through all the resumes, and, uh, he was awesome. And I think he brings another added experience, another level with his military service and, and what he's done in the community. So appreciate your opportunity, your willingness to serve, and we look forward to working with you on the Planning Commission. So thanks, Rod.

That route's amazing.

Okay, we'll, we'll move on to item 9.1. Uh, okay, so we're gonna have a public hearing. Do you need to talk before this, Brandon, or— okay, so I'm gonna turn to you, you give it back to us, and we'll do the public hearing. But this, uh, first one is a public hearing, an ordinance to amend the fiscal year 2023-24 budget.

Well, if we can't get my presentations up, this may go really quick.

Yes, thank you, Tom. We need a moment of silence before we do the budget.

Everybody take a big sigh. Gotta hear a lot of numbers. Don't get to be as exciting as REC. What's up with that? Although with, you know, all the new AI stuff coming out, I went to a conference and they talked about using AI to create a presentation. Presentation and just letting it— give it the spreadsheet and then let AI create the presentation. I'll bet you it'll be really good. So maybe in the future.

There we go. Okay.

Hallelujah.

We have the information here. So go ahead, Brendan.

Thank you, Mayor, City Council members. So the first item tonight, the items we're going to be discussing related to budget, almost all of them. I shouldn't say almost all of them are related to budget in some way. So the first one we have is our final budget amendments for the current fiscal '23-'24 fiscal year for the city. As you know from other presentations that we have various things that occur throughout the year that cause us to have to change the budget. from its original form. Many of these include, as, as on this spreadsheet, you can see any item on that's indicated with a number 1 in the note column are grants or donations that we receive during the year. And we're recording the, the award of that grant, and as well on the expenditure side as to what that's going to be spent on, because obviously each one those grants has a specific thing that is related to them. Item number 2, if you see on number 2 on here, you can see that's a really big number, uh, $5.2 million.

Oh, there you go, look at that.

So every year, uh, we, based on our, um, Bren Red, uh, the award that we received for our fiscal '23 annual financial report. As part of that annual financial report, the last decade or so, we have received— we have had extra surplus funds that we then transfer to our capital projects fund. And that's where a large number of primarily parks, but we have many other things that are in there, some street items, Some traffic type items, some various equipment-related type things also use those funds. Recently here, those monies have been going towards that big building that's being built next to us, and, and this is not a lot of— not different. A large portion of this $5.2 million is going to make sure that that building is totally funded. So this budget amendment moves that money from out of our general fund and moves it into our capital projects fund. Part of those funds are required under state law because we've exceeded the maximum that we can leave within our general fund, and so a portion of those had to be moved just so we didn't not meet state law. If there are any questions about that particular item, 'Cause obviously that's the single biggest item on here.

Will you just clarify that percentage of our rainy day fund or the limit and then you transfer over just so people know?

You bet.

So number one, the state law allows us to only have 35% of our general fund revenues for the year. Then as a— so that's the piece that we then go from above that to try to get down to that 35%. city, we have elected to try to maintain something in the 15% area so that we're using as much of the money that we've received as possible towards various things that the city's in need of to improve the city. And then that can range from a large number of different things. And so we strive to get that. To be honest, each year it's a bit of a moving Moving number, and so I have to make a bit of a guess every year. And so sometimes that number can be a little bigger, and sometimes that number is a little bit smaller. But generally speaking, we're trying to target into that 15% range. Does that answer your— okay, thank you. Um, item number 3. Council members, did you have it?

Okay, great.

So item number 3, we've come to be before, but currently we have some outstanding bonds that we're trying to spend the money on related to various water, sewer, and stormwater projects. Until that money is all spent, it sits in an account with our trustee and it earns interest. And so obviously interest rates have been very good and the funds that are there have been earning money, and those— this budget amendment, um, accounts for those interest earnings, um, and they have to be used towards those, um, similar projects, those bond-type projects. Um, but the budget amendment here accounts for those interest earnings. Uh, let's see, item number 4, which you can see in the top section right here. Um, we had, uh, a safety issue down with one of the doors down at fire station number— I I believe it was 2, number 2, that a door would lock and lock you into a room. So number one, that's not good to begin with. Number two, it's definitely not good when it's at a fire station. So we had to get that addressed immediately. Number 5, down to the bottom of the screen here, you see, obviously with the completion of Hillcrest Park, we had Various things planned there. And so we had added some budget to try to accommodate for the things that have been happening down at Hillcrest Park. It's fully funded, obviously, in our new budget, but we wanted to get some dollars in here in relation to the things that were happening prior to our fiscal year end. Item number 6. So let me scroll up here. So you can see item number 6 here in our IT fund. We had some various upgrades related to our Microsoft licensing as well as some of our disaster recovery equipment and whatnot that we felt needed to be done prior to year-end. And so these— this amendment uses some of the IT funds, surplus funds as well, to be able to get those accomplished.

Thank you.

Completed now rather than waiting because there was a need to get those accomplished now. Uh, speaking of our senior center, which— that was really fun to see. Those guys are rocking it down there. Um, so number 7, uh, related to our senior center, obviously the Monday meals have been going very well. And so we've— in order to balance, make sure our budget, we don't get a write-up from our auditors. We needed to make sure that we increased our expenditures to cover the costs of that program. Fortunately, obviously there are revenues associated with those expenditures, and so we can raise both the revenues and expenditures to cover that to make sure we don't get any kind of notation from our auditors. And the last item, number 8, related to— so we have some charging stations that we own, and we have a sharing— a revenue share arrangement with those charging stations. We wanted to move— we had a need within our capital projects fund to fund some things with the charging station revenue, and so it had been getting coded into our general fund, but we're now moving it into our capital projects fund to be able to fund some things.

Thank you.

fund those items. So that's the last one. Are there any questions about any of those items that you have any concerns or questions about?

I'd just like to make the comment that it's been appreciated, appreciated over the last several months that you've come and discussed all of these budget items in, in great detail, and it's been very helpful over many periods and many work sessions where I've been able to come to understand more fully. So I just commend you for, uh, the many, many hours of work that you do that help us, uh, in your presentations to now culminate with this. So thank you very much.

Thank you.

So anyone on the council have any other comments? Well, okay, we'll open this up for a public hearing.

Yes, your fan club is here again, I guess.

All right, so if we don't have any comments from the public, we'll close the public hearing.

And, uh, sorry, my phone dropped.

Be careful.

I wanted to make a motion that we approve the amended current— the current fiscal year '23-'24 budget as shown.

Okay, so do I have to say that whole thing below it? Yeah, so what, what we've added to the agenda is the the verbiage to help everyone get the exact right.

Whereas the Orem City Council has held a public hearing on the revi— on revising the fiscal year 2023-2024 budget and deems the revisions appropriate to accommodate new revenues and expenses, I move that the City Council of Orem amends and approves the fiscal year 2023-24 budget as shown in Exhibit A.

I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The ordinance passes. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on to item 9.2. This is the enterprise fund transfers budgeted for this year, and Brandon, would you like to tell us about that?

You bet.

So, um, while this is a public hearing, there is no no motion or anything that needs to happen. There's no ordinance or resolution related to it. It's purely a presentation and then an opportunity for citizens to make some commentary in relation to it so that you can take that into consideration when we later on adopt— attempt to adopt the budget. So just keep that in mind. So the state legislature a number of years ago required that through the State Auditor's that we hold a public hearing to show various enterprise fund transfers that get made out of the enterprise funds and into any other fund, particularly into our general fund. And so that's what this public hearing is about and this presentation. So as I mentioned, it's— these transfers are relation to services that the city provides to itself. And so in, in doing that, we are supposed to in essence charge the city, meaning the general fund, for those services. And it includes water, sewer, storm drain, and street lighting. So under the legislature's law and ordinance, we were supposed to do that. So we now record That as revenue to those particular enterprise funds. Now, past history has always been that those are obviously city enterprise funds and that they provided those services as part of the general fund in order to, in essence, keep property taxes lower than they might be otherwise if we had to pay for and pay to those enterprise funds for for those services. So as part of that, um, and we would then— it's included as part of those utility rates already. So the, so the only change was to then make that charge by the enterprise funds and then send the money back to the general fund. So the net result to both the general fund and the enterprise fund funds is zero. It was as if the transfer never occurred, as before the legislation, but we're required to go through those motions. You'll— you may have received a notice in the mail and through your utility bill talking about this transfer. So as I mentioned, the general fund pays the utility funds. Payment for water, uh, for various parks, all the parks we have, the cemetery, and internally, it's a $900,000 transfer. The sewer, any of the facilities throughout the city that are city-owned, the $16,000. Stormwater fee for all of the surface parking lots, etc., $141,000. And street lighting for any of the streetlights The— and lighting that occurs without— in the city that's part of city-owned property, and that's $15,000. Um, you can see those totals in that transfer amount and the relation of those amounts in relation to the general fund or the water fund's revenue and each of the funds' revenue, and you can see what a small percentage that is of that total. We're required to provide you with a breakdown of the utility revenue information and where their revenue comes from. You can see from service revenues to fee, regular fees, and all different sorts, impact fees that we alluded to, the interest earnings. And then I specifically have carved out the contributions related to Those, and that's what they're termed, those transfers back to the general fund, or that are received in this case, are considered transfers in. And so that's that line there to give you a total for the utility funds. Also, to try to give you an idea, we're required to show you the expenses of those funds and how they break down into the various categories. Um, As part of showing, uh, the— those costs that are broken further down into the various— these various elements related to administrative charges, various charges for purchasing and warehousing, our IT fund, insurance fund, fleet maintenance fund, and facilities maintenance. Um, I think so, just so that you can see some of the other charges that are charged for services to the enterprise funds from various other funds of the city, and then a breakdown from each one of those in a more detailed— in relation to all of those different elements that make up those enterprise funds. We're required to show you contracted services, so this is a professional-type services. Some of these are, you know, what we charge for our 311 folks to bill for the utility fund. They belong— they exist within the general fund, but they provide services to all of our utility billing. Same, our public works secretaries also exist within the general fund and obviously provide a large amount of services to our enterprise funds. Engineering, same thing. And our capital projects Or Lane Gray. And then they have some other things that are standard professional-type services, or in the case of Jordan L and Central Utah Water, services that are provided to those enterprise funds from various, uh, or outside organizations, whether they be governmental or private. And that's the end of that. Are there any questions about all of that? Great. Oh, public hearing.

So no questions from the council. Um, as has been mentioned, we talked about this a lot, so that's why it seems so easy just to go through. We'd like to open this up for a public hearing if there's anyone would like to make a comment. Okay, we'll close the public hearing. And as you mentioned, that was just informational. Uh, okay, so moving on to item 9.3. This is a, um, this is something new through the legislature, but it's, uh, a discussion on local government officers' compensation.

Correct.

So thank you. So this year, uh, as mentioned, uh, Senate Bill 91 requires municipalities and other governmental entities to provide an— or pass an ordinance outlining what the expected pay increases for various executive officer positions. So this year, that's— we are doing that and meeting that ordinance.

Thank you.

and creating that ordinance for the first time. Um, what you see on the screen is the, uh, what to— as the city, we have as part of our fiscal '25 proposed budget, tentative budget. Um, I don't know if there's any specific questions about any of those. As you can see, um, Bren's not getting a raise at all, so that's always nice. Um, and, uh, everyone else, everyone else has the, uh, 3% Uh, merit increase.

So, and that was not due to, uh, merit or anything else. That was just the way it all worked out.

Correct.

That his raise was given fairly recently.

It was.

Yes.

You don't know that.

So yeah, let's, let's get on that, get that on the record. He earned his raise earlier than everyone else.

How about that?

As part of his agreement.

Yes.

I officially feel well taken care of and well compensated on on the record. So thank you.

No questions, Mayor.

So does anyone have any questions about this? This is pretty straightforward.

So I have a— is this the, the resolution here, the ordinance, compensation ordinance, or Steve?

Yeah, correct. Executive compensation.

So would you just explain to me this last, um, Number 4 talks about zoning maps. What are you talking about?

9.3?

Sorry, I'm not sure what your question was again.

Yeah, it's the ordinance of the City Council of the City of Orem, Utah, enacting compensation increases for specific city officers. So in the— in our packet, it has like this item 4 that talks about any ordinances, resolutions, policies or zoning maps of the City of Wormhirtu adopted. I just read that. Is that in the wrong place?

That sounds like it.

Do we need to change this before we do a motion?

We're not going to do it based on that. We'll do it based on the paper.

This was in our—

Yeah, so we don't want to do that.

Yeah, it sounds like that was just a mistake.

So misplaced.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and, Lynnae, you've always had this advantage because you've got it on your computer. But we now have paper and Teresa updates it, so we have the exact wording that's supposed to be said.

I'm like, that was in my packet.

Absolutely. Okay, any other questions? Okay, we'll open this to a public hearing. Okay, we'll close the public hearing. And would someone like to make a motion?

Mayor, if it's okay, I'll approve what's on the written paper. Is that okay? I'll make a motion.

That's great.

I move that the City Council of Orem approve and adopt an ordinance enacting compensation increases for specific city officers as shown in Exhibit A.

I second.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the ordinance passes. Thank you. All right, thank you, Brandon. And moving on To the final, kind of, kind of final part of this part, 9.4. Uh, we've got a public hearing, uh, if you'd like to bring us up to speed, to adopt a city— adopt the City of Orem fiscal year '24-'25 budget.

So as, uh, thank you, Mayor. So to complete the fiscal year and move into the new fiscal year, we obviously have to have a budget. You approved the tentative budget back on May 14th, which barring some kind of a catastrophe or some other thing where we couldn't meet to pass a final budget, we would be relying on that past tentative budget until such time as we could adopt a final budget. Obviously, here tonight, we're intending to come before you to get the tentative budget in essence approved and in essence adopted. Throughout the year, we have met several times, beginning with our council retreat in— back in January, moving to the accounting staff and various department directors meeting together to go through the, the details of the budget during January and February and March. Then we come before you in a couple of work sessions— 3 work sessions to be exact— to discuss revenue, compensation, operations, our fleet program, various IT elements, as well as capital projects, which have all occurred between— in over March and April. And then, as you can— as I mentioned, the tentative budget was brought before you in May And we're here tonight to try to adopt the budget for fiscal '25. Revenues for fiscal '25 increased some $7.7 million over the '23-'24 budgeted revenues, and primarily due to the items mentioned in here and mentioned in the— during the tentative budget meeting: franchise taxes, ambulance fees, various water fees, utilities, water reclamation, so our enterprise funds. And one of the biggest ones is our interest earnings on our— on the funds that are idle. And so that's been a big thing. In the past, we've been very conservative on budgeting for those interest earnings, but the interest rates are not changing apparently. And so we've decided that we're going to take full advantage of using those interest earnings to balance our budget, particularly in light of Our sales taxes, sales tax revenues somewhat pretty much plateauing at this point. We obviously— this budget funds the various compensation programs of the city as well as the merit increases that were discussed, as well as the STEP programs that have been started and instituted throughout the various departments of the city. And then Just an item of note that there were no health insurance increases this year. You can see our fleet replacement and capital projects amounts related to this year as well. Just to give you an idea of the relative size of the current proposed budget in relation to the prior 3 years' adopted budgets, and it continues to, to grow. A lot of that obviously is inflationary in nature. And so whether that be from a salary perspective or whether that be from just growth and the cost of the things that we, we have to purchase, all of those things, as you heard in our work session related to 2000 South and the, the cost of that one particular project. And so those kind of things obviously have an impact on our— the total size of our budget. Just to give you an idea of how those revenue— the revenues of each of our major funds, how those break down, to give you an idea of the general size of each of the funds that we work with here in the city. General fund being the largest by far, but our enterprise funds, as you can see, are second, you know, in that larger category.

Let's put it that way.

Um, speaking of the general fund specifically, you can see the size of the general fund, which you saw that growth that we talked about in the total budget. But you can see here within the general fund that it is actually not growing very significantly, obviously because of the sales taxes that I mentioned. And so, you know, when sales taxes don't grow, generally speaking, the general fund doesn't grow either. And, and we have to do some other things to try to figure out how to balance that particular fund when sales taxes are not growing, because property taxes, as we will see a little bit later, property taxes do not grow very much. And some of the other tax— luckily, I want to say luckily, it's, it's somewhat planned. You know, we budget very conservatively from year to year. And so, uh, I mentioned the interest earnings. Uh, the franchise taxes followed a very similar thing where, uh, we've been receiving a large amount. I don't know if you remember natural gas costs, um, having gone up significantly during the, uh, '23-'20— um, or excuse me, '22-'23, um, winter. Uh, they didn't go down over this '23-'24 season. And so those franchise taxes related to natural gas went up that we receive as part of that, went up pretty dramatically over the last year and continued here in fiscal '24. So we've gone ahead and moved those revenues from a budget perspective to, to match those, those what we anticipate to be ongoing revenues. Um, you can get an idea here on this screen where our general fund sources of revenue come from, taxes being the largest piece, you know, property sales, franchise among the biggest 3 in that category. We receive charges for services. You see on there a large portion of our revenues come from those, particularly ambulance revenues and various other fees that we charge for specifically to specific services provided, i.e., vineyard fire contract, our Linden agreement for public safety services. Those are all in there. Um, and then, you know, various other elements related to the general funds revenues. Um, I pointed out sales taxes. This is just to give you a visual of, of what we have had in the past and what we are anticipating, uh, here for the next Uh, budget year. And as I mentioned, you can see the last 4 years pretty much plateaued and have been pretty flat over the next last 4 years, and what we anticipate finishing this year and our budget for next year. Um, just a, a, an item of note, our building and business service charges, just to give you an idea, we budget those usually pretty quite conservative.

That's good language.

Quite conservatively. And so, you know, we, we have yet to not— or very rarely do we not hit those very conservative numbers. If we exceed those, um, we do— a lot of those funds, the ones you can see on the top for business licensing, those end up flowing into that $5.2 million that I, I talked about. It would, it would become part of that $5.2 million. Building permits Under a state law that was enacted that went into effect last year, we were required to move our development fees fund— anything related to development, particularly related to those building permits and the revenues associated with them— they are moved to a separate fund so that they can be accounted for on their own merit. And so that's why you see that, that development fees fund Fund located in writing below that.

Some other—

I've talked about interest earnings, ambulance fees. We've done quite well. Again, have budgeted those relatively conservatively in the past, but various changes to not only the billing company that we use, but various other changes have caused those revenues to increase as well. Um, to give you a breakdown and compare it into the— this is citywide now, not just the general fund. This is citywide, uh, where those categories break down between the prior year adopted budget and the current year adopted budget. And you can see for the most part they follow along the same percentages, um, even though we, you know, it's approximately $7.7 million more Still follows along those same lines. Uh, and again, citywide expenditures by fund, just to give you an idea by each of the funds of the city where those monies are spent, whether it be through personnel, our regular operational costs, and various capital elements. Uh, just a breakdown. We've discussed those. I won't necessarily go into So we, since, as I mentioned, we've kind of broken into those before when we discussed it in the tentative budget, but various items on our public safety side of needs that they have in relation to various, you know, whether it be software or furniture, you know, furniture in the fire stations, equipment, safety equipment, etc. And so those items are included in the tentative budget. Those elements are part of our additions for the current year, as well as we are trying to accommodate some new budgeting software in the finance department and various other elements that, you know, we use to help our employees be happy employees and to want them to stay here. Many of these things are part of that thing, you know, Earlier today we had our, our program for scholarships, and, you know, those kind of things fall into the categories here in relation to management services. And, uh, our, you know, we also had our rec people here talking about Armfest, and so there's an item in there related to various events where they have some specific equipment instead of having to borrow things from various organizations within the city. They can have Related to personnel additions for Budget '25, police officers want to add a detective position that's specifically talking about domestic violence. You heard from the victim advocates earlier in the work session regarding the need there and the growth. And I think that's a great idea. that is occurring in that arena. So obviously the public safety is well aware of that and has requested an additional officer for that purpose. In our rec as well, Gina here in relation to our senior center, and Karina who is here in city events. So some, some changes to their positions to provide some additional Um, uh, pay in, in relation to those promo— those promotions. Um, and then in our rec program, we have some coordinators that make all those rec programs happen and some, uh, increases for them as well. Um, in our fleet, uh, it's always amazing to me how much vehicles cost even before these last 3 years. So The last 3 years have been just incredibly crazy, and I can't— I mean, just police vehicles and fire trucks by themselves are just insane. So, so to keep— be able to keep funding all of those things is a major accomplishment for our fleet group, and, and to be honest, with our, uh, the city budgeting folks as well, as we get together to try to discuss all of the fleet needs and how to best manage So this just gives you an idea of, of the kind of needs that we have in this particular year, and that quite honestly is probably relatively ongoing. Our streets capital projects, you can see a breakdown. We have 2 funds, 2 sources of money revenues that we receive, technically 3. The transportation sales tax fund has 2 elements in it. One that was just recently passed and then one that was passed several years ago. The B&C Road Fund has been around quite some time. The B&C Road Fund, there's— when you buy gas, there's a specific excise tax related to that. And then the other 2 in the transportation sales tax, those are on any sales tax purchase, has a component related to those 2 particular taxes in there. And this is how these various projects are funded. primarily through those 2, those sources of revenues. Within our debt service fund, this just to give you an idea, obviously we've been talking about bonding this Thursday and Friday. We were heading off to talk with our bond rating agencies about the sales tax revenue bond that we did in our last council meeting, and this is just to give you an idea of where those funds reside as far as being paid. You can see the increase from fiscal '24 to fiscal '25's proposed budget, which accommodates for that, that bond being issued this next upcoming year. As we move on to our individual enterprise funds, our water fund gives you an idea. The last, you know, 3 fiscal years here we're talking about. We are raising our— proposing to increase our 3/4-inch, all of the meters, but the 3/4-inch is the most common in our residential, and increasing that to $21.17 from $20.45 on the base rate. And then all of the tiers would also increase over that as well. Um, are there any questions about anything to this point, but particularly the water fund as we have that on there? Great. Water reclamation. We've had so many discussions about the needs that are going to be happening down at the treatment plant as far as improvements that are going to need to occur. The proposed increase in the base rate is to get us on our way towards being able to accomplish all of the things that need to be done down at the treatment plant. And there is also an increase in the volume charge as well. In our stormwater program and fund, there's a 2.8% increase in the base rate there as well, as we continue to try to figure out how to handle all of the canal abandonments and the various movement of stormwater that we need to get pushed somewhere and get it dealt with. Within our recreation fund, it's awesome to see— I was here in the beginning days when the recre— the fitness center was struggling mightily, and it's obviously awesome to see that the new fitness center did what we hoped would do, and that is continue to grow and be a valuable item in the community and be able to, if you will, pay almost— I'm going to say almost. Bryce is going to disagree with me because I'm an accountant and there's things here, but it's awesome to see that it's doing so well and, you know, paying for itself without a subsidy, if you will, from the general fund or any other fund. And Hillcrest Park is in this budget. So that's part of that increase you see is related to the addition of Hillcrest Park coming online. In our solid waste fund, we had the North Station, the transfer station here, talk to us. And, you know, obviously that has an impact on waste management, and so they pass a lot of those fees on to our— the citizens. And the proposed fund here, you can see the rate increases that are being proposed in relation to cover those increased costs that are being passed on to the citizens of Orem.

Before you go off that, could you go back please?

No, wrong way.

The cans— there was some discussion, I don't know if we resolved it, that since the second can and the green waste are going to the same place, why are they charged differently? Do you remember that conversation we had? If since they're now all going to the same place, a second can is more expensive than a green waste, and I can put whatever I want in either. Well, all legally disposable items. I don't mean to do hazardous material, of course.

Yeah, it's something that we can— we need to continue to look at, but The green waste can tends to— well, one is still desired. We still want the citizens' green waste because that helps in the processing of the waste at the landfill, and because people want to keep the smells separately.

Right.

And then in terms of what we charge the public, historically, it's always been a pass-along charge in terms of what Waste Management charges us. And so this— these changes reflect what Waste Management charges us.

But yeah, it isn't worth holding up the budget for, but it was an item raised by a citizen that I'd like us to take a further look at.

But it is a smaller can too.

Is it slightly?

Well, what it was was that we discontinued the green waste program, and so we let— if, you know, so the people could— to help them feel better about it, and, and because it was disappointing to have that opportunity removed, you know, we just let them keep the can for a lower price.

Yeah.

And we don't know if we're going to continue that.

In other words, first can, second can, those are costs that we actually have from waste and we're passing those along. The green waste, we talked about discontinuing it possibly.

Oh, may do it.

Then we decided to do it kind of as an incentive because it helps our landfill and everything.

But I might put— we're not— it happens, but we're not requiring them to put only green waste in the one can, but they're more inclined to do it because it stinks and you keep it out back.

Thank you. Yeah, enough said.

Fair enough.

Thank you.

Uh, just again, uh, toot our own horn a little bit in relation to our total utility costs in relation to various other, uh, cities, uh, around us, or at least that we compare to. Um, and so as you can see, um, we still, even with our increases, And this— these other ones do not include any potential increases from those cities. Um, we still fare very well.

This is with pretty limited water consumption.

I, uh, I think it's— is it 12 or 20?

I'm trying to—

16. I think it was somewhere. Um, anyway, I didn't bring it with me.

But they're all comparable water consumption.

Yeah, we use the same, the same, the same amount of water for each city.

Yeah, gotcha.

So that's the end of my presentation related to our, uh, regular city budget. So if there are any questions, I'd love to—

Brandy, can you go back to the rec center? Because on the— on KSL today, uh, they mentioned that, uh, uh, Utah Tax Association, uh, came out with a report that mostly every city is subsidizing their rec center by $1, $2, $3 million. So just want to give props to Bryce and his team that we're doing very well compared to the other cities with their rec center. Because if you had to subsidize $2 or $3 million, that would hurt the budget. So props to you, Bryce, and your team.

So we were up in that million smaller neighborhood prior to reconstructing, you know, building that new building. And so, um, I, I, you know, kudos to, to—

I think Provo had a positive $35,000 or something like that.

So, well, it even goes to really to programming, right? The great staff we have there. I mean, the people in the Hillcrest Park area, I've talked to a few of them, so ecstatic about everything going on there. Anyway, yeah.

And props to the Rec Commission too.

Give me a break.

KSL said there was only 1 rec center out of 8 from the state that wasn't subsidized by the cities. It has to be Orem's, right?

That was probably—

it was probably better than that by $35,000.

Somehow they forgot us.

It is a tough standard to keep, especially year after year. Because as the facilities get older, yes, you do have to make sure you've got the right staff programs and operations running well to continue to make sure it's attractive and doesn't become a subsidizing item over time.

Right. Any other questions from the council about everything Brennan just went through? Okay, we'll open up public hearing. Okay, we'll close the public hearing. Um, I just want to say one thing before we, we vote on this. Uh, this, this is a really, um, tedious process. You can see, you know, how many people are still with us. But it's a very important process, right? And throughout the city, we're trying to do everything we can to be the best in the state in all kinds of different categories within our city. But unless we get our money right, uh, it's all for naught. So this is like the engine that makes everything work. And, uh, and Brandon and his team have done an excellent job, as per the award that you got. And, uh, there's a A lot of detail in here. I think for our citizens, this is great transparency. You can drill down on anything. I think also that chart that we showed that shows Orem has the lowest utilities, uh, in, in the area is, is amazing. And I think the fact that we haven't raised taxes while we've got major infrastructure projects going on between Hillcrest Park, the new city center, uh, the 10 million gallon water tank, I mean, all these things are going on and we have no new taxes. So, so what we're going through as a council and what happens with our finance department is critical to making all this work. And congratulations to all you guys.

Thank you.

So if someone would like to make a motion.

I move that we— that the City Council of Orem approves the and adopts the budget for fiscal year 2024-2025. Adopting the compensation programs, adopting fees and charges, setting the property tax, franchise tax, municipal energy sales and use tax, telecommunications license tax, transient room tax, and the E-911 fee rates.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The ordinance for the budget passes. Good job. Okay, we'll move to item 11. Uh, Bryn, do you have any city manager items?

Few items. I'll be, I'll be quick. Um, uh, this first one, you received a calendar invite for this Friday at 9:00 AM to the ribbon cutting for SFC Energy AG. That may seem otherworldly. otherwise weird or potentially unimportant, but I want to make sure you're aware that this is a, a, I guess, sizable entity that has been attracted from Germany that specializes in supplying hydrogen and methanol fuel cells. And I guess it's important enough that Governor Spencer Cox is planning to attend this ribbon cutting. So I wanted to make sure that you were aware if you're able to make that grand opening event. And then we have kind of the initial Timpanogos Bluegrass Music Festival going on this Saturday here at the city center at 2:00 PM. And so that's an event we expect will be popular and well received. And then you had here on the dais just some samples of a 1-page Gold Star Family fundraising material. I'll also send it in electronic format, but, um, that's, uh, for you to use to share with, with others.

You know, there's a digit missing.

Okay, I will—

10 is missing.

Thank you. So we'll get that fixed, and then, um, I'll do—

if it's only $250, I'll do the whole thing.

Thank you. We'll fix that. And then just lastly, I just, I just have to thank you publicly for, um, um, your thoughtfulness, your kindness, your words of encouragement, and even your prayers on the behalf of my family and I and my oldest son Braden with his recent health challenges and The outpouring of kindness from you, from our exec staff, from our employees, from thousands of people, it's just been incredibly humbling and very much appreciated and very helpful and motivating for us and for my son in particular. So thank you.

Thank you, Bren.

Okay, Mayor, I move that we adjourn to a meeting of the ORM Redevelopment Agency, RDA.

Second.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Okay, we'll adjourn to a meeting of the ORM Redevelopment Agency. We've got item 13.

Move for approval of the RDA consent item.

Second.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The consent items pass. We've got item 13 or 14.1, RDA scheduled items. We've got a public hearing on a resolution to adopt the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Orem fiscal year 2024 budget and amend the fiscal year 2023 budget?

Brandon.

Thank you, Mayor. Uh, as you are aware, we have a redevelopment agency which is technically a separate legal entity, and so we have to adopt a budget for that legal entity. Most of the RDA areas— the last one expires this year— other than the new CDA, which was the University Place CDA, so that it will be the only remaining active area within the RDA umbrella. And you can see the items down in the revenue total, which most of that is again University Place CDA, and then down in the bottom part you can see the expenditure breakdown in relation to not only the University Place CDA, but there is— they receive 90% of the property tax back to them. 5% is an administrative fee that comes back to the city, and 5% stays within the fund for future infrastructure-type projects. And then there's the project area totals. You can see Uh, though all of those old RDA areas, uh, they've, uh, slimmed down to a meager $65,000 for the year. And so that's, uh, the budget, uh, going forward for the— that's being proposed for fiscal 2025.

Okay. And Brandon, just to clarify, so when we show a 2025, uh, proposed $1.39 million expense, what we're really showing is this is tax revenue that we're giving up, right?

Correct.

Okay, so no, we're not paying this out. This is money we're not receiving.

Correct.

Okay, any questions on the council?

And just to clarify, so, and that's, that's why I bring up the old RDAs. So those no longer— the city is receiving all of the benefits from all of those older RDAs is they— we no longer receive any revenues through the RDA. Most of that revenue related to those is past receipts that we still haven't spent the money, and so they have interest earnings in relation to those unspent funds. And, and we obviously continue to find, uh, try to find projects that we can use those, uh, that money on that are infrastructure related.

Okay.

And then these are increasing because their assessed taxable value is increasing.

On the, you, on the University Place stuff?

Yeah.

Correct.

And then once again, is it 2040 that this rolls off?

Oh boy, you got me on there. Ryan probably knows that better than me.

It was 2038.

Yeah.

Okay, any other questions? Okay, we'll go ahead and open up public hearing if anyone has a comment. Okay, we'll close the public hearing.

You wanna do this one?

Mayor, I need to clarify, it's actually 2040. We extended it 2 extra years. Steve reminded me.

That's right, it was 2040.

Okay, um, I got a motion for the Board of Directors of the Redevelopment Agency of the City of Orem to approve and adopt the budget for fiscal year 24— 2024-2025 and amend the fiscal year 2023-2024 budget.

Second.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Okay, the resolution passes. Okay, next up, item 15.

So I move that we adjourn, um, to a meeting of the Orem Special Services Lighting District.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

I now make a motion that we approve the consent items under the Special Services Lighting District.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, the consent items are approved. Now we'll move to 17, the scheduled items. Okay, we're back to, uh, Budget for this entity. So, Brandon.

So thank you, Mayor. Uh, the Special Service Lighting District of Orem is again another separate legal entity, um, and so our street lighting fees that are paid through your utility bill end up in this fund, uh, and are accounted for here. Um, this year, uh, one of the, the, you know, bigger items which I failed to mention during the tentative budget But I believe Bren mentioned to you one of the big increases for this year is the inclusion, which you can see on this slide, of the holiday lights. So we have a more permanent funding source for that celebration. And so that was, as you can see, it's a relatively large item in relation to that entire budget. And so that element was— has been added in the current year. That, that is part of why, you know, we, we talked about the rate increase in relation to the— to being able to cover that cost. Um, so that's, uh, the big— one of the biggest pieces in relation to that, on top of just normal increases, um, in relation to power and etc. Um, I—

Mayor, if I may. Yes, I really have a question for the police. These lights, I believe— I don't know if we can quantify it, but it reduces the crime in our city. Would you say that's yes without maybe exact numbers, officer? You do all your, your crimes in the dark? Is that what you're telling me, officer? Thank you. I just think it's natural, right, that if there's a light on, there's less crime.

So I do know that, that I remember having a conversation when I first came to the city. Regarding the bonds that were outstanding in relation to those streetlights. And, and that was in the, um, part of the bond, uh, what's called a POS or an OS, an official statement, that it mentions that very thing within that official statement.

I remember a report from a police officer in the past who said every time they get a call from a burglar or something at night, the lights weren't on when he got there, but they're on by the time the police came because the, you know, the homeowner turned on the lights, and of course that chased them away. So it might be worth a few bucks to leave some lights on.

So, well, and let's— I think we can also say from an energy perspective, you know, these are very energy-effective lights. And prior to those lights coming in my neighborhood, we just left our outdoor lights on, which were incandescent bulbs that of course cost a lot more from an energy perspective. So we're going more green.

Yeah, so, so on here, Council Member Miller, I'm Glad you brought that up. So that energy savings lease item that you see on the screen, so that lease, that's what that lease did is it went— we went to all of our streetlights in the whole city and changed them from the regular bulbs to LED bulbs. So that we're continuing to pay on that, of course, but, but that is what that's all that particular line item is about.

Okay, any other comments, questions? Okay, we'll open this up for a public hearing, and we'll close the public hearing. And I'll make a motion.

The Board of Directors of the Special Service Lighting District of the City of Warm approve and adopt the fiscal year 2024-2025 budget.

Second.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, that resolution passes as well.

I move that we adjourn to a meeting of the Orem Municipal Building Authority.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, this, this is, this is the big one. Who, who wants to do this final one?

Jeff, you want to do it?

Jeff?

Too weighty for me to do it, Mayor. Let someone else, please.

I motion to—

I'd like to make a motion that we approve the, the, uh, Municipal Building Authority consent items.

Second.

Oh, way to go, Jeff.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Tom?

I'll move we adjourn all of these meetings.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.