City Council · 2024-12-17

He wanted me to ask you where he should sit.

I can bring his name tag. I think you just sit here. And then Brent will probably— I mean, unless we want to put the camera on them together.

I can only get—

well, I mean, I guess it's fine.

I wouldn't worry about it.

I could bring my recording device. Oh, there he is. I didn't bring my computer. This meeting should be super short. Hello. Oh my gosh.

Did you determine where I should sit?

I just put you in your spot.

Where my spot used to be next to the mayor?

That one.

Okay.

Oh, I need—

better make notes.

I need the mayor's new seating chart. I talked about it a couple of weeks ago, but Does he set it now? I make suggestions and then he changes it.

You know, in the old days when I had hands in Hello?

Can you hear it?

Oh, there you go.

Thank you.

Is this going to be working?

Sure.

I was just wondering, have you—

well, I might introduce the item.

I'm not sure.

Or the mayor. I put it as a consent.

I didn't think you were here, Bryn. You're here.

Should you be here?

Yes.

Well, I know it's not supposed to be the mayor conducting, and I'm just busy.

Is the mayor conducting and I'm just here?

I guess it depends on—

Yeah, I think, I think that's right.

Okay, good. If he tunes in.

Yeah, no, thank you though.

Yeah, I heard.

That's why I heard you might not.

It's a long one.

Tom, will this be your fastest meeting ever?

Well, let's see if David's on and we can get a bet for an over or under.

I'm not betting anymore.

I want to see if we can get him into another sucker bet and we can I don't know when this hasn't started being recorded.

I, I could hear David, Jeff, and you said you see Lynnae, and I think Chris and Jen are planning on joining. Are you texting the mayor to see? Okay, I'll let you do it. For the city council members who have joined, I think we're waiting to see if the mayor is going to join and therefore conduct the meeting. We'll give him a minute or 2. So we have 5 now. Did I hear it? So we're waiting for Jen and the mayor. And Steve or Brent, with both these consent items, we can just say aye and we're done? Yeah, one vote, unless somebody wants to take it out, and we have to ask that question.

Dave, did you go into the office today in Salt Lake?

Yeah.

Did you get stuck behind that mess, that wreck?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, I, uh, But I got, I got off and I went around over, uh, Traverse Mountain. I went over that way and it was clear.

I heard it was a head-on wrong-way driver.

Everyone but the mayor.

Yeah. Oh geez, not good. Yeah, I don't know how you get going driving the wrong way. It doesn't make sense to me.

But yeah, my commute into Utah Valley University wasn't too bad today.

What's your—

Mayor's on. Okay, Mayor, we're gonna let you conduct this meeting. I'm just physically at the city building.

Can you hear me?

Hear me? Hear me?

You can hear that?

Yeah, hang on. Can you hear me now?

Bren, Bren, I think you need to mute, Bren.

Spaceship effect.

Okay, I, I think we're good now. I think Bren muted his phone and we're good.

All right, are we good? Can you hear me now?

We hear you good, fine, Mayor. Go ahead.

Okay, um, I don't have an agenda in front of me.

Would you be okay if I do it and you just ask for the call to vote?

Is that okay, Mayor?

That's great.

Okay, for those of you who have an agenda in front of you, and I assume most of them, we're first calling this 4 o'clock special session of the Orem City Council to order. We have 2 consent items. One is the resolution approving an interlocal agreement with Vineyard, Linden, and Pleasant Grove related to the organized— reorganized school district. And 2.2 is the appointment of Jen Gale to that reorganized school district interlocal joint board. Those are the 2 consent items, Mr. Mayor.

Okay, I'd like to move that we have a discussion on those, please.

Do you want to move both items or just one item to a discussion order, Lynnae?

Um, just the one's fine. The first item.

What's the order we should do, Steve? Should we discuss that item first?

So yeah, the first item is the, um, the approval of the interlocal agreement, right?

So yeah, uh, so the mayor can just open that up for discussion on that item.

Is the first item the, the discussion of the interlocal, or is it the city council member?

I believe it's the interlocal agreement, Mayor.

Okay, well, let, let's open that up for discussion then. The interlocal agreement.

Yeah, I have some concerns that there aren't any timelines on there. There's not an end date. I would have expected that our interlocal agreement, meaning the participation of the city councils in the formation of a new school board, would end at the point— I'm sorry, of a new school district— would end at the point that a new school board, a new governing body, was elected for that district. So I'm concerned at some points in that interlocal agreement. That seem to keep our tentacles attached to the school district formation and would prefer that we have an end date of our involvement be more specific to when their governing board is in place. I know there was some talk of when they would be sworn in, maybe accelerating that time period to After the canvas. So I'm not quite sure what date that would be. How would you do that, Steve?

Mayor, you can't see on your end, but Steve Earl just raised his hand. I propose that we allow him to address that.

That'd be great, Steve.

Yeah, so, Lenny, great question. You're absolutely right. I mean, this agreement should terminate when the new school board takes office. That language is kind of buried in Section 2. So it does say that the agreement will remain, the last part of it says, shall remain in effect until the new school district board starts their term. Whether that happens to be in January of 2026.

5.

Or—

No, 6, you're right, sorry.

Or whether, you know, the legislature might decide to let them take office a little bit earlier, you know, we hope maybe in November of 2025. But that, that's, that's how that's addressed in the agreement right now.

Yeah, my memory was that I had read that in there. So when the new school board's elected, our tentacles, as Lynae said, are out.

That's correct.

Except for the fact that isn't there a section in there that says we still have someone appointed to work with the school board? In my opinion, that should be on, uh, that should be handled from a municipality standpoint, as we are currently and have done for years, versus through this interlocal agreement?

So if I can address that, this interlocal agreement is really very limited in scope intentionally. It's really only—

the only powers granted to the joint board are to make the filings that state law requires us to do.

That is to say, filing with the entity name with the Lieutenant Governor's Office, and then filing a plat map describing the boundaries of the new school district.

That's all this joint board under this interlocal agreement is empowered to do. And it basically says if this board wants to do anything beyond that narrow scope of powers, they will have to come back and amend the agreement, which will again require approval of the city councils. But it doesn't call for any representation Other than just serving on this joint board, it doesn't call for representation on any other group or body.

So that, just to clarify then, and I appreciate your, your addressing these concerns, I wanted everything clarified in this meeting because I, we did talk about what that said, but I want to make sure this is a public discussion. So just to clarify that, if there are some additional responsibilities that this board wants to take on, then they will need to— each city council will need to have a public meeting with a public vote to allow this interlocal group to perform those, you know, tasks or responsibilities or whatever. Is that correct, Steve?

That's correct, yes.

And just for your information, I mean, probably starting as soon as tomorrow, we have a meeting scheduled for this joint board under this interlocal, and I think we will actually probably be talking at that time about whether there are additional powers or functions that this joint board should take on itself.

But again, that can't happen until or unless all the city councils agree to that.

And then is this joint board— are these meetings public? I mean, I understand they won't have to be recorded. But can people, other people attend, or are they a closed meeting?

Yeah, I mean, they're not, they're not, they're not meetings that are open to the public.

So yeah.

Is there— I mean, I, I think we should have some transparency there. Can we add that to— what do we have to do to make it possible for the public to—

So, so maybe, maybe to clarify, I mean, these are not meetings that are required to be open to the public. But if this, you know, if this group, the Joint Board, wanted to allow the public to attend, they could.

So that would just be up to the Joint Board to decide whether they wanted to open it up to the public or not.

Okay, but that option is there. If someone requests it, then they would need to have a vote on that.

Yeah, the Joint Board would have the opportunity to vote on that.

Okay, that's great.

Hey, Steve, as far as you mentioned, the scope on this is really limited. And that we're going to be adding more things to this. But we still haven't resolved— I mean, right now we're just going every city equally, right?

That's correct. Yes. And so in terms of voting power, yes, in terms of voting power.

And so that's another thing that we've got on our list of things that needs to be resolved at some point.

Right, and part of that thought was we're not really too concerned about not having disproportionate voting power if the functions are limited to these very narrow stated purposes, but the thought was if we're going to expand the scope of powers, then we might need to have a discussion about having disproportionate voting power depending on what those expanded powers might be.

The other thing, if I remember right, the other thing that would drive it is if there's going to be costs associated with doing some of the things that we're requiring this group to do that, you know, people might not want to pay equally if they're with their states being all different sizes. So, so those, those are kind of 2 issues that are going to have to be dealt with at some point. I think the idea behind this was it was kind of like the joint statement that we attempted to do. Uh, there were so much— so many different opinions about what should be said in this joint statement that we finally kind of gave up. And that's kind of where we're at with this interlocal, is there's a lot of different opinions, but we have these things that we have to do statutorily, uh, within the 30 days after the election. And so to get those things accomplished, we're putting together this, this interlocal on a very limited scope right now, knowing that we're probably going to have to expand it, we're going to have to, to make some revisions to it.

But we were just trying to get a starting point so we could accomplish these bare minimums that have to be done And just to comment on Tom's comment about my tentacles comment, I said that because that is specifically being said in the community. So I wanted to make sure that we vetted that, that we identified and clarified that we have no desire to do any of that. So, thank you.

Amen.

And one of the things I talked with Steve about earlier, Mr. Mayor, is one of the nice things about having this evenly is the costs are split evenly until such time that we make changes to it. And again, these should be minimal cost because we don't want to have our thumbprint all over this. We want the new school board to have their thumbprints on this.

Right.

Although there could be— I mean, there could, depending on what we have to do. I mean, if we have to do a financial study, that's gonna cost something potentially, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, in the whole scheme of You know, things. This will be relatively small cost, but there will be some costs. And I don't know, we're, we're, we're just, we're, we're going down this path because there's things that have to be done. But it's, it's interesting, to say the least, as we all come together as cities.

Are there other comments?

On before we take this back to a consent item?

Thanks for the clarification questions, Lene.

Hey, Steve, um, when I talked to you on Monday, um, you were gonna, uh, look up some information, and I'm, I'm trying to remember what the question was, but, um, I, I think your question, uh, was whether the other cities Um, had already approved this or were planning to approve it before the end. Yeah, that's right. The timeline. Um, do we, do we know? I think you said PG or somebody's gonna do it in January, and I think that's too late, right?

Yeah, Dave, this is Brent. That would be too late. So we have 30 days from when the vote was certified. And so I think we were trying, we were running up against a December 19th deadline. My understanding is that Vineyard City has adopted this agreement. Linden should have, although I haven't heard a confirmation from them, but they should have yesterday. And I think Pleasant Grove was planning to today.

Okay.

That's all I had.

Mr. Mayor, I'll turn it back to you to ask for a call on the vote of the consent items.

Okay.

Yeah, can we go ahead and have a vote on the consent item?

I move for approval.

So just to clarify, you're moving to approve the consent items?

I move for approval of the consent items, meaning both 1.1 and 1.2.

2.1 and 2.2.

Sorry, correct.

Thank you.

A second?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

I got my— can I do a thumbs up? Does that work too on the Zoom?

Yeah, I think that was 7-0, right?

I think you're right.

Is, is Chris on here too?

Yes.

Okay, so we got a 7-0 then.

May I move that we adjourn this meeting?

Second.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

We're adjourned.

We'll see you at the party.

Thank you.