City Council · 2025-03-11

All the games are out in Scottsdale. Never mind, clear out on the east side. But it rained so much that the field—

we only had to play 3 games.

So you can pull into— yes, that's what that's going to be on my computer. 3 out of 4, hopefully 5 if you make it all—

if you make it into the championship.

That was our first game of the year. No, you're totally fine.

I was like, how come it's not opening? I'm like, oh, duh, because I'm using that.

I think I took the papers up. Where's present?

Oh, down there.

Okay, I was like, where is the guy presenting? So I think he doesn't have this on yet.

Yeah, that's right. Good.

I'll miss you.

There you go. Work session, and we'll start off with item 1.1, a presentation from The Alpine Aqueduct Project. That's Chris Eliason.

Thank you, Mayor. My name is Chris Eliason. I'm actually from Oron, even though I lived in Lehigh longer. I still— people say, where are you from? I say I'm Oron. I'm proud of— I'm an Oron High graduate.

Smart man.

Thank you.

Going to talk about the Alpine Aqueduct Reach 1 project. This is an update. We've been here several times. The last time was back in September or August. I think Court did it. Court's my mentor. He's with Central Utah Water as well. We also have McKenna Mathis with VOROX. She's our public involvement specialist and field guard engineer. Cliff Jacobs, John Chadwick, and Pam Jones are with me to support. So hopefully I can figure out how to do this. So let's— we can talk about Alpine Aqueduct, which is right here in your backyard. It's part of the Central Utah Project.

Um, it's where that green—

that blue circle is. Central Utah Project, as you all know, I think you know, is To help Utah utilize its 23% allotment of the Colorado River, which equates to about 1.7 million acre-feet. The green on here, this area is the Bonneville Unit, which is currently still under construction. It still is fairly close, but it's to deliver water from the Colorado River Basin across the divide over to the Bonneville Basin. Just another picture of the Alpine Aqueduct Reach 1. It's basically that purple line. The red line in the center here is Alpine Aqueduct Reach 1. When they were built, when it was built, it was built by reaches. Reach 1 was— is the one we're going to talk about today. This is a Google Earth map of the Alpine Aqueduct that begins at a 10 million gallon Reservoir up the canyon. It's a buried reservoir. You're not supposed to see it. That's why a lot of people don't know it's there. It goes over to the Donny Christiansen treatment plant up there on the hill. It provides Orem City with 60% of its water. The other 40%, I'm assuming, comes from wells. It was constructed originally in 1978 to 1980 by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and I said earlier it's a part of the Central Utah Project. It's a 90-inch diameter welded steel pipe. That's 7.5 feet in diameter. It flows 450 cubic feet per second. That's 202,000 gallons per minute. If you were to sit there for a minute, that's how much water would pass you. It serves, uh, provides water to about 1.6 million people here in Utah County and Salt Lake County all the way to the airport. And it provides raw water to 3 treatment plants and several others through some connections. And then last year, about 100,000 acre-feet went through the pipeline. That's about enough for 300,000 Utah families. Now, some of this 100,000 acre-feet was irrigation water, but as you know, Utah is converting sagland to homes. The project we're talking about today is the Alpine Avenue Reach 1. It's this realignment from the yellow highlighted there down to purple. It's going to be 108 inches in diameter, which is 9 feet tall, 9 feet in diameter. We have a 960-foot-long tunnel. And a 60-foot vertical shaft. The tunnel will have a 250-foot radius in it. And there are 2 areas where we're going to be using specialty pipe. It's called hazard-resilient ductile iron pipe. I'll talk a little bit more about that, but it's a 108-inch diameter pipe. It's welded steel pipe. It's about 6,060 feet long. So since the pipe was constructed, we've had a number of what we call failures. This is where the pipe is cracked open, water has come out, we've had to shut it down to weld it up. And this is a big enough pipe that you can't— it's not like turning the faucet off when you're brushing your teeth. It takes up to an hour to shut down the gates. In 2017, we had a large kind of a landslide that fell onto the pipe and started Squashing it, taking it out of the ground. So we started the project.

It didn't rupture it, it didn't leak it, it just crushed it.

It just started taking it out of the ground.

Thank you.

So, uh, like I said, I'm from Orem. This is what Orem looked like in 1970, the area that we're talking about. The yellow dashed lines, the rough alignment of the Alpine Aqueduct. I remember as a kid walking to school through orchards. And then this is 2017, it's representative today. Lots of homes, businesses, schools below this aqueduct, and we're worried about it. So we started the study back in 2019. Wanted to know what the issues were causing— were causing on this pipeline to fail. We came up with 2 geohazards. The shaded gray area there is a large historic landslide. And then the red dashed lines are the approximate location of the Wasatch Fault. To mitigate for the landslide, it was pretty simple. Just go out and around it. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but we are avoiding the landslide. What we can't avoid is the Wasatch Fault. It's a long linear feature that extends from Brigham City all the way down to Nephi. On the right is a screenshot from a report that the US Geological Survey did, and they said that within next 50 years there's a 43% chance of a 6.75 magnitude earthquake. So that's what we designed for this project. Back in May of 2023, we dug a couple of trenches across one of the faults. And this is what we came up with. So I think you guys have seen this picture. If not, I'll give a copy to someone today. But you can see the fault here. This is on 1560 East, the road the Boba Chews is on. There's a vacant field up there, and you can clearly see the fault. This is called a normal fault. So it's coming— it's dipping at a 60% degree. That's not— if it goes off at this location, it will not only Fall vertically, but it'll fall horizontally.

It's going—

it's moving towards Utah Lake. So we have to design this pipe to take over 8 feet of displacement. I like to talk about this earthquake in 1983 in Idaho. Borah Peak is the largest, tallest peak in Idaho, and they had an earthquake in October of 1983. It was about a 6.9. You can see these 2 gentlemen here trying to figure out how they're going to get water next spring with the canal displacement.

This is the same picture, the same canal looking a little further back.

This is also a normal fault. This is a road. This is a dirt road, but this is kind of what would happen, we think, along our project. So we're designing for this. This happens, we're finding an old pipe through Wyoming. We do that with this specialty pipe. It's called the HRDIP, Hazard Resilient Pipeline. It's actually made by Kubota in Japan, and it's designed to not only rotate— if the ground goes, it'll rotate— but it'll elongate. The Japanese have been making this pipe for, for 50 years, and They've had great results. It survived the— you know what, it survived the March 11th, 2011 earthquake. So I guess that's been a few years, but they've had a lot of success with this pipe. And so we're putting it in. 590 feet of this pipe are going in. So where we're at today is back into January. Um, we awarded the contract to W.W. Clyde for the construction of this project. And the idea, the plan is to have final completion through spring or summer of 2027. We have been doing public involvement because this is going to have some impacts to people up in this area. Since 2021, when we started the environmental process, we've had 4 public meetings. One was held at Foothill Elementary. The other 3 at our offices were just across the street. We've knocked doors, we've sent postcards to everybody. We've done a lot of work. We've also hired Florox Engineers as our public involvement managers. They've been with us since 2021 on this project. So through constructions, we have a number of ways that we plan on notifying the public through flyers and texting. Service will be sending out postcards and signage along the corridor. And then there's the normal communication channels that we have— a website, an email, and a phone number. And I noticed today that Farm City's Facebook page had this presentation. Not that I was on Facebook during work. So 2025, this is a picture of a cross-section of what we'll be doing in roadways at 1060. This year's construction is all about moving the utilities that are there to make room for this 9-foot diameter welded steel pipe. So we're relocating the sewers, laterals and lines, and the water lines and the storm drains to the outside. Um, also during 2025, we've communicated to the people that there will be some disruptions. We've been coordinating with Postal Service, uh, waste collection, and then, you know, a lot of these people along the corridor have, you know, property maintenance and other services that come to the house. We've been talking to all of them. Contractor today is, is starting to put together his construction yard.

So if you see—

there'll be Clyde's trucks up in that area. We do have a construction yard just off 800 North there by Foothill Elementary that'll be fully fenced and secured.

Um, who owns that land where you'll have the construction site?

This one?

Yeah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And there you've got a permit to utilize that?

We leased it for 2— for 25 months. Yeah. Okay.

I asked that same question right before you began.

And then this is—

this property is owned by Todd Peterson, and the federal government owns this piece. So starting next week, we'll, we'll see the first impacts, um, because we are relocating everything to the outside of the road as far as we can. We'll be cutting through the root balls of these trees. they're gonna have to come down. We think we'll kill them. So we've, we've communicated that to the people. And oddly, most— I don't know if it's odd, but they don't like these kinds of trees. They're a flowering pear. They're dirty and stink. So because the tunnel has a horizontal curve in it, we'll have to be doing some blasting. as well. You'll hear it, especially up in the neighborhood, but it's safe and it's controlled and only professionals will be doing that work.

Is that gonna—

what could—

is there a possibility of any vibrations?

Some vibration, but we've looked at that and it's far away enough that it's stuck on the hillside.

Okay.

It won't be too bad. We will be putting out some vibration monitors. So make sure what's going on.

That's a good point. We also will be, we will be contacting 88 property owners that live in the near vicinity and offering a service where we go in and video their houses so that if something is damaged during construction, we can fix it. Crack drywall or drywall or cracks in the foundation.

So So that would be nice.

2026 is a much bigger type of an impact with the 9-inch or the 9-foot diameter pipeline that will be going in the roadway at 1060 North. That means that up to 3 weeks folks will not be able to get into their driveways.

How do you, how do you deal with, say, if you wind up, you know, with cracks in the driveways but they're already there?

And that's why we'll video it.

So we're going to video all the property and everything.

And some of the residents up there have said, you know what, we've got some cracks. Our contractor, W.M. Clyde, is going to have flown LiDAR, which is a little bit more—

can be accurate than they video the site, you know, at least the corridor.

But we're offered to get into the houses, take inside pictures and videos.

The foundations, walls, doors, windows, and all that kind of—

so if it's, if it's, if it's damaged before we start, then we don't offer to fix that.

We make it worse, that's something we can negotiate with. Yeah, I was just curious too. Um, so you said that other pipe, the mainline pipe, is 7.5 feet tall?

The existing one?

Yeah, but I mean the big one that this ties into, right?

Right.

Um, I'm just curious why they would go 9 feet. If that's something—

We need 9 feet because we're— we have more distance, so we have more, uh, friction losses, and we also have more bends. We have to make, make the pipe bigger so you have more pressure. So that's why it's—

if we left it the same size, we wouldn't be able to get the 450 cubic feet per second that we need.

We're constrained on either side of what can go through the pipe.

We can only put 450 in there. But I don't know if that makes sense. I know, it's an engineering thing. One of our engineers has a very good representation. He said, envision 450 chickens passing you every second. That's what 450 CFS looks like. So a cubic foot is like the size of a chicken.

Or if you don't like chickens, basketballs.

But the longer you make it, the more side friction there is. So, so if we were to leave it 7.5 feet, I suspect—

and we didn't model it— but you maybe only get 400 cubic feet per second through there.

And there's more bends, even though you're feeding it with 7.5 feet. Excuse me?

Even though you're feeding it with 7.5 feet.

Yeah, because those, those ends are fine.

It's the middle piece we got to make bigger.

Yeah. And the 2 places that we're putting in the hazard— hazard pipe, hazard resilient pipe, is only 104 inches. So it even necks down a little bit there, but we're okay. Our engineers over there have told me they've modeled it.

So yep, okay, we're gonna get the pressure you need.

There's 17 homes that will have accesses or their driveways blocked in 2026. And we have a temporary parking lot off 1560. This parking lot will be also a location, central location for our security that we'll have in 2026, 24/7. They will also provide a shuttle service. to these residents while they're out, why they can't drive into their driveways.

Um, I have a question for you.

Oh, you're going to answer maybe.

Go ahead.

I just talked with a resident this morning who was concerned about this and emergency access, who lives in this area.

Contractor is required to provide emergency access.

And like, I think she was concerned.

She said that, you know, it could take up to 15 minutes to get to your house, and that could be life or death in a health situation. And I guess there's some Neighbors there that might have some health situations.

There, and we talked to some of those, and we will work with them. If we know, then we can— we will work with the neighbors and the contractor.

We've got a great contractor, and it's like an emergency situation.

I guarantee you they're not going to say, look, I got 15 minutes, I don't care about that. I think it's going to be whatever we can do, we will help. You have to haul them in. We can coordinate also, and we plan on coordinating.

We anticipate some reassurance for the homeowners based on whatever their medical emergency is, with some advice up front and reassurance that we'll be there on time. And it's kind of like the pre-plan, right?

Yeah, get ready for any contingency is what you're saying, right?

And especially there's, you know, some older folks are more prone to Potential problems. So if you know where they're at, you can deal with that easier. Yeah. So they have a 12-foot sidewalk splash and that'll have all the trees gone. And so in an emergency, you've got a 12-foot lane that's not being used by the contractor.

So, and they actually did that in Eagle Mountain one time. I was at a thing and their city council said, there were cars parked in the street, the fire truck couldn't get down the middle, so they just went on the front lawns all the way across.

So you guys get where you need to be, right?

Yeah, we'd like to avoid people's front lawns.

I'm sure you would.

And I, I think it would be awesome if they had, like, I'm sure you'll do this, but just a point person that they can call, know, in those unique situations, if there's an issue they can call.

The contractor will have one, and then we've got Macy as ours, or me. I The idea is to have, you know, faces to this project that people feel comfortable with.

Me, you know, I said I grew up here in Orem, so some of those people I went to school with, I think that point where you just said, you know, we'll be cutting down those trees and there will be a path if you need one. You know, to me, that would give— that would give me peace if I lived up there.

Thank you.

You guys, the last slide is just this warm city facilities. I talked about sewer water and storm drain being reconstructed, but we're also going to repave the hall routes, all the shaded kind of roads there, and I added them up. So 1.5 miles of emergency access, we plan on doing it. Oh, workshop.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Some time, we got a year. Anyway, that's my presentation. Are there any other questions?

I think we're good.

If you get people calling, please point them to the— she's hard to behavior.

Thank you, that'd be great for just—

I'm just—

oh, I'm sorry, I'll just think about that.

So the city's been working—

so we're going to transition now to the next topic here, but I just wanted to say that the city's been working closely with Chris and Central Utah and Fawn Crackers, also McKenna back here McKenna is with Horrocks. She's the PIO, and she's on staff in case there's any emergency and anything that needs to be pushed out to the public, including things like safety for children. We had a meeting with ASD this morning, and that was one of the items that we— that would probably brought up that we talked about was on our mind— safety, uh, for children to access walking to school, the foot build, and through this construction zone and so forth. So they're keenly aware of the needs and concerns of the community and of our children's safety. So, um, they have my confidence that they'll move forward very well. With that, uh, Madam Council, we have a presentation tonight on our master plans. We are updating our master plans on a frequency of about every 4 to 5 years.

The first master plan that we did in the last—

well, it was about 2015, Pete, and '16, and when we started our Public Works Advisory Commission back then. Tom McDonald has council member was our representative on Public Works Advisory Commission back in 2015, and he's on there today.

So we're grateful that we've come full circle, that, that, uh, Mr.

McDonald's been there along the way with us.

So with that, I'd like to introduce Keith Larson from Bone Collins and Associates.

Keith has, uh, been, uh, with, with his firm for over 20 years, and he's done our master plans and has His company's been a part of this, and we feel like he's a great team player in helping us to produce a great map moving forward in the future for all of our utilities, including sewer, water, and storm. So I'll turn the time over to you, Keith.

Great, thank you. So I have the job to combine years of work on 3 different utilities into a short period. So I'm going to go really fast on this, but I'm happy to slow down for any questions that you have.

You were there too, 10 years ago.

I was, yeah.

We had lots of fun back then. So just a quick history. As Chris mentioned, we in 2016, we did kind of a big reboot of the master plans, we created new models of your system, we did a lot of public outreach, created some financial plans moving forward. It was kind of a big look at things. In 2021, we made some updates. And big ones were we removed your vineyard water obligations. You had an obligation to provide water to vineyard. That has changed. So we took that out of the plan. We made some shifts in density and water use based on conservation. And there was also a shift at the time to do a little bit more bonding than it's a pay-as-you-go. So we made that shift. 2025, Lots of additional things to look at, conservation and density again, and then kind of a relook at finances. And that's, that's a pretty big deal. I want to just talk about this particular update, some specific things, and finances are going to be important. We did reduce density along the State Street corridor as part of this master plan in association with some changes in your land use planning that you made.

I'm sorry, what does that mean?

Reduced density? Along the master plan to remove?

Oh, okay.

How's your request?

Yes.

You're talking water?

Yeah, sorry. Density, number of persons and houses along State Street. Thank you. You have also done some significant items relative to conservation, and numbers have continued to drop In terms of water use, people are using water more efficiently, more effectively. One other big change that occurred this go-around is our stormwater strategy. So the plan now is to eliminate infiltration from stormwater sumps in the 250-day groundwater protection zone. I don't know what that means, so I'm going to come back and look at that here in a second. In fact, I'm just gonna wait on that. we can talk storm drain in detail. But there's a fairly significant change that we've made there. And then the other thing I wanted to note on the economic conditions, inflation has been a bugger for everybody over the last 5 years. And this is nowhere more observed than in infrastructure construction spending. Over the last 5 years, we have literally seen our costs doubled. You see in the news 10% per year or 12% per year.

That—

it is— it has doubled for us on the infrastructure side. So you're going to see some relatively big numbers in terms of needed system investment. And I wish I could change global economics, but that's, that's where we're at. And that's how we've gotten to where we are today. Okay, so with that said, I'm going to talk demographics, then water, sewer, storm. Relative to demographics, this is a little hard to read at this size, but highlighted in the big black areas are areas of focused growth in the city and additional density. This is based on your updated general plan. You can see the population does not actually increase that much more moving forward. We're talking about a 10% increase from about 100,000 people, a little less than that now, to around 110,000. And that's based on your general plan and expected demographic changes moving forward. So that's about all I'm going to say on that, but that represents the areas of growth that we're looking at. Okay, water. Let's talk about some real great things that are going on. What this represents is your historic water use is shown with the black dots and the dashed lines there, and projected future water use are shown by these other lines. Your supplies are shown with the area in the background. And so right now, the state of Utah projects that dashed black line up the top based on some historic water use. But the thing about the state of Utah is that over time, they look at how you're conserving, and they will adjust downward. And so we can look in more detail to see what your projections of water use look like in the future. And we project that even if you didn't conserve more than you have recently, you'd only be at this blue line. And if you continue to conserve in association with the state's conservation goals, we see this orange line here. The good news of all that is you have enough water from an annual basis to be able to supply your water needs. You have done a good job preparing for the future to meet those water needs. We look at not only on an annual basis, but we look at a peak day and we say, do you have enough water to Serve your customers during the hottest day in July. And again, what you see is the orange line is our projection, and your supplies are in really great shape in order to be able to supply those demands. And I won't spend more time on that because it's great news that you're in, you're in good shape. There's a lot of people who are looking for water, and you have what you need.

For the foreseeable future.

We also do a detailed analysis of your storage. And for existing conditions, and this actually stems back to your 2020 numbers, you're just about 10 million gallons short of storage. The reason for that is a shift away from reliance on storage provided by Central Utah Water Conservancy District. to the city's own resources. And you actually have recently completed most of your 10 million gallon reservoir with completion of a few remaining facilities that will bring that storage online, and you will be satisfying that. So you're in good shape there. At build out, you do need a little extra, a little more, 6 to 7 million gallons more. over time that will be added.

So that's good news is you're getting there today, and over time we'll get the rest of the way.

I just want to show this briefly. There's a lot of data here, but we assemble a computer model of your system, and we look at being able to deliver water to your customers. And essentially, if you— this is where you are today. And what you'd like to see is a lot of the little green dots, 60 pounds per square inch, 60 PSI or greater, during the worst times of the summer. And this represents where you are today. And you can see we're in good shape in a lot of the city. In the middle of the city, we're a little bit lower than we'd like to be, but we do meet all the State of Utah standards in those areas. We'd like it to be just a little bit more. However, once we get out to 2065, you can see that without any improvements, we would have some significant deficiencies there. The red represents areas where we are not compliant with the State of Utah.

What's the dark yellow?

The dark yellow, kind of the orangish there? Well, whatever we haven't been existing—

one of those here in the middle.

So those pressures, the kind of lighter yellow is 50 to 60.

But is that bad?

Is that okay?

50 to 60, you probably start getting a couple of phone calls. It's okay. It meets state standards.

Red, you get a lot of phone calls.

Red would get a lot of phone calls and would also not be compliant with state of Utah standards. So you would also receive nasty letters.

Can I ask that?

Upon existing, does that include our detank well and booster station?

Uh, no.

So once those go into place, actually this central area gets resolved for the most part. So this is before those improvements go in place.

So what creates the red dots in the middle of the gold?

So is that an on-site problem?

So what's happening is you have water Most of your water is coming up from the northeast corner where you have the treatment plant that we just talked about. 60% of your water comes from there, and you're trying to get it into the, into the city. Now, down at the bottom, those houses are low enough that they have enough pressure that they can get across. But right here in the middle, at the edge of the bluff, what's happening is all that water demand is sucking on the straw really hard. And the friction losses are causing the pressures to drop in the middle. So it's like you have this big hole in the middle of the city where you're sucking the water as hard as you can, but it's trying to come from the edges and it can't keep up with, with the, with the demand. So if we don't make any kind of improvement there, those pressures are going to drop. So that's our master plan, is to make some improvements.

I guess I mean, like, on State Street, those— that grouping of red dots right above your big group of red dots.

Oh, these here?

Yeah.

What is that?

Yeah, you know, that— that I'd have to look in the model to know specifically, but it is probably a section that's a small line that needs some attention of some sort.

And we update those too.

Just remember, this is if we do nothing. So we have a plan to make sure that this doesn't happen. To what Chris said, the 10 million gallon tank and the new well will resolve a lot over that area.

In the west side, right?

The west side. That buildup, what that projection shows though, is buildup based on the data that's provided by the governor's office and management budget. And those numbers are, in my opinion, very high.

They're showing that in 2065, our buildup population will be around Almost 130,000.

And I don't think the city's going to go there, which means we're going to— those numbers are based on those extreme values. And I think maybe we'll be close to maybe 110,000 to 120,000. I don't know, but we're using those numbers. So that's worst-case scenario based on a land use that this council will adopt or modify over time between now and 2065. Mayor, I have a question. So with the work that's being done now, it's going to make the west side better. Doesn't that leave pressure on the east side and make the east side better too at the same time? That's right, theoretically. Yeah, yeah. So, go ahead. I just have—

so, oh, can I ask my question quick?

So I'm gonna say 28 years ago they redid State Street.

Do you remember they dug all that up and that was supposed to be a 50-year—

every, every 50 years they do that up to First North?

Yep.

So is there a new extension of that they're going to do in the near future? Does that affect this?

Not to my knowledge.

A concrete road, I don't think, is in, is in, is in the works there, but they will be reconstructing in the future as needed.

But didn't they do new pipes? Didn't they do all new infrastructure on State Street?

Yeah, we did. Okay, we put in all new pipes, all new utilities.

That's going to be the same.

We don't have to change any of that to help this.

Yeah, it appears not.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I have—

so, so here's the plan, basically, of how to get rid of the red in the middle.

And the critical item is that new 10 million gallon tank, pump station, and some additional pipelines to be able to Out from that, and what was really driving that was the the peak day at usually it's about like five o'clock in the morning when everybody's sprinklers come on and the demands really hit the system. Now what we have is we have that large tank there. We have a booster station. We can supply water during that period of time, meet the demands, and avoid. Pressure elsewhere in this, in the city. In the long term, we also have to make some improvements up in that northeast, potentially add some additional storage. We have one new well to be able to serve up in the north area. And that's the, that's the master plan. I will tell you from having done a lot of these, these are relatively minor improvements. The price tag won't make it look that way, but your city is in really great shape and well positioned for the future.

Well, if I could just add, we're kind of shifting from we're deficient in this large tank and the well. We do need another well, but we're starting— we will begin a significant effort to start maintaining the system. system better by replacing aging pipelines and things like that. So we, we will continue— our rates need to be adjusted in order to continue, uh, or to— I shouldn't say continue, but to more aggressively improve our system. Okay, Chris, just out of curiosity, um, where that new water tank is on the northeast? No, not Northeast, the one that works down 4 South.

Okay.

Where that is, does that mainly help pressure like downhill from there, or does it help in a circle all the way around equally? Well, so, so what happens is the pressure is resolved really by putting the new well in and the booster station in, and that will boost water into the system.

We're going to fill the tank with water that we're pumping out of the ground from the well.

And then we're going to take that water out of the tank and boost it into the system through the booster station. We will also be able—

which will also prevent water from passing through the city from the Don A.

Christianson Water Treatment Plant all the way down to the Southwest Storm.

It's not going to do that anymore. We're going to have that new source in town, and then we're going to retain that water in the northeast part of the community as much as we can by installing these facilities as we've done. Also, that tank will be able to provide enough head or pressure To the southwest part of town without pressurizing it or boosting it out of that tank.

It'll be gravity-fed from that tank.

So it'll have a 2-pronged purpose there. So, so the net result would be it should be pretty equal around that entire—

Yes, it affects that whole area there, including— it actually improves pressures all the way up to the east. Yeah, um, not as much because they're closer to the other source, but But it improves for really the entire city.

And that zone that that's in is called the central zone. And that takes up about 60-65% of our geographic area of the 19 square miles of the city of Warren. So that's a substantial portion.

Yeah.

Right.

And we're also—

we're changing our location of our storage facility, not putting all of our eggs in one basket at Northeast Warren. We're diversifying it a little. That up in the northeast part of town is closer to the Wasatch Fault, as we just learned in that last presentation, which is very concerning.

This is isolated in a separate and away from that area.

So it's hard to summarize everything in just a couple of bullets, but I think these are kind of the most important ones. Complete the wastewater reuse project. That helps you with some demands in southwest corner. Uh, complete your 2 new wells, one at the 10 million gallon and one to the north. Finish the facilities associated with the 10 million gallon storage reservoir. And then, as Reed mentioned, we do need to start thinking about continued system investment, specifically sustainable levels. So, real quick story. And this is true for all of your resources. When your original assets were built, They weren't built using funds from the water fund. They were built using impact fees or developer contributions or individual homeowner improvements, so that basically the cost of the water system original construction was built into your mortgage, into the cost of your home. So that's great. That has served us well for the last 50 to 70 years, but we are getting to the point where those facilities need to be replaced. And not only that, they are now under asphalt and they have a bunch of utilities around them, and so they are much more expensive than they used to be. I bring this up because this is a challenge that is being faced by every community of your vintage along the Wasatch Front. I'm doing a study for Springville, for Provo, for Salt Lake City, for Murray City, and all of them are looking at double-digit rate increases because of the need to fund their infrastructure. I'm not doing your rate study, but I bring this up because I think this is going to be a challenge moving forward is how do we fund these improvements? How do we make, make this affordable for our residents, but still responsibly invest in our system? And it's a major shift. People say, how come we haven't had to pay that much in the past? But this is a major shift that is being faced by our aging cities. So even though your system is in great shape, you've done a real good job with it. This last one, continued system investment, is is going to be a challenge moving forward.

And that's just— And Keith, just to highlight this example in terms of well number 1 replacement. Well number 1, the numbers are chronological. So that was the city's first well, at least out of all the current ones that we have. 1958, it was built. 1958, same time as our water reclamation facility.

Same here.

And it's good producing well.

And, you know, if you can get— so what's that, you're coming up on 70 years?

Almost 70 years.

Well, that's, that's, that's pretty good lifespan for, for a well, especially one that was built that long ago.

Yeah.

With that technology.

With the technology that's available. I have a chart so you can kind of visually see what is in the spreadsheet that Reed handed out. These are the dollars that need to be invested, projected to be invested in your water system over the next 10 years. You have a big group in 2026 as you continue to finish some of these fundamental projects and then continuing to invest in the system moving forward. Okay, I'm ready to move to sewer. Is everybody else? Okay, um, let's talk sewer for just a second. Um, so, uh, here are your sewer flow projections. Uh, our previous projections were at the gray line. The updated projections are at the black line. And one thing that is really great about these projections They have dropped within your current water reclamation facility capacity. So we are not projecting a large need for future capacity. There are a lot of asset rehabilitation needs at the facility, but capacity, it's looking pretty good.

Are we thinking we'll continue to service other cities that we serve there, or will they do their own thing, or will— are we going to go to the hip for We're joined at the hip. To get a new treatment plant for these other communities would be nearly impossible. Cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive.

And from a regulatory standpoint, the state would unlikely to issue a permit.

Yeah.

So we've got to figure out not only our needs, but Vineyard, which is growing much faster than we are, and Lyndon, which is probably growing a little faster than we are. Yeah, we take just a portion of Vineyard's flow. We met with them just yesterday. to explain in detail what their responsibilities are when it comes to paying for their portion and impact on our facility.

And how about Lyndon?

Do we service them? Yes, Lyndon as well, the entire city. Okay. And part of it goes where, if not to us?

To the—

Special Service District.

To the north.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Are we subsidizing at all that, or are they paying their own way?

They're paying—

they're paying their And, and is that—

they're paying also, are they putting in for future infrastructure improvements?

Uh, or just our current?

We've told them yes. We've told them we provided this plan to them and said, this is what we need to do. Be ready to pay for it.

So the same percentage we're putting for future infrastructure improvements, they're also contributing as their payment to us?

Yes, we have agreements with them currently under, under its current service providing that we're providing right now. But we are going to create new additional agreements that'll take care of— take into account what we're talking about here for the treatment plant. Vineyard is at 2.1%, and then I think Linden is at just under 13% obligation. So, so 15% of it is going to be paid for by others, not us. And to give you a visual, 4th South, South and 4th South is what we take. north, south, north goes to TSSD. So it's a relatively small, small area, but they, they do participate and pay for their impact.

So what's the preparation for Utah City?

That'd be further north.

That's north of us.

So they're definitely going there.

And I will emphasize that everything we've done has included the projected growth in those areas. So we're—

we are prepared for those.

Here's again the model results, maybe less time to spend on this, but just note the red is up through orange is okay. Red is not so good. Black is definitely a concern.

And this—

the concern here would be getting backups into our homes. So we really want to avoid that. You can see existing looks really great. There's a couple of little flat sections of pipe, but we've actually looked at those and they should be— they're okay until the proposed time to put in some improvements. You can see that even at 2065, things look really good, except as you get down closer to the treatment plant. Some of that growth coming from vineyard elsewhere is beginning to put some strain on the system and needs some improvements. So the recommended improvements from a capacity standpoint are identified here. You can see they're relatively small again.

So— Again, that's capacity. That's how much water you get through. Then we'll talk about conditions.

Um, look, I didn't edit the orange here.

We know what you're gonna say.

So bullet item number 1, the previous page, we have those collection. Bullet item number 3 is the continued system investment that we need to put in, and I'm gonna give it to Reed.

Yeah.

The Orem Water Reclamation Facility improvements is something that you're all familiar with. We've talked about it in the past. It's why we increased our rates $4.50 on the base rate last year in anticipation of all of these improvements. Since, since then, we've been meeting with our engineer and designing the things that we need for our water reclamation facility. We're moving forward. as if we're— we'll be adequately funded to do so. And so the second sheet that I handed out details all of the improvements over the next 8 years that we need to do at the water reclamation facility. It's heavy almost on the front end because there are some significant needs that we have. But Again, this, this is just what's contained. What's highlighted in yellow there is what we've identified in the capital facilities plan, and that we've discussed with you in the past. So it's, it's, it's pricey.

So this chart shows both the collection system improvements, that's your pipelines, in green, and then the reclamation facility in yellow. And as we mentioned, 2026 is a big number.

That's $40 million number there. So, so he talked about the capacity. There are pipes that we need to increase capacity on. We will continue to have an aggressive pipelining effort where we go in and instead of excavating the pipe, We're putting a liner inside. If it's a 10-inch pipe, we put a liner and it decreases the diameter a little bit, but it's essentially a new pipe and it's a fraction of the cost of actually excavating it. We've been doing about $1 million per year for the past several years. We'll continue to do that, even expand that. And also, we are an aging community. There are pipes that can't be lined because of how old they are. And we will, we will address those needs as well with, with these rates, with, with this plan.

Okay, and last, stormwater. Stormwater, we have a couple of challenges to address specifically in stormwater. The first is the abandonment of the West Union Canal and West Smith Ditch. And in fact, I'm going to go to—

yeah, let's just go to a couple figures here.

These are some major canals and ditches that exist in your community. Specifically, the large blue here is the West Union and West Smith Ditch. With the reduction in agricultural activities These are being phased out. They have historically been used to carry stormwater. And so at each of these different points, the ABCD all the way through, those are areas where you traditionally have discharged water into these ditches. So that needs to be resolved before the canals can be totally taken out of service. So, as part of the master plan, we have a plan To either remove those areas or to replace the canal with another facility that will, will take the stormwater.

So that's one big issue, that back in the day it was convenient to put stormwater there, it was close, cheap. We're paying for it now. Good point.

Okay, the next item is well protection zones. So, if you look basically at the center of each of these little red areas here, you will find a well. And those wells have what are called well protection zones. So, as they pump water, they are pulling water from the soil and the aquifer around them. And we can measure or estimate how much time it takes for the water to get from one point to the well. So these red areas are 250-day zones. That's how far the water will come in 250 days. The orange is 3-year, and the yellow is 15-year. In our '21— in our 2021 master plan, we had a plan to pull— okay, back up. One way that you deal with stormwater in your community is through the use of groundwater sumps. These are basically large manholes that take water from the street and put it down into the ground. And that works really well in Orem because of your bench. And so it was a great way to solve stormwater issues in the past. However, we are beginning to see, or we— I don't know that we're even beginning to see, we have some concerns that if that water ends up getting into one of our wells, our culinary wells, that would adversely affect our ability to supply our citizens. And so with that in mind, in 2021, we put together a plan and we tried to get rid of all the sums that were in both the 250-day zone and the 3-year zone. So all the red and orange here. In looking at that, there were a lot of really expensive improvements that had to go into that. And so as part of this master plan, we've taken a little more compromised, nuanced approach where We are eliminating all the sumps in the 250-day zone. And in that 3-year zone, we're going to eliminate the ones that are easy. We're going to pick up some here and there, but we're going to allow some to remain to be able to avoid some really expensive costs associated with storm drain. So that has been revised to kind of— As a compromise. In terms of protecting our well, but also not burdening our citizens with really high costs. Anything else you would say to that?

Are you piping them?

What are you doing?

Yeah, in most cases, what will happen is we will bring a pipe into the sump, we'll eliminate the sump, and just connect the catch basin that's catching the water directly to the pipe. and pipe it to somewhere outside of the well protection zone.

Okay.

Yeah.

So there will still continue to be quite a few sumps in the city, but there will also be additional stormwater facilities. And that's actually— these maps identify both red, orange, and yellow, kind of a priority 1, 2, and 3 pipelines to be added. And if you compare this to the 2021 master plan, you would see that we've eliminated a number of pipes, kind of downsized it a little bit, but still captured the essential ones. There are still quite a few pipes in this plan to be able to accomplish. This is the north end of town, and this is the south end of town. So what we did, and you can see there's some more improvements down in the southwest area because there have historically not been facilities down that area. What we did was we took this and then prioritize those in terms of what needed to happen. This is the whole city. And we've identified those that we would recommend to happen in the next 10 years. And those are all contained in the master plan in detail. Just in terms of summary, summarizing what we recommend, we're going to address existing deficiencies of there's any areas of flooding, we can do that. We will address the connections to the West Union and West Smith Ditch where they're— those areas, the ditches are being eliminated. And then we'll begin the process of addressing the well protection concerns, specifically eliminating those sumps.

So I don't think we get that all done in the 10 years, but we make take a good, uh, good chunk of that.

Okay, uh, I'm almost done.

Thanks for hanging in with me.

Uh, these are the stormwater costs, and you can see that these are a little, uh, little lower than the other. And I actually put one last slide in here, uh, which was just to compare the, the different utilities. Again, yellow's water reclamation, green is the sewer system, Blue, or the light blue, is the storm, and then the blue is the water system. So kind of seeing what your expenditures fall out over the next several years. So I think this is kind of the first step in terms of informing you where the plan is and what the projects are. And then there'll be some additional steps.

Yeah, so moving forward, this, this is the plan. It's similar to what we did with our public works advisory Advisory Commission. Um, we informed them of what was in the plan, then we told them, uh, at one meeting, that's what we're doing here, uh, and then we, uh, told them, showed them what our financial planner suggests that we do, uh, in order to finance these or to make sure that, that we could, we could pay for these projects. Um, and that was at another meeting. So in 2 weeks we plan to, uh, come to you with our, with our financial consultant, Lewis Robertson, LRV Finance, uh, Fred Philpott, who you've, uh, all heard from before. Um, we've been working closely with him to, uh, come up with creative— the, the, the most, uh, conscientious way of, of funding these, these improvements that are, that are so, so necessary. So on April— sorry, on March 24th, Fred will be here with Chris and myself. Keith, you can come if you want.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you. Nothing I love better. Yeah. And Fred will talk about the ways that we recommend that we move forward to finance these. 2 weeks after that, Fred will come back. Uh, and he will talk about impact fees.

He's—

their firm is, is, uh, looking at all 8 impact fees that are currently charged. Um, ours are— the utility fees are probably the ones that are changing the most, and, and probably need— I don't want to say more attention, but you'll probably be more interested in, in those. And he'll be here on April 8th to discuss those. And Between all of these different sources, that will be our recommendation to the City Council to approve a path moving forward during this and to adopt necessary changes to our fees and charges in order for us to accomplish these projects. Now that we've presented the plans to you, I want to get them in your hands so that the handouts that I gave you can can look to learn more about those projects. So I'll work with, uh, with Bren and Teresa to, to give you access to, uh, those documents, and, uh, feel free to review them, uh, ask questions between now and— we've got, we've got about another month before we, uh, hope to take action on this. And I would anticipate that, uh, final adoption of, or approval adoption of the master plan would occur as a consent item Um, at one of the next couple of, of, uh, of city council meetings. So that's, that's the path, uh, moving forward. So, um, before— all right, before we— I ask for any additional questions, I did want to recognize Jim Michaelis sitting in the back and Robert Moore. Jim Michaelis is the chair of our Public Works Advisory Commission, does a great job. Um, keeping that, that wild group contained. And then Robert Moore is a member of the Public Works Advisory Commission as well, and, uh, we appreciate them being here and offering their support. They've— the Public Works Advisory Commission's been a great resource to us to bounce ideas off of and to have good, good discussion where it's, it's not necessarily a unified group Um, we're not force-feeding them. They, they tell us what their concerns are. Um, and some are very pro, um, improvements, and others are pro-improvement, but man, that's pretty expensive. And we, we, you know, I'm preaching to the choir here. So, uh, anyway, we, we see the Public Works Advisory Commission as a valuable resource to us and If they're a resource to us, they're a resource to you as well. So we appreciate them being here and the efforts that they have made to become informed on this. So with that, any final questions for me, Chris, or Keith? I'm just going to say, as far as my perspective, that's something I'm pretty interested in as far as the process of how we got to here. Um, you know, and just, I mean, did we accept every recommendation? Did we pare it down?

You know, because you've got a combination of, you know, all the infrastructure that's got to be built.

That's one whole thing that's worked out. Then you've got a financial piece that's all got to be worked out. So I'm just curious if there's— that's pretty dynamic.

So Jim's our chair.

We've had quite a discussion. it hasn't been a rubber stamp. I, I'd also add that that's why we hire these consultants. They're the ones who are most keyed into how we address, um, how, how a community needs to address aging infrastructure. They need to be the experts and tell us this is what you need to do, um, and then we need to question what they, uh, what they're recommending so that we understand and can explain to the citizens why these improvements are needed. The members on PWAC too, we had—

so Jim was on our, ironically, on our, on our commission back in 2014 when we started this, and he might have been our chair back then too, but—

No, I wasn't.

He wasn't. So, but he left, he served the mission and did other things, and we recruited him back, and now he's willing to serve in our community as well.

And so he was, he was the Utah Valley University facility manager for that, for the entire campus.

So he knows a thing or two about how to manage facilities, aging infrastructure, and so forth.

He's brought great insight and brought some excellent ideas and recommendations. Robert Moore is legal counsel for Central Utah Water Conservancy District, so he has the legal mind, and he's been around a lot of big projects too as a part of an affiliation with Central Utah Water Conservancy District. Mike Wimpey is on that committee— or excuse me, he's on the commission as well. And he's a lead engineer, staff engineer at Central Utah Water Conservancy District, and others then in a variety of areas, technology and so forth, fiber optics, and very sharp-minded people that have been involved with this from a variety of different professions. And so we really appreciate their support and their help and assistance with this, 'cause we couldn't do this without them. So— I can maybe just, Highlight a couple of points of evidence that suggest that the group has been thoughtful. One, they went through a prioritization process on all the different needs for potential projects. And 2, I think the attitude has been progress over perfection. Or in other words, there's a growing into— there's a phasing of the projects over time. So Both of those things are evidence of the attitude that I think has been applied into this semester process. And so then I'll just commit that, as per usual, as we then transition and talk about how to finance this, it'll be with that same attitude. Multi-pronged phase to make progress over time. multi-pronged sources of funding, which won't be just the monthly rates. It'll be impact fees, grants, special financing. And Mayor knows more than most because we just got back from a trip back east to, to look into federally subsidized financing. that we would expect would be a big part of our how to, to be able to pay for some of these big numbers that you're seeing. Do you want to throw out a teaser for 2 weeks?

The interest rate maybe, or just hold it back?

That's a great way to start.

Go ahead, Chris. Well, so with the funding, uh, there was an article in the paper just recently regarding Salt Lake City Public Utilities, they received a $350 million loan through RIFIA funding. It's federal funding, it's subsidized funding at an interest rate of 1.74%. Okay, the, the Tre—

they follow the Treasury. The Treasury rate is what, Mayor, today?

Uh, 4.2. 4.2.

So they're subsidizing it, uh, 2.5 points. And we're looking at that, we're going after it.

And it's a lengthy process, an arduous process.

We feel like we have great— a great story to tell, and we have a great need. And also, most of these— a lot of these issues here we're talking about are unfunded mandates regarding our water reclamation facility. So we figure they need to have a little skin in the game.

That 2.5% sounds good to us. If we can get that, follow what Salt Lake City has done.

There are other entities that have gone after WIFIA funding who have been denied.

And so we're hopeful we can get it.

Otherwise, our, you know, our bond rates probably will be on the order of 4 to 5%, which is not as favorable.

If we can get this funding that we're working on, that'll be a huge win for Warren, right? Save a lot of money. Yeah. And next week, we—

I think we have a really good, well-thought-out plan with our financial advisor. I think you'll be happy to see the rates that we're looking at.

They're going to be increasing, but it's in a very responsible manner over an extended period of time.

And who doesn't like first-world amenities, right?

Amen.

So, and so just to put words in your mouth, but when you do a business plan, you come up with really conservative estimates, expected estimate, best case kind of thing. But what is that what we're winding up with here? It's our sense that we're not scrimping, you know, and cutting costs. because we're trying to save money, but we're trying to do what's the most optimum. So probably that center line in a business plan. That makes sense.

Yeah. And you're referring specifically to the, just the, the projections overall, the cost?

It's just the cost projections. The things that we've decided, okay, these are all the things we're going to do. And this is what it looks like mapping it out. Yeah, I mean, I would guess that there's an option where we spend a lot more money than this. Yeah, absolutely. There's an option where we can spend less. I'm just trying to verify that this is the optimal path that you guys recommend based on all your experience and everything.

Well, I will tell you what we've recommended is kind of, uh, we think it's a responsible plan, but we don't think it's overly aggressive. I do think if you were to cut back from this plan, you were starting to kick costs down the road a little bit. What I like to tell councils is you, you don't get to choose if you spend the money. You just get to choose when you spend the money and how much. You can spend a little bit today, or you can spend more tomorrow. And that's sort of how, how life is. And so we've set the plan up to try to, try to optimize that.

Which one of these $20 million plus numbers were the little number? Yeah, one on the left.

Okay, good.

Either way, it's a lot or a whole lot. Yeah.

And I recognize I'm not trying to minimize the dollar numbers that we're talking about.

About.

These are big dollars. But I will point out that though, what you spend for water is probably on the order of 35 to 40 cents per person per day. And if you think of the benefits that you get at 40 cents per person per day, to be able to shower, to be able to drink, to be able to water our yards, that's it's still one of the best deals in town, in my opinion.

And in 2 weeks, we're going to show you that it is the best deal in town.

We're not saying anything else.

I just want to add, thank you for thinking of this. I think we've seen across the country infrastructure failures and the way they impact people, either service delivery, you know, or even dangerous. I appreciate your thinking about this proactively and helping us get on the right path. And Robert and Jim, thanks for your many years of service.

We really do appreciate it.

Most of this happens and the average citizen has no idea how lucky we are.

They only notice if it doesn't. Our water reuse facility will be open in about 2 months for a ribbon cutting. You'll be getting information soon. $40 million project that was estimated at what, Keith? Yeah, seriously, prior to our, uh, to COVID, ARPA funding, the world imploding and everything, that's what we were looking at.

And then everything went crazy.

He was talking about 20% increases every year annually, and that's what happened.

And so we had to shake down the money trees everywhere we could. Thank you.

Thank you, man.

Thank you.

All right, next up we've got our 1.3. This is a presentation supporting foreign businesses, the Business Alliance, the UVU Resource Center, streamlined licensing and state reinvestment. Kathy Lewis. May I counsel perhaps to just kind of preface and Get things going. We wanted to come back at least annually to give you kind of general economic update so that you know, I mean, obviously, you know about things more on a macro scale, nationally and statewide. So we just want to make sure that you know specifically what we're doing in Fort Worth and how we're In what ways do you make progress? So you can see with the long title here, there's, you know, a handful of different aspects of our economic development efforts. And Kathy will go over all those details for you.

Thank you, and it's great to be here in your town hall to give you an update on what we're doing in the Economic Development Division to support our businesses. Just to give you kind of a broad focus, the Purpose of— and the focus of economic development really is to promote the economic well-being and the quality of life for our community. And it's all about creating, retaining, and expanding our jobs. And that in turn really facilitates growth and increases wealth, and it provides a stable tax base for a healthy community. So, um, the Economic Development Division is committed to building a thriving and balanced and sustainable business environment in Orem. And through our strategic initiatives, through the Orem Business Alliance, through our collaboration with Utah Valley Business Resource Center, and through streamlining the business licensing and also recognizing those businesses who have revitalized their buildings on State Street, we really feel like we're going to make a difference. Thank you.

here.

So the Orem Business Alliance, by way of background, under the direction of the city management, I started the Orem Business Alliance 5 years ago this March. And it really was started to provide educational opportunities for businesses, to provide networking opportunities. They like to get to know one another, to feel a part of an important business community, and to make those connections to our resources that are available through our business resource center. And, um, and today the business— or the Orem Business Alliance has held over 90 ribbon cuttings over the past 5 years, and that helps our businesses to brand their business and get the word out that they're open for business and that Orem's a great place to do business. We recently rebranded our business alliance, and I gave you each a notebook. Inside the notebook is this business card, and the QR code enables businesses to just quickly sign up for an email newsletter that is sent out 3 or 4 times a month that gives businesses knowledge and information about our upcoming events. The education part is really important. Our businesses want cutting-edge education that helps them to put these business principles into action. And some of the great presentations we've had in the past year. Real estate essentials, social media and digital marketing. That's really an important topic for businesses. How do they get information out about their business? It's so much— not so much a print world anymore. It's about social and digital marketing, tax preparation. We brought in Spanish translators to help our bilingual businesses. be able to have that information. Entrepreneurship principles, networking essentials, and one of the hot topics this recent year has been utilizing and capturing AI to drive business. In fact, that was so popular last month for a half an hour presentation that we're doing a workshop in May. We're bringing the BSB professor back to do an hour and a half workshop so we can really drill down and—

That's great.

empower our businesses with those kinds of skills. Our businesses thrive on networking. Today at our business alliance meeting, before, after, and during the businesses, I saw so many businesses sharing their cards, sharing information on their phones. And what happens over time is they build a network of support with each other, and that is Amazing to see. It's one of the topics that our businesses request again and again is to have more networking time. We pull our businesses every other month or so and ask them, what keeps you awake at night? What's important to you? What information do you need to know about to make your business more successful? And they really like the networking portion. We provide connections to valuable resources. Some of the resources outside of the Business Resource Center are we make connections to the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, Mountainland Technical College, their custom fit program that helps businesses, assist them by paying for training. Apex Accelerators, that's through the, again, the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity, and that gives businesses information and knowledge on how to do government contracting. Then there's that Utah C-Space, or Commercial Property Assess Clean Energy Financing Program, that helps businesses at a lower cost to finance those upgrades for energy conservation. And then finally, there's the Smart Cities and Fabrication Lab at Utah Valley University. Now, we also offer sponsorship opportunities for our events, and what this does for our businesses, it gives them a chance to get their brand out there to help other people become aware. Maybe they're a smaller, locally owned and operated business. One of our great sponsors has been Overtime Honey Baked Ham, and I've asked Mark Poocher, the general manager of our Honey Baked Ham, to talk about I could talk about it, but it really resonates when Mark talks about what has the Business Alliance meant to him as a business manager and how has it helped his business.

Thanks, Valerie.

My wife and I moved down here about a year and a half ago.

By the way, this is the most amazing place to live. Love it.

From where?

From Salt Lake City.

Okay.

So I just grew up here in Salt Lake City, but Salt Lake City has changed drastically. And so I came down to a struggling store in Honey Baked Tan, reached out to the city, and her— Dave's been a big part of my life.

I now run the number 1 growing store in Honey Baked Tan.

We have 225 stores across the country, and a lot of it because of the— that's why I'm here today, because of the business alliance. Their meetings are good enough to take those of us who are super busy and come, and we want to be there and get something out of it.

But the biggest thing is the networking with Renee, David, uh, just other businesses that have helped me expand my business in a major way through catering and such like that.

Also, now I have a number of clients where I'm putting my money into, or I'm getting my signage from people. And so the networking has probably been the biggest change, but I'm very grateful.

all of you for, you know, taking a store where I laid off 2 people when I started to hire 3 more. And I think the health of the business within the community is a big part of the healthy community. So I'm grateful for what you've done for us.

Thank you, Mark. And Mark was so generous. Inside your OBA notebook, he's given you a gift certificate for our hand-baked ham, $10 gift certificate. Thank you so much, Mark.

It's nice meeting you.

Thanks.

It's your job to bring business.

They have great box lunches. You don't just have to buy your Easter candy.

You can go there for lunch.

They do. And if I can give a little pitch too, they have great takeout dinners and sides that you can have just on the go. So they're a great business, very supportive of Warren. Um, one other opportunity we have for our businesses is the Standout Business Awards that occur in December. And it really gives businesses an opportunity to shine and be recognized. And one of our businesses, Youth Net Services, on the bottom left, um, the business owner in the red and white, her name is Sana. And it meant so much to Youth Net Services, who provide great opportunities and supportive services through foster care in our community. And her older brother is the city manager of West Valley City, Ifo Peely. And once Ifo saw how much it meant to his sister to receive this award, he had his analyst call me up and said, how can we start this with our businesses in West Valley City? And so that was heartwarming to see. It really is meaningful to our local businesses. We provide ribbon cuttings at no cost. We bring everything. And our most recent ribbon cutting, Sweet Roll Tacos, Chris Kilpack said, how about we bring some drinks? treats and some desserts from this so we can all try it. So today they've provided us with samples of their brownies and cookies. And Sweet Roll Tacos is a great business at University Place, and it's just an opportunity for the community to know that our businesses are open. And on the right there, Bonchon, it's next to Dillard's, between Dillard's and Medici's. They're opening tomorrow, so watch for their ribbon cutting coming up. And here, just some other wonderful businesses over time that we've done ribbon cuttings for. And then let's talk for a minute about the Utah Valley Business Resource Center. So, by way of background, in 2014, the city of Orem formalized a partnership with Utah Valley University to expand and renovate a Saturn car dealership. You, um, the Department of Commerce, the EDA, Economic Development Administration, was able to grant this project through Meg's help a $1.5 million grant. And the City of Orem made a contribution of $500,000, and UVU also made a financial contribution. And together, um, this Utah Valley Business Resource Center was created to just provide a myriad of services. The World Trade Center of Utah is housed there at the Business Resource Center. The Small Business Development Center, or SBDC, it provides no-cost business advising, training classes, workshops, resources. They also have just recently started the Maximum Impact Leadership and Executive coaching program, and that is a fee program, but it's high quality. It's $200 for all the phases of that course. Um, they have also just started Spanish classes, Spanish business classes. We're super excited about that. It's just a great resource. In January, the Business Resource Center offered an annual update, and they Explain that the Business Research Center incubator space currently has 36 businesses in their incubator space. They have taught over 80+ businesses in their business accelerator program. They're able to have businesses come in and use their prototyping labs. And currently, the Business Research Center really has limited capacity in their incubator space. And so the demand from local businesses also for space for conferences is really limited. They can only host just a maximum of 70 people in their space there. So, as Bren mentioned, Chris Shirkey and Bren and Mayor Young recently visited Washington, D.C., and spoke with Senator Tom Curtis, and one of the discussions Was about potentially supporting UVU's request for funding for expansion and renovation of our Business Resource Center space.

And also—

Fantastic. And so we're excited about the prospect of that in the future to provide even more services and a more welcoming, lighter, brighter space, possibly with more incubator space for businesses to locate there. So now we have—

Oh, say, we found out yesterday that Representative, U.S. Representative Mike Kennedy is going to come out next week to tour the BRC as well. So, so we've received very promising verbal responses, and we're following up on it and With the intent, of course, to close the deal. Steve Anderson and then Peter Jay.

And you were at these in DC also, Bren, right?

Yes.

So that's hopeful. That's really exciting. Now we have Elizabeth Gormley, our new business development specialist, to talk about business licensing and streamlining that she's making and will be making in the future.

So we want to streamline our business licensing process not only for the business owners but also internally as well across our departments. So before I talk about that streamlining process and what we want to do with that, um, I want to discuss just the current state of our business licensing process. Um, so here's a diagram just depicting the business owner perspective or their journey map of how they go along just making an application. And as you can see, there's like a ton of questions that they have, a lot of pain points that they experience along the way just applying for a business license as well as renewing it. And there's a lot of opportunity to improve our processes. So some examples include just application errors resulting in confusion and even duplicate applications in some cases. I see You can see in the top left, just this error screen that you get when you apply for a business license, and that's not the type of user experience that we want to provide. There's also basic problems with payment. Our system will automate incorrect fees as well as do double charges. There's problems with online renewals. Oftentimes the user will get locked out and they won't be able to make the renewal unless they call in and have us manually unlock that renewal process. Currently, there's no way for business owners to even know the status of their business license. Why they haven't received it even though they paid for it a couple months ago is a common question. So overall, just the lack of information and troubleshooting causes the most questions and distress for our businesses. So I have about 6 points that we can— or 6 ideas that we can use to create a better user experience for the business licensing process. And first, we want to create a user portal that the business owner will be able to log into. They'll be able to see the status of their business. They'll be able to make changes, update like contact information, as well as request changes such as changing the location of their business or changing the name of their business. And this portal should be easily accessible and have the information available to them for frequently asked questions and as well as just working links on our online website. site is also a big one. Second, we hope that the user portal will properly outline business licensing renewal requirements because oftentimes they don't know all the things that they need to do in order to renew their business license, which is why they haven't finished that renewal process. So it will hopefully outline those very, um, easily for them to follow along and comprehend. Um, third, we want to troubleshoot the applications to make sure they function properly, again with no errors No duplicate applications. This means the user should be able to fill out the application. You shouldn't be able to get stuck. They'll be able to upload all the required documents as well as make a payment. 4th, instead of printing and mailing the business licenses— sorry, instead of printing and mailing the notices, we will send out automated texts and emails. We want to go digital, and this will just eliminate The long processes it takes to just get that communication out there regarding their licensing requirements. And these will be for upcoming renewals, current balances for payments due, as well as required inspections and required documents needed to do the business license. Next, our system should also work across multiple devices, such as desktop and mobile devices, and this will help us meet ADA compliance requirements. As of now, I don't think it works on a mobile device. So we just want to be able to make it accessible to all users. Lastly, the number one request we get from business license owners is just have a digital copy of their business license. We just have the physical one that's printed and mailed to their mailing address, which again just takes more time. It's just not user-friendly. We want our portal to be able to allow the business owner to print their business license. And get it as soon as they receive it, right?

Not have to wait in the mail.

Um, so moving from the business owner perspective to our department's perspective, business licensing, as you can see, touches a lot of departments in the City of Orem, a lot of moving parts, a lot of things that need to be approved. Um, so hopefully we can streamline our business licensing system internally as well to make it efficient and easier and safe. city time and resources as we work together. This will allow our building inspectors, fire department, pre-treatment to easily schedule and pass business license inspections. It will help planning and zoning ensure businesses meet the zoning requirements. It will help our legal team when giving approval for solicitor's licenses, as well as future alcohol licenses too, which we intend to implement into our system, I believe, next year. As well as including an efficient business license revocation process. As of today, the City of Orem has never revoked a business license, and not because there has not been grounds for revocation, but because we don't have an efficient system and practice in place to do that revocation process. Um, this system will also work for the neighborhood improvement team. We have already required 65 drive-bys for delinquent business licenses just this year, and I found the main reason is just due to lack of payment, failure to close the business license. Again, just lack of communication, lack of understanding and knowing where the status of their business license is. Um, so when we create a system that prioritizes communication to the business owners regarding these requirements and clearly lay out what is needed, we will eliminate the need for most of those drive-bys, again saving city time and resources. Um, lastly, the system should work in conjunction with our finance department, making our processes more efficient when taking payments as well as issuing refunds. So overall, we just need an internal system that allows for effective communication between each department and prioritizes accessibility to help our departments better help businesses owners meet their licensing requirements.

And those are the suggestions that I have.

I love this.

Yes, good job.

Thank you.

Stepping into the new millennium, we are.

Yeah. Um, so as of now, it's based on the priority of like what we're— the city's prioritizing.

And for our—

most of the improvements have to be done by IT. Um, most of them are like that user experience, right? So, um, as of now, they haven't really began what we want to do. They had prioritized other things. So they're doing it based on priority as well as based on how we can prove to them that it's going to make a difference. So it's not really a timeline that I—

If I can jump in, they've done an excellent job. Before we can coordinate with IT, we have to figure out the process so they can code it for us and get it done.

And that's what Elizabeth's been doing.

She spent a lot of time working with all the different city departments to really bring that user experience knowledge in so that when we start actively building, IT will know exactly what we need to do. They've been great working with us as we're getting this going and making some immediate fixes to the current program to make it a little better. So we're going to really ramp it up here in a few months. If I can just add, So, for our IT programmers, our top 3 priorities are HR portal for employees onboarding and offboarding, and our Citizen Connect app and integrating that with our other programs, and then business licensing. So, just so you know, these are— those are our top priorities, and you could help me, you know. poke Carlo and any of our IT guys along to, you know, keep these as a priority and get them done as soon as possible. Nice, Carlo. Let me just add one thing too. I love the look and the feel of what you have.

Exactly.

It feels very non-threatening, very user-friendly. It would be easy for someone that's starting a new business to be able to go there and navigate their way through that process. So thank you. For doing that. I like that.

It just has a great feel to it.

So, well, having a husband who's a programmer, the framework that you explained, that's what they need, right? They need to know what is your need so they can fulfill it. So you've done a great job of targeting— well, all of you, everyone who's worked on this, right?

Of targeting the needs, identifying the needs. Perfect.

Let me just say why, why all of this is a big deal. So Kathy's done a phenomenal job building her group and getting everything going. I've had a number of people refer, you know, ask me about business in Oregon. I refer them over to Kathy. She always does a great job helping them understand the resources and all that. So you do a great job with that. As far as the Business Resource Center, it's a big piece of this puzzle. It was established in 2014. there's a number of ways they can really go to the next level. And so what we're talking about is pretty significant, have a partnership between Forum and UVU and their entrepreneurship program. They're trying to take it to the next level. Uh, there's just a lot of things in flux, and we think this business resource center could be a huge key. And then just lastly, as far as you look at this, well, at the core of Community, I mean, you all can do the things you do, but at the core is the business community, and that's what really pays for everything and helps everything happen, the vibrancy. And so tell me what the latest number of total businesses in Lawrence is.

Over 5,000 brick-and-mortar licenses.

Over 5,000. We have about 440 or 450 buildings.

That's a lot of So just last, we're going to talk just for a minute about highlighting the reinvestment that's happening on State Street. And you might wonder, well, why is reinvestment so important? Well, it boosts economic growth because it modernizes the buildings and attracts new customers, and it enhances the aesthetic aesthetic vibe and people, it kind of spreads. Like, if a neighboring business has cleaned up their business, yeah, that's— want to do the same. And it really increases buyer confidence, it increases and improves the infrastructure, and just develops community pride, I think. So it benefits by strengthening the tax base, creating new jobs, diversifying the economy, and really enhancing the overall quality of life. So these are some businesses along our State Street that have reinvested. Um, Nord Orthodontics, who we're going to talk about in a minute. Alpine Credit Union, Ryan's familiar with that, was a project when he was in economic development, I believe. So the first is Alpine Credit Union, and their 25,000-square-foot facility, it's a 3-story administration building. It was built in 2018. And it's really a modern, energy-efficient hub, and it consolidates their leadership and enhances employee experience. And it's designed with this beautiful open concept. It has a light-filled layout, and it's really a— it just encompasses those stunning mountain views, and it reflects kind of a progressive brand image and a commitment to sustainability. I think it's a beautiful Building, then there's Nord Orthodontics, and it's on 805 South State Street. It was also completed in 2015, and it's significant— significant— it signifies a significant investment in Orem, and it's a modern patient-centric facility, and it really attracts patients by demonstrating Nord Orthodontics' commitment to comfort and care. And that's their, you know, commitment to revitalization on State Street. We have a more recent revitalization project at Sunshine Buns. They took the Italian place, which was in need of some love and some renovation, and they really turned it into a vibrant location. Look at that bright yellow to brand their Sunshine Buns. And I think they're cheerful Exterior really brightens the area and it reflects the positive energy. And I hear they have good cinnamon rolls inside. So that's another example. Then there's Bruska's Kolaches, and we're going to have a ribbon cutting grand opening for them coming up soon. It's a Czechoslovakian bakery, and it's really revitalized that exterior with that pretty brick, that facade. And it not only enhances that building's aesthetic appeal, but it also demonstrates their commitment to being a part of this beautiful area. And the last is Heritage Craft Butchers, and their renovation is at 1560 South State Street. And they've modernized the exterior, but they've done an amazing job really in their interior, and the Small Business Saturday recently recognized them, and I'll play this short little—

It's Tomahawk Steak.

Come in and see us.

Be part of our family.

We want you to come and get to know us right here in the heart of Orem. Again, that's 1580 South State Street.

You'll see a big white building, Heritage Craft Butchers.

Come in, mention this.

We'd love to entertain you while you're here.

Modernization of that exterior. And if you ever have a chance, if you have need of custom meat, visit and take a look on the inside. They have a custom mural that they painted on one of their walls. It really is quite beautiful.

Tomahawk Steak.

Come in and see us, be part of our—

one. But Hewish's redid their whole exterior and it looks really very nice. I drove by just the other day and went, missed one. We should have a picture up there because they've done a fantastic job. So if you see that, they actually got an award, right?

They did, for the historic award. They've been in business a long time. So thank you, Brian. We'll add them to the list. Just kind of in closing, the economic Development again is committed to building a thriving and sustainable business environment in Orem, and through our strategic partnership with these different areas, um, we're fostering a healthy business environment that, um, paves the way for today's success and for that sustainable success in the future.

Well done. Thank you.

Thank you.

And you know, if each one of those businesses gave $100 to our Gold Star Families Monument, we would have it paid for.

Can I put that in there, maybe in case they're listening? Well, and just so you know, um, representatives from our library assistant and from Orem Fest and Cane and our businesses are engaging and supporting different sponsorship opportunities in Orem. Yeah, well, Mark, he's done a lot, right? for donating meals.

And yeah, we should, we should pitch this at your Lions meeting. Yeah, as far as the Gold Star Memorial, just to make them aware of it.

We have, and we can again. Thank you.

I don't think the topic will be short, but, but, but I will say if we can try and— you, you've got 30 minutes and, uh, and Steve Earl's got 30 minutes, but if we could get you guys down like 25 and make the math look right.

So with this presentation, I anticipate this will be not a one-and-done presentation or discussion, but a series of discussions over the course of a couple work So if, if the mayor needs to play me off, you can just start—

Peter or Theresa can start playing some sort of classical music, and that'll be my sign to leave stage left.

Um, I'm passing around a draft copy of the, of the ordinance. Um, this is not meant to be a final Copy. This is really a working draft, one that gives us a starting point for a conversation. So the, the intent of this, as I said before, is, is really to give us the starting point. It's not a perfect ordinance.

It is new.

It will have some areas where we need to tweak. that there need to be discussions about which levers we want to pull, or have we pulled the lever too, too hard, or have we not pulled the lever hard enough? Currently, the status— and I just always want to start with this just to reiterate where we are with short-term license, short-term rentals— they are currently prohibited by the Orem City Code. So any short-term rental that is in operation in Orem City is actually operating in violation of current Orem City Code. As we look at options as how to move forward, if the decision is that we want to keep the status quo and have a ban or prohibition on short-term rentals, we should clarify our city code to make it more apparent, rather than having to dig into Appendix A at the end of our, our city code defines transient lodging as a prohibited use in all zones of the city. Um, so we'd want to make an update to our code to make it clear to residents and to businesses that this is a prohibited use in all zones throughout the city. Um, recent Utah state legislation, uh, we had House Bill 256 that was passed This really clarifies that municipalities can act in this area and regulate short-term rentals, that we can adopt a permitting or licensing system that regulates short-term rentals. In fact, it goes so far as to allow us to even, you know, contact the county auditor, providing their website advertisement and let them know that they're subject to the transient room tax. And it also reverses what the prior law was, which prohibited cities from using the website information as ways to prove violations. Now, the way the bill has altered the legislation indicates that municipalities can use the onsite online advertisement in connection with other evidence to support that that short-term rental is operating outside of the city limits.

side of our, our ordinance.

So it was a really big change. This becomes, uh, this goes into effect in May. Um, and with that, I think we should hopefully have a good idea what direction the city wants to go, and we can have whatever ordinance prepared to go into effect shortly around that same time.

Is our current ordinance that forbids it legal?

Yes.

So the state hasn't overridden that?

Yeah, there is a 2022 Utah appellate case that basically addresses South Weber City's ordinance, and their ordinance is very similar to ours in that it has a, has a language in it that says any permitted uses or non-permitted uses are outlined in a land use appendix, see land use appendix. So then you have to go to the appendix, find out what permitted use you want or what use you want, see if it's permitted in that zone. And in that case, the Court of Appeals upheld the banning of short-term rentals, because the use of a short-term rental was equal to lodging, and lodging was banned within all residential zones. So our take is based on that case, We're in good standing with our current ordinance as it is.

And what year was that case?

2022.

So case law has been improving and clarifying, but also enforceability of the law has been improving, most recently in this legislative session.

Yes.

So I want to look at this as a really a continuum or spectrum of Where does the council want to go? Again, I've passed out this draft ordinance, and I'm aiming for the middle of this. But that doesn't mean we have to go with the middle. I just wanted to give you a working document from which you can throw stones at and say, that's a bad idea. Let's not do that. So on one side is we keep the status quo with a complete prohibition. But if we were to do that, let's clarify the Orem City Code, make it clear to the residents what is banned and why. In the middle would be the creation of a new regulatory or licensing program wherein we, we say where a short-term rental can go, how many short-term rentals can go into Orem, what are the regulations on a short-term rental. how should they operate, etc., etc. And then on the complete opposite side would be we just allow short-term rentals with no regulation. And we go with, you're a property owner, you have all of these property rights, do with your property as you so choose, and we won't regulate any use. That would be on the far, far side of that. As we've had this discussion for over the last I don't know, 18 months, it seems. There seems to be, from discussions I've had with council members, as you have all reached out to me, sent emails, and I appreciate all the council members sending emails from conferences they've gone to, or information that they've come— has come their way, whether it's from Airbnb or best practices from the, you know, conference of mayors, etc. It has been a way for me to collect the information and then try to digest it and then put it in a format that's easily to understand and digest as a council. So I appreciate all of your time and efforts and being part of this discussion.

What I've taken from those discussions, though, are basically 6 different guiding principles to approach this problem.

And number 1, I think is the hallmark, though, is we want to preserve the residential quality of neighborhoods. Because the idea and the underlying basis for using a residential zone is that we are identifying that the uses in this area of Orem will be meant primarily to have single-family dwellings or family dwellings, multifamily dwellings, but they're meant for residential habitation. They're not meant for commercial or business operations. So how do we, you know, protect and preserve that quality of the neighborhood, knowing that people want to use their land in this way? And then on the other side of it is we also, I think most of us realize and accept that Hotels and lodging have changed in the 21st century. The gig economy has created these ideas that I can have a second home, or I can rent my home out part-time, and I— that helps me make the mortgage. And people like staying in VRBO, Airbnb type settings rather than a hotel. So, if we want to have that use, how do we also capture a tax from that to help offset some of the costs that are incurred by the neighborhoods that have these operating in them. So, um, I've taken those guiding principles and tried to instill a purpose behind our regulatory scheme and try to identify all of those in the, in the opening statement of this ordinance. And again, really, it's to promote the public health, safety, and welfare, and by requiring that all short-term rentals be safe and fit if they're going to be rented, to prohibit overproliferation of short-term rentals so our neighborhoods are not overrun by them, and to establish rules and regulations governing short-term rentals to ensure that they are compatible with the character and nature of the existing residential neighborhood.

of it.

So again, that's kind of the guiding principles and the purposes behind this new regulation. Breaking down the ordinance that's been provided to you, there are 4 different regulation approaches that are all being used in this ordinance. First is a quantitative regulation. How many, how often can they be rented? How many people are coming into the short-term rental? So a quantity regulation. The next would be a geographic regulation. Third would be a density regulation. And fourth would be a quantitative regulation, or trying to regulate the quantity, the quality of operation of that short-term rental. As I go through these, these are all suggestions at this point, and I would love to have a discussion as to each of these levers. Because as I've— as we've had these conversations, I kind of have a feel for where different council members may be. Um, but I would really like to, to have a better understanding of where the council is on these levers. So first, Is occupancy. As I've looked at other city regulations, they have an owner occupancy requirement. Some some cities, some counties require that for the operation of a short-term rental, either the owner has to occupy the residence for a period of time, usually the majority of the time, so 183 days, or the owner has to be present. And living in the short-term rental area at the same time the short-term rental is being offered up. So that would be a situation where an Airbnb, the owner staying in the master bedroom, and they're leasing out the basement as a short-term rental. So you have the owner there at the same time as the tenants are there. This draft does not require an owner occupant. We could adopt it that way, but this draft does not require that.

So does that give them a sidestep around, uh, it being—

how am I saying— from a tax perspective being a second home and, and then losing the 45% primary residence exemption?

Or does that affect that because they have people living there through short-term rentals? Or can we you know, get that tax revenue by counting that as a secondary home?

So if we are not requiring it as an owner-occupied, then they do not have to have that as their primary residence. So if they are not selecting it on their county tax form as being their primary residence, then the property tax rate, my understanding is, would increase. It does.

Yes. Okay.

So is that— is—

I mean, would that be key here, right? That designation to—

I mean, again, it's a lever.

It's really not so much for us, but for the school district, right?

That would be huge for them, correct?

A designation that something that we put into this legislation could affect their—

Correct.

If we require to be owner-occupied, then we would be requiring that they use this, this property as their primary residence. Okay, and it would take that designation as a secondary residence off the table if they're not—

okay, if it were their primary, but if it's not, then we— it's designated, right? So there's no question on where the taxes are going to be. I mean, they have to designate whether it's owner-occupied or not.

They have to designate that with the county.

Okay, so it would be wise for us to put that in there.

That it's not—

so we can identify—

so they're—

who identifies that?

If county—

just the county will do it?

We don't have— but we could.

But do you see what I'm saying?

But in their application, their business license, whatever, we could have them identify if they're living there or if they're not living there.

Yeah, it could be not a requirement, but you could still ask the question just so it doesn't slide through the cracks.

Yep.

And it is anticipated that we would be asking that question The application.

I mean, theoretically, the county can cross-check that, right?

Yes.

So next would be the number of renters that can occupy a short-term rental. Now, this can create a lot of different math scenarios, and math is not my strong point.

That's why I went to law school.

So, so I don't want to make it overly complicated. I want it to be simple for the applicant to know how many people they can have within the short-term rental, and I want to make it easily enforceable. So if we get a complaint or a call and our neighborhood preservation team or neighborhood improvement team goes out, that it's easy for them to decide if somebody's in violation, and it's not Can we pull a blood sample so we can do a DNA test to find out if you're all related? And how many, how many degrees of consanguination do we go down to determine how related you are? So here I've chosen what I think is a pretty simple way to do it, is to identify the number of bedrooms that are in a home. So when they apply for a short-term rental, and you'll see later on in my presentation, they have to give a description of the property. Or the area of the home that is going to be used as a short-term rental, and they need to identify the number of bedrooms. From that, we can say 2 individuals per bedroom with a total maximum number of occupancy of 8.

So big houses wouldn't be allowed, basically?

Well, big homes could still be used, but they'd be maxed at 8. But then again, this is the lever. This is where you guys can say, 8 seems like it's not enough.

I mean, some of the big homes I've rented with my family have bunk rooms for the kids, and, you know, they'll have 8 or 10 rooms in it to handle family gatherings.

So, and that was actually one of the policy questions Jake and I have talked about is, do we want short-term rentals to be used for that purpose? And I know you do, and I have relatives who use them for that purpose too.

Right.

And, and, but, you know, you might have 25, 30 people, you know, in those gatherings and tons of cars that go with them. And so the question was, do we want short-term rentals to be used in that way? And if you do, we can, we can modify that. But this is kind of where we start. No, I think that's the question.

I don't know what we want.

Right. To your earlier point, we're not going to get through all these pages in 25 minutes or 30 minutes, right?

Yes.

So, but that's where you get the goat house scenario, right?

Where if there actually is an impact on the neighborhood.

Yeah, I have one right near my home.

That's a former PAL home. And they have off-street parking and they put a boatload of people in that. It's a 20,000 square foot home and they put big groups in there.

But they have everyone off the street, which is kind of nice.

But the goat house is on a cul-de-sac and has parking for 2 or 3, right?

Anyway, what have you seen from other—

I mean, 8 on the one hand, I'm like, I wouldn't even have a family there.

And I don't—

I'm not talking about 20 by 30 people. I don't think we want to go there.

But what have you seen from other cities in terms of this range? So some—

again, you have to also take into account the city that you're looking at. If you look at Torrey, which is at the gateway to Capitol Reef, they do— and they don't have the density that perhaps more or less. So if you have a bigger, um, bigger home, maybe it doesn't affect the neighborhood as much. And so you look at theirs, and theirs is based off of bedrooms with no cap. You look at Park City, same way. You have bigger ski lodges that are ski-in, ski-only that are being used that way. Again, most of those homes are also being used as vacation homes.

They're not year-round. And that's one thing that seems to me is I'm just thinking through the places we've stayed, a lot of vacation destinations, you know, allow bigger places, right? Yeah, that's the way it is. Yeah, but we're not really vacation destination per se.

But yeah, sure, we certainly are.

I mean, they come from far and wide there.

Nice try though.

And not to interrupt, just another thing to think about.

I mean, a cross bridge to this sort of thing would be if you allow some number of houses to be more. If you had your baseline— oh, this, you know, but then you said we're allowed 25 houses in Orem to be bigger, and you have to apply for that permit to apply. They have to be checked out, they have to meet all the requirements.

And that's, and that's where you look at a city like San Diego, and they have 4 tiers of licenses for short-term rentals based on areas You know, if it's near the beach and it's a larger home, then it has a different tier. And we're trying to really make a decision of how complicated, how nuanced do you want to make this. We can pull that lever, or we can try to have it a little bit simpler. And then this is the policy decision that y'all need to make.

Simple question.

Do we know how many we have?

And do we know what the benefit is from those homes? What the economic benefit is?

So we've looked roughly at the data to find how many potential rentals are out on the market currently that are short-term, that are short-term rentals, not residential, short-term rentals. We believe the number to be around the 250 to 260 area. Now, as to the, the income benefit, the city's—

That's 1% of our houses, right? We have roughly 28,000 homes, right?

Yes.

As it results— relates to the transient room tax, I can't speak to that number. I know that it's— Ryan and I had this conversation, and I may speak— misspeak here, but I think it's equal to Or near the amount that we get from hotels, uh, transient room tax.

It's about $50,000. It's what, about $50,000 a year? But it is our number 1 lodging. It is our number 1 lodging. Airbnb. Airbnb.

Is that a function of the number of hotels we have?

It's our number 1 sales tax generating lodging.

Lodging.

Thank you.

All of those added together, the hotels that we have.

Oh, including—

so the owners of these homes are somehow figuring this out and charging? Well, Airbnb collects that tax. And so we are being— Right. Oh, because they're registered with them. Yeah, the money goes out over VRBO and Airbnb that's paid by the person renting it. They automatically take out that transient room tax. Before dispersing it then to the owner. Yeah. So if they're not going through one of those, we may not be seeing it if they're not going through those 2.

Yeah, but it's hard.

It's hard to rent a 3-night place without going through a VRBO or an Airbnb or something. Yeah. I mean, you got to know an awful lot of people who want to come to your place. Yeah. So we probably aren't losing that much. This all sounds good, but how do you enforce it? Yeah, well, I think it—

I think that's the key, right, is you can have these limits and they will last as long as the complaints, right?

If someone exceeds the limits but there's no complaints, we're not going to know about it.

Correct.

It's—

it comes back to the way that we've typically regulated most issues within the city is complaint-based, or it's visible and seen by one of the officials who enforces the law. We don't stop every speeder on State Street. We don't even respond to every traffic accident that occurs within the city. It's, it's only when oftentimes we either see it happen or can stop it, or we get called to a complaint.

So it gives us an opportunity.

Yes, if we are more strict like this, it gives us an opportunity to Handle complaints.

Absolutely.

But you have 250 homes that could be either purchased as a single-family home and use it instead of an Airbnb. So, absolutely, you're—

if you want to really—

what was your first point? Was, you know, keeping the integrity of our neighborhoods.

You know, what are we doing? I mean, that's the question. Absolutely.

Is it all about the money? Which it is, I guess, for the Airbnb people, but I don't know. I think we need to keep an idea of exactly where we're at and what is our purpose.

That's our housing stock.

You remember that letter from somebody that was a young family and couldn't afford unless he Airbnb'd his basement or something? So there's, there's an interesting— folks are on all different sides of this issue, and the key is neighborhood, like I was describing, neighborhood preservation and all that. So it's a— this is— thank you for all the effort. This is a lot of work that you put into this, and it's important for us to discuss.

He's coming back again.

He thought he was at 3. He's coming back to talk about, you know, an open mic period. Hey, I want to keep my Airbnb going.

Was he here before when we talked?

Yeah, he was the one I talked to when you walked in.

Well, I mean, there were 2 people who came about a month or two ago.

Yeah, it's one of those two.

Okay. The house on Center Street.

I don't—

can't remember where his house is. Sorry. Main Street. May I also say, on enforceability, the inability to enforce has been greatly impacted in the past because of state regulation. So the fact that they have provided more clarity and more opportunity for us to look at how these short-term renters advertise what's available, that gives us a better ability to then enforce. So, for example, if we get them to apply and become licensed within the constraints of whatever, you know, law you decide on, And we can then make sure that they advertise for it consistent with what they've applied for. Again, consistent with the constraints of the law. So, not that it's perfect, not that we're going to catch every speeder, but it will— it at least provides progress, significant progress. And maybe you've already done it, but I think we're gonna have to do some kind of financial analysis too to figure out Hey, whatever rules we come up with, now we've got enforcement and following up. Are we covering those costs? And does this generate revenue for the city?

So there are 2, 2 factors we should look at when we do that.

One is, what should we charge for the fee to administer this type of program?

We also should identify that this is a money-making venture.

This is a business.

And so with that, I don't think we should set the fee, you know, de minimis. It should be something that can be reasonably calculated to help cover the cost of administering this type of system. Secondly is, and to address the enforcement, that is towards the end of this presentation. It's like 20-some-odd slides later here.

You got more to go.

There's a lot more to go. Okay. But Also, when we have violations, those fines should be higher than what we would do for a speeding ticket, because again, this is a monetary venture. And so we want to, we want to preclude bad actors. And then also as a way to strengthen the enforcement is if we have somebody who violates our ordinance multiple times, that we have a mechanism to revoke their short-term rental license. And then preclude that owner from operating any short-term rental within the city for a period of time.

And do we have the power to tell Airbnb or the other ones, this guy or gal, forgive me, this person doesn't have a license?

Well, we could also, um, we could probably make that communication. Whether or not Airbnb or VRBO will remove them from their website, that's a different story. We can also, and this is included in their Identifying that anybody who gets a license with us on any advertisement, that they need to include specific language that lets the renter, the potential renter, know that this is a valid license, short-term rental within the city, provides the rental number, and then says a warning. If any business or any short-term rental is offering its, its home up for rental and does not include this language, That is an illegal rental within the city. And that's also within our ordinance. So try to, you know, prevent a renter from going into a bad situation.

So, so we're at— yes, 27 minutes. And you've got 20 more pages to go. Absolutely.

So, so why don't we—

why don't we recommend the council to, you know, go through this agreement? I think that would also be really helpful at the end of your presentation. Yes, just because that's more English. Um, yeah, if you could, if you could send that out to all the council members, then council could go through all this material, and then we'll get back another time or 2 and talk about it. But I think that would speed up our process if everybody gets up to speed. So, thank you.

Thank you.

So, Community Council, we'll plan to reschedule this and continue this discussion at one of our next work sessions.

But please do provide feedback so that we can continue to refine, uh, spectr—

you know, perfect.

And Jake, you, you could even, as you start to get feedback, so you get feedback from one or two council members, you could send out things, you saying, what does everybody think about this? And we could keep dialogue going that way, so it's kind of dynamic. Great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

They don't— or Steve doesn't care if we eat while—

if we want.

Okay, if you guys want to get dinner, then I'll—

you can eat while I present. That would be great. Yeah. Okay, so let's go ahead and, um, Sure. Heavenly Father, we pray for this food that we have to partake of. Pray for this opportunity to gather and try to do well by the city. Please bless this meal. Help us to, uh, work collectively this evening. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Is it a double left turn there or single left turn?

Single.

Single?

And what does it look like now?

It's an arrow. Okay, so— What they're willing to do is they— that sounds like the correct one. All right, everybody. That's right, the scalp.

All right, welcome back.

We're all the way to item 1.5, and Steve is going to teach us more about open meetings. Yes, thank you.

I'm sure you're all excited about this. Um, this is our annual City Council ethics and open meetings training, uh, something we're required to do every year. Um, something that you have all heard before, but it's always good to have a refresher. And, um, so we'll just jump right in here. Uh, start with the Open and Public Meetings Act. This is a part of Utah, uh, Code Chapter 82, and you're all familiar with the concept that, um, the public's business, uh, is to be conducted in a public meeting for which notice has been given.

A meeting is defined as the convening of a public body with a quorum present for the express purpose of receiving public comment, deliberating, or taking action upon a matter that is within the scope of the authority of the public body.

So you'll, you'll note that a public meeting, this definition would not include things like social gatherings, chance meetings, if you will, that happen to come across each other at Forum Fest or something like that. Um, those obviously are not meetings that require you to get notice for. Um, meetings are required to be open to the public unless the requirements for a closed meeting are met. Um, you're all very familiar with that process when we go into a closed meeting. Do we have to start being in an open meeting and then somebody makes a motion to go into a closed meeting? Uh, we tell what the purpose of those— that closed meeting is and the location of the closed meeting. So meetings that are, uh, that are required to be open include work sessions like we're doing right now, uh, site visits like we often, uh, do, and retreat as well. So any, any questions, just feel free to interrupt me at any time. Um, so the notice— noticing requirements for public meeting, we have to give 24 hours notice of any, uh, public meeting.

And that's—

Teresa handles that for us, so you typically don't have to worry about that. She does a great job with that. Um, the notice is required—

Just clarify, so that 24 hours is technically 24 hours, so the notice for this would have been 3 o'clock yesterday, it would have been over? Yes, or by that time. Yes, it would have to.

So the notice for this meeting would have had been yesterday before 3 o'clock.

Okay. All right.

Um, so the notice is required to include the meeting date, the time and place, and the meeting agenda. And the meeting agenda is required to provide reasonable specificity as to topics that are to be considered at the meeting. So that's important, just so you know that if it's, you know, if an item is not on the agenda, it's not something you can really talk about and take action.

Sometimes we'll have someone in the open mic period. Yeah, bring up something that we want to discuss, but we really are not allowed to, correct?

Well, you actually are.

And that's the next point.

I led you right into it.

You did.

That was perfect.

I appreciate that.

Or a topic that's raised by the public, for example, in the open what do we call it, public comment, personal appearance. Um, it can be discussed during the meeting even though it wasn't noticed, um, but you just can't take any, um, action in regard to it. So if they raise an issue that you think is important, I mean, you can take a half hour, an hour to talk about it if you want, ask the person questions, you know, you just can't take any final decision at that step.

Mayor, I think you do a good job in saying please talk to someone And we got to do the community hearings. That's been a law set in the last couple years.

Yeah, well, we couldn't say, I agree, we're going to hold the change that right then.

We'd have to do it at—

Right, but you can, you can gather information, you can ask some questions, you can ask questions of staff about it, you can kind of go get—

have some back and forth on how you think the council would want to handle the matter, that kind of a thing.

Just ultimately can't make a final decision.

Well, let's say, I mean, to me I think it's best just to refer them to a different department or whatever most of the time. But most of the time, if there was something compelling, yeah, how would we decide?

I mean, do I decide?

Do I ask the council to vote if they want to take this further and discuss?

What's the process? Well, you know, as the, uh, as the mayor, you're the chair of the meeting, so you really have some latitude to decide how you want to handle that. So, so for example, let's say Council Member McDonald wanted to delve into it further and ask questions and things like that, you could say, hey, as, as the chair, you could say, I think this is better, let staff work on this and we'll bring it back as a scheduled item later on. That would be one option. Or if you wanted to entertain the discussion at that time, that would be your option too.

So as the chair, that would really be your discretion if you want to discuss it then or reserve it for another time. Okay. And generally, that would be inclined to just have it be significant things. I don't want to go everywhere on everything. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think that, you know, taking significant time to discuss it in that meeting would be the exception.

Yeah.

Okay, so then the last point, we kind of talked about this, but no final action can be taken on a topic unless that topic has been listed on the agenda and has been again, describe reasonable specificity. Okay, so you're all very familiar with the requirement that we have minutes of our meeting. Again, Teresa handles this, does a great job. Written minutes and a recording must be kept of all open meetings. Um, the written minutes shall include the substance of all matters proposed, discussed, or decided by the council. Um, has— includes a record of each vote taken by the council, including how each council member voted, and the name of each person, uh, not a member of the council who provided testimony or comments to the council on the substance of what they said.

Steve, I had a question on that. Yeah, back in the day when Tom and I first got elected, the— everything was said in the meeting was like verbatim.

right?

Now it's like a story. So why did that change?

So you said back when you started we had verbatim minutes, is that what you mean?

Yeah.

Usually my, my understanding is it's norm— the normal practice has been to have a summary rather than verbatim. There might be, again, exceptional circumstances where it's important to have almost word-for-word transcription of the minutes, but again, I think that's the exception rather than the rule.

Normally we have the tape available, that is verbatim. So once we Yes, but I went back, researched things back, like when, uh, Utopia or whatever was back in 2000-whatever, and they were— it was verbatim.

And again, that might have been one— I mean, Utopia was a big deal, right?

I mean, all of them. I mean, everything was verbatim. I mean, it's changed.

Well, I mean, part of it might have to do with your—

who's—

AI, I don't know why you couldn't have verbatim.

What's that?

With AI, I don't know why you couldn't have verbatim.

I mean, it makes it a lot easier to have them now.

Absolutely.

We do have a— sorry, we do have a program now that Teresa is piloting that can do verbatim through AI. But if you're— if 2 people are speaking at the same time, it only captures one voice. So it would take some extra work on Teresa's shoulders to go through and make sure that if 2 people are talking, that we—

And there's also Citizen Portal that did Ties is through AI. Yeah, that's a different program though.

But to go back to your question, I think part of it depends on your city recorder. Everybody does it a little bit different, right? Some might have higher level of detail than others. There's pros and cons of having a summary versus a transcript. I mean, a transcript can end up being pretty long, you know, and somebody just wants to get the highlights and just a summary.

They don't want to read through all that.

You know, it's a matter of preference, really.

So the, the law just requires a summary, it doesn't require verbatim.

Because our state recorder went to— yes, maybe she took a look at it. So, Dave, I, I will say, kind of, I don't care what I'm saying, we have been, quite frankly, over the last few months learning, um, how to Use an AI system and trying to set AI less work. We can have it choose different settings based off of, I guess, different situations. So, so if we, we can now have the ability for it to say, generally speaking, it would do a summary, but then when something becomes more substantive and involved, or ever escalated, that it can revert to a transcript level. So, so I'll just say AI technology is providing us a way to be more responsive. We're just, we're just learning it and applying it. Okay, great. Good question.

All right, so, um, y'all know that all of our meetings are report—

are recorded.

And that's obviously a complete unedited record of the meeting.

Recordings are not required when we do a site visit or traveling tour. Again, no voter action is taken. And, um, so every once in a while you see somebody who comes in and wants to do their own recording, either, you know, little tape recorder or video, and the Utah law allows them to do that. We have to stop them. making an independent reporting in case of—

Okay, so closed meetings. Again, you're all familiar with this process. Uh, closed meeting can be held if 2/3 of the members of the council, uh, vote to approve closing the meeting.

Uh, that, that basically means if you've got 7 members here, the 5 members of the council need to vote to approve closing the meeting. Um, There's a whole laundry list.

Clarify that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, the next line. So it's not just the council, is it? The council votes to go to a closed meeting regardless of what they're going to talk about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so there's really 3 main things that we hold closed meetings for. One is to discuss the character of professional competence or physical and mental health of an individual.

2, uh, to discuss pending or reasonably imminent litigation, or 3, to discuss the purchase or sale of real property. So it has to be those 3 things.

Those are the 3 main things. There's a whole laundry list of other things that you could do a closed meeting for, but essentially none of those ever apply.

I'm just trying to understand if the council just randomly were having a conversation, we could say if 2/3 want to go to the closed meeting, discuss whatever it is they're talking about, and it say not those things?

No, no, it has to fall into one of these categories.

Okay. Yeah.

So, all right.

And then once you're in a closed meeting, uh, council cannot take a vote, um, or, um, except for obviously a vote to end the closed meeting, and can't pass any ordinance, resolution, contract, or anything like that in a closed meeting.

Again, coming back to the the principle that these kinds of actions need to be done in the open where the public can see what's going on. So any other questions on closed meetings and what can happen in a closed meeting? Okay.

Um, and then you, you probably have all noticed when we have our closed meetings, Teresa generally comes in with a recording device and records those. And the only exception to that is if the only topic that's being discussed is the character or competence of an individual, uh, you don't have to report that.

Then the mayor has to sign an affidavit saying that was the only topic we discussed, and that happens sometimes.

Okay, um, and then finally, just the only other provision we wanted to talk about here is with regard to electronic meetings. State statute says that we can hold electronic meetings in accordance with the rules adopted by the City Council for such meetings.

Council has previously adopted rules of procedure procedures for those electronic meetings, which we always follow whenever that's necessary.

So that covers open meetings unless there's any other questions.

You have more you're going to cover?

I was going to cover ethics after this.

Oh, that's what I was going to ask about.

Yeah.

I have no questions.

Okay, great.

Wait, Steve. Yeah.

I thought they modified the rules that open meetings could be a weekend meeting, not open meetings. Uh, they, they did loosen the, uh, let me see if I can find that here.

They, they kind of loosened the definition of a meeting a little bit. So going back to this where they, they changed, uh, the definition of what constitutes a meeting, I mean, it's basically convening the meeting with a quorum for this express purpose of receiving public comment, deliberating, or taking action. That, that's actually a looser definition of what, what used to exist. So, but, but I think that that's the intent, is not to really let you talk about public business so much in, in, uh, unrecorded or unpublic meetings so much. I think they were just—

I don't know, I think they were just trying to clarify the definition of what they meant a little bit. I just remember there was kind of a to-do about them loosening the open meeting rules. Yeah. And but that's— this is what it is.

This is what it is right now.

We originally thought that maybe— I mean, one of the constraints we have is if you ever want to try and have a discussion about anything, you know, you can't really do it. Um, but I thought those rules were loosening up, but maybe I misunderstood that.

Well, again, so Yeah, I mean, here's, here's the difficulty. I mean, I think, I think best practice is to— if you're talking about something over which you have authority to act, best practice, I think, is still only to do that in an open meeting and not to do that, you know, with, with a quorum outside of an open meeting. Technically speaking, there might be some things that you could discuss without violating this, but it's kind of gray area.

So I'm not, I'm not counseling you or telling you it's open season to do that.

It's kind of gray area.

Yeah, it also needs to be on the agenda.

Yeah, I feel like a while back, when it's been a while, a long time now, there was some stuff that council worked together, and maybe at that point, maybe that's been talked about in post-meeting. There's no public business, more like how we function Together.

I mean, I think that falls within that gray area. So for example, if you wanted to talk about, you know, a council policy or procedure, how you do certain things, you know, that's not really acting upon a matter within the scope of your authority. It's not a zoning decision, it's not appointment of somebody or something like that.

That might— that would be— it might be one of those things that you can talk about in a quorum outside of a public meeting.

But I think we just have to be really cautious about those kinds You know, and not, not trying to expand that into something that is, you know, beyond the scope.

So the penalties—

are there penalties?

Yeah. So, yeah, so I think that was my last slide, I think, here. Penalties for violations. So a member of the public body who violates knowingly or intentionally is guilty of Class B misdemeanor. Now, I think what's important here is that knowingly and intentionally, right? So if you do something inadvertently, you know, that's not going to be a violation. Obviously, you know, you don't want to purposely be in ignorance about these things, you know, but you have to knowingly, you know, create the violation knowing that it's a violation before it's actually a—

Okay.

So, again, yeah, intent is really important. Okay, let's see. Whoops, I went too far. All right.

Okay, next let's talk about ethics here.

And, uh, Steve, yeah, as far as this gray area, can we take it one step further and just have an agreement policy that if anyone ever wants to do that, they basically have to clear it with you.

Yeah, yeah, I was going to say that's a great idea. Instead of just, you know, giving you a general rule that it's okay to talk about these things outside of a public meeting, if there is something that you want to do that for, we can talk about it and discuss whether that's something that would, that would still be in compliance with the Open Meetings Act.

Yeah, that's the way around the gray areas.

Yeah, yeah, that's— I think that would be the safe way to deal Yeah, thanks. Okay, let's go dive right into here. So when we talk about ethics, there's basically 2 different sources of ethics. One is our own city code, and one is state law. In our city code, there's really this one section that deals with conflicts of interest. It's Orem City Code Section 2-6-8. And this is probably the most common thing that you have to be aware of, the most important thing to be aware of, and that is that whenever a matter comes before you that involves your direct financial or personal interest, and it's reasonably foreseeable that the decision will have an individualized material effect on such an interest, then you should disclose the conflict and disqualify yourself from deliberating, participating, voting on the matter. And usually when that happens, we think it's best practice that When you recuse yourself, you actually exit the chamber, um, just so that you're not in the audience and giving a thumbs up or thumbs down.

You don't even like us in here where we can hear it, do you?

What's that?

You like us in here where we can hear it?

I, I think it's okay that you're in here.

Okay.

Um, you just don't want to be in a position where you might still be able to influence somebody else in the council or be accused of—

You can't be waving.

As far as this, I mean, it's pretty obvious if you own a building and you're going to benefit, that's pretty obvious. But what if somebody's going to give you a $10,000 campaign contribution? If you— does this come into play?

No.

But you have a direct financial interest in receiving $10,000 from your campaign? No, I, I, I—

the, the direct financial interest on this doesn't include campaign contributions. I mean, it's more, it's more of, am I gonna make money personally in my business? Or do I have property that's going to go up in value or go down?

If you win your campaign, then you get big salaries. Well, you got me there.

I mean, you said it.

So That truly could be a— I don't know, maybe I'm baiting you here, Steve. That could be a personal interest because, you know, personally you want to win.

Yeah.

You're investing money in a campaign, and if you don't win, all that money, that investment was for naught.

But the campaign, you know, the money that you receive in campaign contributions, it's not personal money, right?

It's not money that you can do anything you want with, right? You can't.

Right.

But I'm saying the personal interest is not the money. The personal interest is the win.

Winning a campaign. Yeah. I mean, I guess, I guess the way to look at it is, you know, there's, there's obviously a political and a free speech and the way our political system works. There's an interest in being able to make campaign contributions, right? And to support the candidates you want. And if by doing so, you're, you know, the candidate was disqualify from voting on matters having anything to do with you, then that, that system would kind of be inhibited, I guess. So those types of affiliations are just not considered to be, um, uh, direct financial interest. Now maybe you think they should, but legally they're just not.

So, yeah, I mean, imagine a world where—

What's that?

Imagine a world where you can advocate for anyone who Right. But that's kind of positive.

Well, it depends on your point of view, right?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who have ideas about campaign finance reform and all those kinds of things, but right now that's, that's not what the law is.

So, you know, personal interest is going to extend to not only your own personal interest, but if it's a close family member. So if it's a spouse, a child, or a parent, You know, that's probably going to qualify as something you need to disclose or recuse yourself for as well. But if it's just a friend or an acquaintance, somebody lives in your neighborhood, they've got an interest, that's not something that's typically going to be a personal interest that you need to recuse yourself for, unless you feel like, hey, I can't be unbiased on this matter because I've got such a close relationship, you know, with that person.

But don't feel like you're compelled. to recuse yourself in, in those types of situations.

Okay.

Can we ever abstain from a vote?

Can you?

Uh, yeah, I mean, you can, you can abstain from a vote anytime you want. I don't think it's good practice to do that, but there's nothing that says you can't.

Okay.

All right, so the next aspect of this—

how we doing?

We got a couple minutes.

Is the—

called the Municipal Officers and Employees Ethics Act. And this is basically prohibiting you from using your office for personal benefit. So, you know, that's, that's largely going to be in terms of business dealings. You know, obviously, as council members, you have some influence, you have some power, you have some authority, and you can't use that to leverage your own financial gain. Improve your own financial position. So, just to get into that, it's, it's an offense to use or attempt to use your official position to further substantially your personal economic interests or secure special privileges for yourself or others. I mean, the most obvious example of this would, would be, hey, you know, give me 10 grand, I'll vote your way on this. Or, you know, if you, if you do this for me, I'll use my influence to help you. you know, on the side, and you have a coming report to the city council.

Um, or how about after the fact? Or even, I voted for you, now you owe me.

Yeah, same thing, same thing.

Yeah, great point.

Okay, uh, let's see. Uh, it's obviously, uh, a violation to knowingly receive, uh, for yourself or another a gift of substantial value. that has substantial economic, or substantial economic benefit, can amount to a gift that would tend to improperly influence you, or would be viewed by a reasonable person as rewarding you for an official action taken. Now, the safe harbor to this is an occasional gift having a value of less than $50. That's probably the most common situation. So, you know, if somebody ever offers you some sort of a a benefit, whether it's tickets to a theater or, you know, golf passes or, um, you know, an expensive dinner, anything like that, be very cautious about accepting something like that.

Uh, you might think that it's not going to influence you, but it, it might, uh, subconsciously influence you, and it might look to the public like it's impartially influencing you. you.

Now, one of the ways that we have tried to deal with, um, people who want to kind of give to the city is, for example, with golf passes or theater tickets, is they don't give those directly to you, they give those to the city. And that way, you know, they can be distributed not only to city council members but city employees, and there's no direct gift to you that we have to worry about. So if somebody makes an offer to you, again, for these things, just be Careful.

Let them know that you're not really able to accept those kind of gifts because how it might look and how it might be— might be probably—

any questions on that?

Can you send this to us too? Yeah, sure.

Okay, the next thing is if you have— if somebody is giving you compensation Uh, for assisting them in any transaction with the city, you have to make a disclosure in an open meeting to members of the city council and, um, file a sworn statement with the mayor containing the information, uh, outlined below, including the name and address of the officer, name and address of the person or business entity being, uh, assisted, and a description of the transaction. So sometimes your lawful business activities will intersect with the city.

Now, this— I don't know that this really applies to any of you, but if you're a contractor, for example, you might be bidding on city contracts.

You know, if you're involved in that sort of thing, then you would—

that's something you would need to make disclosures for. Again, I, I'm not sure that really applies to anybody in this room, so we won't spend too much time on that.

But, uh, and again, if, uh, if you're involved in a business that's regulated by the city, you need to make some disclosures as well. Again, I'm not sure that applies to anybody here. Um, now the penalties for violation of the Municipal Officers and Employees Ethics Act are, are pretty serious here.

Again, person who knowingly and intentionally violates the act, um, is to be removed from office and is guilty of, you know, second or third degree felony, or possibly a Class A or Class B misdemeanor if the value involved were low enough.

But these are, these are really serious situations.

So just be careful.

And again, I'm happy to send this presentation to you.

So you've got that information. Happy to answer any questions.

When was the last time they updated those dollar amounts?

Um, I don't know, 1927. for adjusting those to make it $1,000. I, you know, I think that what this says is that, you know, even for relatively small amounts, they consider it a serious offense, and they're going to really, you know, potentially go after somebody for a felony if it's, if it's more than $250. You're right, those numbers are quite low, but, but that's— you talked about that.

That's Yeah, this is Utah code.

This is not city code. Okay. Yeah.

So back to like, I don't even know what this fits under, open public meetings, whatever, but texting each other while we're on the dais, can we do that?

That's a great question. That's for Eric. So the Open Meetings Act doesn't specifically address that.

Of course, texting probably wasn't around when they wrote it.

You know, it's been around for long enough that they could have addressed that if they wanted to.

Right?

So I don't want to give you a definitive answer on that. I would just say be cautious about that. I mean, one thing I would say is that if you're doing that and you're texting about a city-related matter, it's probably ground level. You know, so—

But is it unethical?

Is it unethical? Well, it doesn't violate— it doesn't violate the Ethics Act. Does it violate the Open Meetings Act?

It's gray area.

That's the best I can tell you.

And then the texting people in the audience, that's ground— the only thing there is ground.

So here's what I would tell you is my opinion on texting. Is it a violation of the Open Meetings Act? I would say if you've got 4 members of the council on your text chain, yes, because then you're discussing a matter outside of an open public meeting, right? While you're in, while you're considering a matter over which you have authority. If you're just texting probably one other council member, probably not a violation. That would be my opinion. But again, that's gray.

But then, but then I'm going back to the audience members, the case in Lehigh, right? Was that with Brown Uncle where some developer was texting a council member?

Yeah. So that's why I would say if you're doing it, you know, don't Don't text anything that you wouldn't want the public to get a hold of.

I mean, it does seem like it flies in the face of the whole open meeting concept. I mean, they're— you're having an open meeting because everything's supposed to be out there. Yeah, in front of the public. Yeah, if you're texting, yeah, during that, then you're obviously not— whatever you're saying is not being disclosed in that open meeting, right?

I mean, on the other hand, sometimes you whisper in your neighbor's ear, right? And that's not really being heard by— so it's— that's why it's gray area.

Yeah, no.

So it depends on how close you are to the person texting.

Yeah, if you could whisper or not, there might be a problem.

So are you, are you gonna get prosecuted if you're texting one other member of the council?

I'm, I'm guessing probably no, that's probably—

that's not gonna be considered a violation. But does it violate the spirit like you're saying?

Maybe. Yeah, so.

Great question. Any other questions?

Can I just say, and I, you know, I don't want to make Steve blush, but I'll just say that I super appreciate Steve and our legal department. I consider Steve and Jake part of like my own personal professional ethical true north, like Anybody who has a question or concerns, I'll just encourage you to continue to keep this dialogue going. And super appreciate the standard of ethics and professionalism and legal advice that Steve gives us.

Well done.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

And like I said, anytime you have a question about any of this stuff, feel free to call me. me, our, our goal is to always keep you out of trouble.

And so, yeah.

Thanks.

Thank you, Steve.

We have a minute.

Just because we're voting on this today. So what I'm proposing is changing the August 19th date to the August 26th date. The reason being is the Board of Canvas will not be ready on the 19th. The county will not be able to get that information to us. So then we would still have to have a Board of Canvas on the 26th. So we're proposing going back to that 26th. We're skipping the 12th with the primaries. We would go just have our meeting like normal on the 26th, but be able to encompass the—

So we'll be on the 4th Tuesday instead of No, it'll be on— yes, it'll be on the normal one that we would have done. So no meeting on the 12th. That's a Friday.

12th is the primaries, so no meeting. And then we'll move the 19th to the 26th and do the Canvas together so we don't have to meet twice. So City Council and Canvas, same night, 26th.

That's what I'm proposing.

So it's a consent item today. If you're comfortable with that change and you vote positive on it, then I will update everyone's schedules. I will get all schedules emailed out to you, and we'll make that change. We'll notice it with the citizens. If we don't want to go forward with it, then just know we will probably have to have a canvas of some kind on the 26th.

But you're basically asking us if we're okay having one less meeting, right? You want to be—

if you all want to come in, we know we're all 15-minute canvas. You can do it, but I encourage you to, uh, save yourself the night. Hey, that's it, Mayor.

Okay, we'll do this really quick. We're supposed to be starting. General review, um, call to order. So Kevin, I'm going to pass this over to you. Jeff, have you introduced somebody? Hey, um, we got 7.1, uh, the presentation in the wildland fire team update. Got personal appearances, consent items. Uh, we're gonna— I'm gonna recommend that we table the approval of the meeting minutes because we still have some issues with the AI. trying to get it translated. And so we'll probably— on all 3 of those? Yeah, we're waiting for those to go through. Can you announce that so the public knows? Just— yeah, I'll do that.

Excellent.

All correct. Say to table that. And then, uh, got 9.2, an update to City Council 2025 meeting schedule. Uh, 9.3, our appointment to the events advisory Commission. Actually, Mayor, okay, he comes on the 9.4 appointment to the Cultural Arts Advisory Commission. Done. He's typed in, uh, 10.1, public hearing on ordinance regarding the zoning map to save warm by rezoning property that's located generally at 134 East 1200 South and 110 East 1200 South. single-family residential to commercial. And item 10.2, a public hearing on the ordinance amending fiscal year 2024-2025 budget. And any comments he's got, and we should be good to adjourn.

So, Mayor, will you ask—

because I believe that the appointment to the arts would be here.

want to just have her stand?

Suggest that those—

the others stand if they're here.

I can do that. Is there a side vent going over here?

Okay, BJ is not gonna do that.

Take my time. Although he's a really— he's a really good personal veterinarian.

I remember that.

He probably picked the Chiefs this year, didn't he? Oh my, thanks. Good job. If you ever want to, you know, if you need to play a pure freak song, just pull up real quick.

Test 1, 2.

Okay, welcome to tonight's City Council meeting. We apologize for the delay, but we had— we've been going since 3 o'clock and we still weren't done in our work meeting. There was tons to discuss, but this meeting tonight will be a little easier. Um, I'd like to welcome you all out tonight. And call this meeting to order. We'll start out with an invocation from Kevin Patton and a Pledge of Allegiance from Lynn Patton, and Jeff Lamson invited them, so I'd like him to introduce them.

Thank you, Kevin and Lynn, for being here this evening. Kevin, uh, comes from a long line of Orem residents.

His family helped settle Orem back when it was known as the Provo Bench, and Lynn, uh, comes from a military family. She's lived all over the United States, mostly in the West and Midwest, and attended school in Frankfurt, Germany, and graduated at an American high school there in Germany. Um, 2 wonderful people here in our community. Um, Kevin, uh, uh, they worked—

uh, well, Kevin grew up here in Orem and, uh, and then married, uh, met and married Lynn.

They met at Snow College. And then spent a lot of time in Missouri in the IT industry with Kevin. And then Lynn worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, currently works for BYU, and Kevin's retired. And Kevin and I have worked together a lot of years serving in the Boy Scouts of America, and they're just two 2 wonderful members of our community.

We're grateful that they're here.

Just a quick side note, um, Kevin's father, uh, one of my personal heroes, served in World War II, uh, was one of those brave men who stormed the beach at Normandy, uh, and, uh, also had the, the opportunity of rescuing his younger brother from a prisoner of war camp. And an amazing story there. So somehow, somewhere, that story needs to be So many stories that need to be recorded. But anyway, thank you, Kevin and Lynn, for being here this evening.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity of meeting together and discussing the, the needs of the city and its residents. We ask that thy Spirit will be with us, that we can understand one another and have good feelings, and that the outcomes will be favorable for everyone.

And we do this in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Will the audience please rise for the pledge?

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

Thank you, Lynn.

We'll move on to first item, item 7.1, a presentation, uh, by our wildfire team.

Uh, I've got—

there's—

we've got Sean Hurst. Derek Spencer, Fire Division Chief, and Michael Hickman, Fire Captain.

Thank you, Mayor.

My name is Sean Hurst.

I'm one of—

I'm the Assistant Chief, or one of the Assistant Chiefs for Orem Fire Department. I want to excuse Division Chief Derek Spencer. He's at a code conference as part of his role with the fire department.

He's a fire marshal, so I'm going to talk to a few points while Mike gets this started.

Wildland is essentially a department within a department.

For a long time, we were a structure-based department, as well as EMS service.

For a lot of years, we were not equipped or able to respond within the state or even outside of the state. This gentleman right here approached me, I believe it was 2016 or 2017, about developing this program, and what it's grown to is quite amazing in this time. I had a chance to deploy with Mike to California just a month or two ago, and it was really great to see what ORM has become in the wildland world in the Western US. ORM is one of the go-to agencies in this state when it comes to wildland.

We lead in a lot of fronts on fire, both structurally and wildland, and that's great to see.

This year, I think we'll cross over 365 days deployed by our members.

As we—

I think we're gonna have a buster season. It's not great for the landscape, but these guys really enjoy getting out and doing this work.

You're gonna see some numbers as a part of this program, but we're very close to self-funding a fire apparatus purpose-built for wildland response off of revenue built or brought in by this crew of firefighters.

So I want to introduce Mike.

I told Mike probably 5 years ago that I wanted to make him into a juggernaut in the wildland world, and I had nothing to do with that, but I think he truly is a juggernaut in the wildland world.

He is very well respected, very talented, and it's a pleasure to see what he's become and the work he does out there.

So Captain Mike Hickman.

I've been working with Orem Fire Department since 2014. I started working as a wildland firefighter in 2009, right out of high school. So firefighting is really all I know. When I came to Orem, we didn't have a wildland program because historically we don't deal with very large of wildland fires. Luckily, we had a wildland program up and going before we had our large incident of the Range Fire just a few years ago that I'm sure everybody's very aware of. So, uh, this program is developed and designed not only to be able to deploy and to help across the United States, but also to, to help our people here in town. So as Chief Hurst said, the program was first pitched in 2017. Um, I'd just been here a couple of years. Um, I'd been deploying with other agencies through part-time work and seasonal, seasonal work in addition to working here at Orem. And I wanted to bring that here to Orem because I, I saw that That missing piece here to better serve the citizens of Orem. We then entered into a contract with the state just the following year in 2018, and we were able to deploy down to Elkridge and Woodland Hills and help with those large fires when half of the community of Elkridge and almost all of Woodland Hills was evacuated. That was kind of our pioneering deployment where we were able to go outside of the city and serve for longer than would be considered in our normal mutual aid where we go and we'll help places for a few hours and then return. We were there for a little over a week. The next year, because we had now entered into that contract, we had had a successful deployment, our administration saw the fruits that came from that. So we formed our wildland team or wildland division, whatever you want to call it. And to date since then, We've done 19 different deployments outside of Orem Fire Department jurisdiction that has been able to benefit our department and benefit the citizens of Orem in so many different ways. Some of those benefits, number one being safety of our firefighters and of our citizens. We respond, we're an all-hazards fire department here with the Orem Fire Department. We can respond to not just fires, but Any array of specialty type calls as well, whether that be EMS, hazmat, rescue services with extrication, getting people out of cars, whatever it may be. And wildland is one of those specialties, but it's a specialty that we go on probably one of the more frequent. A lot of times our wildland fires are small and contained very quickly within the first 20 minutes. But when they become more than that, it becomes a very large operation very quickly. Again, as we saw with the Range Fire. So now we were able to certify our people and get them more trained up into this specialty that we very regularly go on. We don't have a year that goes by that we don't have a wildland fire in the City of Orem. So now we're more prepared to better be safe as firefighters in those responses, but to keep our citizens, both themselves and their property safe, because people's property is very important to them, obviously. But it also serves as a cost insurance for the city. We enter into an MOU with the state through this program, and by us playing, by playing in the wildland world by their rules, we're a Mm-hmm. cooperator in their system. If we have a large fire, because we've gone and helped outside of our jurisdiction throughout the state, if we have a large fire, they then come and they help us financially with the bill that's associated with these large wildland fires. Which we saw. It's a great PR opportunity. Um, when we're going and we're helping and we're all over the place, it, it puts Orem on the map. As Chief Hurst was saying, um, it puts us eligible for grants to buy equipment that otherwise we would be paying for 100% that we're able to now receive. And, um, it's just a morale boost for the guys because citizens come up to us all the time and they say, hey, what's going on with those wildfires in California? And our personnel are able to say, well, hey, we, we actually have guys that are out there and helping. And I think that brings a lot of pride, not only to members of our fire department, but to citizens of our community to feel like that they're contributing because their fire department is out there and helping on the front lines. Again, to, to, I can't harp on this safety enough because the wildland world, it, it not only has the environment of fire, but it has the environment of very large aviation, very large pieces of equipment, whether it's dozers, multiple engines, air tankers, helicopters. And we have guys now that are serving as subject matter experts, not only for our community, but for the surrounding communities to make sure that our response is qualified and capable in this specialty environment. So the wildland team can take those experiences that they get on those deployments, apply them to fires here at home, and give that same training to the guys that stayed home and backfilled us. That experience that they bring, it comes through— again, most of our fires are small, but now when we have a large fire, we have guys that can seamlessly plug into these systems Because they've done it and they've done it for years rather than us having had whiteboard discussions or theories or drills. These guys have actual real-world experience doing, um, doing really some, some pretty crazy stuff sometimes. I've got a video that I'll show you guys that highlights some of the, the, um, the cool things that these guys are able to do and the experience that they gain while they're out. Like Chief Hurst mentioned, uh, this program Unlike other programs in the fire department or within the city, it's self-sufficient. It's a revenue for the City of Orem. So it's a way for us to offer overtime for our members that's at zero cost to the city because we get reimbursed by these fires while we're out there. And that money not only covers the overtime for the guys that are deployed, but also for the guys that are backfilling. So it's a financial incentive for our personnel, but it's still a financial incentive for our city because we still have a lot of money left over after paying those bills. As you can see, we've, we've revenued, uh, just over half a million dollars over the, uh, last few years of this program, which has been outstanding because now we're going to be able to buy a fire engine that's going to be able to serve the citizens of Orem at no cost to the citizens of Orem, which is, which is such a great thing. I've got a video here that I want to play that kind of highlights some of the things that we've done over the last few years. But before I start that, do you guys have any questions about our program, about our deployments, or anything in relation to wildland fire?

No?

Okay.

Mayor, we took the time to change the music. Yeah, I bet.

As the battle gets closer.

This is a first vision by myself.

I just want to say thanks again for the opportunity to share with you the success that the guys from this team have had over the years, and I just want to definitely state my gratitude for the support that we've received from city administration and especially from you guys, our mayor and council, to give us the opportunity to represent the city of Orem, and states all across the, the western US. Um, we, we appreciate it, and we look forward to continuing to, to represent Orem.

Thank you.

Now, we—

is this mic on? We're back. We're having test.

Hello?

Testing. Now it is. Yeah, that presentation, and that's more evidence of our best fire department state. So we appreciate all that you guys do, and you're doing a phenomenal job. So thank you. Next up, we've got item number 8, personal appearances. And just to clarify, so we've got later in the meeting, we'll have a public hearing about the Ken Garf property. So if you want to— if you'd like to talk about that, uh, that's not yet. And then we'll also have a public hearing about our budget. So if you're here for that, this is not either. So what this is for right now— and I'll just read your name and you can decide if you want to come up now or, or come up later, um, but this would just be for people that aren't on those 2 topics. So first I've got Derek Phillips.

Are you Here for—

okay, come on up.

Thank you so much. Um, my name is Derek Phelps. I'm an Orem resident here, and, uh, thank you for everything you do, City Council and Mr. Mayor. Uh, I'm here to speak on the topic of short-term rentals, as I know that that's an agenda item and something that the City Council is considering, uh, regulating here in Orem. Since listing our property as a short-term rental, we have welcomed many guests to our home. The vast majority of those guests we've welcomed are people coming to visit family. We also get some tourists and some traveling on business. These people come to our community and spend money on local businesses. We refer our guests to local businesses, including the Orem City Farmers Market, which several guests have enjoyed greatly. We take measures to ensure we are responsible. We do not allow parties or events. We do not allow our guests to park on the street. We enforce quiet times. I know we are not alone, and many other hosts like us here in Orem do the same. Our neighbors have commented on how much they like having a short-term rental in the community, and we've even had one of our neighbors book our property to host their family for a holiday. I know there are many other voices in favor of harsh regulation against short-term rentals or even a ban here in Orem. They point to the infamous goat house. And the general disturbance caused to other residents by that property. However, this property was an outlier, and more importantly, existing city code and regulation was able to resolve the issue. Potential issues that may arise from short-term rentals can all be addressed through existing code enforcement. Uh, others may point to short-term rentals as contributing to housing price growth, which this is, uh, pretty categorically false. Uh, Oxford Economics did a study examining the impact of short-term rentals in the U.S. And they found that short-term rentals contributed just a tiny fraction, 0.4% of the 32.7% increase in housing prices. And given that there are only 200 active full-time short-term rentals in Orem of over 31,000 housing units, or about 0.6%, the effect of short-term rentals on price growth can comfortably be assumed as negligible. I urge the members of the city council to take my case as well as the many other short-term rental hosts in, in Orem into account when considering regulation and the best way to move forward. If the city council decides to pursue regulation, I would advocate for a thoughtful approach, more so than other municipalities in our area, such as Provo, which has limited short-term rentals to only specific zones, which greatly decreases the benefits that short-term rentals can bring to both The residential and business communities in all areas of the city. Similarly, the Lehigh and American Fork approach of limiting short-term rentals to only owner-occupied residences discourages robust investment in amenities, which attracts better and higher-paying guests to our community. There is no way to get a good return on investment if listed days are limited. I plead with the city council to consider my case and all the many other hosts. who work very hard to provide a service in a responsible way that doesn't cause disruption or inconvenience to our neighbors. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Next, Lucy Ramirez. Yes, yes. Um, and then Aubrey Wild.

Hello, my name is Aubrey Wilde, and this is my partner, Charlie Largie. As you know, the Hale Center Theater in Orem has relocated to Pleasant Grove. The theater is now called the Ruth and Nathan Hale Theater at doTERRA Campus, or just the Ruth for short. We are serving on a community advocacy team. Or committee for the Ruth, and we are the liaisons for our city of Orem. Through the youth, we work to elevate the arts through community connection, and our goal is to work with the arts councils in our city. So we're here to share information about an exciting opportunity for our community and open up a line of communication as we move forward. Since the theater has opened, we have distributed throughout the county approximately 6,500 vouchers. For tickets to the Ruth. In January, our first initiative was strictly for educators in our schools. February was community and arts teams, dance companies, and now in March, we are here to serve our civil servants. The Ruth will continue to provide world-class shows and performing arts classes that residents in our community can enjoy. They are also in the process of developing a variety of offerings to support Our community. So the Ruth would like to invite, um, you and other city guests to attend Jersey Boys, which is opening here at the end of the month through May. And, um, we have vouchers that we will give to Teresa, our city recorder, and we would love to see those go to anyone that you feel would be fit. And, you know, maybe that wildlife— that was a great presentation, guys. So hey, let's go see Jersey Boys. Let's go get some songs. Out fighting fires. So, as additional opportunities arise, we would love to keep benefiting you guys and all of our residents, and we would just love to keep passing these vouchers on to you.

So, thank you very much.

Thank you, Theresa.

Thank you. Next up, we've got Stuart Merrill. Okay, thank you. All right, we'll move, uh, from the personal appearances to the consent items. We've got on item number 9, consent items, we've got item 9.1, approval of meeting minutes, and I'm going to recommend tabling that. We're just in the process of switching our meeting minutes over to AI, and we've got— we've been working to get some bugs out on that. And that should be done soon. So for now, I'm going to recommend tabling item 9.1.

Yeah, I'll make a motion, Mayor, that we table item 9.1, approval of meeting minutes for January 14th, 28th, and February 11th.

I second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye. Thank you.

We'll table that. And we've got in the consent items item 9.2, an update On the City Council 2025 meeting schedule. Item 9.3, a reappointment to the Events Advisory Commission of Ashley Mann and Krista Eakins. Are either of those here? Okay. And then item 9.4, we've got an appointment to the Cultural Arts Advisory Commission with Jen Young. Is she here?

Okay.

All right, well, she'll be excited she got a board in. So anyway, um, as far as— let's go ahead and vote on the consent items.

Mayor, I move to approve items 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4 from the consent items.

I second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

The consent items are approved. Thank you. We'll go to item 10. Scheduled items. Item 10.1, a public hearing regarding an ordinance, uh, for Ken Garf amending Article 22-5-3A and the zoning map of the City of Orem by rezoning the properties located generally at 134 East, 1200 South, and 110 East, 1200 South from single-family residential R-8 to commercial C-2, approximately 1.05 acres. Jared Hall, would you like to present that to us?

Thanks.

Um, as you said, this is the request for a rezone that folks are going to know as the Ken Garf rezone at those properties. Um, they are located 110 East, 134 East. You can see them highlighted there, and you can see the car lot in back. And surrounding it, but the larger map kind of shows that in better context, the residential area to the north and the commercial behind. The request is to rezone from the current zone, which is R-8 residential, as you can see there, to the C-2, which is existing there to the east and a little to the south. The request is to facilitate Ken Garf expanding their inventory lot and employee parking lot, as they explained to the Planning Commission. We do have a conceptual site plan for that activity. This is, as you can see, what they would want to do with that property, with those properties, make it seamless into their existing lot. The expansion could accommodate about 79 new parking spaces. This configuration would, at any rate. It does include an access onto 1200 South. Uh, the C-2 zone would allow for that. They have included for the Planning Commission in this site plan a gate that you can see there labeled as number 7 that would help control access to it so that it was used for the people that they intended for, for the employees and for vehicles coming in for inventory for that back part of the lot. Um, the request did go to the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission's vote was split 3 to 3, so there's no recommendation from them to For me to present to you. It comes forward the way it is, and I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have about the project.

Could you go back 1 slide, please? The red 144 East is not in this. That's already zoned.

Yeah, that's, that's not part of the request.

So it's only the 2, 110 and 134.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out.

Thank you. I thought that was it, but I wanted to clarify.

Thank you. That's exactly right.

So, so just to clarify, so essentially, That entire area is zoned except for that 1 acre in the middle of it.

Yep, that's exactly right. And thank you again. That's— it's about 1 acre, just over 1 acre right here, these 2 lots.

And the 1 lot looks undeveloped. The other has a home that would be demolished, I'm assuming. Yeah, thank you.

So the home— sorry, the 144 East where the home is, that's zoned commercial.

Yes.

The PD-5 zone is where the dealership is now. Yes, the PD-17 zone, the 62 East, that's Utah Housing.

Yes.

And so these 2 lots are R-8.

Yes, they're the last 2 that haven't been rezoned to something different.

Okay.

Would you go to that slide that you were at? So may I ask, are there, um, you know, typically we have a fence, we have a landscaped buffer zone. Is there a plan for those areas?

This, this particular site plan concept that they've submitted here does not include a fence or a wall to buffer this area. It does include the landscaping that could be— that could be beefed up, for lack of— I'm trying to think of an elegant way to say beefed up, but landscaping could be— thank you— enhanced. I freeze sometimes in the public.

So, um, could the landscaping— I mean, it could be a row of trees that would Block the dealership.

Yeah, that very well could be.

So it would just be more appealing than a concrete wall or whatever, right? Is the idea—

it could be done that way.

Sure.

The Planning Commission needs to review the site plan. This was a concept plan that was presented with this, the zone change. But when that's done, if the zone is approved to C-2, then the Planning Commission will take it through, or we'll take it through the Planning Commission for a site plan review as well. And then it needs that approval before it can be developed. The rezoning is one thing, but the site plan is another to come.

So, if, if we wanted to guarantee that that was going to be a landscaping barrier, how we would do that?

I don't know how you would. There's probably multiple ways that you, you could do that. The Planning Commission would probably, in site planning, look at ways to mitigate impacts of this kind of change to the neighborhood to the north.

So, does the—

I thought the C-2 required a 6 to 8 foot fence.

Where it's adjacent to residential zoning, it would.

So are we— because if you drive down that street, those others businesses, some have more, some have prettier fences than others, right? To the east, I drove by there behind Carillon Square.

Beautiful brick wall.

That was gorgeous. Beautiful trees, park strip.

If we—

so you're saying the point that we would request Something like that would be when they come with the site plan.

The Planning Commission would, would look at site— part of the site plan process would be the Planning Commission looking at ways that they could mitigate impacts.

Okay.

In the site plan, they, they, they have code that's required.

And, uh, Mr. Robles said—

Yeah, so just so you're aware, when they come in for a site plan approval, all they're required to do is what the zone requires them to do. So, you know, if the, if the, um, the C-2 zone doesn't require a fence, for example, then they won't have to do a fence. If it doesn't require the buffered landscaping, then they won't have to do that either. So if you want to guarantee that those things are there and they're, they're requirements that are not required by the C-2 zone, then I would suggest you look at possibly doing a development agreement. And then we could specifically tie Um, them to doing these improvements, if you will, um, to the actual rezone. So then they would be contractually bound to put those in, whatever that may be. I don't, you know, not sure where you're going, but yeah.

Okay, thanks. Just one question on this entrance back here.

Is that—

did you say that's a gate?

Oh, yeah, item 7 there.

Like a remote gate or just some—

I guess all we know is the gate.

Okay. And the idea behind that is that deliveries would come in there. And how frequently would that be?

Um, during the— the applicant could probably answer that better than me. Um, during the Planning Commission's hearings, they were talking about a few times a week.

And then, and then beyond that, you were Saying potentially employees would use that as well?

Employees would be using it as well, as far as I understand, yes. The gate— to that point, the gate would be something like Mr. Earl was talking about that would have to be required by something outside because it's not part of the code requirements in the C-2 zone.

I mean, just because from my perspective, um, one of our goals would be if we did do this would be to mitigate any impact on the neighborhood. And so, whatever that looks like, you know, I mean, for me personally, I'd like to see some kind of a development agreement or something if we decided to approve it.

So, can the applicant— can the applicant come and maybe respond to that?

Uh, I'm Chris Bick. I'm the applicant for this one.

Into the mic. I can't hear you.

Sorry.

Sorry about that. Is that better? Thank you. Okay. Um, I do have some exhibits that I could share because, um, this is our site plan. We do have a landscape plan that shows a little bit more with, like, the trees. And then we, we kind of left it open because we weren't sure, you know, if, if with the 20-foot landscape buffer, if it was preferred to have, you know, like a a chain-link fence with privacy slats, or to have enhanced landscape with trees and shrubs. Um, but we've talked with Garf about both those options, as well as they definitely want to have that gate on there because they don't want people driving through the back of their lot through there. Um, and, you know, they're very open to, you know, working with staff on whichever of those options is preferred. And so I do have some exhibits, either hard copies, or I could pull it up on my computer. I don't know which way is easier. Um, on the computer.

Okay, sure.

Yeah, I think if you put it on the computer, then, you know, people can see. Watch them.

You can sit right down here next, right here on the table.

Thank you. Sorry for the lag on this one.

All right. Should be going up. Okay, a little bigger.

Not sure if you can see that or not. This is our landscape plan here. Um, so it shows some of the— we've got 6 trees up there that are shade trees that have a pretty wide canopy cover.

Is that entire distance 20 feet from—

Sorry, what was that?

Is that entire distance 20 feet?

Where those trees are?

Yeah, the landscape setback is 20 feet through there.

So those canopies would be 30 feet from the looks of this, right?

Yeah, it looks like it.

Yeah, it looks about like 30-ish. Yep. Um, and, you know, I'm not sure exactly how to scale that is. I could talk to our landscape architect, but, um, but the trees that we were proposing was with the intent to kind of shade and provide some of that screening. And then we could either, you know, put shrubs in between the areas where the trees come up to kind of help with that as well. Or for the lower part, we were thinking, you know, maybe we do a 6-foot, like, chain-link fence or something that has, like, slats in it. So you can't see through underneath the tree canopy, but you can still see the tree canopy above. You know, those were kind of a couple options that we wanted, and then the gate. You know, we're, we're still don't have anything set in stone. You know, the, the typically what they will do is like a swing gate, something that, that can, that isn't sliding back and forth and breaking, but is something that can pivot, open up, and then they can lock it with a chain and make it easier. There's less maintenance, less chance for it to break and then have it leave open. They really want to keep that one closed. Um, because if, uh, if you go to the site plan, all the back of the house there is really congested. And so we can look into the— I mean, if we're looking at the history of it, uh, the first dealership went in in the late '80s, early '90s. Second one came in about '97. Um, and so they've been there for quite a while, and as they've been there, they've grown. Um, 2007, the right turn lane on 200 East went in, which limited some of the street parking and condensed the parking of the property a little bit for what they could use it for. And then in 2016, the parking and loading areas on University were taken away when University was expanded. And so with all of that, they've been— they currently either have to unload with their haulers on Uh, 1200 South or on 200 East. And when they go into 200 East, they have to go in that suicide lane and try not to block the entrances of the other businesses. And then unload, wait for traffic to clear, drive the cars through the lot across one of the dealerships into the other dealership. Um, from 200 East, that distance is 760 feet of travel winding through the back of their dealerships. And they've had accidents going through there. It's pretty tight. It's pretty congested. There is a narrow access on the north, on the just east of where we're trying to put this parking lot and east of the existing residents here. But with that one, to get to this parking lot and weave around, that's 645 feet of travel distance. Um, what that means is, um, 2 things. You know, they're, they're not only going nearly an 8th of a mile from the hauler to the parking where they would need, but, um, the hauler time is going to be extended. It's going to be out in the street longer because each car has to travel that. You know, an 8th of a mile, I think, is 660 feet, and 645 is what the shortest distance would be from the north side if they We're able to park the hauler so that it's exactly coming off the back. Um, so that added trip distance adds to the time that the haulers are on there. Um, in the last public meeting, it came up as a concern for the residents is how long the haulers stay on the road. So this would be mutually beneficial that way, because it would allow a shorter trip. You know, now they're able to park and they go. That 20, 30 feet to the parking lot, they're right there able to unload, drop their cars off, and get out of there much quicker versus the 645, 600, and— or 760 feet, whichever option they're using that way, um, which they're currently doing right now. Um, the, the other thing, you know, as, as Ken Garf over the past you know, 15 years, they've also been growing as far as sales. They've increased their sales over 1,500 more vehicles, or selling 1,500 more vehicles each year. They sold 3,306 just in 2024 alone, as well as the customers that are servicing their vehicles has doubled For the Honda dealership, it's doubled to 11,366. For the Volkswagen dealership, it's tripled to be 6,503. That growth has created over 200 and— or sorry, over $2.7 million in tax revenue for the City of Orem. But the growth constraints, in addition to the restraints from 200 East and from University, Are what's is are why we're here today. You know, we're trying to relieve that congestion. They're not planning to increase. So the current employees that go up to the north can go out through that north axis on the side. So rather than having employees coming through the north axis from the Volkswagen and the Honda dealership and weaving through each other and going through that. access to the north. That would allow just an easy ride out from that lane that would allow for less traffic through the parking lot, ease the congestion, but it also decreased the time that the haulers have to be on site and offloading cars. And, you know, like I said, Kengar's looking to work with the city. They'd love to Uh, you know, they've been a great partner. They've invested in programs like the Key to Success. We're here for you, supporting UVU, BYU, those kind of programs. They like being with, teaming with the City of Orem. They like working with the City of Orem. We understand that, you know, like the rezone would need some type of either I'm not sure if you can approve with a condition that they put landscape in there or work with the staff for agreeable landscape or whatever, or do the development agreement. But I know that Kengarff would be open to those 2 options to— for the safe—

for the—

to be able to work with the city on those.

Can you talk a little bit to the— as far as that gate? That gate, I mean, if you're setting it up with a chain or whatever, that's not going to be— that's not going to work for lots of employees coming and going if you're constantly shutting the gate, right?

Yeah, and I'm sorry, Carlos, uh, he helps out with the operations of it. He's actually in the hospital today. Uh, he's, uh, having a kidney stone. surgery, um, he would be able to speak more to, like, what their plans were with how it opens and, and, you know, if it was open for an hour or while employees came in and, and left, or if they closed it up.

Yeah, that, that, I think that's something we want to understand.

Yeah.

Um, I mean, because the goal, if we approve this, would be to have the minimal impact on the neighborhood.

Absolutely.

And so your haulers, if they're just coming 2 or 3 or 4 times a week or whatever. I mean, to me, that's— in my mind anyway, that's kind of a slam dunk that that makes sense to get it off the street and get it where it can safely be undone. As far as the number of employees coming out of here, that's kind of a question. Um, and that type of gate, I mean, that looks like you'd maybe open it up, like you say, maybe for an hour, maybe all day. I don't know.

Um, but anyway, Yeah, could the employees come in through another entrance and just leave that for the hauler?

So they, they currently do come in through another entrance. They, they do have some safety concerns with that because as they weave through the other dealership and go back up through that north access back onto 1200 South, they— it's just that, you know.

How do your customers get into here?

Customers are only going to be using the front. They're not going to be coming in through the back. But couldn't, couldn't the employees enter the same way the So, yeah, they, they could come in through either the east side, the north side, or the south side, but that's where they'd have to kind of weave around. Um, do you, do you have that bigger—

oh, excuse me. I didn't know that I was going to have to be helpful. Because he's in the hospital with kidney stones.

I'm the general manager of both the Honda and Volkswagen dealerships that are there that we're talking about. Oh, Lorenzo Case. So I'm general manager of both stores, so I can answer any questions, probably. Maybe more operational than these 2 gentlemen. I have not been involved in the planning of this project at all. So, but I have a relatively strong idea of what the employees do. And kind of where they come in at and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, if you could give us an idea on that.

Yeah, most— so the Honda store, most employees will come in off of 200 East on that side of the building, and they'll come either park on this, on the, on the side of the building, or back behind the building to 12th or South, or you have to make a U-turn. on University and then turn around and enter. If you're coming from the west side, you have to make U-turn on University, come around and enter from University, and come— and I'm coming that way. Um, it's really difficult for the employees to enter from University at either location because of the— and I wasn't there for this, but when University expanded and that frontage shrunk and the buildings were already existing, It just compressed the inventory, and it is really, really difficult and tight to drive around on the, on the frontage of those 2 dealerships where the new cars are that we're offering for sale. And so, um, I think I don't have a thought, um, really in terms of how you would, um, you know, control the traffic through that gate with employees, uh, other than you would have to just have it open for a certain period of time in the morning and then open at a certain period of time in the evening.

So, so to my question, um, I'm sorry, Lorenzo. Yeah, could we just not allow employees to come there and have them continue to come in for our 2nd East?

Yeah, they would still— I mean, to, to his point, I mean, um, They'll be happy to have the parking. Yeah, they can park back here, right?

How do they get in?

But, but the other thing that we could do, I mean, it's 80 spaces. Um, we could, we could designate those spaces for even additional inventory, um, because we can have employees park in other areas of both locations. Um, we just have to have places to park the other cars. So we, we could, we could choose to use that whole space and those 80 spaces to accommodate, uh, inventory and, and, and use it more as, as storage, which would mean the gate doesn't have to be open and closed much at all, which would then free up parking for the employees, um, directly behind the Honda store or even over on the side of the Volkswagen store where they could continue to use 200 East or even University. to, to enter and park. But having that additional space to put that inventory back there, it might make more sense to do that anyways. Because if the— if, um, the transport, the vehicle transport, in, in my mind, is the biggest issue, um, especially on 200 East, where, where the— where they unload for the Honda store, is just— it, it is extraordinarily unsafe for the, the transport driver, for the other traffic on that road, for, for everybody right there in the middle. So Having the Honda store be able to go back and pull back there, if we had inventory, if that's where we kept our inventory anyways, it would make all the sense in the world to have them unload back there and just pull it right back and park it there.

So you have that flexibility to do employee parking a little closer to the east entrance if you need to?

Absolutely. The employees park wherever they can right now. Where, you know, the earlier they get there, there might be a spot. The later you get there, it might never not be.

Okay.

Um, and so, uh, we, we can, yeah, we can use, um, we can use the space.

However, I mean, I'm looking at Google Maps right now at that situation over on the 200 East, and yeah, you've got that, the north end. You can have your employees there, you can have inventory there.

We could have employees park there. We can put— yeah, we have, we actually currently have an overflow storage place at down our Nissan location down the road on University, uh, in the, um, the land that we bought from Golden Corral a couple years ago. Uh, we store 100 cars or so down there, um, just to have a space to store cars. Back to the point that he made, we're just in a situation where the buildings have been there for 15 years or so, and in that time We've doubled our sales. We've doubled our service traffic. You know, both locations at any given time, you have 450 to 500 cars there for sale. You have 150 people coming in for service every day to both locations and leaving their cars or driving in and out of there. Just, we've just grown and we don't have any space. So 150 employees-ish that are parking there every day. It's just hard to fit everybody almost on those 2 spots.

So, so, so just to clarify, you, you think if we just use that back gate for transport deliveries, dropping on and off, or maybe an occasional something important or whatever, but in general the idea would be that that would be closed most of the time except for transports coming in and out, would that work for you guys?

Yeah, I think it, um, for, for me and for our employees It's, it's 6, 6, 1/2 to the other, because, I mean, they'd rather park closer to the dealership anyway. So that might be ideal to have us park inventory back there that's not being marketed actively, or we can park service cars back there that are waiting for pickup. We can utilize that space for, you know, like I said, that 500 cars on that lot at any of those lots at any given time. 100 of them employees, 120 of those employees at any given time. Yeah, we can. We, we just need a place to park cars and access there would be fantastic for transport. Um, but yes, yeah, we, we could repurpose that to, to store other things, have our employees park closer, um, and, and probably not have a need to have them coming in and out of a gate back there all day.

Okay.

Yeah, now that—

yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, Tom.

Thank you. Can you go back to a photo? Back one. What is that house that isn't in this zoning proposal being used for? Because you own everything from 2nd East to the west, don't you?

We don't, we don't own the house where the—

What's that house used for? It's not your property.

That's not our property.

It's a business and the people live on top. It's like a mixed-use.

Oh, do you know what the business is?

It's been grandfathered in. There's a couple, quite a few different businesses.

Okay. Thank you. But you own, you'll, it'll be an island. You'll own all around it someday. No doubt you'll want to own that piece.

So, okay.

Thank you.

My question is on the, on the gate. Um, to me it doesn't make sense. It should be an electric gate so your employees could go in and out, um, with a key card or something. Uh, you know, and, and also the look, um, that's not very inviting, that little This would need to be a nicer little fence that would— or gate that would open with electronic things. I don't think that's— so I think you want to utilize— I was at the Planning Commission. I think the key thing is having the VW employees park there and also park the new inventory. So I think it defeats the purpose if you're going to have a gate there and it's only being used for unloading cars. But that's— That's just my gist, and I'm not sure if you have different direction or not, but because you're at Honda, right?

I'm Honda Volkswagen.

Okay.

Yeah.

So just from what Carlos said in the last—

Yeah, yeah, I know Carlos had mentioned that, you know, ideally they'd want to use this for employees and inventory.

You know, I'm not—

See, but The issue, the issue is, it's— so it's a different vote. So, I mean, if we're basically voting to allow transports to come in there and going down that path, that's a vote. If we're allowing 100 employees to come in and out there, that's a different vote. So that, that's why I'm asking the questions.

Yeah, I, I only can give my opinion operationally as we, as we operate every single day. I don't know how they would how the corporate would feel about the cost of electronic gate, or if that even is even—

I don't know.

A, a, a benefit from my perspective, um, running both those stores, uh, the math is pretty simple for me. If there's 80 spots, I've got 120-ish employees that are parking every day because some probably ride together or whatever, some are sick, all that kind of stuff. Um, that allows me to put enough cars back there To allow the employees to park other places and alleviate some of the traffic. Yeah, that's how I'm looking at it.

If I understand correctly, Lorenzo, you cannot say whether there'll be an electric gate, but do you have authority to say the employees wouldn't be coming in there and they can come in a different direction?

I have the authority to manage our employees and their processes and our, our how we conduct our business there.

So, to the mayor's point, if we're voting on that's only for transport used you know, a few times a week, you can live with that and it would meet your requirements.

If what the city approves is a gate that is locked for the purpose of unloading and loading transport only, then I'm capable of making that work for our employees and for our business.

Yeah, that answers my question.

I can manage the— I, yes, I have the authority ability. Um, to provide direction to our employees.

You're Ken Garst's favorite employee, right?

For now, right now.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So, um, no, I— the, and the other, the other piece of it. So, I mean, just so we can clarify and decide what we're voting on that way. And then the other piece to me, uh, would be the landscaping piece, just because we want to buffer to the neighborhood and want to blend in and look nice and add value that way.

So, well, and I guess I'm looking at the— I have my little cheat sheet here. For a CT-2 zone, you are required to landscape the entire setback, which is 20 feet. So for me, the question is at this point, because I drove that street before I came today, I went down there and it's the fence, you know. I'm not so sure I like the chain link because in fact the one you have now is Kind of run down a little bit, you know. Um, I, I really appreciated— I thought this, the, the, um, setback behind the Carillon Square was very well done, very— and I think it would be a beautiful buffer to the neighborhood. I think that the neighborhood would appreciate looking out their windows and seeing a pretty masonry wall with some trees.

And, you know, sorry, where was that location? I want to make sure.

So just a little farther east, east of 200 East. If you keep driving down there on that, on 1200 South towards the mall, past J-Dog's, right? Yeah. Okay, right behind Best Buy. Yeah, that, that next commercial section down there, they have a, a red brick, uh, masonry wall that has some little columns. It just looks really nice. Further west, they just have your cinder block masonry wall. Now, to me, that one doesn't look that great, but the, but the landscaping in front of it looks nice. So, you know, I prefer the, the brick one. It looked really nice, you know.

Although, and I agree, but brick is definitely nicer than cinder block. However, if you have cinder block and good landscaping, yeah, then it can look great.

Then it can look great.

I, from a, from a security and, and maintenance standpoint, I, yeah, I would recommend brick or cinder block or something. Yeah, the, uh, the chain link won't hold up.

Yeah, well, and, and, you know, our goal here— there, there's a planning, um, theory. In planning theory, you buffer between zones, you know, and you're, you're asking for this commercial zone, even the albeit 2 lots, right? But we're, we're changing residential there's residential across the street, residential here. We're changing it to commercial. So we need to figure out some way to buffer this residential zone across the street to the north so they're not impacted by this zone change. And to me, that landscaping to create a beautiful, you know, area to look across at, to have across from their homes, is an appropriate buffer.

Sure.

And it sounds like maybe that's something you're— you think would beautify your property also and protect it. You know, maybe we could find a win-win here with that.

I don't think that's what we're voting on. We're voting on a zone change.

That would be part of a development agreement that we would require with the zone change.

Right, Steve?

Okay.

Yeah, it's got to go back to the Planning Commission.

To reiterate with the gate, um, as I'm listening to the discussion, um, and I'm probably not fully authorized, but if we have the extra space and we have the gate for the transport, our employees can park closer to the building. So we can manage that space and put cars there and, and make it, uh, make it work.

Okay.

If I can maybe share another example, because you mentioned the Nissan dealership over by Golden Corral. On the south end of that dealership, there is a masonry wall and landscape buffers similar to what I believe is being described or proposed for this dealership as well.

Yeah, it's also behind Target. I mean, it's a much bigger deal, but it's— that's the idea, is masonry with all kinds of nice landscaping.

And there's, uh, the lot that we use, the Honda store uses to store cars over on the Nissan property, is fully enclosed in a masonry wall. Uh, that's not— it's not chain-like for security, for vehicle security to keep people out of those cars and stealing it.

We—

I mean, I would prefer something a little more, um, more than chain link. Yeah, I think it works for— I think we're both on, on the same page as far as that goes.

Sounds good. Um, are you guys ready to open this up for public comment? Okay, okay, let's go ahead and open this up for the public comment. Uh, if any of you would like to Say anything? Come on up.

Good evening.

Um, I brought some pictures so that you can see. Um, right now there is, as they've— the applicants indicated, there's an open driveway to Part of the C-2 zone area. And I, I just took a picture, uh, one evening, um, of a truck delivering cars, and they just unload them there and drive them into their parking lot. If another opening would occur because of the C-2, that would further complicate the issues that we already have on 1200 South. So, um, I took it upon myself to ask for the police records to see how many, um, issues there have been. I mean, traffic issues between 200 East and Main Street in the last 5 years. There have been 318 traffic, uh, violations. And 87 traffic accidents. That from 200 East to Main is less than a quarter mile. I walked it. Um, I measured it, and that's an incredible amount of traffic issues. It's basically the mini University Parkway. Um, when these trucks come, they already block the existing traffic. And to add an additional place where cars are going to be coming in and out is going to further complicate it. I don't have to remind you, um, that we experienced a death of a friend, um, in August of last year due to traffic issues in that part of the world. So I don't know how— at first when they presented this meeting or this zone change, they said it was PD-5. We went to the Planning Commission and they even sent it back to the applicant to make sure that they hadn't inadvertently submitted it as a C-2. Because to the neighborhood it was a PD-5. But they reaffirmed that it was a C-2 in the second meeting. So, I just feel like this is going to be difficult for me because I'm gonna live right across the street from this parking lot. And a C-2 doesn't require that they— well, they may if you, you make it a part of it, but require a buffer or a fence. Um, I didn't purchase this home so that it could eventually become across the street from a business. And let's say they move. Is that development plan going to be in place for a McDonald's? I doubt it. So it's just the slow encroachment of commercial to the residential neighborhoods, and I appreciate the mention of a nice buffer. But the additional exit to 1200 South would further complicate the traffic. Sometimes it takes me a good while to back out of my own driveway. Um, so I would ask that you take all that into consideration before approving an additional exit to 1200 South.

Thank you.

Hi.

Um, it's becoming a habit up here. Um, I live directly across the street where that entrance is going to be. And, um, 1200 South is becoming a commercial corridor. Like she said, it's becoming a mini University Parkway. That street is so freaking busy already. Uh, it's, it's horrible. And that's why 3 of the Planning Commission voted no about their whole putting in an entryway and, um, having more traffic on that street and making it more commercial. PD5 was more—

would be more—

would be better. But basically, um, Up and down 12th and South, you've already mentioned the wall behind Carillon and the walls down past west of Main Street. Why are we not deserving of a wall? Why don't we get a wall? Why are they having to put their parking lot right in our face? I mean, I'm going to be across the street from them watching this, and when their transports come in, they're going to have to make a wide swing out on 12th and South. And that street is incredibly busy. And it's not just a few times a week, like they said. They come on weekends. They come several times during the week and weekends. So am I going to have to watch a truck wide swing in front of my house and drive in there? They do not need another entrance. What they failed to tell you is they have an entrance on 1200 South on the other side of that house. And, um, if you look at that, there's an entrance there. And they say, oh, that's too small. We can't use that. And it's for the Honda dealership. Well, it's— I just today, I saw 2 big trucks pulling out of there. It is not too small. And they put cars along that edge there. So if they, if they move that, they would have plenty of room for transport to come in there. They have 4 entrances, one on 1200 South, 1 on 200 East, 1 on University Parkway, and 1 on Main Street. And all of that area is Ken Garf. You can't tell me they can't organize their parking lot, that ginormous asphalt sea of cars, better so they, they can get a transport truck in there. I think they can, but they don't want to. They want to inconvenience the neighbors.

Thank you.

They want to make it hard for us. And they don't care about us because, like she said on the first meeting, it was PD5. And when they found out that we were not happy about an entrance, then they came back and said C2 so they could do whatever they wanted. You know, they are steamrolling over us and we're not— we're standing up to them. They do not need an entrance. They have 4 and they can better manage their space. To get their transports in there. You know, and they, they misrepresent the sacrifices they have to make for their employees because they have to drive a little bit. What about the neighborhood? What about the neighbors that have been there? And I'm almost done. The planning commission, the 3 that voted yes to make it C-2, they're all, oh, Ken Garver is such a good employer. They pay so much taxes. You know, they've been there 20-some-odd years. How many? You know, we should just let them have what they want. Well, my family has owned that house for 45 years. I, I think that trumps them because I was there before they were. And, you know, Lucy and I, we do not want tons of cars coming in and out right now. That where that red line is. Cars go in and out of there all the time. And they could move the cars parked to the left of that red line so a transport could get in there, and they could better organize their parking lot so they wouldn't need another entrance. So please keep it PD-5. Make them put a wall. You know, The neighborhood does not want a commercial corridor down 1200 South. Thank you.

I can hear— can you hear me real quick? Okay, thank you for raising the poignant point. I don't know your name, right, to them about questioning whether this is about inventory or their employee parking, because the employee parking is a lie. Because up until now, they could have accommodated and better organized their parking space for their employees, but they're just really saying that for sentimental value. And like my mother said, we've had a death in our neighborhood, and that neighborhood, that whole road is so congested with traffic. And with all this planning, with them building this parking lot, we've not talked about the construction hazard that this is going to cause, how much time that's going to take, how that's going to actually affect us. They talk about accommodations with y'all, but they don't— they've failed to even do that with us. The first meeting that they had, they didn't even have any sort of initiative to talk to us directly. They sent in a representative. So that just really reflects of how they see the community. And at the end of the day, this is really about how the community feels. Although it is just me, my mother, and our neighbor Stu, I have— I know this neighborhood very intimately. I've talked to the residents. I got to know them because I am a part of them. And multiple people disagree with this. Multiple people do not want this to happen, either because they're afraid of how it's actually going to affect them, or we're going to have another person who dies just walking, crossing the street because they think it's a residential zone, when now this is going to change every single thing. That's every single thing about our community. So, I just want to iterate that. Ken Garth has been completely misrepresented and underhanded in every single thing that they've told every— everything to y'all. So please take into consideration of the community, because we're going to be here long after they are.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Does anyone else from the public— what would you like to comment?

Okay, I'm in between a rock and a hard spot here because my in-laws own that home, and my husband and brother-in-law are sitting right here. So I have lived on that street 42 years. And I know what it's like, and it's busy. I've raised 6 children, I have 20 grandchildren, and I know the street is very, very busy. I know years ago that when his parents were— well, they were old and gray, and Ken Garf wanted to buy it, and he says, I'm not ready to sell the place, but when I die, we'll give you first option. So I know where my husband and brother-in-law stand with this whole deal. I know where the neighbors— what they're saying. I know exactly what they're saying. I feel for them. I feel that when I get out of my driveway, because I do live across the street, that it is very, very hard. And certain times of the day, it's very, very, very hard. But the traffic that comes out of the driveway by Sue's house, it's right there, the house with the driveway. People come out of there, the employees, I don't know if they're— and some test drive cars and they put the gear in and just zoom out. And a few times there's been really close calls of me getting in an accident. But people don't care, they just want to get on that road. And it is very hard, and I know the neighbors are feeling it too. And so I personally would not like a gate there. Because I personally feel that Ken Garf, they want to— they have an ownership, they've got the ground, and I think organization is a great big deal. They need to think about that with the trucks and loading and employee parking and all that goes into having a business. I feel like if we do, if it all goes through and it's all set in stone, I personally feel like Linnéa is saying, a really pretty brick wall and landscape. I would like to look out my window and see a beautiful landscape wall. And so if it does all go through fine, I'm all for it. But I do not want to look out and see a chain-link fence with slats that are going to be broken up in a couple years and weeds along the fence line. That's not what we want. We would like a really pretty brick. Well, so thank you, Lenny, for saying that. So I know how the neighbors feel. I feel for them. I, I hate the fact that if a gate goes through, the traffic line would be that much more extended. Busy, busy, busy. So that's my 2 cents, as I'm between both places, and I do love my neighbors, and I do want to keep peace, and with my husband too. Thank you.

Hello, um, can you pan out from like Main Street to 2nd East on there?

I'm up here for just a serious safety issue.

From Main Street to 2nd East, anybody that has to pull into their driveway straight in and have to back out onto 12th South is very dangerous.

I live on the 2nd house from the corner of, uh, 12 South and Main Street, second house from the corner on the south side. Backing out of that driveway is— every day I cross my fingers.

There's, there's 6 lanes. There's 3 lanes coming from the west, 3 coming from the north, from the south, people turning onto 12 South without even slowing down. I know Debbie, where she lives, she has the same problem, and the other has the same problem.

Backing out on that street is like crazy.

Um, so just to hit the safety concern, I think we should all have horseshoe driveways.

Seriously, because you pull in, how do you get out?

When there's 20,000 cars going down that street a day.

That's all I got to say. Thank you.

Any other comments? Okay, well, thank you. We'll go ahead and close the public hearing. And bring it back to the council.

Thoughts?

Steve, maybe you can help us know how we would come around a development agreement that required some of the fencing we've talked about and some— could that be worked out? Could we approve it subject to a development agreement being worked out, or does that have to happen first?

It has to happen first.

Yeah.

So tell the applicant what would happen if we want to wait for that.

Um, so I think we have a meeting scheduled in 2 weeks, another meeting. So in the interim, hopefully we could maybe work out a development agreement that includes the things you, you want in there and have it ready to come back in 2 weeks, potentially. Is that what you're asking?

That's what I'm asking. And I wanted them to know what the process is if we want to make sure the fence is there, right kind of fence, and the right kind of brick and landscaping, if we can work out those agreements. How soon they could get moving if we did that.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, possibly as soon as 2 weeks, obviously just depending on how quickly we can get together and work out the details and get the information and all that.

Yeah, thank you.

It might be helpful also if we could get some guidance from you on what you're looking for in terms of, you know, what kind of a fence are you looking for, how high, you know, you're looking for it to be right adjacent to the sidewalk or maybe set back 20 feet so that the the landscaping is in front of the fence. You know, those kind of details would give us some guidance that would help us work it out as well.

Match the Carillon look and feel. Is that what you were suggesting, Lynette? And there, it's not set back 20 feet, I don't think, that fence.

Yeah, but they said—

she said— say what you said.

Oh, wait.

Oh, you just—

you said you'd like brick, but you'd also be okay with I think I'd be okay with the cinder block if it had a good enough landscape plan that created a buffer, just a beautiful— so they don't see a prison wall. That's right.

Okay.

Because to my mind, if you have— if you're gonna spend so much money and you have block, but then that gives you extra money for really nice landscaping on the other side, right?

Yeah.

So And you won't even see the brick if you do the landscaping, right?

You won't see the block.

The block.

You won't see the block. Um, one other issue, and maybe I'll get roasted for bringing this up, but like I say, I drove out there and, okay, I live next to 1600 North in Orem, my neighborhood. I have to pull out onto 1600 North, so I know exactly what you're talking about where you got to find that window. And there's some times of day I wait 5 minutes to get out of my neighborhood. I get that. As I was down there and as I've kind of looked over that area, I think what's problematic here is you— we have a light to the east on Orme Boulevard that can halt traffic and create a pause in the traffic, but we don't have— to the west is a 4-way stop. And so the cars come at a pretty regular stop interval. So I almost feel like as a city, maybe we need to look at At Main Street and 12th South from a traffic perspective and see if we have enough of a traffic flow to put some other way that we could regulate causing pauses. Yeah, put a stoplight there where we could have more— a longer pause so these people can get out of their homes, their driveways. I, I totally relate to that, and I'm not sure How that works from a traffic perspective in the city here. I mean, or if there are other options.

We would need to look at what is warranted and look at, you know, our standards and stuff. But can we look at it? Absolutely. And we can explore options there. I've made note. 12 Main Street and 1200 South. We can definitely look into it.

Yeah, and I recognize that doesn't have anything to do with you guys really, but at this point has been of the neighborhood experience. Yeah, they're experiencing some issues because of that, and they're worried about it being, you know, further complicated by adding more opportunities for traffic. I like the mayor's idea of that driveway not being for employees because then you're taking their cars off that little segment of road. If their cars are coming in from 200 East, they're not even traveling on 12th South. If you— if your employees will Honor that is the key, right?

Yeah, I think, I think, you know, hearing the comments of the community members, I think the employees feel this, have a lot of the same feelings in terms of trying to enter and exit off those same roads. It is difficult for them too. So I don't know that— I don't know, I wasn't involved again to this point in requesting employee parking specifically. I don't— speaking for our employees, I don't know that they would want to enter and exit consistently off of 1200 South anyway. That it's difficult, as they pointed out, it's difficult to get across there. It's difficult. I mean, it's, it's not the ideal place to, to come in and out of our location anyways.

And I think as far as, like I said, back to the employees, I mean, if we can agree basically that the employer is not going to come off 1200 South, because I mean, employees coming in and off that, now you're 150 cars or whatever. Transport's coming in and off of that, you're talking 5, 6— I don't know what the number is, but it's a very, very low number that's pretty much almost insignificant in the whole scheme of if there's thousands of cars going up and down there.

So yeah. The only— I mean, um, the only thing that you would probably put an additional transport back on 1200 south for Honda, because that's the transport that loads off 200 East. And if there was that access point back there, then it would make sense for us to direct all transports to that gate.

Do you know what that number is?

How many?

Per week?

Yeah.

Uh, it's gonna be It's one per week per store max. Those transports carry 12 to 15 cars. We generally don't acquire from transport companies 30 cars a week at either store because of trade-ins and various— how we acquire our vehicles. It's— now, if you buy cars, could we have 2 in a week? Absolutely, we could, for sure. Yeah, of course we could. Um, but I, I don't have a, uh, I cannot tell you with certainty how many transport drop-offs we get.

But I mean, from what everybody's talking, it's like less than 5, less than 6 per week. Per week?

Oh yeah. Of auto transports.

Auto transports.

Yes.

So we'd be using that back gate.

Yes.

Yes. We're talking very, very low impact, honestly. So Okay, I'm sorry, but we've closed the public hearing.

So, Mayor, uh, just FYI on the Planning Commission, they did, uh, request a development agreement and then it got sidelined. So, but they did request that, the Planning Commission.

And the Planning Commission wasn't voting on development agreement.

Right.

So how did it get sidelined by the applicant, or just—

they continued it and then it just—

yeah, it disappeared. It was discussed but died.

Correct. And there was only the 6 members, there wasn't 7, so it was a 3-3.

So as far as to resolve this, if we— do we want to talk about what we might want in this development agreement so we can Vote to—

I'm guessing you've taken a few notes. Some kind of solid wall instead of a chain link fence. A gate that is only allowed for transport, not employees coming and going. Some landscaping that is beautiful. That has to be decided as to what that is. Those are— oh, and the height of the fence. I think 6 foot is adequate, but I don't know. I assume that's what Carolyn Square— I drive by that every day too, but I couldn't tell you how high it is, but I think a 6-foot fence would be adequate. Those are my key takeaways. I don't mean to be all-inclusive, but those are the bullet points I was identifying as we discussed.

If I may add maybe one, maybe some signage could be put at the gate that says deliveries only, just to kind of help reinforce for that use only.

And then can you—

I'll buy the delivery-only sign for you.

Do you have Can you say to these delivery trucks, you cannot, you know, stop on 200 East or 1200 South to unload or to any— for any reason, right?

Yeah, we can't.

Do they honor that?

It's more difficult to— like, I would not be able to tell them to have delivery hours because, as the residents have stated, they do deliver on the weekends, Sundays, even if they— I mean, they deliver all the time. Um, these transport companies are just running cars across the country so that they deliver whenever they're in. But yes, um, we, we, we absolutely can tell them where to drop their cars. Yes.

Okay.

Because I've been by J-Dawgs. I've driven by there where the, where the delivery truck was in the middle of the road.

Yeah.

I was afraid I was going to hit the guy. I was really worried about his safety.

It's perilous.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's for the only the Honda deliveries parked there. Volkswagen already unloads on 12th South, um, on 1200 South. But yeah, the, the— we, we, we have the ability to direct the transport company. This is where we receive our vehicles for both stores. The, um— I can't speak for the Mazda dealership that's next to Volkswagen, they're not ours. But, uh, for us, we, we can absolutely tell them.

Mazda's not under your control either, right?

No, we, we— that's not Kengar.

Okay, so as far as next step, so Steve, we don't need to vote on anything, do we? So we just need to basically—

we have to vote, don't we?

What's that?

Do we have to vote to defer this?

Could you vote?

Yeah, contingent. Could you vote for it?

No.

And then a contingent?

No.

On the development agreement?

No, the development agreement would need to be signed first before we vote.

Yeah, so I could make a motion to To delay, defer, what's the right term?

Continue.

To continue this until a development agreement has been worked out.

Yeah, if you want to just continue it to the next meeting.

Okay.

And then, you know, for whatever reason we're not done, we can continue it again, but hopefully we can get it done in 2 weeks.

And then if there are some other things that we find out about that we maybe want to put in the development agreement or approach them about having in a development agreement, that's open, right?

Yeah.

You don't have to say all that right now. So if the residents have come up with some idea that you guys are, you know, we can work a compromise or something there, we can do that.

Yes.

So are you open for a motion on the deferral on the—

can I make one last question? So as, uh, Lynette pointed out, you know, the C-2 zone already does require them to put 20 feet of landscaping adjacent to 1200 South. So do you have a thought as to where you would want the fence? In relation to that 20 feet of landscaping? In other words, do you want the fence at the back of that landscaping or in the middle of it, or what, what's your preference? Okay, that— I think that makes the most sense, but I just want the applicant to know what your intent is.

You guys are just going to park cars on the other side of the fence, right?

Hey, back, back to us. She's asking a question.

You're only going to park cars on the other side of the fence, right? So, you know, you're okay with having all the green To the north, to the— on the north of the fence.

I think it, um, ideally we'd just want to have like a little clearance from the curb to the wall so that our bumpers aren't hitting up against it or something.

I think he said yes.

Did you?

So what we're talking about is 12 South, a landscaping buffer for 20 feet or whatever, and then the wall. The fence. So, is that what we're talking about?

That's what C-2 requires is a 20-foot.

Yeah, it requires the 20-foot landscape buffer. I don't think it requires the wall.

Right.

So that would be correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think he's just suggesting that if he puts the wall right on the 20-foot, then their existing parking may not have enough room because they're going to be bumping against the wall. So they might need just a, you know, a foot or something of room to—

you guys can figure that out.

17 feet, 18 feet, 15, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

And then there's site triangles too that we'd have to stay out of.

But—

And then figure out the fence thing too, or the gate, as far as what's going to be the best way to do that. I mean, how would— these are all different transport companies, aren't they? I mean, do they have a key to get in, or you have security that has to let them in?

No, they, they have to They, they can't— they don't drop cars unless we're there, generally, because we don't allow them to leave the keys in the cars. Someone has to sign for the cars. They inspect the cars.

So I guess what, what I'm trying to get at is ideally those transports show up and they go right in your dealership. They don't sit out on 12 South for an hour figuring out what's going on.

Yeah, they would, they would, uh, notify us that they are there. and we would come unlock the gate, um, and open it so they can pull the cars on, um, and then leave them. Uh, they, they're, they're interested in getting in and out as quick as they possibly can.

Yeah, that would be our interest too, to not obstruct anything.

We're on the same page.

I don't know if there's any, any way we could do that different with the entry next, as far as a key box or whatever.

But anyway, so Tom, are you going to make a motion?

Because I'm ready to— the next city council is, is March Yeah, Mayor, are you ready for a continue?

19th.

Does the development agreement— does that have to go to Planning Commission, or does it—

it's just to ask something like this? It would not need to.

Okay, okay, perfect.

Okay, okay, I think we're good.

Mayor, I move that we continue this item. Or do I need to say the whole item? We continue item 10.1 until the meeting held on March 25th.

Someone want to second that? I'll second that.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Uh, resolution continues. Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, next up we've got item 10.2. A public hearing, ordinance amending fiscal year budget 2024-2025. Brandon Nelson.

Well, you'll land on the 27th, but where you land, what— in theory, you could be on the call. What you, what you Are you available to call? Let's find out. My brother lived in Ecuador for the last 10 years of his life. He was broke and was escaping problems. It's Brandon.

Welcome.

All right, thank you, Mayor, uh, city council members. Uh, we're back again for, uh, another one of our, um, Budget amendment rounds for fiscal year '25. As per usual, most of the items on here, although we have a significant number of other items this time as well, but most, as per usual, most of the items that are on here are grant or donation related. All the items you see with the note of 1 are related to those type of items, whether they be from donations to the Orem Foundation, um, or relate— and even those donations are usually related to a specific thing such as the Gold Star Memorial or the library, or in various other items such as if you look down, down in here, down in the Major Crimes Task Force They receive a federal grant, the HIDTA grant for high-intensity drug trafficking. Forget what the A is for, but they receive that grant and it's a calendar year grant. And so they receive that every— even though it says January through June, that it's like the full calendar year. We have received our— if we scroll down just a little bit here. You'll notice the grant for the LWCF there near the top. For that includes 2 of the parks. I believe it's Windsor was one.

Is that what?

Northridge and Windsor.

Yeah. And we have others in the works, but we haven't necessarily got to the point of submitting for those or getting those yet, quite yet. They're— I believe they're tentatively awarded, but we haven't started the progress on those.

Um, and those are our park improvements, right, Bryn? The ones that we— you showed us for Northridge and Windsor they're working on right now?

Yes, multi-sport courts and, uh, playground, I believe. Playgrounds.

Nice.

Okay, uh, we have to do a 50% match, so some of it comes from general fund or CARE tax and the other From the, this federal LWCF grant.

Wonderful.

Um, are there any questions related to any of those particular items other than the ones we've already asked? Okay, um, if we look at item number 2 near the top, the rental revenues athletic fields, we are raising the athletic field rental budgeted amount in order to purchase A deep tine aerator, I think, is what it was referred to. I'm assuming that's one of those things that puts the holes in the ground and fertilizes to some, some extent or other. So, and they've been doing very well with those athletic field rentals, and so they're attempting to move forward with that, as obviously as we're in— particularly as we enter that particular season. Item number 3 is a sale of a fixed asset, um, the $17,000. And if I remember correctly, that was the sale of the dirt. I have to go down to the notes, but let's see. Yeah, so when we did Lakeside Ballpark, um, obviously there was dirt in the infield. That dirt is actually a different kind of dirt, and so when we replace that with the Turf, then we had that dirt available and sold it to Highland City. And so the Parks Division would like to use those funds for additional things that they need for the facilities. And let's see, we go back up. Item number 4, the $135,000 miscellaneous revenues. So if you'll remember, once upon a time we had a fire engine that caught fire, and, uh, the— so we received some insurance proceeds from that, uh, fire, and we've been put— basically put those in a savings account. And the fire department currently has a need for a paramedic vehicle, and so they would want to use Um, those portion of those funds to, to purchase that vehicle and get that process rolling. And number 5, uh, the normally number 5, we would— we— it's the one we come to you in June. Normally it's the surplus funds. Uh, you know, if you'll remember, the auditor when he was here said we exceeded how much we could have. So this entry is to get us below that threshold required by the state, as well as we have an intended use for a portion of those funds to finish funding the Beast next door. So, uh, we felt like, okay, we'd better get that rolling now so that those funds are available to, to finish that off. Um, any questions on any of those 4 things— 2, 3, or 4 or 5 that just mentioned. Okay, um, and you can see that number 5, those funds are being transferred to the Capital Improvement Project Fund for that purpose. Um, and then the last item is item number 6 here toward—

there we go.

Item number 6, the Senior Citizens Fund. Uh, they are having a boiler issue, um, as well as some kitchens, kitchen equipment, um, things that they need replaced. Obviously, we would prefer them to fix the boiler before next year. So, and it's made it this far, basically through the winter. So a good time to really be going in and trying to get that taken care of. They are using the Senior Citizens Fund appropriated surplus. That is what the intent of their surplus is, is to cover, primarily cover facilities items. Of the Senior Citizens Fund. And then, you know, obviously, we— those funds grow over time again until such time as these kind of things come along. Um, and so, are there any questions about that particular item? Okay, those are all of the budget amendments that we have for up to this time. So if there's no other questions, then I guess we can turn it over to the mayor to open it up for a public hearing.

Thank you.

So just a quick question. Stay at the bottom, please.

Stay at the bottom.

All righty.

So net city funds increase $7.8 million. Is that right?

Yes. Obviously some of those— that $3.2 million, for instance, is a dupe because it involves 2 different funds. It's there twice.

So is there a net city increase or no?

Yeah, there is. It's technically $7.8 million.

Okay.

When city as a whole— if you look at any particular one fund, that's not the case, but every fund of the city will go up by $7.8 million.

And then the $8.6 million total city funds?

The $8.461 million, is that what—

right.

Yeah, so that's the difference, right? If you compare that versus the $629 million, which currently budgeted for those items, then that's $7.8 million is the difference between those 2. So that's the change, that's the net change in the budget. We're just— some of those we want to identify that, hey, we already had some budgeted funds there and we're, you know, adding to those existing funds.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, you bet.

Any other questions before we open this up? I'd like to open this up to the public. If you have any comments on these budget issues. Okay, we'll close the public comment, bring this back to the council. Would somebody like to make a motion on this?

Yeah, I move, Mayor, that we approve by ordinance amending the fiscal year '24-'25 budget as shown on the sheet.

Second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Budget ordinance is approved.

I just want to add, I think that it was genius of Parks and Rec to sell dirt. Well done.

I didn't even realize they, you know, that was a thing, but makes sense after you told me about it.

And Highland is being blessed by Orem soil.

That's right.

We're now part of Highland.

How's that?

So, special dirt.

A lot of memories.

So, but these days it doesn't even have to be special dirt. Just dirt in general costs a fortune.

So, so, Mayor, uh, Jennifer Young finally made it here. So she was one that we, uh, she's on the Cultural Arts Advisory Commission, so she showed up.

Yes, Jennifer, we, we approved you for the cultural arts. We're looking for good things.

Thanks for all you're doing.

Being willing to serve, appreciate it.

She's gonna— I'm on that, over that commission, so I appreciate her willingness.

So thank you. Last on the agenda, we've got city manager information items.

Yes, I will direct Pete to do a social media post saying that a city win is that Highland City values Orem's dirt. We'll be light on the details. Other than that, we We're, we're really excited about the State of the City event, uh, Thursday morning, 9 AM, in our library hall. I have it on good authority, even though I haven't seen it myself, there has been some pretty good, uh, screen time, acting and non-acting. Um, uh, really excited about the agenda. We have different performances going on, uh, different individuals that are coming to, to share.

Thank you.

share the, just the wonderful things that we've been doing. So you and the public and employees won't just be hearing from, from just us, but hearing from others who have enjoyed the partnership and working alongside us to make Orem better. Let's see. You know that we restarted neighborhood meetings, and we've had a few. Several of you have been able to be there. These have been hosted by our Neighborhood Commission. Well, I'll just say, you know, keep having patience with us. Keep coming as we build momentum with this. We think we're gonna— we have, you know, plenty of ideas to continue to get more and more of the public, more and more of the neighborhood out to those.

Brent, I heard about those after the fact. Can you somehow let us know about them? There was an email sent. I didn't— I didn't hit a calendar invite, so I missed it.

I'm sorry.

Yes, so I did hear from one of you that we didn't get the word out soon enough and good enough. I apologize for that. That's us training our new neighborhood commissioners.

Not a criticism, just the future. Thank you. I know I didn't show up on my calendar.

Fair point. We will do better. So thank you. Um, uh, let's see, I'll just— I mentioned to, to some of you, and I've mentioned by email, that I think we really had a successful trip out to D.C. Um, uh, Mayor, myself, and Public Works Director Chris Shirkey attended, and we really had a very, very positive response, specifically by Senator John Curtis and And Representative Mike Kennedy. Um, although it's a, a long process to make things sort of official in writing and everything, uh, we did receive some very promising verbal, um, responses from, from those 2. So, uh, just want to, you know, publicly acknowledge that. Last thing, I am hoping for a bit of a straw poll from you. We, we of course have our City Hall opening, uh, coming on here very, very soon. We've already started the process of slowly kind of, you know, moving employee groups over there. Um, we feel like we could achieve, uh, an April 8th, uh, opening, an open house. However, um, uh, I understand that there may be some on vacation. at about that time. And so we, uh, we know we could hit April 25th, and we want it to be celebratory and everyone to be there. And we have lots of plans to make it fun and engaging and interesting, um, but want to make sure that if we do push it back to an April 25th, that all of you, you know, would be able to be there. And that, um, uh, or April 22nd, sorry, it would be. And, and as part of that, so then we would have a work session on April 22nd, but our— we would have the, the open house in lieu of a council meeting that, that evening. So the open house would start at 6:00 so that, so that we can make it a proper event and, and, you know, invite the public in and around and, and to enjoy the new facility. So can I get— yeah, like a thumbs up on availability? 22nd?

Everybody here?

So April 22nd, either one, either one.

I'm either one too.

Okay, so we will then plan for April 22nd, and we will move a 90% confidence rate on April 8th to 100% confidence rate, Ryan, for April 22nd. Open house for—

it's 80%, but I'm eyeballing Brandon because I think we have to approve the tentative budget that night.

So, okay.

Be a work session still. I'm just making sure we're okay with Brandon since we're kicking him out of this building this week.

I want to make sure he's still happy with this.

Wonderful.

We'll be sending out more details about what that whole agenda will be.

Mayor, if there are other things we need to approve, we could have a shortened meeting and just approve some critical items. I don't know what they might be. It's still a month away.

So thank you. Well, we'll then keep that in mind.

That's all I have.

Yeah, yeah, because we're planning on having a work meeting. Still trying to get in the work meeting early and just do a quick city council if we need to pass anything.

Yeah, right.

Yes, as long as we— yeah, notify.

That's—

yep. Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you, Bren. Thank you for coming, and we'll adjourn this meeting. We'll make a motion.

Actually, I move that we adjourn. I second.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.