City Council · 2026-01-09

Go ahead and welcome you to the 2026 Orem City Council retreat. Do we need to put— do I need to say like it's January 9th or all that?

No.

So, okay. I am excited to see all of you here today. I'd like to welcome the guests that we have, the I'm assuming that it's the spouses. Everybody?

I think I've met everybody.

We're glad to have you here as well.

This is—

I'm excited. I'm excited about the coming year. I'm excited about working with each of you. I've had the opportunity to individually meet with every council member and I really, really enjoyed that. I probably overshared with some of you, and for that I apologize. But I came to really understand and feel what each of one's hearts were about this community. Every council member, I feel, loves Orem and wants what's best for Orem.

Thank you.

And I'm grateful for that. I can't imagine doing this office without having that as one of the— one's foundation. I really enjoy getting to know everyone and appreciate your patience with me as I navigate a new role.

I—

the city— when Bryn leans over and says we're ready to start, I used to be, when I was on the city council, I would just, you know, like other people start around the meetings and I'm like, oh.

I'm sorry.

I guess y'all are waiting for me now, so bear with me, if you will please, on that. I wanted to start off with what my— a couple of my hopes for the coming year, and then we'll go ahead and have the agenda review. My hope, one of my hopes for the coming year, is that we can come together as a city council And work, work as a team to make warm the best it can be, and to represent our residents, to represent, to represent our residents. And I know, let me preface this. I preface some of this. I, I am not the most eloquent person. I always, I always envy Jerry Washburn because he could. finesse anything. And I'm kind of just say it. And sometimes when I say something, it could— I understand it could be taken in a way I did not mean. And I really don't mean that. My heart's in the right place. I'm not saying that I'm going to just run wild and say that's a blanket apology.

That's not what I'm saying.

Mm-hmm.

But just know that if I say something that I— tell me if I've offended you and I will apologize because I really don't mean to do that. But I need to talk about something That I'm afraid— I'll just say it. We need— I would like us to build our trust with each other.

I think that's a good idea.

There is right now, through a series of a variety of events, particularly through a long and arduous campaign season, there have been some things that have happened that have created situations where Where we— the trust isn't the strongest right now between some of us. And so as I pondered as mayor, I thought, how— what can I do to bring that together, to build that trust? And I've thought— I've really thought a lot about this, and I've kind of divided it into 2 different areas. The first area are the things that I can do, and then the second area are things that I can't, I don't have any control over. So I'm going to focus on what I have control over and then challenge you on the things that I don't have control over. What I have control over is I can, I'm, according to the policies and procedures, I run the city council meetings. And like I told some of you, There's certain procedures in that place. I have certain responsibilities in, in that. One of those is to have your backs in a public city council meeting. If somebody comes up and starts attacking one of you or me personally, I have the responsibility to shut that down. Now, there's a difference between personal attacks And then having people making comments, and then we have a lively discussion. Please know that I recognize that. I want us to have thorough discussions. I don't want us— we come from so many different backgrounds, we're not going to agree. I have learned so much. As I've come, as I've been oriented and visited with each of you, I've really appreciated learning, and I hope to continue to do so. But if somebody attacks, starts attacking personally a member of the public, or, and heaven forbid, that it's on the dais, I will shut that down. Because we are there as representatives of our community, and I think we need to set a good example as far as how we are with each other. If you've got a concern, I remember I remember when I was working for another city in Utah Valley, I watched a staff member and a member of the public get in a fistfight out in the front of the city building. You know, it's— I've seen lots of things. I think our community expects us to treat each other with respect and also to thoroughly be prepared for our meetings and to have that that thorough discussion. So things I can control is I can help control what happens in the actual meetings. Like, also as part of this with control is I have hope that as we work together toward, toward making Orem, continuing to work on making it an amazing place to live, like I said in my opening remarks, to be a place that people are proud to be from. That as we work together, that we will build that trust, I hope, will begin to come back just as we work, just through time. And so the challenge I have, a couple challenges, if you have concerns or if you feel that there's a lack of trust between you and somebody else on the council, this is something I can't control. But please, please talk to them individually. Let's see if we can work on that cohesiveness, just getting it out there so we can all stay focused on working together to— as a city council. I can't— like I said, I can't control that. But I do want you to know that again, that I have your backs as a— as mayor in these— in the public settings that I do have, I, I do preside over, because I, I value each one of you. I have really enjoyed getting to know you, and each of you bring a unique perspective that I think is very healthy for our community, and I'm excited to, to go forward with that. So—

Thank you.

I hope I didn't offend, but those are what I wanted to encourage as we work together for the next couple of days to work toward building that trust, just working together as a group. And then also encourage trusting, trusting the staff. Like I kept hearing during some orientation, I don't know how to build a road. I don't know how to build a road.

Where's Chris?

There's Chris. Chris knows how to build a road.

I do.

I think, right?

Yeah, you're a civil engineer, so yes, you know how to build a road.

But I don't know how. Um, so I, I'm going to depend on you and each of your, each of your, um, areas of expertise. I'm going to be depending on you to give me sound advice, sound counsel as, as we go forward. And I'm encouraging you as council members If there's something, if you don't know how to build a road, I don't know how many of you know how to build roads. No one in our conversation said they know how to build a road. So feel free to talk to and learn because we have some amazing staff members here who have so much experience. I don't know if we're in the hundreds of years like Public Works. We went to get oriented at Public Works. There was a row of people, and was it Chris, was it 300 years?

About 300 years.

300 years of experience. I didn't know you were that old. It was not all vested in one person. But anyway, so with that, I just would like to welcome you and hope that in the coming year we can work together. We've got some challenges, we've got some wonderful, wonderful opportunities, and I am truly, truly excited for For the privilege I have to be part of— work with you and to be part of this group. So going forward, we have our agenda here. I think each of you have a copy of it. We're going to go ahead, I'll just go through it all, then I'm going to turn it over to Theresa. Don't be scared, Theresa, I'll tell you what you're doing. City Council leadership quotes and videos, we'll go in the order that Theresa has them set up on the— with the different—

Oh yeah.

on the screen or just— then we have a City Council roundtable and then a review of ORM's major accomplishments then and now. And so that's going to be— will that be—

Yeah.

You'll be facilitated by exec staff, but that would be— turn it over to Brad.

Yeah.

Then we have a break and then we have presentations by Brandon Nelson and Laura Lewis, overview of city's financial picture now and into the future. into the future. I don't know, I know many of you know Laura. I think, I don't know, Quinn and Crystal know Laura. I've known Laura for a lot of years. I asked her one of the questions back when I was on the council, what made you decide, what were you in junior high and say, you know what, I want to be an investment banker, I want to help cities get money. I kind of joke with her about how did she get to where she's been. She is so good at what she does as far as municipal finance. And I'm grateful to have her come later and work with Brandon and explain that. Boards and commission assignments. Okay, I told some of you too, this is like those logical games. I don't know if any of you have taken the LSAT before, but there's a whole section on logical games where, you know, there's Mr. Brown, Ms. Jones, and one has a cowboy hat and one has a parakeet. Someone's allergic to cats, and who lives in in the greenhouse. You know, you have to do this sort of— I killed it on that section of the LSAT. But that's what I kind of felt like. I decided that one person in the marriage is already in law school, there's no reason I need to be in law school. But that was what this kind of felt like. I told— talked to some of you about commission assignments. I will tell you that I made some last-minute changes. Again, like at what, 5 o'clock, Brandon, last night, probably. So you may see things on there that you go, oh, I didn't know that. So anyway, but I tried to make it— well, I'll talk about that later. Then we adjourn, and then dinner. Is dinner in the same room that we were at lunch? It looks like.

Yes. Okay.

Then after dinner, activities on your own if desired. I see a football game in my future. Then D2 breakfast. Then Quinn, you're going to be speaking to us. I'm excited. Why do people love where they live? Lessons from the Midwest. And then presentation of potential major projects. So that would be Brandon again with the exec staff. Then we have a break. And then the goals and areas of focus. Then you'll spend an hour and a half, myself and Brandon will facilitate that. Then we have lunch. Then roundtable. I did skip roundtable up there. We have a couple times for roundtable. Please, please bring your ideas. Let's— I want this to be a safe space for us to share ideas and how we— what we see, our perspectives on that. And then there are going to be some closing remarks, and I assure you they will be brief. And then there will be a half hour.

I promise.

And then we adjourn. So any questions on my remarks or on the agenda coming up? All right, Teresa, we'll turn it over to you for the City Council leadership quotes and videos.

All right, um, so I just kind of randomly stuck them in there and kind of mixed up some videos with the comments, so As I scroll to the next one, surprise, we'll see who gets to go.

Oh!

That's you, Mary.

That's me.

Okay.

All right, I picked this one. This was— this is something that I'm not perfect at, but when you go out into the woods, you look at trees. I love forests. You see all these different trees, and some of them are bent. And some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. So think about what kind of tree you are. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. You're constantly sitting— You're constantly sitting. You are too this, or I am too this, that judgment line comes in. So I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way you are, or they are, excuse me. And appreciate yourself as you are. Because I'm kind of a weird crooked tree. I've had things. So think about the kinds of trees that you are. Are you deciduous? Are you evergreen? Do you have one that peels your bark? Do you have one that— or whatever. Do you have pine cones? But this was really important to me because it tells me how— it reminds me to not be judgmental. Because we don't know what someone has gone through. And that we're not judgmental about other things that we see, but we're judgmental towards ourselves. And we're also judgmental with others as well. They may have gone a period of time without light or without water, or they haven't had a chance to have their roots get really deep. And so this was the quote that I chose. And what I did too is I gave us a little souvenir here. I have the quote if you want to take— I hope I've got enough. I've got 20 copies.

Thank you.

So I'm going to take one and pass it around. But that's, that's mine.

Thank you.

This one is mine. This is my dad's favorite quote. And I— it's mine now also. I saw my father Always wanted to be an entrepreneur. He always wanted to own his own business, and he had ups and downs in that, and a lot of different experiences along the way. Saw a lot of successes and betrayals, and but always said, you know, well, I should probably read the quote. Says far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank. with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat. So my dad always talked about the gray twilight. And do you want to live in that, or do you want to take the chance of experiencing defeat? Because that's the only way you're going to get success and victory, is by taking those chances. So I've always admired this, this saying.

Thank you. Yeah, it is.

Thank you.

As I'm looking down instead of up. So this was one that I heard originally In a book that Ryan Peakeley wrote, and then when I went to go and find it, I searched, and I found it. Stephen Covey quoted him in that book, First Things First.

Service is the virtue that distinguished the great of all times and which they will be remembered by. It places a mark of nobility upon its disciples. It is the dividing line which separates the 2 great groups of the world. Those who help and those who hinder. Those who lift and those who lean. Those who contribute and those who only consume. How much better it is to give than to receive. Service in any form is comely and beautiful, to give encouragement, to impart sympathy, to show interest, to banish fear, to build self-confidence and awaken hope in the hearts of others. In short, to love them and show it is to render the most precious service. And so I think that in a lot of ways, the public service that we're rendering is I'd like to hope that I follow this course and encourage us all to do so. And I think it's a great privilege to be of service to others either in our homes or community or whatever, wherever we are, to be that type of a servant leader.

So thanks. Ah, that's me. So, in 1978, I was introduced to a man who became a dear friend, even though we'd never met. And I've admired his life, even though he's not a real person. But in a lot of ways, he's become a mentor for me, a man named Jean Valjean. And I remember the first time I watched the movie, and it was made for TV. And I was just absolutely blown away with the story. And then over the years I've been able to read the book and watch different versions of it. But I've always loved the story of Jean, a man who was imprisoned for 19 years, not for any horrible, horrific crime. He stole a loaf of bread because his sister's children were hungry. So So 19 years of hard labor, and he comes out of that. And I just want to watch a little clip. And I apologize. I'm still stuck in the Christmas My Favorite Things mode. So this is one of my favorite movies. Anyway, so I just want to watch this little clip we put together. I was hoping you'd sing.

I'm not a tree.

And the night is cold out here. Though our lives are very humble, what we have, we have to share. There is wine here to revive you. There is bread to make you strong. There's a bed to rest till morning, rest from pain and rest from longing.

Bless the food we eat today.

Bless our dear sister and Our honored guest.

Thank you. Get in here!

Pipe down!

Stay there!

Monsignor, we have your silver. We caught this man red-handed.

You didn't have to say you gave him this.

That is right.

But my friend, you left so early, surely something slipped your mind.

You forgot I gave these also. Would you leave the best behind?

Yes, Lord, release me. This man has spoken true. I commend you for your duty. Our Lord's blessing go with you.

But remember this, my brother, seal this some higher thing. You must use this precious silver to become an honest man.

By the witness of the martyrs, by the passion and the blood, God has raised you out of darkness. I have saved You're so poor. So this kind bishop is such a small part of this story, one of the greatest stories in my mind that's ever been told. That's such a brief part of the story, but his actions changed the course of history for this young man. Yeah. And the ripples that went on out from that. Not only did he give him candlesticks, but he passed, passed a torch. A torch of goodness, and kindness, and compassion, and empathy. He goes from prisoner 24601, to an honored guest, and grows to become a man of means and influence, even mayor. And always using what he had been given to bless others, and especially the less fortunate. And I was thinking about this, you know, we spend more time with our coworkers than we do our own families. A lot of times. And We, city staff, all of your employees and all of us, we have the privilege of being with the public in circumstances more than most people have that opportunity. A wise man once said, when you meet someone, treat them as if they were in serious trouble and you'll be right more than half the time.

Thank you.

the time. I suspect if we went around the room and, and if we asked the question, who of us has worries or concerns that are troubling at this very moment, I think we would all probably raise our hands.

Yes.

And I think that that's true with those that we come in contact with. And so on occasion we might have an opportunity like this kind bishop to be a light, A lift, a shoulder, a listening ear, and perhaps even one that we might be the one that needs someone to talk to. And good to know that you're surrounded with good people that you can do that with. So I just, I just, I feel like this is an important principle to remember and to treat each other with kindness. Because we never know what can come from a candlestick, a smile, or a kind encouraging word. Thank you.

This is my quote. It's from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince. Some of you may be familiar with that. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood. Provide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. This appeals to me because I think the best leaders in my life have been leaders that have inspired me to see a bigger vision rather than told me exactly how to get there. And I actually brought 2 books that have been been influential to me. I'll just highlight them for you. One is by a woman named Liz Wiseman. It's called Multipliers. She's at Stanford Business School. The punchline of that book is that we often, through micromanaging other people and telling them how to do their jobs, we often fail to get the best out of them.

People.

And people want to have avenues to be creative. They want to have avenues to be their best selves and find interesting ways to get to a particular destination. And the way we help them get there is we ask great questions rather than tell them a bunch of stuff to do. And so the more that we think of the folks that we lead as partners and collaborators in a larger mission, I think the happier they will be, the higher performing they will be, and the more success we'll have. Second book is by a British guy named John Alexander, Citizens. And I think it's just a— a great read. The punchline of Citizens is that we need to reimagine government from being an organization that efficiently delivers great things to people— that's a good thing to do— but rather a collaborator with citizens on accomplishing cool things. And so he encourages us us in many ways to really think about how to bring citizens into our conversations in more meaningful ways, how to empower them to co-create outcomes with us rather than imagine that our job is to deliver them the best outcomes based on what we believe.

Thank you.

John, J-O-N, Alexander.

This is mine. Did I send you the video clip?

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, let's, um, are any of you familiar with Missy Franklin? You heard that name before? Okay, well, let's watch this clip really quick and I'll talk about it. Looks like you can just X that out and go. Watch it change.

Okay, good.

There we go.

Then you're sitting again.

Then go back to the other hold.

You sound strong. Yes!

Ceebon with a silver!

Missy Franklin, Franklin to the wall in lane 5! Is her first individual medal going to be gold? Yes! Ceebon with a silver!

I think my favorite moment from London was after I won my 100-meter backstroke.

It was my first individual gold medal.

I got out and was doing my first interview, and on the little TV screen it was showing my mom and my dad that were in the stands, and they were both crying.

And I hadn't been emotional until that point, and as soon as I saw them crying, I lost it. And being able to see my family and how happy and proud they were after all the sacrifices that they've made for me, that was my most joyous moment at the Olympics.

So Missy Franklin was a swimmer, and that was the 2012 Olympic Games. She, she was 17 at that time. She won, that was her first gold medal. She went on to win 5 medals total, 4 of them were gold. She held the world record in the 200-meter backstroke from 2012 to 2019. She won Swimmer of the Year in like Swimming World Swimmer of the Year, American Swimmer of the Year, FINA Swimmer of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Then she won 28 medals internationally during her time as a swimmer. And she was the World Sportswoman of the Year in 2019. So she was a very accomplished swimmer. So going into the 2016 Games, you know, she was only, what, 4 years later, she was 22 maybe? So she was a favorite to win and defend all of her gold medal titles, and she'd been killing it in the sport. But she didn't. She got to the Games and she did not even make finals in any of her events. Some of her events she was 6 seconds off her best time, which is like eternity in swim. So she, as you can imagine, was feeling really discouraged about that, and I just want to read to you you what she said about it because I think, when I think about leaders and leadership, I think she just embodies that. She said this: I'd been cast as one of the faces of these Olympic Games, and even now after my failures, I wanted to live up to that image at least as much as I could. Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to live up to it as an athlete, but it was still on me to do so as a person, so that's what I was determined to do. I realized that if I wasn't able to be the athlete I was I was projected to be, all I had left was to be the person I was projected to be. So I wiped away those tears. I vowed to do just that. I would stand in support of my teammates. I would be gracious in defeat. I would answer every question thrown at me by reporters. I would make time for my fans, my sponsors. I would still be that person on those billboards, still be the face of the Games, only I'd be coming at it from a different place. Everyone knows what it's like to fail, and here I'd failed in front of billions I'd let my teammates down, I'd let my country down, I'd let myself down most of all. And yet through it all, I kept reminding myself that everyone knows what it's like to work hard for something and not get it. The real opportunity here was in showing the world what failure can look like in a positive way. What it can mean to work hard for something and not get it and still look ahead to the next goal. To be an inspiration in disappointment. That phrase just kind of lit up in front of me. That would be my theme coming out of these Games.

I'm It so proud of you.

wasn't exactly the thing I'd set out for, but it was the thing at hand, and I would carry it proudly going forward. And I thought she was so courageous and so graceful in that moment, and it just reminds me that sometimes being a great leader doesn't mean you get it right all the time. Sometimes things don't go exactly how you hoped they had gone, but what matters is how you handle that and how you move forward.

Are you gracious?

And do you do all the things we've been talking about? Do you love other people? Do you bring out the best in other people? Missy Franklin went on to be a great influence in the swim world and still is active in that world. She doesn't swim anymore, but she's a great mentor for so many people. So I think maybe one definition of being a leader isn't doing the amazing thing by winning the medal, but it's being gracious and graceful in spite of your failures.

Thank you.

And I'm up last. My favorite quote comes from an old Polish proverb. And I love it so much that my friend got me a sweatshirt with it on it.

Oh! Not my circus, not my monkeys.

I love this quote because it reminds me to not worry about what I can't control. It helps me not micromanage, especially my kids, to say, okay, this is their thing to take care of, it's not mine. Other people. It helps me to give other people grace and not be judgmental in a moment when I might not understand why somebody's doing something. I can say, not my circus, not my monkeys.

I don't know why, but it's not my thing to worry about.

And I think in the form of government, in government you can think of it in the, is this what we need to be doing? Is what we are— is this the proper form of government? Is this the proper role of government? Whatever it is that we are approaching, is this our circus? Is this our monkeys? Is this what we should be doing? There is so much that is. We all took on jobs that mean we are taking on a lot of responsibilities, and it is our circus, and it is our monkeys, and we get to worry about it all, all the time. But there are some things that we can let go, and there are some things that aren't ours to do, and there are things that we need to just let go. Other people have or let— and I think especially with all of you on the executive staff, we need to let you guys shine. You guys do an amazing job. And so I don't want to micromanage anybody. I don't want to judge anybody. I don't want to put my nose in business that isn't mine. So if I ever say not Milwaukee's not necessarily They're not my circus, not my monkeys. Either way, that's what I mean by it, is I'm trying to do my best to focus on what's most important and not worry about what I can't change and not try to change what isn't mine to control.

Thank you. I love that. I love all these, I love all of this.

Thank you.

This is— I appreciate us taking the time to do that. And to go along with what Crystal says, I have that same expression. Because there are so many— I don't need to tell you what I was about to say. There are so many circuses out there. And there are so many monkeys out there. And there's some circuses that want— are going to want us to take their monkeys. They're going to want us to take their circus. And they want us to be in and be part of their circus. So yes, Crystal, thank you. Wise words. We have our circus and we have our monkeys. And some of you know too, I have a problem with primates. But this is, I mean, this is a figurative monkey, so we're okay. But yes, just, we have plenty of things going on in our own circus.

You know we're all primates, right?

No, okay, I should say I like primates.

I mean humans, I'm not even going to comment on that.

It comes from the, you know, if I live a really bad life, I'm going to spend eternity wrapping presents in a corn maze with apes. That's kind of my issue. Primates, I love these primates. These primates are great. But anyway, see, I tend to overshare, and that's why people— my husband and I taught Sunday school in our church congregation, and it was not what we taught, it was what was Karen going to say that made everybody come. And so I apologize ahead of time for possibly oversharing. But thank you. That was— all those messages were very, very powerful. And help me better understand you, and I think help set a tone for us as we go forward.

How are we doing on time?

Okay.

City Council roundtable. Every council member may share your thoughts and ideas. I have some thoughts and ideas, but I'm going to wait on mine. I want to hear from you first.

Quinn.

Quinn, here you'll see some that Quinn would like to talk about. And then if you have any that you would like to talk about, let's do those. We'll come back to mine if we've got time, because we do have another roundtable time tomorrow as well. So Quinn, do you want to go ahead and talk about the things that you want to? And then we'll just go around. So it would be Linnea's on deck, and then Jeff, and we'll just go right around. Chris, Crystal, Jen.

Thanks, Karen. Yeah, I had emailed Bren with a few things that I wanted to come up at some point. Thanks for getting them on the agenda. I wasn't sure how good it looked to have 5 things there, but maybe I'll just address them briefly. These are some things that I wanted to bring to the executive committee executive staff and city council. I'm not terribly attached to a particular timeline on any of these, but these are some things that I've thought about looking at other cities and looking at some other examples of places that are doing really innovative and interesting things that I thought would be Ideas for us to explore. One of these on here actually is for you, Jen. Do you want to take that one now, or should we take— this is the tree planting initiative.

Go ahead, you're on the roll.

I can do that next.

You want to do it when you come up?

Yeah.

Okay.

So I'll save that. The tree planting initiative is something that has emerged from the Natural Resources Commission, and Jen is the City Council representative there. we have told them that we would introduce that idea to you today. The first one on my list is what I call a resident advisory council. I am really interested in the spirit of this John Alexander Citizens' Book of trying to find ways of helping more and more people across Orem feel represented. And I think that's good for them, and I think it's good for us. We have quite remarkable city commissions, resident commissions. I think they're great, and we should continue with those. But there are 2 things that I think we could explore So the first is I would love for us to be quite systematic in surveying our residents on a wide range of issues. So we do, we've done that before. I think some surveys are better than other surveys. Some surveys we control, some surveys others control. I've surveyed a lot of cities, so I have some opinions on what provides useful information there. But I would love for us to have a really rich set of data from our residents on a wide range of issues that we can use as we try to make some decisions on their behalf. In addition to surveys, I think there's power in what I would call a focus group. And the best focus groups scientifically are those That are representative. In a city like Wharton, the best way to get a representative focus group is random selection, at least if it's big enough. And so I am going to propose that at some point we create what I call a resident advisory council, which is a standing focus group, maybe about 15 to 20 people, that meet once a month for a 1-year term. And they are randomly invited to participate in this. The power of that randomization is, is that we are likely to get people that represent all age groups, all parts of the city, all socioeconomic classes, all ethnicities, and We don't get that on our citizen committees. We don't get that in our public comment at City Council. The idea here would be that we as council and executive staff would have a place to go where we want citizen input on tricky issues or decisions where we want input. So let's say it would be short-term rentals, for example, right? Tricky issue. We could take that issue to our standing focus group, the Resident Advisory Council, and ask them to provide feedback on that and use that feedback as we make decisions. I think the advantage of that is twofold. So the first advantage is that it It does, I think, create some visibility in terms of us going out and deliberately trying to solicit citizen input on a range of decisions. And then secondly, I just think it gives us a richer set of creative ideas and reactions from citizens on stuff that we need to solve for. No city in Utah has done that. There are places in the world that have done that, and they've even been more ambitious than this, where they've actually given those resident advisory councils power to make decisions. My proposal is, is that we treat it as a standing focus group as we learn from it and pilot it and see what we can do.

Thank you.

Learn about that experience and be grateful for that feedback. And that's something that I would love to experiment with in an innovative way that I think would expand our democratic process more. It would look like meeting once a month, maybe for 2 hours in the evening. Those who were invited could say no, but if they said yes, that would be really appreciated. We could make a decision whether we wanted to compensate them for their time, perhaps $100 a night. So that would be about a $20,000 commitment over the course of a year. That might make them feel appreciated. and that their time is valuable. But I also think that there is some power in treating it a bit like a jury selection process where you do it because you're a good citizen and a good resident and you're contributing your best ideas without compensation other than just we expect you to contribute to your community as much as you can.

Thank you.

I have a question just on procedure. Do we want to take— when someone presents an idea, do we want to discuss that now? Do we want to let it percolate? Do we want to just hear the idea? How would you like to go forward in fleshing this out and having the opportunity to discuss possible?

Can I make a proposal?

Yeah, let's see. So you have the proposal, or you want to hear all the proposals and go back and talk about them?

My proposal on your question—

Yes.

Is that we use our time today to hear all the ideas.

Okay.

And that we use our time tomorrow to dive into those that we think merit the most discussion.

Is that okay, Council? Is that what—

so I think we could be here a while if you have to date and release on all of them.

Okay, okay, great, thank you.

I guess I'm just teeing up ideas here, and any of these could be the subject of a work session at any time, right, if we wanted to really get everyone's feedback on them. Another thing I'd like to bring to your consideration is that a number of cities have sister cities. I think the sister cities program generally is pretty broken. You know, you go to Chicago and they're like—

Ours was in China and we were told not to be their sister city anymore.

You know what, I gotta tell you that I got an email from one of— some representative of theirs, and there's someone from their country coming next— is it next week?

He's shaking your hand.

And says they want to meet with the— pay a courtesy visit. So I forwarded that to Brynn and said, I would like some guidance, please.

I have some background guidance.

Appreciate that.

So what I don't like about the Sister Cities program that I've seen in a number of places is that it feels a little bit random or a little bit like a cultural boondoggle or something and that you have a sister city in the Czech Republic or something. And maybe once a year you send your folk dancers to your place. And it's a nice cultural exchange. But I'm interested in sister cities for a different reason. And that is that I think we have an opportunity to really learn from other places that are working on the exact same things we are. Or maybe even had worked on them a few years in advance of us. And so I'm a big fan of us trying to be very deliberate about cross-city collaboration with Provo, with other cities in Utah County and beyond. Not only in areas of shared interest around regional commissions, but trying to solve problems together. So there's something local, I think, that we could do. But I also think that there are other cities out there that resemble Orem in many, many ways. They're about our size, that are about our level of development, that have a university in them perhaps, that are wrestling with development questions, that are wrestling with financial questions. that we can learn from. So I, you know, I asked ChatGPT, for example, to find me cities that looked as close to Orem as possible, and it came up with places like Lethbridge, Alberta, and Bellingham, Washington, and places that were similar size, similar stages of decision-making, and I am introducing the idea that a sister city partnership with cities that are doing the same stuff we are could be very productive at a low cost. So that's, that's that idea. Next idea, I get this one from Brookings, South Dakota. Brookings, South Dakota on their website has what they call a City Employee Speakers Bureau. And what that is, is it takes all of these amazing people we have at the city who have expertise in particular things, and we go out and we ask them and say, what are you interested in speaking to citizen groups about? So maybe it's the arborist who's interested in speaking about trees of Orem. Maybe it's Brandon who's interested in speaking about Orem's budget. Maybe it's, you know, Bryce who's interested in speaking about what it means to have an experiential library. Things like this. And then groups in the city, whether they be church groups or civic groups or others, can look at that directory and say, okay, here are people and their expertise, here are the things that they can speak to foreign citizens about, and they can invite you to speak at their events. And I think that not only is a good way of educating citizens, but I think that that's a way that we can demonstrate great partnership with our citizens and helping bring them into all of the awesome things that you all are doing. That to me is extremely easy to do and would be a quick win for us. And then finally, One of the things that I would love for us to be known for in Orem is having a really vibrant arts community. And we have this amazing Sarah Theatre and programming. We've lost a couple of key cultural events. There's a lot of hunger for cultural events. I think there are a lot of grants out there. That would help support what I call artists or writers in residence, which would look like an artist or a writer coming to Orem for a period of 6 weeks or 2 months or something and receiving a fellowship to work on a particular project sponsored in part by the city. And then as part of their commitment, being available and active in helping with the SARA or with other groups to bring their expertise and teach youth groups and collaborate with others in the city. I think that that could help us brand ourselves as a cultural arts community. I think it's not an expensive proposition. I think it brings people into Orem that we don't already have here. to see the creative artists and other people we do have at Orem and to start to build opportunities for collaboration with people that we think are really interesting from all across the country or even around the world and bring that into our community. So that's the high level on those ideas.

Thanks.

All right.

So you'll be doing the tree— talking about tree planting when it's your turn?

Yes.

Okay, Lynn, thank you. All right, Councilmember Millett.

Um, yeah, I must have missed the memo. I didn't know we were presenting projects, ideas for projects, so I'm just kind of shooting off the flyers. Um, I guess some of the things I'm passionate about for this next year is, um, I really would like to Create better or more relationships with legislators, not just our Orem legislators. I'm finding as I'm attempting to make some things happen on the state level that benefit Orem, it really depends on what legislator is sitting on what committee and who has the most clout and how your ideas get presented. So if we we could figure out ways to really expand, improve our relationships with our legislators, our local legislators who are always wonderful to help us, but they themselves have said to me several times, you know, maybe go talk to this legislator instead that lives in Draper or Sandy. So, and I know the ULCT kind of helps us with that, but maybe as a city if we could figure out a way to expand that relationship. Thank you. hosting our own, maybe Pancakes and Politics brunches or something like that, that will bring legislators here or wherever to help them see our community. And we're very unique as a— I'm finding our name is— we're called a legacy community, over 100 years old, built out, you know, defining ourselves at this point as important. And so we can just decide what direction we want to go and who we want to be. I was just sitting in a webinar yesterday about that, and it was a very interesting conversation to look back and see how we're like other cities— Saratoga, Eagle Mountain— they're where we were 40 years ago.

They are build, build, build, right?

And I remember that because because I was part of that build when I built my house 35 years ago, right? Um, but now, Orem, we need to find our groove here and figure out where we are. And at that— and all of this Wasatch Front cities pretty much have these same challenges. So change those mindsets, educate on our situation, where we are. Um, that's kind of something I would like kind of move forward on is, you know, brainstorming ways to create those connections with the other legacy cities and also with our legislators. And I've talked about this quite a bit, is the owner-occupied housing issue.

I'm kind of concerned.

I've been talking several times about, along that line, you know, we're giving these property tax exemption to homeowners, but we're also giving that to investment properties. And the incentive with the, you know, according to our state constitution, is because residents live there. But I don't know if you know this, but I'm on some email lists and they're talking about upping that, increasing that exemption from 45% to higher. Well, to me, you're just— there's opportunity need to get more money for our schools from those property taxes through these investment properties. And to de-incentivize investment property discounts would be something I would like to concentrate on, because I think we should be incentivizing homeownership. And if we can lead out on that as a city, because we're the ones being occupied by investors, Our housing stock is being picked up by a lot of investors. That's— I know that's a tricky line to walk, but I'd like to see if we can brainstorm on ways to start those conversations. We're not really able to do a lot of the legislation, but if we can once again work with legislators to kind of get those conversations going, that would help our city. And then one that just came up this last year that I thought about is preserving corridors and using those corridors for public benefit. And one that I really noticed this last year was along railroad tracks. You know, that there should be a buffer zone, there should be a corridor next to these, and there are. And why don't we use that for running paths, for bike paths, for public use, you know, for beautification. Let's see if we can create some partnerships there. I know we've been looking into canals, putting bike paths over canals, and that's a slow move, right? I've been talking about that for 4 years now. But as I— I just remember when I worked before, I had a professor at BYU that I used to— I needed to get weather reports often for my investigations for slip and fall cases or whatever. And tragically, I read in the newspaper that he passed away riding his bike up to campus.

He'd been hit by a car while he was riding his bike.

And so my thoughts from there was, why, you know, let's— and we've improved a lot on that, but let's see if we can create some safer areas. for people to ride their bikes, those who want to do that, so we don't have some of these issues, safety issues, because I feel like one of our responsibilities is to provide safe communities and safe environments for our residents. So those are probably my 2 biggest passions right now. I could give— I probably have another list, but let's just start with those.

Thank you. And I need to apologize. It looks like I talked about having people suggest the email, suggest this, I think, to a roundtable, but it looks like it kind of circulated internally with the staff, and I must have mentioned it to Quinn as I met with— because I met with you first, and so I hadn't talked to you about that.

So—

Oh, no worries.

I apologize for that. It looks like it's swimming around in my computer with other email addresses. I'm always willing to talk. No, I appreciate, I appreciate the things that you would like to work on. All right, Jeff.

Thank you. I love these ideas that we've heard already, and I'm excited to hear other ideas that come forward. So one of the things that I've been concerned about and watching, and, you know, we've seen the national concern Yes. In terms of housing affordability, and going along with what Councilmember Millis said, you know, we have an opportunity to change some neighborhoods, you know, as a legacy city. I know Ogden, and there are some other cities that have done some great things there. And so I would also like to make that a continued focus. As part of our safe and livable neighborhoods, to maybe put even a little more emphasis on that. And I love what Lenny was saying about working with outside legislators and those that might be able to help us move the needle on that. We have so many neighborhoods and so many homes. I look at the neighborhood that I grew up in, and these are great homes for families. But they're gobbled up by investment companies, and that is just taken right off the market. And I think, you know, if we can turn that tide, some great opportunities for young families to get into affordable—

more affordable homes.

I don't know what affordable means anymore. More affordable homes. And You know, in fact, I saw that President Trump said something yesterday about wanting to do that same thing, to make it easier for families to be able to purchase these homes instead of these institutional mega corporations that come in and just buy up everything. And they don't really care what happens in the neighborhood, where on the other— the flip side of that coin is a family that's buying that and investing in it. They care, and everything just gets better.

And not to keep beating that horse, but I love that.

Thank you.

Another thing that I've been thinking about, and it kind of goes along with what you were saying, it would be nice to be able to have a pulse of the city of what people are actually thinking Thank you. Not what's being said on social media, but a broader perspective of the whole city. And I know that there are pros and cons with surveys, and, you know, so if you would know more about this, I don't know how you get a survey that people are comfortable with because it seems like anytime someone does a survey If they have information you don't like, then it's rigged. And if they have information that you, you know, it kind of goes both ways. So if there's, if there's a way of doing that and getting an actual pulse of where the citizenry is at on lots of different subjects, that would be really helpful. Also, when I was 30-something, something. I had the opportunity to come into the City Council and make a presentation about a poet laureate. There was a man in Orem named Clyde Weeks.

Oh yes.

Who was postmaster. And his wife sang in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Ken.

And anyway, great family. They lived on 100 And he was prolific about writing poetry. Something he loved to do. And, and so he and I talked about, wouldn't it be cool to have a poem written about, you know, certain events that happened. And I know other places do that kind of thing. But it's kind of a lost, a lost art. But anyway, so I came and presented that to the city council, and it kind of went nowhere. And maybe nobody cares, maybe it's a dumb idea, but I think it would be interesting to— and again, this kind of goes along with what you were saying about artists and writers and, you know, kind of special moments in the history of the city and having somebody write something So anyway, I don't know who that would be. Maybe Bryce has a— you know, I know he has a flair for writing and some spare time.

To be or not to be.

Yes.

In Oram, that was the question.

See?

Yeah, roses are red, violets are blue.

And then this is kind of a silly one, but— and Brent and I have talked about this, and I've heard about it, others have been talking about it as well. But I was talking with someone a few months ago, and they had lost someone very close to them. Not someone, something. They lost their dog. And we were kind of, you know, tearfully, you know, Reminiscing about how great this dog was and how, how, what a great friend and companion. And, and, you know, we've all heard the story of the Rainbow Bridge. And so I was thinking, you know, it would be really cool to have a Rainbow Bridge built. And my proposal was to do it in the dog park. Just to build a bridge where people could come and either hang a dog leash on a fence or Paint a stone with, you know, little paw prints on it or whatever. Come to find out, St. George already has one. So we went down there last time we were down there and went and visited it. But it's in the dog park, turns out probably not the best place to do that. But to have somewhere where those of us who sometimes in families, those furry friends are kids and very, very much loved. And anyway, I was just thinking it would be fun to do a place of memorial for dogs and cats.

Don't forget cats.

Yes, we won't have any monkeys.

He's got a cat ally now, so just so you know.

No primates.

No primates, no gorillas, no No paintings, no things?

It was fun to— the one in St. George, it was really cool because it was kind of in a quiet place off of the beaten path of the park, but it was beautiful because people would— you could see that families had gone out and gathered rocks that they had painted or had— what do you call that when you've been picturing anything?

Mod Podge.

Mod Podge.

Yes. They had like put a picture on a rock or done different things just to kind of like say we love our dog or our cat. Anyway, that's not anything that's gonna change anyone's life, but I think it won't be worse than the bridge.

Mayor, if I can just briefly say, while While I don't know if on all of these we can be, you know, immediately perfect and do exactly what is being suggested, I am very confident that on, you know, all of these things we can make real progress and we can flesh them out and we can find a yes, a path forward. And the reason why I say that at this point is, you know, this is something that Jeff and I have talked about that we have been exploring.

Thank you, appreciate that. All right, Councilmember Kilpatrick.

Again, that same process where I'm just contemplating.

We have thoughts about thriving and balanced business environment.

So I know that we've done a lot under Gary's team and leadership of supporting Supporting local business, having those weekly, those monthly meetings for business entities. But I also think that would be nice to try and create, as we do, like a Chamber of Commerce helps, but sometimes there's a need on the small, medium, large employers that are in our city might have some input. And so maybe I thought we were talking Possibly either a council commission or a meeting of some sort on a regular basis, even annually or quarterly or something that would allow us to see if the needs that they have and their growth and their future cycle, just tapping into what their needs are and if we as a community could help assist in one way or another through our resources. That might be just to help and assist in lifting.

And also, as we think of ways to help others come into our community, the business growth cycle is critical to our tax infrastructure and helping all of us have our citizenry pay lower taxes because we have businesses that are thriving, excelling, and bringing in lots of sales tax revenue. Thank you.

So that's just one of the thoughts of just seeing what we could possibly do to assist there.

Another would be, and where I think we're already doing it to some degree, just work on our neighborhood areas as we already have the safe, livable, connected, and engaged neighborhoods, which is one of our current focuses. Just continue to I know Monet's done a marvelous job at helping assist with that in her particular commission that she oversees and has.

But I think there's more, as we've also talked about, the need for that renovation process and finding neighborhoods in which we can probably focus on and create some.

The state has funds, and there's other kinds of entities that have funds to revitalize.

So maybe in our planning processes of looking at that, what are the next areas that we might be able to assist in helping that vitalization of our neighborhoods? Some that need more care than others, maybe pinpointing some of those and what they are and then creating ways to accomplish some of that as we are in that legacy state that's certainly mentioned over here. And then just finally, we have a solution, but just some form of traffic congestion, peak hour opportunities to consider as we have hundreds of thousands of people travel through our city every day going to other cities.

Yeah.

From the freeway to Provo, up here to Heber and up Provo Canyon as they travel through I-15. Just so, as we're already heavily involved in that, but just be aware of that ongoing awareness.

I wouldn't say I don't have a solution. I just say that we ought to continue that opportunity study, think about, understand. And what has been done already is tremendous. So maybe it's just continuing on the same path we're already on.

I'm not saying we need to change. I think that is an emphasis that would be helpful because many have always expressed, boy, the city is always congested, I can't get around, and that kind of thing.

Just to try and create, if nothing else, opportunities for them to say, well, here's another alternative path, consider these, just for our citizens to know what we're working on.

And I'd say those are probably the most for now.

Thank you.

Other than just thanking the city staff for all the amazing work they do do.

because they're so responsive. I've had lots of citizens ask questions, and every time I point them in the direction of someone in the city, as a city staff member, to look at something, they're always more than happy and always so wonderful.

Yes.

So I just, yeah, I commend our city staff and, and the role that they all play in making this an amazing city to live in. So that's probably all I have.

Great, thank you.

Councilmember Milstein.

Going towards the end means that most of the great ideas have been taken.

Oh, that's what I'm actually going to take a second here. You see what mine are? Mine are like, I picked 2, 3 very inward-looking ones, but I'm like, yeah, this is what I wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get it.

Legislative priorities is top on my list.

Yeah.

Work closely with some legislators, and so kind of cultivating those relationships and seeing how we can help Oren with those is— I would love to work towards that. I think there's a lot that's happening in the legislature that affects cities, and we need to be aware of that and pushing back where it needs to be, but also not creating an antagonistic relationship with our legislators. I've seen that happen too often between other organizations who tend to butt heads. I see it with school district and legislators, I see it with other cities and legislators, that that pushback relationship is very harmful. And so if we can foster a great relationship with our legislators and all legislators instead of pointing fingers or relationship, I think that will be very beneficial to us as a city. The neighborhood revitalization, that's something that I've thought about for a long time. I was part of a neighborhood revitalization program when I lived in Ogden and when I lived in Columbus, Ohio. And so I feel like that's a great thing that if we can bring that to Orem, that would be awesome. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is our new school district. How are we planning meetings with the new board? Are we planning meetings with the other cities? What, what's going on there? How can we best help and assist our new school board to help make our schools be as successful as possible for the next generation and the generations to come? It's funny because none of my kids will actually even go to this new school district, so it's a little odd. And I think we're all in that position where—

It'll be close, maybe in a couple years.

Right.

So I mean, for reference, my 2 younger kids are in a charter school, and so they're not going to be in Alpine or whatever the TVA name school district would be. But I think that helping however we can fostering those relationships is going to be paramount for what our city looks like and what our school district looks like.

Those are those.

No, those that's great.

Thank you.

I have some updates on. that. I'll just wait till it's my turn. Thank you. Anything else? All right, Councilmember Gale.

Like everybody, everybody said, I'm like, yeah, let's do that, let's do that. The few I've had on my list, let's start with the tree planting initiative. That came out of the Natural Resources Commission who brought it to our attention. There was a national study done and they had kind of maps where you could see how trees are across the country, how many they have, how big their canopies are, etc. And what they found was that when they looked at— when our commission looked at our area, of the 7 urban areas in northern Utah, the Orem area, which includes Spanish Fork to Lehi on this map, had the 2nd lowest percentage of tree coverage with 9.3%. Ogden, Salt Lake, and Logan are all 13% or higher. Of those same areas, Orem had the 3rd worst growth in tree coverage with only 0.3 percentage— 0.3% growth over 5 years. If you zoom in on Orem and separate it from like Lehi and Highland and other nearby communities, you can see that our tree canopy actually shrank in the past 5 years. So if we take those other cities out, we actually would be shrinking. Of 7 Intermountain West metropolitan areas, the Orem area has the least tree coverage. Even Reno beats us. Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Bozeman, Grand Junction, Denver, kind of all cities in our similar area, they all have more than we do. So the commission said, why don't we launch this initiative where we just plant trees? And that, you know, not just any trees, but the right trees. So that's something that they're actually actively working on and hope to bring to the council to have discussions about. So that's something I think—

Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

What is the definition of tree coverage? Is that number of trees? Is it the size of the canopies?

Or—

That is a great question. I would I think it's canopy.

I think it's satellite data, so I think it must be canopy.

Okay, so like if we had 5 million cypresses, we would not have as big canopy, but if we had 5 million willows—

And I'm kind of responsible for that.

A couple years ago, we had our trees trimmed, and they pretty much massacred our trees.

Okay, so we'll have no satellite living anymore. I also remember Millets.

We had the Millets.

Millets, uh, their fault.

We'll start it for you. Sorry, I did not request that.

They took out a lot of water tanks, so—

Oh, Public Works.

We've had Josh Story come talk to us and he's been fantastic.

Our arborist.

Yes, he's been a blast.

Josh Story is awesome. He's our arborist and he came to talk to the, you know—

We just planted 100 trees as a council before last year, so we're trying.

Well, then we have started already, so let's One fun fact that Chris and I figured out last night was that we have the same number of traffic lights as trees. So 6,500 traffic lights, 6,500 trees.

Oh, that's right, with the city— city—

parks.

6,500, I think. Streetlights, not traffic lights.

Was that intentional, Chris?

What's going on?

6,500 streetlights.

You've been waiting to use that one.

Yeah, it presented itself.

You painted the light— the streetlight post green, but it's still not a tree.

The canopy on a streetlight post isn't that big.

There's a lot of streetlight posts.

Anyway, they are very excited about it and lots of really fun ideas on things that we could So that'll be something I hope we can talk more about later. A couple things that were particularly interesting to me is, first, I love Lynnae's idea about the corridors, using the corridors for transportation. And I like those canals, if we can get those going, because Murdoch Canal Trail, those bike paths, they are used.

People love those.

And I think there is a greater need to get more walkability, more bikeability for our residents. So if we can do that, that would be great. And along with that, I think Traffic is something I'm looking at. Oh, actually, let's step back. Murdoch Connector Trail. So Murdoch Canal Trail ends at 1100 East and 800 North. The Provo River Trail starts at the mouth of Provo Canyon there. And I've talked with Chris about this already. We've had UTA or UDOT come look at it with us. That section of trail was— it was like never meant to connect, but it does connect. People use it regularly and it's not very safe. So I would like to see— and part of the The problem is everything is under different jurisdictions. So Arm City owns a part, you not own your part, Central Utah Water District owns a part, and we're not really working together because it was never intended to be a thing. But it is a thing. So I'm hoping that we can be more proactive about getting stakeholders together and organizing that to make the connection between those 2 trails safer, prettier, you know, just more usable for the public.

Thank you.

And then next, I agree with Chris on traffic, especially as you look at the growth in Utah City and the growth in Midway. The traffic on 800 North is going to increase significantly. I've already seen an increase in the last 2 to 3 years, even though I live off of Provo Canyon. Sometimes you see traffic lined up, especially in the summer, all the way back up to like Canyon Glen Park or to Canobas Park or beyond. It's just like that. It's bad. It's really bad. So I don't know, like Chris, how much know what the answer is exactly, but I would like to see us be more aggressive in sorting out some of the traffic issues. That, and I talked with a resident who lives at that Midtown 360 kind of area, and she's a college student, and she said, I go to UVU and I take the bus. It takes me an hour to get from Midtown 360 to UVU just because of the way the bus routes are.

That's a good point.

I was like, okay, well, we can't solve all the problems, but maybe we could partner a little bit more closely with UTA to see if we can sort some of those out, to I would love to see more active public transportation, more walkability, more bikeability, those kinds of things, because that will hopefully ease congestion for all of us. So those are the big things. My little things are, and I've talked with Bryce about this, I would love to see an RC park, like a little area for remote control cars, a park where kids could come and just drive remote control cars.

Mm-hmm.

And then I love the arts, Quinn's idea about arts, and I guess you talked about this as well, but, and this goes with our Walking trails. On the Murdoch Canal Trail, we'll be on there and you'll see people take little like rock guards and they paint them pretty. It would be really fun to see more art in kind of random fun places like that.

So yeah, that's my list.

Thank you. Wow, I'm so excited. Does this list excite you? It does me. Mine looks like— my things are like super boring. Like I said, I focused on some very, very specific things. I have 2 things for this meeting that are deep that I have seen that have caused division or have concern. So I'm going to focus on those 2, but I want to say that I completely support all of what I've heard. It's all part of what I would— if I didn't— I just like all of it.

Thank you.

Even if, even if there was— the Rainbow Bridge did have primate, the primate section, I would still support that because I'm not going to judge who, what kind of animals cross the Rainbow Bridge. Um, but I have just a couple things, and then I'm— but before I do that, Councilmember Muehlstein, I just wanted to follow up. I have been in contact with, uh, with Jen Lyman, who's chair of the new school district board. She is anxious, just as we are, and I am too, to develop that relationship and have meetings, regular meetings with them on how we can best support them as they go forward. She said, I love that, it's just we have no budget. Could you host them for the year?

City Hall.

Yes, I said I think we can find some space that we can do this. And so very, very eager, eager to do that. Provo— and I've talked to Provo City as well— they are eager to restart having our meetings as well, our regular meetings with them. I talked to Vineyards Mayor last night. Not Vineyard's mayor, Lyndon's mayor, and same, would like to meet. I'm meeting with Vineyard's new mayor in the next week or so, and we have talked about having regular meetings with them. I don't want to burden everybody with meetings, but I think it's really, really important to establish those relationships and strengthen those relationships because I just think it helps with, like, with Councilmember Miller was saying with legislative responsibilities— excuse me, relationships. And just in a variety of ways that we can work together on that. So I'm not going to talk about the upcoming legislative session right now because it's totally in flux. I hope that you'll sign up for the Friday Facts from the Utah League of Cities and Towns. Keep up on that.

Thank you.

There is a legislative policy committee that will start meeting weekly. Councilmember Muelstein and I will be the ones involved with that. So I'm going to go back to campaign finance reform. As I was running for office, for this office, I was approached by different members of the community expressing concern about some of the things that could, might be happening, could happen, have happened, what can we do. Not just finance, but just campaign reform in general. Everything from there are too many signs, and can we just, can we not allow businesses to have signs on their property, can we just have it be like neighborhood signs. signs, which is no. But, um, to— are there— what about maximum campaign donations? What about, uh, 501s and 501s and all of, all of those different— just a bunch of different things. So I threw that out there. I don't have a particular opinion on what we do with all of this, but I put that up there and I sent them a public— I think for tomorrow to talk about about, is there anything that we want to change within what we have power to change, as far as campaign rules, reporting, whatever? Maybe it's just asking Steve to do some more research on some particular topics that we haven't researched yet. But I just threw that out there. Like I said, I have no— I have a question. No preference. I just wanted to open it up to give you all the opportunity to discuss this. The second thing is our board and commission term limits. We have one board or one commission that by ordinance, this is my understanding, says that you can do 2 terms. 3-year terms, as I recall. It's policy on the other commissions and boards to have a maximum of 2 3-year terms. So I'm trying to think who might have been here. Chris, you may have been here, and Steve, I think you may have been here when there was an issue with— this was Planning Commission, but it's the same thing. There were some When someone wasn't renewed, in fact there was a policy, and the decision was made by the administration at the time, this was before I was on the council, to not appoint, reappoint a couple of people. Even though that they had term, they had their 2 terms, but it was just where you could just go on and on and on. And big feelings happened. And so what I'm thinking is just a discussion on do we want to codify that same policy for all of our boards and commissions? Because it can be, and this is outside of the attendance requirements and things like that, but just do, if a policy is 2 terms. I would personally— this one I have an opinion on. I would personally like to have it set as a PAWL codified, because that way we can— it keeps people from having to be in awkward situations. It also gives the opportunity for turnover. Even if the PAWL— even if it said, you know what, you can come back on after you've been been off for a year or whatever, or 2 years. But what I would like to see, and it ties back to what Councilmember Mika was talking about, giving some people— getting people more involved and having that opportunity. So that's something I would just like to kick around and see if there's an appetite for that as well. Those things are like the little, the little priorities for me, or the things we've talked about the neighborhood revitalization, the legislative. I really am looking forward to developing and strengthening those relationships with our legislators, especially with this session. All of these different things. Traffic. We had our orientation, I think the other day, with Public Works, and we talked about traffic. And the problem is capacity. And so how do we— how do we— How do we do that? work with that. The example we used there was Provo— excuse me, Orem Center Street. I used to work in Provo and live near Center Street. But Orem Center Street, when Riverwoods empties out for the day, all coming through Orem. Just all these different— I'm excited about what these possibilities are here with the different things. Councilmember Muehlstein, I just Just remember to— no, who talked about the bus route?

Let me find that.

I did.

Okay, Councilmember Gail. They are— UTA is currently looking at that bus route, 850. They want to have us as a city be involved in what can we do to make that route faster, more efficient, things like that. They're not interested in putting in a dedicated lane, any dedicated lanes for a bus because it just would make a problem that's already there on State Street worse. But they would say, how can we work with our transit, what we have, and make it more efficient? So anyway.

Can they do that on demand?

Oh, that's something that they could We could talk to them about—

Ask for that?

Yeah, yeah, but when I talked to Mary Delmar Schaefer, she— we were talking more about the route, the actual physical route, but there are other resources through UTA that can get— so this student can take an hour to get to UVU.

Faster than that, right?

Oh my gosh. You could walk there.

Anyway.

Because of gravity.

All right.

You got to go back up to home now.

Take the bus home.

I'm really excited about all these things. Because as I went through, as you've just talked about all of them, I'm like, yeah, yeah, I want to do that. Those are things that I really would like to work on as well. And so I wish I could put my name by everybody's stuff too, because I love it all.

Love it all.

You are the mayor, you can kind of do whatever you want.

No, I'm just— I'm so excited that we have so many things in common, interests and common desires for our community, and I think we can do some amazing things like what Brynn was talking about. And just that some are going to be easier to do than others, others are going to be more Challenging, but I think really communicating and telling our story and having the citizens and those we represent be heavily involved is important. All right, anything else on this roundtable?

Let me just add one thing.

This is something I keep hearing.

I get calls and emails from lots of people about electric motorcycles. Yes, they look like so much fun, but when you put a young teenager whose brain hasn't fully developed on that much power, it's scary. And I don't know what we do about that, but—

I think your seatmate might have some problems.

So, back to communication and Involvement with your legislatures? The bill right now is not— it's all over the place. And so I'm not sure where it's going to land. And so my recommendation is wait and see and talk with those people and let them know. I mean, there's everything from you can't ride them unless you have a driver's license to Having an e-bike type of license for 16 and younger. I mean, it's all over the place. And, and so I would wait until we do anything from a city ordinance standpoint.

This is at the legislature, you said?

Yeah.

So there will be something that should be— I'll get it on and let you know which House bill it is so you can be as up to speed as you can. But it's Draper Chief Chief Ferguson has been dealing with that, and Brad Bishop Chief from Payson. He's the Copa president currently. I asked that question yesterday or Wednesday. That was kind of the you know hey what's everybody else doing with this? And everybody's like yeah we're waiting for the meetings.

You do.

We can, we can enforce trespassing. We can enforce, you know, they like to drive in the little catch basin ponds, the grass catch basin ponds, and we can enforce that from a criminal mischief standpoint, trespassing standpoint. But yes, I agree, as far as the— Yeah, there's some risks with H-100 and people walking Yeah, well, back to your point of the bike path from coming down off the hill off of 8th North, you can see where they go up under the grass right there. They've got their own little whoopty-woo. So it's catching them in the act is the problem, and most of the time we're catching them as they are—

You see their taillights.

Putting her in an ambulance.

Oh.

And that's where the problem is. And so, you know, at what point do you— what is your appetite for enforcement for my officers to pulling people over and giving them citations for speeding to a 12-year-old? I don't have that. So it's pretty nuanced.

So yeah.

Sorry, I don't have a magic pill for you on that one. Kind of a little bit of a wait and see. But I'm interested.

I just have a thought on this.

You know, we're involved with the Tiger Team, the Trapped Tiger Team.

And I'm thinking, you know, there's legislation that's going to be coming out. But we obviously have a long list of things and concerns that we would like to address.

We may not want to do it right away, but we can at least start creating that dialogue, creating a group to talk about this.

I have concerns about scooters with motors, and they're riding up and down the sidewalks, and they run into a car, and there's a lawsuit. They look to us, well, where's the law on this?

Just happened in Target, uh, just like a year ago on Center Street. And we're like, they didn't see them coming, they were going the wrong way, they didn't know were coming in, and they were just on a scooter.

It wasn't even like an e-bike. Yeah, but e-bikes are even more serious. You know, should we prohibit any motorized vehicle on a sidewalk, period, including scooters and bikes and so forth? I mean, I think a good discussion needs to be had on this. It's a big issue. Which the reason they're there is because it's not safe to be in the road.

So can we have protected bike and scooter lanes? I'm not talking the ballards, just the ballards on the street. I'm talking we need to reinvent that.

Everybody's always messing with our job security.

I don't know what's going on.

That's very sad, but kind of funny.

I know that's not how you—

I'm wondering if there should be a public service announcement campaign, a communications campaign, education from the city. On these topics that would help just make people aware?

Because I think there are a lot of parents who are like, yeah, that's a great thing, let's get it for our kids, and they don't think about those things.

They don't think about whether or not their kid's prefrontal cortex is developed enough to make the decisions on such a device. So I think sometimes information— it's not going to solve the problem, but it might make some people think twice or And it's probably a very inexpensive way to do something.

I saw that on driver's ed, and I just had to go because they make the parents come to the zero fatalities presentation.

Oh.

So to your point, if they actually had something like their presentation, which is very in your face, to be honest with you.

I think the legislature— I think a lot of the things like the common ground is they may just classify it as a motorized vehicle. If it has a motor, okay, you need to register it, and in order to ride that, you need to be a licensed driver. And so I think you may see something along those lines.

And then that's— The way the legislature goes, that could take a really long time to get there.

That was a good one, Jeff.

I think we all have feelings about that.

Thanks, Jeff.

All right, thank you. I hope executive staff, that you— this has been helpful for you to understand, kind of see what we're— what's on our minds and what we're— what we're thinking about. And we look forward to working closely with you to see what we can do do to— for accomplishing these different things. So it is okay now, time a few minutes ago here to review Team Orem's major accomplishments then and now. So turn the time over to— do you want to be City Manager Bybee, or can I call you Brent?

You can call me Brent. Brent.

Okay. Um, yeah, so I just want to emphasize as we go into Thank you.

And we're—

we've kind of decided to gamify sharing of the major accomplishments over the last several months. But before we jump into that, I just wanted to reemphasize and reassure to all of you that we take these ideas seriously. We take this retreat seriously, and you do provide our guardrails, our direction, our budget. And we take these things and we really do try to do whatever we can to accomplish them. And you'll see evidence of progress, whether it's through, you know, citizen budget or events or in our newsletter or focus groups with neighborhoods or in our employee training. or in seeing progress on capital projects. We genuinely take this meeting and this direction and these ideas into account and want to make real progress on them. If this was my first council retreat, I'm— after seeing that initial list, I may want to get into the fetal position.

I'm just kidding. I'm going to ask you to—

But it's not.

No, and frankly, truly, I just have tremendous confidence in this executive leadership team, in your employees throughout the organization to just to get things done and keep you aware of that progress over the course of the year as well.

So with that, And to your point, some of these things we've talked about are being—

we just need to incorporate them a little bit into what's already happening.

It's already happening. This list, I see it as just partly a check-in with what we're doing, plus going forward.

And a little push out.

We have one fetal position here. This is planned to be done all this year.

I'm joking.

It'd be great if you could do it.

Great.

So Pete has gamified this presentation.

Anytime you're ready.

Okay, so we're going to use a program called Slido. So you can either go to the website there, slido.com, and type in that code, or you can use the QR code. So basically we're going to go department by department. And what's that?

Do we get to play too?

Oh yeah, everyone. Everyone in the room play. Yeah, and I'll just run the computer. But we've taken 5 questions from the achievements of each department and just had some fun with it. At the end of the presentation, you will get this booklet that has a disgusting amount of detail, and so you can see everything that every department did in 2025. It was a huge year for moving the city forward. So we're going to— our first category is library. So if everyone's ready to go, we'll start with this. So we're going to start with the library. This device installed in 2025 in the new library hub can sort how many books an hour? And then what we'll do is have the department director, if you want to chime in on anything about the hub or this project or this device. Just give us some context, whatever you want to do.

Are we done? I don't want to ruin it. At up to 100—

no, I'm kidding.

I think each of y'all had a chance to be over there. This is one of the key features of our newest library remodel. It's Lord Voldesort. It sorts 1,800 1,800 items per hour. We circulated just under 1.4 million items this year, and so this takes a lot of those tasks that used to be assigned to our staff and assigns them to a machine so our staff are focused on quality of the interactions, building relationships with the residents rather than sorting books. So it's been a huge boon for us. Our staff have raved about it and And I think it's putting our people closer to the residents.

Awesome.

Next question: The Library Hall Art Gallery generated $17,000 in sales for local artists since expanding to allow artwork to be sold.

I answered first, just so everybody knows.

Okay.

I was 100% no.

All right, that is absolutely true.

No, I did not lead us astray on this one.

This is a—

this is an initiative we started just a few months ago. So just within a few months, as we bring in artists that are able to put their things on display, they are now allowed to sell them, which we think is just so cool to bring in these local artists and help them make a living through their art. Yes?

Are these sales through their websites, or—

No, the city staff handles that. So they bring them and they're able to buy it and—

Through city staff?

Through city staff, yeah, through our library hall staff.

Our city cut isn't too bad.

There is a gallery commission, Andy.

Gallery commission? We've heard about it.

60,000%. We can turn it around and use it for the bookstore.

Yeah, yeah.

See slide 1. This is your taxes at work.

All right, next question. There were several big updates to the Warren Public Library in 2025. Which one is the most exciting to you? I think this one— yeah, this one scrolls. So if you want the cop-out answer, you can go find it.

So this is, this is an opinion question.

Opinion, yeah, of course.

No, no, they're right.

Objectively right. As you're looking through some of these, what I'm most proud of is sometimes we do some really creative thinking behind the scenes. So then what you see here, we're just able to open up money to expand our collection budgets. And so sometimes those can be really difficult asks of a city council budget, or in a year where maybe y'all are facing some really challenging budget things, to just come and say, can we have more money for more materials? Where there isn't like a quantifiable hard limit of what's the exact right amount to spend or how much is too much or too little. Instead though, our staff work really hard to make their staff sizes more efficient, to simplify some of the processes, and we're able to take some of those cost savings, reinvest them in the library, and in a world where publishers' costs to us as libraries are skyrocketing, we are one of the few libraries, maybe the only library I know that is expanding at the rate we are to be able to buy more materials and deliver them to our residents. So the demand from the residents is not going away, and our, our leadership team at the library there has just crushed it to make sure that that money is being reinvested right into the book sets, the books, and the materials.

All right, Library Hall rentals were up how much in 2025?

Bryce, are we a part of Libby?

Do we use Libby?

Heavily.

About 480,000 circulations a year of ours are going through Libby right now.

So there you go, 20%. 20%.

Hopefully y'all had a chance. We had our most popular program this past year was The Nutcracker. We had almost 1,600 100 people come through for that show. A couple hundred different events happened this last year at Library Hall. And so you have performances, you have library programs, you have speakers, authors. Beth Brower is coming in a month, and that one is February 5th or 7th, and the buzz around that one has just been Silly. And so very cool to bring in authors, bring in performances. We worked with several other groups. Each of our care groups are putting on shows in Library Hall, and it's just blossomed this last year.

Okay, and then at the end of each category— oh yeah, so at the end of each category for the department, you can just throw out something that stood out to you about that department, or, you know, show Bryce some love for things she knows about the library. This one's just open-ended.

I've had a chance to talk to, I think, each of y'all about how incredible of a spot our library staff are in right now. But our staff are, in my opinion, thriving right now. We have— we spent 2— A couple of years working through and defining our mission and our purpose and what it means to be a library in 2026 and how do we respond to the needs of our residents. And so there's been a lot of change, and I think our staff have really done a nice job of identifying and jumping on to that change.

No.

Some of it is new programming, some of it is new sort of core services. A lot of it, Councilmember Mika mentioned this, but trying to identify ourselves as an experiential library, as a third space where we, we won't program everything for them, but we have these venues and these spaces where they can come together And build that. So our staff are at the forefront, the training, the collaboration with our other county libraries has been awesome. But our library is in a really great spot right now. It's very strong and we've had a lot of fun doing it. So excited with what we've been able to do with our remodels thus far. I hope thus far. And so we'll be working to share with y'all what we sort of have planned next and where we want to take the libraries in here.

Perfect.

Anything else about library? Any questions? Okay, on to the next category, which is legal. Oh yeah, true or false, our prosecution team handled hundreds of criminal cases in 2025.

Really?

False.

So that could be read like hundreds, like at least a hundred objections.

We're trying to capture the essence of each. Yeah, and that so you got you got onto that. There was thousands and thousands and thousands of cases. Anything that Anything to add about that, Steve?

No, only that I want to just make it clear that you came up with the question, not me. Next question.

Oh, here's a Steve Earle question. What is Steve Earle's preferred term for helping troubled employees find new opportunities outside of the city? Well, at least it was on the list.

Rehome. Positive. Positive displacements.

Oh, these are going to be some good ones.

You might find a new favorite, sir.

Rehome is a good one.

Yeah, rehome.

The answer is reverse hiring.

Oh, but some of these are actually better than reverse hiring. Did you get that right? I, I didn't. He's—

someone who was close with reverse onboarding.

But that's a big part of your department, right, is helping us through some of those tricky employee challenges.

Yeah.

All right, next one. Which issue in 2025 didn't This is going to require a Herculean effort from the legal department. And be careful with this one, it's a little tricky.

Did not require.

Well, good, that's what you know, that one's not right.

Okay, and the answer is the soda flavors in the break room. He actually did have to help us protect Miro. He got trademarked this year so that he can't use it.

Do you know the amount of time we spent on the damn soda machine?

I don't know that the legislative office was allowed to weigh in on that.

Maybe we should have had that.

Oh yeah, that was—

that's actually true. Team Coke, Team Pepsi.

But yeah, so legal did help us out this year. Miro is officially trademarked and protected, so nobody can take him, including NHL teams.

We're suing anybody that tries to.

Exactly.

That was great.

So it's not like Summerfest boot again, right?

Yeah, exactly. We didn't want to go through that. And then, yeah, let's talk to you about legal team in 2035. They did a ton. There's a lot of big issues. Steve, did you want to say anything about the department's efforts this year?

I really should come up with some flattering things to put in here, honestly.

Yeah.

They were handsome. They were handsome.

I'm grateful, Steve, for you.

In your department and, you know, the way that you navigate some very, very tricky, difficult situations.

Thank you.

And you—

I'm just always impressed with how much you know and your diplomatic way of letting people go, whatever the situation is.

You just have a— I've been always impressed.

With the way that you do that.

Thank you, appreciate that. Oh, absolutely.

Classified legislative waters reference, right?

Classified waters, legislative waters. Have you ever— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so classified.

Okay, classified. Yeah.

I'll just also emphasize about legal that they do their time and they There's no, there's no fluff in that department.

They do—

they run a lean and mean— it's diplomatically named team.

All right, our next department is, uh, Community Development. So here's our first question: select all the plans that were finished, reviewed, updated, or started in 2025. All right, so it's those 4 right there. Operation Overlord was the plan to invade Europe in World War II.

No, actually it is a plan we're working on. This is a trick question. We're working on a plan for the city and county of Orem. So we're just going to absorb Utah County.

That's one that Denver But it's a little difficult because our LEO has to approve it and it hasn't been approved.

But we started the plan.

Gary, anything you want to say about the planning efforts?

Yeah, there's actually a lot of interesting fun things going on that we're looking at. Actually, one of my favorites is the active transportation plan, is really diving into that and trying to make make it a more walkable, bikeable, family-friendly community. And if there are ways like that, that student at UBU had been talking about, you know, helping them get around the community, is fantastic. And then the heart of downtown. Hopefully all of you have been reached out to, and this will be coming, a presentation to the council at the 27th meeting or work session there. So just a lot of really good fun things happening.

What's your favorite engineering project of 2025? I think the engineers were just super busy this year, lots of really interesting projects, but you can pick which of the ones you felt like really stood out to you.

Why do you gotta make us choose, Pete?

This is hard. There's only one answer. Which is your favorite child? That's the easiest question I've had.

The one that's not causing me trouble.

That's the right answer.

Anything you want to say about the engineering projects?

Wow, that's just an incredible list. And one of the impressive things about this list is these things are designed in-house. We have one of the best engineering firms in the entire state of Utah that works for Orem City, and they design these projects. They help them get bid out. They help manage them and look at and review them as they're going through. So you can just see the myriad of things. It gives us the ability to pivot quickly Quickly as priority changes and to be nimble and quickly work on a project and get it executed.

All right, take a wild guess at how many building inspections were performed in 2025, including City Hall, the Central Utah Surgery Center, and the 10 million gallon water tank.

So just those 3? No, no, all just included.

Those were included.

Yeah, just those are included.

Yeah. So don't say 7. Pete, can we back into who said 1?

Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead, Stephen.

It shows up on her screen, so she knows what you're saying.

Okay, the answer see who got closest, is $5,552. So whoever said $5,000, nicely done. There are no prizes, I apologize.

But anything you'd like to say about that?

Hey, I was playing Price is Right.

You know, these are inspections at every separate individual step in this in these projects. So what they do is they go in there and ensure that these things are built— being built correctly. And it does take a lot of time and effort, but it saves, uh, money in the long run, and it makes sure that things are safe and that they function and work correctly. So it's just invaluable, but it's a tremendous amount And logistics that we have to juggle.

If I can also just emphasize with that, that most cities deal with a ton of complaints related to their building inspections. And this is one of those normal complaint issues that you, you, we don't hear about a lot. And it's because our guys just do a great job and stay solution-focused. oriented and kind and sort of hold people's hands through the process.

That's awesome. Okay, moving into the realm of economic development, we welcomed a ton of new businesses to Orem in 2025 and hosted ribbon cuttings for many. From this list of ribbon cuttings, which new Orem business from 2025 are you most excited about? So the list is pretty long, and these are just ones that we went and did ribbon cuttings for.

Is that a wildlife, or what is that for?

Um, did you vote for yourself?

I did.

Good, good. That was an easy one for me.

Who voted for Boilers?

Anybody?

What is Boilers?

It's a fake one. It was our April Fool's joke this year. That's right. All the cuisine at this new restaurant is boiled. And they don't serve drinks because the food is already so moist.

So I'm glad no one fell for that one.

Anything about Econ Dev you want to say?

Yeah, there is a lot of things going on with businesses that come and go. One of the great things that we try to do through the OBA is provide, as you see here, ribbon-cutting services to try and help communities welcome them in. businesses into the community and kind of feel the love of things giving them some added pressure. So it's a great value that we give these individual little businesses.

And it's fun to go to those OBA luncheons and to sit with— on tables with those small business owners from, you know, I have a I started a bookkeeping service in my home.

I bought dogs. I mean, it's—

kudos to you guys, the OBA, Orange Business Alliance. You guys do great things.

It's awesome.

And then what stood out to you about community development? Page 25.

Who else in here likes Legos?

Who said they gotta go spend their money at the Lego store?

That's what I—

oh, have you ever stepped on one?

Political leanings. There was a meme today of the— it was supposed to be the Danish army dumping Lego on the beaches of Greenland.

This may not mean much to the council, but I have a Lego bonsai tree in my office.

I saw that.

All right, next department is Management Services, and our first question is, which neighborhood joined the My Hometown program in 2025? Oh, and then, Carrie, anything you want to talk about as people are putting their votes in?

Uh, well, I don't want to give you the answer, but Cherry Hill is not it. Switch your vote quick! Or Cascades.

Or Cascades.

Can't you find Cascades?

Uh, we have doubled how many sites we have now.

We used to—

we started in Geneva Heights, so if you picked Geneva Heights, we did start that, but that was in 2024. Um, Lynnae was very instrumental in helping us getting Sharon Park open this last year.

We opened the CRC, and then next year we'll do community service projects with Sharon Park.

Excited for that, and hopefully we'll bring on some of these other places.

And Carrie has been masterful in those meetings.

Can you regret New Geneva Heights people?

Yeah. Yes. The folks that were a part of it are now over the whole state.

They were telling me that they are so large, for example, in West Valley, they've purchased a facility just for CRCs because it's such a major community.

Wow.

So, wow.

They purchased a building that's held thousands of hours.

Wow. Yeah.

All right, next question. Where did the City of Orem rank in 2010 for top places to work? And this is not just us being biased. This was an actual award.

Mark, if you put lower than 5, you're in trouble.

Price is Right, man.

Everybody should all bid.

Okay, the votes are in. Do you think about this one, Kate?

Yes, um, we were really—

this is the first time we've gotten it.

We're the only city who got this award this year, and we will put in for it again next year. And the thing we ranked highest on is supportive managers. So our employees really do appreciate their leaders in the organization, which I think is a big win. All right.

How much money did the risk management team recover for the city in 2025 through subrogation?

Which—

explain to us what subrogation is.

So subrogation is when we have city property that's damaged, for example, example, if there's a vehicle accident and they hit a light pole and the light pole needs to be replaced, sometimes— Do you have to? Well, we always replace the light pole because we do have to, but in the past, people weren't very receptive or insurance companies weren't very receptive in reimbursing the city. And so now we're actively working with IRMAA, Utah Risk Management Association, to use their legal team to take it to the next level. And just by sending them a letter by our legal team with IRMAA, we've been able to bring just since July almost $150,000.

Wow.

Which is something we have never done before. We just started that this year. It's amazing.

I was going to say, what was the number?

24?

Zero.

Zero.

Yeah.

So big increase.

What are your top 2 areas for subrogation, Carrie?

What's that?

What are your top 2 areas?

Definitely light poles and then vehicle accidents.

We're able to get a lot more money back from the other party hitting our signal poles.

All right, next question, just a yes or no. Did Strategy and Innovation rake in more or less than $1 million in grant funding? So I guess, sorry, not yes or no, more or less than $1 million in 2025?

That was my fault.

That's right.

If you want the right answer, you gotta ask the right question.

So we have a great strategy and innovation team that's ran by Jenica, and she has 2 full-time analysts and 2 student interns.

interns in the NPA program, and they have been able to do a lot of great things.

The grant funding on the federal level is drying up with all the things that—

all the changes on the federal level, but we are continually looking for other grant funding opportunities.

And I think the number was 1.9 for 2025.

I don't remember.

I think that's in the document here, but I think that's the number. So the answer is yes. Okay, uh, which of the following didn't happen for the city's boards and commissions in 2025?

That should have happened.

Should have.

Yeah, should have.

Anti-privatization.

It felt like a big year for boards and commissions.

It was.

We did a lot of revamping. We looked at all the boards and commissions from our— from last year's council. They really wanted us to streamline some of our boards and commissions. We have a lot more than any other city, so we were able to condense some and to make them more impactful. And then the strategy and innovation team created a new handbook.

Theresa's been really helpful in helping us do new trainings.

And then the online boards and commissions was another thing that the council asked us to create. So our in-house programming team created a better program for people to be able to register to volunteer.

All right, the answer is $11.3 million. What is the question? This is still inside Management Services.

Yeah. Okay, okay.

Balance.

Yeah, that's probably true. Question mark to look at new ideas. Temperature 9 degrees in the mirror costume. That is true.

I, I did do the mirror costume once at the Orenfest parade, and I'm pretty sure I saw my deceased grandfather.

That's actually wrong. That's how much extra money I asked for, not the number of questions.

I was trying to be really nice.

If you put something around social media, that's true. That's the number of views we had this year. Last year I thought it was going to be impossible. We had just under 2 million last year, and I was like, oh, there's no way we can beat that. And then this year we had over 11 million. And it's just been fun. The social media presence for the city is growing, and people are engaging with it more. So it was a fun year.

Did anyone guess that?

Oh yeah, there was a couple people who said social media. Really?

Yeah.

So, and then, yeah, just to close out this category, what stood out to you about management services this year?

That's right.

That was the most important thing.

Thank you. Awesome.

All right.

Our next.

Our next category is the Recreation Department, which also includes events. So how would you rate Taste of Orem? Incredibly awesome or unbelievably awesome?

You only get 2 stars, right?

Well, just that, just between the 2 choices.

Michelin's not quite in the state yet, so you've gotta shoot for 3 stars.

Yeah, we'll let them catch up.

This was one of, uh, a new event this year, uh, so adding it to sort of our marquee events. But for a first-year event, it was awesome. So many ideas on how we're going to grow it and improve it, but really well received by the residents. I know we talked about we've lost a couple of cultural events over the last couple of years, and so I think having a blueprint for something like this is exactly what we want to be doing and building. But it was really well received. Our small businesses loved it. Our restaurants were just thrilled. And I think the residents that came had a great time.

So amazing food, baby.

You know, it's a good event when even the employees there are having a great time, you know? Like, it doesn't even feel like work anymore. So that was the most amazing.

Were some of them just absolutely blown away at the response?

I mean, that was one of my favorites was like Pruska's specifically. They ended up like they were calling in and they were going back and forth. A couple of the more mom-and-pop, like literally were on the phone with cousins like, hey, have you ever baked before? We need sugar donuts for the next 4 hours. And so they were filling up. I mean, several of them could not sustain the event. And so I think they will come back. They will know better. But I think just thrilled with how much. And then the smart businesses, they had coupons and things to bring them into the brick-and-mortar. That was our big emphasis, was not to take away from our brick-and-mortar and do sort of a food truck roundup, but to create this liaison to go out to them. So overall, I think just really successful, um, and I think they felt the same.

My answer on $11.3 million was how many times I've been back to Jaruska since.

Mission accomplished.

All right, next question. Which 2 city facilities won a top honor from Utah Recreation and Parks Association?

2025.

So this was fun because we had a new facility, Hillcrest, and a 20-year-old facility, Lakeside, come home with top honors at the Utah Recs and Parks Association meetings. The Hillcrest Center, for being a new— it's a very new type of facility and delivered on a fraction of a budget compared to building a new rec center or a new amenity like this. And then Lakeside really goes to Chris's team for parks maintenance. But the reason we won that award— and I might mention we won it in the same year that another neighboring city brought in a tens of millions of dollars similar facility, and we beat them out with our 20-year-old Lakeside— But they mentioned the longevity of the quality of the turf and the facility there as the reason for the award. So it's not always new and bright and shiny, it's, it's really how we manage Lakeside and how we're introducing new types of sports tourism and events in addition to local use and club use that it got the award. So I love that we got the award for Hillcrest, but I think I'm even more proud of the joint effort between our 2 departments for what was recognized at Lakeside.

Teresa said it was One might say.

Yeah, one might say. All right, which of the following recreation offerings had increased participation in 2025? All right.

The answer is everything on the list.

Yes. What a dumb question.

I'm going to know it's everything when they put lifeguard training.

We call this finance department envy. Fitness center crested 20,000 members this past year, which was awesome. Subscription classes, we retooled how we deliver programs to residents, and so they sign up on a subscription model. It's easier and less paperwork for the parent. It's simpler and more financially consistent for us. So really excited to see that. Things like adult softball came from our capital infrastructure. We added turf a couple years ago, so instead of 2 seasons with lots of rainout dates, we now can offer 3 seasons. And so a lot— lots of these sort of work together, and then as they learn about our programs, they can sign up and choose 4 or do other ones. So And then lifeguard trainings, also glad to see more of those.

All right, which number is the total sports field rental revenue which has spiked due to an increase in sports tourism events in the world?

To the nearest penny, huh? That's pretty good. We have a good accountant. Good job, Randy. I don't even know the answer.

But it does say good question. Yeah, yeah.

I didn't see yes as an option.

Yeah, so the second number is actually last year's amount, so you can see the growth between the two. Wow, that's great.

What accounts for that growth?

I think the biggest thing is we changed a lot of our youth sports to be Monday through Thursday so we can rent the weekends to sports events that are brought in. Having the turf, this is cool, Lakeside in last year's shoulder and offseason months, so sort of after we normally would close down grass fields, we had 200,000 visitors to Lakeside in the offseason months. That's the equivalent of like adding an entire new park from a resident traffic perspective.

That's great.

We were able to do that just by having turf and again Chris's team that can maintain the turf in the winter months, adding the lights. Where we don't have acreage to build out and add another 30 acres of sports fields, we can put another 200,000 people in where we weren't able to before. So a couple different things.

And that's just revenue to the city.

Yes.

That doesn't talk about all of the dollars that come to Oroville because of the businesses, restaurants, hotels, gas stations.

We crested almost 60,000 out-of-town visitors to Lakeside. And so those that their home is more than 50 miles away, we had 60,000 of those participants. And they in theory stayed at our hotels, eat our food, fill up our gas, everything like that. So just a massive growth of that number as well.

We can maybe present this to the county to continue to receive instead of just that one-time infusion from that tax, right? Tourism tax to get our more.

We can show that we can produce.

And I think not only having the events, but I think right now Orem is at a place where we are able to present pretty data-heavy presentations, not just supposing or hoping or total attendance at the park, but we can get granular with these people are coming from far away and out of state. And it works for more soccer events, but it— I mean, going to— again, not to harp on these like cultural events and festivals, but it's the same formula. We are bringing people in. This is good for the county, whether it's Orem County or Utah County. Military, uh, things.

Overlords.

Operation Overlords.

We hope that this first step has been the toughest and then we're able to just keep this rolling for future funding.

Yeah, put that on your list, Brent. Let's keep getting money towards the county.

Yes.

All right, and then what stood out to you about recreation in 2025? Oh, running the Spectator.

It's like the out-of-towners, they tip well.

The FC.

The FC.

Now, uh, Spanish courses, called EC. So I'm going to have to say EC.

Yeah, correct. Okay, awesome. Next category is the police department. The Orem PD cracked a huge case and recovered $250,000 worth of what this year?

Diamonds.

I got that one first.

Elegant.

Now, wouldn't that be a fun idea? How much does the diagnosis cost?

That'd be a lot of money.

It's not funny. All right, there's the answer.

BJ, what would you say about that?

Or at least that's what—

so this is like just You know, we're in Utah, we're 70,000 miles away from the border of Mexico. This goes all the way back to Mexico. This is a cartel-based operation of organized crime coming through our little hometown, and it was a retail theft case that a detective took a little deeper dive and look into and ran it all the way and arrested over—

I want to say over dozen.

The numbers come to mind as like 16 different people touched 3 or 4 different states, and all the goods were— a lot of them were recovered as they were about to go across the border in Texas. A lot of them were recovered from search warrants here in Orem. And so it's organized crime, so it's everywhere.

Great.

The Orem PD Mental Health Unit unit was honored with the Best of Blank Award in 2025? Ooh, the Galaxy Award. We're going for that one next year. What would you say about the mental health unit?

So our mental health unit is comprised of one civilian, um, And at the time when we won this, we had 2 officers and a few interns. And the idea behind it is trying to follow up with mental health consumers so that they don't become— reoffend or re-have— so we deal with them less and less. 20 years ago, you'd go on a mental health call maybe once or twice a week.

5 or 6 times a day.

And so it's a big call for service. And so trying to find a way to help alleviate the problem before it becomes a problem. And so just putting effort and manpower and resources towards that, we have a good, good response to mental health consumers in our, in our city.

All right, out of 1,149 physical arrests in 2025, 21 involved use of force. Is this under, on, or over pace? If you want to give us a little context on this, BJ, as far as—

So, use of force is when we use either like an impact weapon, a taser, or the suspect is— or the person arrested claims injury or is injured. So, You know, you tackle somebody on the grass, they don't get operations. You tackle somebody on the pavement, they do. That's the difference between what we count and what we don't.

So you let them run a little bit farther before you tackle them? You tackle them when you get back.

If we can, yes.

Sometimes you just—

another example.

BJ, what was the pace we're looking at?

So our 11-year average is 22.

Okay.

Our last 5-year average is 18.

Okay.

So we're right where I expect us to be. To me, that's Pretty amazing number.

Yeah.

I mean, it's less than 2% overall. And so out of, out of that number, 14 of them are classified as hands-on. So that's your abrasions, that's your, hey, I was injured or whatever. We had 6 tasings and 1 firearm incident.

Any questions about that?

Any of you, if you've never been tased—

Not recommended.

Not recommended. I do it once. It will deter you from ever thinking— I did it at Provo Citizens Academy. I got tased. And I am a new woman. I have turned away from—

You've seen the light? Yes.

Yes, not recommended.

No.

Did you see Pete's grandpa?

I saw— he was a bright flashing light. Along with the clicking.

Yes, he was.

All right, over or under. The Police Records Division underwent a major overhaul in 2025, greatly improving service and efficiency. Did they complete over or under 3,000 reports? Background checks.

That's great. How did you do that? I did that.

Oh, there you go.

There's only 2 answers.

So the answer—

do I write it down—

is over, way over. I want to say it's closer to 5,000.

It's 35.

35? Yeah, 3,500. So anything you'd say about the records division and all the changes there?

Uh, yes, so we had 3 that retired.

About 2 or 3 months' time.

And so, about training new people, added a different supervisor there. Our supervisor retired. And so just new eyes, new efficiencies, new ways of doing things has helped. And I would say it's moving in a good direction and moving very well. I'm excited about that and the future of that.

All right, here are the numbers for 2025: 533 cases created, 64% reactive, 35% proactive, 236 cases closed, 614 violations resolved. What is the team inside of the police department that belongs to these numbers? Many people got the answer. It's NIT. What would you say about NIT this year?

This will be what you guys call me about the most, and that's fine. I think we talked about it with the orientation, is we'll refer them to the the portal as much as you can. That helps us and helps them. It works. And so that team is very solutions-oriented. We work with people ad nauseam. And again, I think it comes back to what is your appetite for enforcement and how far— how, you know, trying to thread that line.

Yeah.

It's trying to find that line from the complainant to the problem, how lenient and how strict we want to be. And so trying to find that line to show compassion, I would say, in some instances and actually solving problems in others. So we have good people in there that They've threaded that needle very well, and a lot of it's just based upon your direction and how you want to see that now.

So, okay.

And then what would you like to say about the— or what's to say about the police department this year?

I love BJ. That was nice of you, Marcus. Yeah, nice.

That was good.

Very nice.

I was just getting butt, so somebody asked about me.

Thank you, thank you.

DJ, no one can see this. It's a good place.

Anyways, it's a good department. I'm proud of it. I'm proud to work there. I feel lucky to work here. Um, we have a great police department, and it's not me. I'm a part of it. It was great before I got here. My job's not to screw it up. Keep heading in the right direction. Um, be proud of your police department.

What was that? Excuse me.

I thought you said get fired up.

Yes, and they really gave us a new home. That should go on the list of achievements. We got the fire out of our, out of our buildings, so we're stretching our arms a little bit.

All right, next up is the Finance Department. Who was the president the last time the Orem Finance Department didn't win the Annual Award for Excellence in Financial Reporting?

George Washington.

A.O. Lincoln.

Hoover. Adams. Oh no, we weren't at the city like that. Yeah, you've got to go.

Yeah, you got to think 106 years and then like when did they start winning this award? So I haven't seen the— oh, there we go. Who said Reagan?

Good guess.

Reagan.

Okay, Reagan is the answer. So it'll be Won it every year since 1989. Wow.

So incredible job.

Hey, you want to just, you know, chest pound?

That's why he wears the belt.

That's right, that's why he's got the belt.

Just kind of double-check.

That's one of the questions.

Ah, all right.

Sorry. The finance department is full of numbers. What's significant about 80,477? And you think of the finance department being, you know, obviously accounting, uh, budget, The help center, the court, invoices.

There might be more invoices than that.

I'm a little like Steve. I can't wait to see what my department does.

It's your shit.

Whoa.

So whoever said 311 calls, that's probably the closest.

It's—

this is citizen interaction. The number of essentially help requests or interactions that the help center had with residents and businesses, 80,000 in 2025.

Wow.

Um, over or under, the Orem Justice Court handled 9,000 cases in 2025?

It's never under.

Sometimes it doesn't It doesn't let— it doesn't put it—

oh, it doesn't do anything? The answer is over. There was 12,021 cases.

What a stupid game.

I guess when he said one's a number, the one's a number because he doesn't want to—

oh, I see. Okay, my bad. But yeah, so the Justice Court, anything you can add about the Justice Court?

They handle a lot of cases, from what I can tell, and obviously we know I keep hoping it's going to go down and it doesn't, but— They are very customer-friendly even though obviously they're dealing with people sometimes in a totally unique environment, many times for the first time. And so they know that and work to make sure that those people understand the process as best as they can. The most customer-friendly way that they can.

And sometimes we mess up things on a citation or whatever like that, and we're creating, you know, different work for, for them. They do a phenomenal job. And so, as we tighten those things up and fix those things, we're very appreciative for what the Justice Court does and how they handle things.

All right, this one was given away, but who created the He Justice Court? certainly holds the heavyweight title belt for the Bybee Award for Budget Optimization.

You know, the man himself.

Who came into my office?

It was Isaac.

I want that.

That's what everyone's striving for in this next budget year.

Unachievable for me.

No, I don't know, you had some good ideas the other day.

Well, yeah, but I spend way more than I make.

Yeah.

Once you realize it.

Buy one fire truck, I pay for 18 belts.

Yep.

Theresa, would you add that to the minutes, please?

And then what stood out to you about the finance department this year? I know Brendan mentioned that, uh, Yeah, it was— they had to get creative with, you know, the budget, and, you know, there are some different challenges, and they always do such a good job putting that whole process together.

I just want to say thank you. I especially want to thank Crystal because she mentioned finance very first in her speech.

Well done. Much appreciated.

Okay, next up is the Orem Fire Department, and we'll just kind of pick up the pace here. Over-under, the Orem Fire Department responded to 6,000 calls for help in 2025? Yep, it's always over. I want to say it was like 6,100 this year.

No, we're 7,800.

Wow. Yeah.

So anything you want to say about, you know, the amount of calls you guys are getting put out on?

Well, there's about 70% medical-related calls versus fire, but it's just continually growing.

Next question. Exceptionally grateful that they came in the middle of the night when her fire alarm, that is 2 ladders tall, Yeah, we do a lot of battery changes for vaulted ceilings.

The fire department purchased the state's first van-bulance and saved approximately $300K in the process. What is a van-bulance?

A van-bulance is a van-style ambulance. You see our—

I saw that the other day.

Yeah, so I mean, our current ambulances— our current ambulances span van-length. A current ambulance costs $400,000 and it takes 3.5 years to get it. And so it's just, we had to try this. I've been, I've been threatening this for 16 years, but we saved $300,000.

We got it.

We spent $102,000 and we got it in 12 days.

That's cool.

And it's, it's just different. I mean, firemen like big trucks, so if you think about You think you're a cool fireman driving a minivan?

You know, that's not so much.

But actually, it rides great. We're still tweaking things, and it's— it actually is being placed out in the Vineyard Station. It kind of fits that demographic, smaller streets, just the whole concept in general. So we're exploring it. We may see over the next 10 years nothing but ambulances, even if it's just from a cost savings You have to explore it.

All right, Orem firefighters deployed to which state to help fight major wildfires in 2025?

One of the things about our wildland team that's amazing is that it really is a self- It's a self-funded operation. It actually generates revenue. And actually, Chief Hurst with the team is committed. We purchased a Type 3 fire truck that once we deploy it, it significantly increases the revenue, but they're funding that through their deployments. He's committed to that with his job on the line. So, just teasing. But really, they generate enough revenue to pay for the fire truck.

Without tapping into the general fund. Uh, the—

oh, the fire prevention team was on fire this year. Inspections, Fire Smart courses at elementary schools, 60+ Knox Boxes, 5 certified fire investigators, uh, the 3rd high school fire cadet class. Should they bring back Cinderwich as the clown? If you know your Orem history— yes, if you know your history, this is a— when was this?

How long ago?

David Forsyth and Cinder Bridges.

Yeah, well, that's on the council.

Yeah, so back in the day, if you know your art history, Cinder Bridges was a clown that would teach kids.

Why was he taken away?

That would be the question.

What's that?

Why was he removed? Yeah, yeah, because I guess nobody wanted to do the clown. He retired.

They retired.

Next year he works for Thousand Words.

What's funny though is like all— there used to be photos They've all been scrubbed. Couldn't find a single real history, but he is memorialized in the one color book. All right, the Emergency Operations Center was activated for the first time in 2025. Do you know your role in the event of an emergency? And there are your options.

We actually have Heath coming in to work session. Kind of outline our emergency preparedness and just the obligations or requirements and, and what we expect from you as council members in this role is that it's our job operationally as exec staff and then below us with our supervisors to keep you informed. You guys are the policy decision makers. We want to provide you all the information so that you're well educated with the emergencies so you can talk with citizens. And prepared to talk to the media and be the face of Warren when these things happen. And so Heath's going to do a presentation and kind of bring you all up to speed. So if you just think over the next week of— I think it'll be on Tuesday is the actual meeting— if you have emergency preparedness questions, Heath will be there. So come prepared with your individual responsibilities and those kind of things. It'll be a really good— it'll be an informative meeting.

But you remember a few years ago, or we talked About maybe getting media training for city council.

That would be good.

Add that in. I don't think we ever did that.

Well, I think I think one of the biggest benefits is with Pete and his team providing you mayor all the talking points, and in that perspective, we BJ ourselves we all have PIO trained guys within our organizations that we put them in front of the cameras because they know they're articulate. They know the things. can and can't say, and keeps us all protected. And so I think that training would be amazing for all the council members.

Yeah, and those messages that we get when things pop up to, you know, refer media here, or, you know, that's very helpful because I remember a few months ago when we were all just getting buried in phone calls and text messages.

News agencies everywhere, and that was nice to be able to just know how to deal with that.

And this is one of the biggest things I know BJ and I both would, through Bren, would provide him emergency situations that are newsworthy or just high profile. We shoot him a quick email, loop him in, and then he then relays that information to you guys. So If you haven't already called, but we try to as soon as we have some information we know it's going to make a difference for you guys receiving the phone calls and provide you with that.

So yeah, thank you, Mark.

Just, uh, how are we doing? We're at 3:26. Should just—

there's 2 more.

Keep going.

Let's just keep going. Okay.

All right, um, so this is Public Works now.

Oh, we know this.

Which number is closest to the number of city-owned trees cared for by our urban forester?

Lots of 6s and 8s. This is clearly wrong.

It's the correct answer, 6,700.

The biggest thing I took away from that conversation was we need to focus on our fire extinguishment of trees, not so much houses.

Those are dead trees.

But yeah, the answer, as we heard, about 6,800?

Correct. Correct. All right.

Yeah, if you think of the Orem City Cemetery as a city for our dearly departed, which city in Utah would be closest in population?

In the cemetery?

Yeah.

How many burials?

Interments? Yeah. That's a great question. Wow.

What is going on here?

Shut up, let's do some spitballing here.

Yeah.

I have no idea what the answer to this is, so.

The answer, based on available data, American Fort. About 34,000. So there's a lot of people buried there.

Wow. And more, more coming.

Yeah, more coming.

So the cemetery does an amazing job, especially as we do our Memorial Veterans Day. Anything you'd add about the cemetery?

Cemetery.

So we, we opened the lower cemetery a few years ago.

We've been selling a lot of plots down there. The upper cemetery is fully sold out.

Doesn't mean that, that they've been interred. It just means that they've been sold out.

So it's our opportunity to continue to basically improve the lower cemetery and the upper cemetery as well.

We have great staff, we have 6 full-time employees up there.

Our cemetery sexton, I will say this, he is—

you got to be a special kind of person to be a cemetery sexton. He deals with some challenging issues on a regular basis. He's there providing support with somebody who just lost their spouse or their child or whatever.

And I think that's a great thing.

And that he is very willing and supportive to help at a time of need.

He goes above and beyond.

So his name is Robbie Unbrick. So we have great staff.

Uh, the H2 Orem team completed a massive multi-year project in 2025 called AMI. What does AMI stand for?

Acute myocardial infarction.

What is that?

That's a heart attack.

Besides that, in public work, in a public works context. What is AMI?

Oh, you guys know your stuff.

That's true.

There's some language on there.

Anything you'd say about that project?

We completed over about 22,000 meters.

We deployed them in-house. We didn't hire anybody outside to do it. We did it completely in-house with our current existing staff.

And so it was very challenging.

But they rose up to the occasion and they're very dedicated. On the council meeting, for the next meeting, you're going to see that we had an incident, well, several incidents that occurred over about a 10-day period.

We had about 15 to 20 line breaks in Southwest Orem that happened in a short amount of time. Basically, crews coming in and relieving the next crew, they don't want to go to bed and the next crew is coming in.

come in late, early in the morning, and then it was ongoing.

So we have a solution for that, but we have dedicated water professional staff.

Awesome.

Is the Traffic Tiger Team the coolest team in the entire city?

Coolest coat.

I like the answer.

Coolest coat.

Show us the coat.

What would you say about the Tiger Team?

I would say the first— the answer is without a doubt yes. No, it's been fun to be a part of this. It's interdisciplinary. We work with police, we work with fire, we work with engineering, we work with our own staff in-house, and it's just a really good broad perspective from all kinds of individuals and professionals.

You know, we respond to every single one of the requests to look at We don't say that—

we don't give them everything they want for sure, but we do what we can within reason. But it's been great to look at this from a multi-pronged perspective and all these solutions.

I was the captain over patrol when that was made. I don't know whose idea it was. I want to say it was Brent's. I don't know why we didn't do that decades ago. I mean, that has been one of the best things that we have formulated as far as— I think it was kind of done in a hodgepodge way of, you know, us talking with them and us talking with other people, but ever since we've had that team, things have gotten done quicker and more efficiently. So they're good and they deserve the jacket.

So The GIS team, which is fairly new, a couple years, right? 2 years old. They can track all kinds of incredible data, including the city's most valuable tree, currently valued at $77,000. What type of tree is it?

Wow. I don't know. I can tell you what the smelliest one is.

What does Ram Dass have to say about this one?

I don't know. Let's have to go take a look at it.

So the answer— I don't know why it's doing this, but the answer is aristocrat pear.

Which I don't even know.

I mean, it sounds fancy.

Well, okay, so the aristocrat pear has kind of been designated as a noxious tree in some states.

It's getting worse.

We planted a lot of them, but they do stink.

They do stink.

Chris, remember this: you don't know what that tree's been through.

It's genetics.

And then what stood out to you about Public Works in 2025?

Well, nice, you can do emojis.

Oh, I didn't know we could do emojis.

That's breaking new ground.

I'll give you an emoji.

Well, it looked like she might have been heading in a different direction when you said get stuff done. All right, final category, and then we'll, uh, we'll turn it over to Laura Lewis. How many years did the new City Hall design, build, and move take off Ryan Clark's life?

All of them.

It's all okay.

All of them.

It's just a good one.

He used to have dark hair. No gray.

I was going to say 66, 67.

Right. Ray, what is the real answer to that?

Uh, I don't want to talk about it.

Yeah.

My therapist says we only talk in time controls.

It's still not done, so I don't want to talk about it.

Because especially, it should have been so far.

Brent, anything you'd add about the City Hall project?

I too am glad it's done.

It took—

in fact, my first presentation, my first council retreat was about City Hall and that concept. So long time in coming, and I'm glad it's done.

Were you present?

Most of it.

2014 or '15.

Uh, which of the following was not a major capital project underway in 2025?

Do you remember?

You guys are the council.

It does get cold.

If we could get one to Village Bay.

That'd be great.

But yeah, so these are all projects that the city management team has been overseeing and help leading. And so you can see how many different things have— big, big projects have been going on this year. All right, where does Orem rank among peer cities for combined property tax and utility fees?

I don't know that one.

Are we going to hear more about this?

Yeah, I think we are.

I love it.

That's right.

Anything you'd add to that, Brad?

You know, it's become this saying to do more with less, and you've seen our advertisements turning the name Orem into more. We really are doing more.

We're more efficient.

We're more customer service oriented. More projects and programs done.

I just—

you as council have been really great about giving expression of gratitude to me, but could not do it without this executive leadership team, without our other department and division managers, and all the way to our frontline staff. They are— they're all in on building a better Orem and making do and wearing out along the way. So yeah, we really are delivering on doing more for our residents with— well, at the lowest rates.

All right, 2025 was a great year for improving and strengthening relationships with community partners. Select all community partners the city management team focused on this past year. And then what would you add about those efforts?

Um, you've heard me talk about In the public sector, we try to get a social return on investment. We're trying to build relationships. It is top priority for the city manager's department, and it does take a lot of time. So I need, I need, you know, mayor council's help to continue to build and expand our how we interact and communicate and get things. done with, with our other partnering agencies, other levels of government.

And then final question is, what stood out to you about the city management team in 2025?

That was me. It was not about bread.

So as you're submitting your answers, I'll just give you this booklet. It's, uh, this is the full list of achievements for 2025, just if you're interested in seeing a little bit more detail. You know, there's never enough time to go over everything that happened. So many wonderful things happened in 2025, and just building that momentum in 2026.

Thank you.

And if I can maybe end with one last little thing, and this is a little personal. The last 18, 19 months, I've been dealing with my oldest son battling cancer, and it's taken attention away from from some, some job focus, some amount of job focus. So again, I super appreciate, and it's humbling to me to be able to work with such wonderful people who have been so thoughtful and so interested in doing good beyond yourselves. And we actually just got, frankly, miraculous news yesterday. My son went in He's been coming for treatment at the clinic, and the lead oncologist said that his treatment in the maintenance phase will, as long as things continue as they are, have been going, will end this coming September. And that is— They say that it's a long road with leukemia, and so they had us expecting and thinking that it would be more like another 2 years or a little less than 2 years. So he's going to be able to keep moving on with life and normal life and doing great things about a year early.

I think that's wonderful.

So thank you. And so I wanted to share kind of you know, that there's light sooner at the end of that tunnel. And again, without your support, positive thoughts, prayers, uh, you know, just working with me, working with us, you know, amazing things that I couldn't accomplish on my own would be impossible. So thank you.

That's really awesome.

Thank you. That's wonderful news.

Thank you.

This was fun. So many good things going on. We have— what time? How do we want to modify our— do you want to direct us?

I think that everyone should be aware that there's snacks here in the back. And I think we'll just transition into this next presentation. And where Brandon and Laura Lewis are kind of doing it, I'll just look to you to be mindful of the time. And at the same time, for you, Mayor and Council, I think this subject— I mean, the financial picture of the city is so important, but obviously we want it to sort of be work travel back and forth through or discussion-based. So let's tackle it and take advantage of it. I think we put more time this year on the boards and commission assignments. So we can probably move into that a little bit if that's—

Yeah, we can do that a little bit later. Yeah, we'll have time.

Brandon, I think we're starting with you.

Do you want to take a little break?

Yes, sorry.

Loren's like, power through!

And followed by Operations Fleet 9T. And then in May this year, because of the strange kind of schedule we have with council meetings this year, This meeting would normally also be in April, but we kind of have one planned in May to discuss capital improvement project items, a work session. Then that budget is then adopted by you as a tentative budget in the first council meeting in May. That is, as it says, by state law. And then depending on whether Yes. Whether a property tax increase is proposed or not. Normally we've obviously done it in June. If it's not in June and there's a property tax increase proposed, then that occurs in August. We always focus on the budget through these guiding principles. These are the guiding principles that we use when evaluating all things related to the budget. I'm not necessarily going to go through each one of those, but those items are not only in our budget document, but you can refer to this. Part of the reason for the PowerPoint here is so you can refer back to it, and if there are any questions, then you can certainly contact any of us, myself included, of course, about any one of those particular elements. The areas of focus from our prior year Kind of one overarching element here on the left related to all areas of focus is aligning the interests of the city council and various groups, employees and community, with Family USA— Family City USA as the benchmark. And then these were the 5 areas of focus that were determined and all, you know, we tried We try to make sure that all of the things that we're doing are related to those particular areas. Again, in the budget document, it outlines what kind of each one of those elements means, and so you're welcome to refer to the '26 adopted budget to kind of see if you have further questions about what those might specifically mean. Just some real quick— again, this is This is going to be for your reference, just to give you an idea of the types of funds that the city operates in a governmental space and what they generally fall into those categories. And then these are the specific funds that we work with, staff in the accounting arena as well. Just again, to give you an idea, the general fund is the single largest fund of the— in the— in Orange City, and it gives you an idea of where do our revenues for the general fund come from and kind of what the magnitude of those dollars is. Not a surprise to anybody here, I'm sure, that sales taxes are significant in relation to what we can and can't do within the general fund. general fund. And you can see the total of the— out of that $178 million, $78 million of that resides within the general fund. Just to give you an idea of expenditures, I mean, you know, kind of this idea here of a breakdown within the general fund again, personnel versus capital or operating items. And then from a department standpoint, where those dollars are spent within the general fund. You know, Bren asked me what is one of some of the questions that maybe I get asked often. Your sales tax, where does it come from? And, you know, this gives you an idea what did— out of this total sales tax that is paid by a citizen or by anybody buying Yes. When you're buying something, what does Orem get? Because all too often I don't think people recognize, similar to property tax, which we'll talk about in a minute, but they don't realize that Orem doesn't get all of that sales tax that is paid. And these 3 particular items are the sales tax that Orem receives out of that 7.45%. This is that— this is the biggest one, of course, by far. That's our regular local sales tax. That's that $33 million. These 2 are what they call boutique taxes, and those are both related to transportation. And one— and so we receive those at the same time we receive the others, but they're significantly smaller. And they're specifically to be used for road-type projects, road and street-type projects. This is just to give you an idea of the property tax and how property tax, generally speaking, works in relation to how do we get it, how do we get more of it, and what impacts that thing. And that's either through new growth or a voted property tax increase. And I say voted, meaning as a city council, you can determine what that is and it's not voted on in a general election unless it happens to be refer— you know, referred. And then the last one is if a vote through a— if we decide to issue general obligation bonds for whatever reason, that's a separate component on a property tax bill. So the citizens do vote on that in a general election. Or in an election, and then that's added as a separate item on the property tax bill. Just, we already kind of mentioned it, but you can see where Orem falls in relation to our property tax rate and in relation to when somebody receives their property tax bill, Orem's portion of that property tax bill as far as the ratio of the total tax. And just to give you an idea, that's the same breakdown, you know, much bigger, and but shows you how much Orem gets if your property tax bill happened to be $3,000, what Orem would receive out of that $3,000.

Any—

I know I ran through those things really quick, but are there any particular questions that you may be just burning to to ask right now, or like I mentioned, you'll be able to ask a lot of those questions. And a lot of these things, um, Laurel will also kind of be touching on, so, you know, we can potentially address some of those questions during that too.

Okay, so does the same—

um, I'm not sure what question I'm asking here.

I'm trying to find out if commercial properties, if they are also with this equalization, you know, if we get a business that just booms and thrives and expands, is it always just per square foot? Is it per income? I mean, how— is that the same as a house as far as—

Somewhat. It's all in the same pool.

And it's affected by numbers still?

Uh-huh. It's—

so the assessor's office at the county still assesses all property. It's based on value, and the value of that particular property in comparison to the total— to the whole determines whether their potential property tax would go up or down. Obviously, if they've added to their structure, that becomes part of the new growth calculation, and that's treated differently than what already exists.

So those 2 pieces are separate.

It's always an assessed value. There's nothing based on— I want to call it success or increase in revenues or anything like that.

You are correct.

Nothing is affected by how well they do unless they expand, of course, as far as actual building.

Yes.

The 1% of sales tax, therefore, you broke it down 50% stays in Orem, 50% is distributed. Can you explain that?

So what sales tax is called point of sale, Orem's got 1%. You have a point of sale, which means things sold in Orem. And then, and there's— we receive 50% of that, whatever the number is that Orem has had sales tax produced from is— we get 50% of it no matter what. The other 50% is then determined by a population distribution. So our population in relation to all population—

Across the state?

Yes.

It's thrown—

think of everybody's sales tax are thrown into one big bucket and then based on our population, who We get a certain percentage of that total, and we are losers currently in that environment.

We sell more than our population warrants. But we also get some revenue from other cities when Salem is working. For sure.

So yeah.

How are we receiving funds from another jurisdiction?

Somebody from Lyndon or Vineyard comes and buys something in Orem that, you know, obviously grocery stores are— up until Bellas or Walmart went into Lyndon, most of those people came to Orem to buy food.

But if we don't capture the full amount of our Eligible taxes, don't we lose in the long run?

Well, so as long as we are a high-tax producer but our population in relation to the total population is lower, yeah, then we're giving ourselves tax breaks.

Yes.

So, you know, and you have to balance— that's a balance, right? Some, you know, because what they indicate, so Say Vineyard before maybe this recent growth, maybe a good example, right? Small town, not a lot of businesses there, but they— the legislature recognized that they spend a lot of their money next door.

Got it.

And so they, clear back when this was put into place, they indicated, you know what, we need to give— we need to be fair to Lynn Vineyard in that particular instance. probably fell in the same category as well. So they developed that population factor as part of that.

How long has that been in place, and are there discussions about changing that now that we do not have as much rural in Utah Valley specifically?

Yeah, there have been discussions about it, but it's actually been going the other way towards a total population, not eliminating point of sale.

Wow.

So hurting—

So you're not shopping. You've heard, maybe heard the term shopping for dollars or zoning for dollars. That term has come from because of sales taxes. That's part of the initiative of the governor and the legislature who want to increase the supply of housing. That's one of the ways they've talked about and thought about incentivizing building more housing is to change how sales tax are distributed in the cities.

As far as I know, there's nothing concrete going forward in that direction, but those are discussions that are always taking place.

Did you do OPC this morning?

That meeting?

No, I did not.

I think this formula's been around— I think it was negotiated by Roger Toomey about 40-plus years ago, or—

I've been in the business 36 years and it's always been around.

Every time it comes up, I think the reason why ULCT has kept— utility cities and towns has kept Robert too and convinced him to not retire is so that he can keep bringing back sort of the historical knowledge and reasons why this current calculation was negotiated and settled upon. But yeah, I think it will continue to But that should— that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to keep bringing it up and defending what's best for our community.

Well, I want it to go the other way.

I feel like we've invested in our commercial infrastructure. Why are you taking it away from us? Because we're at a point now where we're out of real estate.

We can't grow.

You know, why, why are you now creating hardship for our residents? Because there isn't a population boom here in the legacy cities.

It's not just Wharton, right?

So, you know, connecting with some of these other legacy cities. Because they are talking about— do you know how serious they are about changing the primary residence exemption this legislative session? Is there a bill already?

Yes.

Because it's on the agenda for Utah Taxpayers Association meeting. On the 21st?

We do have Cameron Deal coming to this year to our work session in person on Tuesday, and we set aside a good hour with the intent of not just having sort of a one-way presentation but having a two-way conversation with them. So it'll be interesting to see what he's— what the latest is from him of what he's projecting in this legislative session, but let's be sure to bring up our concerns about any rumors. Okay, any other before I turn the time over to Laura?

You'll send us that?

Say again?

You'll send this out to us?

Yeah, I think— is this or all of any of the presentations going to be in a—

Yeah, they'll have to be part— well, they'll They'll be available for public, but I can send them individually to the city council.

Thank you.

Turn the time over to Laura.

All right. Thank you.

Go for it.

Okay.

So I'm old.

I've done this for a long time, and I've got lots of war stories. And one of my favorites, it relates to Orem. So years ago, when I was pretty much as green as grass, I was working for an underwriter, and we have a national periodical called the Bond Buyer. And usually, like, big things in the Bond Buyer are like, they— New York just built a $2 billion tunnel, or Or whatever, right? So that's important to know. So I'm green as grass. I get a phone call from your then city manager of, we need to finance more property for our cemetery. And at the time, you could not pledge sales tax revenues to bonds. So our choices were to do a building authority, which works like your mortgage. Or a general obligation bond.

You immediately have collateralized property.

With the land, yes, yes. So those are— now we have other choices.

We have—

we could have issued sales tax bonds today, but we couldn't then. So I undertook the— we are going to do this as a land-backed— like the cemetery— as land-backed security. And we had to work very carefully to make sure that as you paid bonds down, you could release some of the property so that you could bury people in it.

Right?

So I got front page with the bond buyer, only time in my 36-year career for having— this deal wasn't dead.

That's nice.

There you go.

All right, it's great to be here. I love working for the City of Orem. I have done it for literally the duration of my career, and because of that I feel very much like I'm, you know, like it's my home even though it's not where I live, because I drive through and my kids are— poor kids— I financed that. I financed that.

They're like, oh my gosh, and their eyes just roll in their head, right?

Well, I look at so many things in Orem and I'm like, oh, I financed that. Or just asking about, well, what about your fire training facility? Because that was such a cool project. So, um, next slide. It just gives those of you who don't know me— Oh, we do, and thank you for helping with that. So I am the L of LRB Public Finance Advisors. Our name has changed several— a couple of times over my career. We started this business in 1995. I previously was with the underwriter of Kemper Securities, and my business partner that we started the business with, he's like, you know, there really needs to be like an independent group that represents cities. And we said, well, that's a great Great idea.

Let's do that.

And the rest, as they say, is history. We are a licensed municipal advisor. I have a whole plethora of securities licenses, and the only one that really matters to you is that I'm a municipal advisor. We serve as a fiduciary to the city, so, you know, I have to put your needs above mine, and I can give you several examples throughout my career where I have done that. And also several examples where the mother bear comes out in me when I'm trying to protect my clients. So I'm generally pretty mild-mannered, but don't cross my kids or my clients. We also conduct various studies for local governments. You've seen my colleague probably, Fred Philpott. If you haven't, you will be seeing him related to your Financial sustainability plan, we do utility rate fees, impact fee studies. If it can be studied by a local government, we've probably undertaken it at some point in time. We're locally owned and operated, myself and the R and the B, Robertson and Burningham, which is nice because we can make decisions locally and quickly. And I've worked for the city for over 30— I hate to even say 36 years because it seems like I am so old, but it's just the truth.

Thank you.

Oh my gosh, that's a long time. All right, next slide. So I thought it would be helpful for you to know the financial market's view of the City of Orem. Each bond issue— people said, well, what's the city rated? Well, each bond issue is rated in and of its own because it has different security. Like you mentioned, some have the Some we pledge water and sewer rates, some we pledge sales tax revenues. So each of those are going to have a different rating. You are very highly rated. Some entities impose or indicate what they think your issuer default rating is. They don't call it a— here's what your GO rating would be, but they do That's indicate what they think your issuer default rating would be.

So what is the what difference between a GO rating and a credit it rating?

is.

It's their name of if they had issued a general obligation rating for you. So your sales tax revenue bonds, which are done in 2024, have a AAA rating. That's the highest that you can do under— in my world, it goes AAA, AA, single A, and BBB or BBB+.

BBB-.

Each of those with the exception of AAA has a plus or minus associated with it. So you can't get any better than AAA. When you read that rating report, it will talk about sort of why can this rating be higher than the sovereign, the sovereign being the United States of America, and your rating is higher than the United States of America. And it talks about the metrics of why they think that's the case. The state's AAA rated. There are several cities within the state that are AAA rated, but, you know, many, I would probably say the majority probably fall in the AA or single A rating. S&P also assigned a AAA to your sales tax revenue bonds and a AA+ to your general obligation, which is a little bit of a head-scratcher. Why isn't our GO as high as our sales tax? Well, when Brandon was talking about the sharing formula, the rating agencies really like that statewide sharing formula because of this. It reduces the worry of sales tax concentration. So let's take what happened at one point in time. Midvale City had a Costco. Midvale City is not going to be the size of yours, doesn't have the population.

No.

of yours, right, and Costco moves. What happens to their sales tax?

Meow.

Right, down it goes. Well, with the sharing formula, it at least mitigates to a large degree that concentration risk of a single, you know, car dealership or whatever within a small city. And so they really like that. And, you know, bumped up to that AAA for your sales tax. That bug is making me crazy. It kept flying around when you were presenting. I'm inclined to whack it, but then it's going to— it's— blood and guts is going to be on the thing.

There it goes.

It's had enough.

So Moody's is the other rating agency. It rates your double-A your general obligation bonds, AA1, they use different nomenclature than S&P. AA+ for S&P equals AA1 for Moody's. So phenomenal ratings. I've got— I mean, these were exact quotes out of the rating reports, which I can send to you if you're dying to have some reading. You'll note here, see, The city is AA1, Utah Valley University is A1, so a full grade below that. It talks about your financial profile, a strong, consistent structural balance, ample cash, which is great. You've got healthy reserves, and it's enhanced by your low debt. You have very, very low debt. All right, next slide. Okay, can I kill it?

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. Grab that too.

Grab that.

Yeah.

Is that one with blood?

Nice.

Okay, so that's even better. Why do ratings matter? They're a good indicator of how financially strong you are, and it reduces your interest rates. So this. So this is some kind of a snapshot of an index we refer to as the municipal market data based on rating and number of years to maturity. These are the different interest rates. So you can see AAA is better than AA, is better than single A, is better than BAA. That far column is the high to low differential from BAA, which is investment grade rating, still to a AAA. For the city, your AA+ GO rating or AAA sales tax rating, it probably equates to about $250,000 in present value cash for every $10 million that you borrow. So your ratings are very important and save you a lot of money.

All right, next slide.

Hey Laura, really quick, are there other cities in Utah County that have Have as good ratings as we have?

I think Provo is AAA rated. That's the only one I think is AAA rated.

Okay, thanks.

So now on to financial sustainability planning. The rating agencies and bond purchasers alike want city councils to think beyond the one budget year cycle. It's really important to make sure you have a balanced budget. It's required by law. But the rating agencies also want to know that you're not just like operating in year to year, okay, we can squeeze it out and make this happen. So they like to know that you're looking beyond just one year. And we're working with the city right now and doing that long-term financial sustainability plan. I'll talk about I'll talk about the process of that in a minute. As you look at that plan, there are several metrics that you should consider. Obviously your capital needs, your staffing needs, your fund balance levels, and this important factor is the makeup of your general fund revenue. Is it reasonably balanced? Now those of you that have heard me talk about this before, I almost said preach because I feel like It is that sometimes. In the rating agency and financial world, they would like that to be a roughly equally 3 or 4-legged stool. Do you notice anything about one of your legs?

Somebody's tipping over, man.

I got a long leg.

That is hard to sit on. That's a hard stool to sit on. You have really high sales tax because, as has been indicated, You have a great sales tax corridor, people shopping all around, and this has allowed you to keep your property taxes really low. Well, why don't the rating agencies love that? They like it, it's not bad, but what do they know is going to happen in a down economy?

Sales.

Those are going to go down, right? And you can't control it. You could call my children and say, move to Orem. That would help some because they think Amazon is like one click and it's here, right? But you can't control that. That's the concern with the legs of the stool. And I think the next important thing is on the next page. But notice real quickly here. In 2019, In 2015, you had about 21% of your general fund revenues came in from property taxes, and now it's not quite 16%. Next slide. So that property tax reduction is about a 5% reduction in that time frame, and it could be a concern to rating agencies. We talked about what will happen in a recession, what the city can and can't control. You can control property taxes. It's not fun, but you can control them to a degree. And your ability and willingness to control expenses. It's important to understand, I lost my mind a few years ago and agreed— I have a condominium in St. George, and for some insane reason they called us He said, we really— the guy that does the finance bit of this needs to get off the board. Will you please sit on the board? If you're ever asked to be on a condo board, don't do it. Nonetheless, I said, I will be on the board. I'm not going to take phone calls of my neighbor's trash can's been out for 2 days. I don't care. You want me to talk to you about the finances of the board?

Sure.

Sign me up. So when I discuss our budget with them every year, I point to— I mean, they can be really unhappy with how much we've spent in mailing and, oh, our mailing expense went up by 15%. Well, that was maybe $20, right? What we need to focus on for them, there are 4 key things in that setting that we focus on. Because they're the— 86% of our condo board's expenses are in 4 categories. For you, 67-ish percent. For some cities, it's as high as 75%. So again, that shows that you're lean. I think the number I saw on Fred's preliminary study is 66 point something or other. So, You've got 67% of your general fund budget is in salaries and benefits. So you can debate all day long about we need to shut the lights off sooner or close the library for a day, whatever ideas might come, but if you really need to control expenses, you are going to have to Fire people. I mean, that's— that is all there is to it because so much of your expense relates to that.

She's telling us.

And nobody wants—

I mean, I'm going to duck because someone's going to throw rotten food at me here momentarily, but nobody wants to do that. But I need you to understand that so much of your expenses are tied to that. So should you be be cognizant of other things, certainly. Just know they're not going to move the needle as much. Related to that, I was curious what wages had done. It took me a long time to find a defensible data point. So from February of '25 to February— looking back to February of '24, national wages increased by about 3.4%. At the same time, inflation was 2.8%. Now it's important to understand that property taxes, the way they're set in Utah, do not capture inflation. So you're not even capturing this 2.8%, and yet to make sure your police officers and firemen and everyone else aren't rushing to other cities, you're probably trying to keep We're trying to keep up to somewhere in that 3.4%, and it's getting harder and harder. And to Brent's comment, I mean, there's only so much blood you can squeeze out of that turnip in terms of being efficient, right? The other thing rating agencies and financial markets care about is your ability and willingness to raise revenues when necessary. Utah law gets a huge woohoo in terms of ability because you can go up to 0.7% or something, I mean it's way high compared to any city that I have ever worked with. You could, I mean by factors of, you know, 10 times you could raise your tax rate and not be anywhere close to the maximum allowed under state law. So we have— you have the ability.

Mm-hmm.

sort of this perception of are they willing to, right, to raise taxes when necessary. Because all of your other taxes that you can impose are already at the maximum rate. You impose the most you can with franchise fees. There was a long time that I worked for several cities that only did half of that. All of them went, oh, let's raise the franchise tax to 6. And you're operating at the max of all of those other taxes that you can impose. So you don't have anything other— anything else you can push on. And then as I talked about, cuts to non-salary items just may not move the needle much when you're looking about, you know, controlling the expenses when it's like, well, we either have to raise revenues or control expenses. So the financial sustainability plan process. We collect your historical information going back, you know, 10 to 15 years. We then expand that out with a baseline model, a very basic baseline model of, you know, if fire expenses in your post, if they've increased by 4.5% a year, we just project that out in the baseline model at 4.5% a year. Then we— so that That becomes our baseline model. Then my staff meets with your department heads and says, okay, we built inflation in here, so those will, you know, keep up with some of your needs, but what other things are not captured under that inflationary assumption? And there's usually a long laundry list in every department in every city, right, of— We need new computers, we need new tasers, we need whatever it is, right? And we ask them to give us an idea of when they think they're going to need those things. Maybe it's extra personnel, maybe it's a new truck. Well, what year are you going to need that truck if it's a capital expenditure? And we build all of that into the new model. All right, next page. And when we get done with that, done building that model, oh, no surprise, there's likely going to be a deficit in terms of your revenues versus your expenditures. Because now, and I hate to say wish list because we really try to, you know, get the department heads to dial it down to, you know, some level of reality. But, you know, in order to do what they want to do, the best they can do it, provide the highest level of service to your citizens, I have— we have never worked with any city that through this process the first look was not a funding deficit. So then, it's part of the iterative process, we present several scenarios and options. Well, okay, given this, I mean, first of all, we meet with your department heads and with your city manager who gets out his red pen and says nope to that fire truck, nope. And then we basically just iterate that process till we come up with something that's reasonable, but it is not uncommon that it will call out the need to get into some, hopefully some planned process of raising your property taxes every few years to arrive at that stability. So the process gives you a range of— it's going to give you a range of outcomes. You'll all be party to seeing that in a month or two. Every city You're not alone. Every city has more needs than it has dollars to fund. But the framework gives you— or the analysis gives you a good framework to have those discussions. Well, what if, right? And then you've got to make the hard choices of prioritizing those needs. All right, next. I think now I get to show my most fun graphs. Okay, now I have to scroll down a little bit here. Here we go. You wouldn't know it, but Brad and I did not talk about our presentation, but we just both know how important this, this element is. So property taxes in Utah are structured to create substantially level property tax revenues. If, if you as a council or other city councils don't act to increase your property tax Tax rate. The idea is if you had $100 to operate in 2024, you're going to have $100 to operate in 2025. That is the goal of the way truth in taxation is set up in Utah, which sounds good if you're the taxpayer, but not if you're the taxpayer and you want services, because you're basically being asked to do more with less each and every year if you don't do that. So after a long period of time, that, that can become problematic. And from a rating agency's and bond purchaser's perspective, back to that willingness and ability to raise property taxes, they know, they know the state law, they know you have the ability, but if it's like year after year after year Oh, they just— nope, they just keep living off that sales tax, right? And they watch that property tax revenue as a part of that pie go down, down, down, down. They worry about your willingness to do that. So keep that in mind. Let's see, as Brandon mentioned, you do get exception for— from that if you have new construction. So the formula takes out new construction. So think of when, you know, the mall was being rehabbed—

is that the right word? Basically.

Expanded.

Yes, expanded. So, you know, it went from, okay, stores are leaving, to, oh, we pour a whole bunch of new money in it and there's now some office towers and whatever else. You do get to capture the benefit of those new property taxes. But again, once that level's set, the next year that's already included. It's only new growth for one year, right? And then again, rate adjusts down and down and down so that you have the same level of revenues. It's not designed to capture anything that may result in property taxes— in property values, excuse me. So I would dare say that if If you surveyed your citizens in your neighborhood and said, hey, do you think that property taxes go up when your property value goes up? I would bet you 80% of them say yes, yeah, my house is worth more today, I'm sure they're paying more taxes. No, they may be paying more taxes, but it may be because the school district raised theirs. Maybe because the county raised theirs, maybe because—

right?

But they're not paying more to you or them if you don't raise your rate and their property value goes up. Now the good news for you, and during the Great Recession in 2008-2009, states like Nevada were just like bleeding red ink because Theirs adjusts up and down, right? So values go down, guess what happens to their revenues?

Meow.

Right?

This is set up so that during downtimes it protects cities, because again, it's intended to give you the same dollar in revenue you had the year before. So if my property value drops in half, under Utah law, that tax rate's It's going to go up. If my property value goes up, the tax rate's going to go down. But most people perceive that it works like it does in Nevada. My home's worth more, I'm going to pay a ton more in taxes. You guys should have so much money you don't know what to do with it, right? So, um, it's good for you to understand it so that you can explain it to your neighbors because it's an unusual system. It's good, it protects cities in the downtown. But it doesn't help you when you're trying to pay for things with additional, you know, with the same dollars when those costs have grown. So to keep your property tax revenues in line with inflation, you have to act to increase your property tax rate.

All right, so scroll down just a little bit more so I can see the bottom of that graph.

Whoops.

Here we go.

So you can see your property tax— these are tax revenues, not your property tax rate. I have another slide about your property tax rate in a minute. Your property tax revenues compared to CPI. So up, down. This was, oh, 2020, and then it tanks, right? So, um, you need to make sure, because like if you— this goes on for very long, tax revenues are well below inflation, at some point again you have to get to that point of firing people. I mean, that's— you just can't do more with less forever and ever.

All right, next.

All right, when you had the question of, oh, When you're doing the little question thing. Of who, who has the lowest property tax rate. I knew the answer because in addition to representing you, I represent Lehi and a whole bunch of other cities, and we do rating presentations and we show what everyone's tax rates are. And Orem City's is one of the lowest property tax rates. This is what your tax rate has done since 2016. It's a steady hill downward. Here's what your property tax revenues— they've changed some here. Why would that be? Oh, because you've had a little growth, right? But in general, you look at that line and go, well, in 10 years or 9 years, whatever that is, we've gained a million bucks. But I'll bet your expenses have gone up a little bit more than that. I haven't looked at that, but I'll bet that. All right, next. I didn't mean to quiet the room so much. I'm gonna have to come up with another fancy story here.

Smash another book.

Okay.

So here is a summary of selected cities in Utah County. It's not exhaustive because it goes on for another, you know, 8 rows or whatever it is. Everything that I've highlighted in green is where a city has acted to increase or maintain its property tax rate. So if it's the same— so look at Santaquin here. If it was $0.001404 and then it goes to $0.001409 and then $0.001409, if it stays the same or increases— It stays the same. They have had to have had a truth and taxation hearing. Oh my gosh, it is just tempting me. Going again.

Oh, there's not any cameras going.

They're going to bail me for theirs.

Good job.

Take that out here. Don't mess with more.

Don't mess with more. By the way, thanks for smashing that on the table. There you go, perfect.

Good squish.

Yeah, that was well. So again, because if cities do nothing, like look at Orem. So in the last 9 years, these are the number of tax increases these cities have had. Orem has not raised its taxes. It goes down just like on that line graph. This is where the line graph came from. It goes down, down, down, down, down. If you don't act to maintain a tax rate, it's just going to keep in free fall because of the way the system was devised. So I wanted to give you a sense that I think with the exception of— well, in Salem I think increased theirs.

Let's see.

2, 2, 3.

Right here. I just didn't— it didn't get highlighted. So all of these other cities, even those that are high growth like Lehi— so why should high growth matter? Well, because you get to capture the revenues from new growth, right? So sometimes we'll see cities not increase taxes when they have a lot of high growth. That is not your city. You have growth, but it's not the growth like Lehi, Eagle Mountain, Saratoga Springs, Vineyard are experiencing.

Right now.

So I just wanted to give you a sense that you're a little bit of an anomaly, and there's a point at which, you know, doing more with less is good. There's a point at which it looks unsustainable, and that's the thing, you know, again, you need to think about. Just because it's a fun number, If you had maintained your property tax rate in 2019 was 0.001267. Again, under state law, this could be as high as— I'm not advocating for this— this could be as high as 0.007.

Why aren't you advocating for that?

Yeah, because I want to be hired tomorrow.

I'm not sure.

But just to give you an idea of, again, that's where the ability to raise is already there per state law. The ability to raise is there, right? But it's the willingness. That was your rate in 2019. This is your rate in 2025. That's a differential. That's your current taxable value. If your historical tax rate If the city councils had acted to maintain the tax rate, something similar to what Santaquin is doing, right? They're not trying to— I mean, once they did have a big increase here, but then it's like, no, we just want to maintain it.

We just want to maintain it.

Just get into maintenance phase. If it had been maintained since 2019, you would have $5 million more every year.

That's right.

this year based on this taxable value. So when you're thinking about, ooh, we want to do new parks or new— a new fire engine.

Thank you.

There's a point at which some maintenance of that rate, or at least not letting everything fall, is helpful.

Yes.

Laura, question for you. Genuinely help me make sure I'm understanding this correctly. I'm not Column on the far right, it's showing essentially that Vineyard charges 5 times more than Orem.

Yes.

And that Provo charges more than double.

Yes.

But then if you go over to 2022, and you were to double Orem's rate at that time compared to Provo, they weren't double.

Close, but close-ish. Yeah, that is correct. Yeah, because These rankings are based on a 3-year average. Well, and the reason it was 3-year average is because I, as I was driving up here, I said please pull in 2022. So that's why it's only the 3-year average and not a 4-year average. But yes, you're exactly right.

So do you have, are these cities, are any of them doing bonding that also increases costs for residents?

None of them to my knowledge. I don't know about Provo because I don't represent them. Mapleton doesn't do much of anything in bonding, nor does Santa Clara.

Alpine, I would say school district does, but I mean the city itself.

Yeah, the city itself, I'm not aware of any that have general obligation bonds that would also raise their tax, but I can look into that.

Was Pleasant Grove sales tax or general on their big park project?

I think they did I think it was sales tax. I'll ask Jason. I can find that out.

Was Provo the sales tax for the new city hall, or that $80 million was a bond?

I don't remember. I wasn't there at the municipal.

It was. I voted against it. It won by 400 votes or something.

So the bond went through.

The bond went through.

$80 million.

So that's data we can certainly look up and break out the property tax versus the—

Does it seem like taxing entities used to coordinate and try to not create a huge impact, but that people just do whatever they want now, right?

The county?

Well, did I say it out loud? Orange County? If it was Orange County, we wouldn't have gotten that.

Laura, is there any sort of precedent or something you know of where cities just have by ordinance have to maintain their tax rate from year to year?

It is so interesting that you asked that because just about a month ago— so I'm going to back up before I answer the question directly. Over time, cities have had to sort of have a reckoning with this, right? Because nobody likes to raise property taxes. It is not a picnic. However, However, and the earliest adopter that I can remember was Clearfield City. Again, older city, landlocked, not a lot of development going on. And so I don't know if they like adopted a formal policy, but as a matter of practice, they started— and this was like 15 years ago— they started working to maintain their tax rate. So they got to a point where in the first few years of public hearings of raising tax rates, lots of people come out, right? Especially because if it's— and I don't know the percentage jump, but if I look at Santaquin here from, you know, 0.009 to 0.0014, right, whatever. I mean, that, that first year people are like, oh my gosh, pitchforks and whatever, right? But then after that, they keep doing this, it becomes sort of a nothing burger, for lack of a better word, right? So there are several cities that I work with that have started to do that every year or every other year by matter of policy. To your question directly, about a month ago, one of my clients, West Valley City, emailed me, and Jim Welch said, hey, do you know of any cities that do just Here's what you said, by policy, they adopted a policy that they'll maintain, go through Truth in Taxation to maintain their rate. And I said, I don't know that they do it by policy, but I know, I mean, I can give you a fairly long list of those that, you know, address it every year. I mean, they say, we're gonna, by practice, we're gonna go through Truth in Taxation. Some years they don't raise it, some years they do, because then it has to just be this little increase. Right, as opposed to— I mean, I don't know what the percentage would be, but it would be big, uh, 50% quickly eyeballing it. Not quite that. If you said, oh, we're going to raise ours back up to what it was in 2019, and people saw 50% tax increase, right, you won't be able to seat enough people in your room that will be angry about it. But if you said, okay, today we're going to take this from 0.000755 to 8 and then hold it at 8, eventually it's going to be like nothing, right? So West Valley is apparently looking at, I think on their January 20-some-odd meeting, of possibly adopting a policy related to maintaining the tax rate. Now in years of really high property values, value increases, that's going to be big, right? So, you know, we all know how much our own homes have increased in value over time, right? But if you look at that, there was a year, probably post-COVID, that they went popping up, right? So that would be a year that you might want to go, well, or if I were going to do a policy, I'd probably want to put some bands around it in terms of total percentage or total revenue dollars or something. So West Valley will be the first one I know that's trying it from a formal policy.

But it seems like irresponsible policy by councils not to maintain some semblance of tax, because what happens is you get, you know, way down the road and nobody wanted to raise taxes, and so one council gets stuck with doing it, and that's not awesome.

That is not awesome.

Trust me, it's not.

Yes, and I've had a similar thing. It's been— it was— I was talking about greenest grass. It was probably the first year I was in this business, and Riverton City hadn't raised their water rates for a long time. They kept living off of their fund, you know, their water fund balances, until the point they hit zero, and they drained them— no pun intended there—

water.

Drained them. nothing, and then they had to have like a 100% increase in water rates. People were not very happy, right?

Is it lower?

When you say 100%, what does that equate to?

Doubling. A doubling of—

So like from $5 a month to $10 a month?

Yeah.

So if you choose to go through a property tax increase, a truth in taxation, again incumbent upon you To help educate your citizens, because, you know, Brandon mentioned that I think out of a $3,000 tax bill you get $300. The way the state requires that you advertise your tax increases, I mean, let's say that it's a 10% increase, which sounds big, right? That's going to be $3, or $3.18 if I remember your number correctly. So— Ooh, 10% increase. these, people are like, oh my gosh, that's so much money. And the reason they're going to think that's so much money is because people think of their tax bill in total.

Yeah.

They think of the $3,000, they hear 10%, and they're thinking you're going to raise my property taxes by $300, right? So you have to really be very proactive about how you educate your constituents. related to what you're planning to do. The other thing, and it was— I didn't have a look at this for you, but I did for an entity in, I want to say, Wasatch County years ago, maybe 3 or 4 years ago.

Mm-hmm.

But while your rate is doing this, we looked at something for Wasatch County, their rate's doing this. Well, you know, so instead of these being other cities, pretend they're other other districts, Alpine School District, water districts, whatever, right? Well, those entities kept raising their taxes, the county, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, so the whole time basically, you know, you're like, oh look, we're— look how fiscal and prudent we're being, but your citizens aren't really seeing a drop in their tax bill. Because other entities are raising their rates. And I thought about that when I think you said something about coordinating whatever. None of that ever happens anymore. But, um, so I just want you to be aware of the picture. It's not fun, but I, I tell you, I have seen cities that do it. Once they bite the bullet and do it a couple years in a row and they educate their citizens, it really becomes— I mean, do Do people still show up to complain? Yes, we're talking 3 or 4 as opposed to 300.

So Laura, as you know, cities are at the front lines of being transparent and communicating with the public. And so, so even though we're not the county yet, we're not school district, what, you know, we're not Century Tower, we still get the blame for their— so probably So do you also help cities in the education and PR process and, you know, share best practices on the best way to go through truth-in-taxation?

Yeah, we do. We helped Ogden, we helped Vineyard, are the two that come to mind right off the top of my head. Vineyard was just last year.

So yes, we do that.

All right, next slide. Now we'll talk about, very briefly, about long-term financing. I believe it's not true just for Utah County people, but there is a high propensity toward thinking debt is evil, right? That no one should ever enter into debt.

Mm-hmm.

And I will say Orem has a very low debt burden. You should be very proud of that. It's not like, you know, it's the first thing out of Bren and Brandon's mouths to think, oh, we should bond for that, right? I mean, they— you have used it very prudently in the past. It's beneficial to know local governments issue bonds with tax-exempt rates. What does that mean? The most recent example, I closed on financing for Holiday City in December, and it was about $10.5 million. had a 20-year maturity, a weighted average maturity. So in the bond world, you only amortize a portion of the principal, like your home mortgage, right? You amortize less principal early and more principal later to give you level debt service. And that was at a 3.91% true interest cost. And just as a comparison, this is not not always in line with this. I'm not trying to say you can always borrow at the PTIF rate. Short-term rates are still higher than typical, but your December PTIF investment earning rate was about 3.95%. So it's not like borrowing at corporate debt levels, which are— corporate rate levels, which are like 9 to 15%. And one of the things in terms of like educating your constituents is, you know, I mean, it is a mind-boggling number. I can't even think in the trillions, right? I mean, it's— my world is very much in the millions. And when we all hear federal deficit, it's— I've even lost track of how many trillion. But once it's a trillion, it's too much zeros for me to understand. And I understand numbers. And people think of that because they hear it in the media all the time, right?

We have so much of a federal deficit, so much federal deficit.

And they, you know, kind of automatically assume that the city's borrowing, you're going to have this big deficit. And a very critical differential in what local governments can borrow for and the federal government can borrow for is the reason the federal government is in—

Debt.

gigantic deficit is one, they don't have to have a balanced budget like you have to have, and they can borrow for operational expenses, right? So they're borrowing to pay people in the army and then people— I mean, that— I mean, they print money.

So, um, it's 38.4, Laura.

Oh, right.

And I've seen— I was thinking it was over 20, so I would have guessed at least that. But this is a really important distinction. You can only borrow with really limited circumstances. Those limited circumstances probably don't even apply to Orem anymore, might to the new school district, right? The reason it might apply to the new school district is they're— they've got to like start paying teachers and superintendents, but they get their property taxes in one lump sum. They don't get sales tax revenues. So they can borrow for operational expenses for 1 year. They borrow for a year, they pay that off, and then guess what? The next day they borrow for a year, and the idea is that every year they're borrowing a little bit less and less and less and they eventually catch up. So it's a really limited circumstance that you can borrow for operational expenses. You can only borrow for capital improvement projects. The end. A pleasant You can borrow for capital improvements. Let's see, there you go. So a lot of times too, it's like, well, should we go into debt or should we pay for that over time? And that really depends on what the useful life is, what the expense is, and frankly, who do you want to pay for it? So here's my war story. I didn't have time to do anything cute up there. But years ago, probably the most conservative mayor I have ever worked with, he had worked at the LDS Church's finance department for the duration of his career, right? He retired and became the mayor of Riverton, and he quickly took off his white shirt and said, I'm never wearing a white shirt again. And he wore colored shirts all the time, but he still had that We don't go into debt. We do not do debt. I mean, so Riverton needed a road built, $10 million at the time. It's 134 South, and it was a death trap. I had a friend who lived not too far from there, and it was awful. And their then city manager and finance director said, we really need to bond for this so we can do it now. And he was like, heck no, we're not doing that. And I, I met with him and said, okay, here's, you know, I mean, one good thing, he had a very open mind.

Mm-hmm.

And I said, okay, so I'll tell you what, Mayor. I'm gonna go back and take that $10 million project expense, I'm gonna put it into some debt service numbers, because they had some set, like $300,000 a year or something was coming out of their budget. They were gonna pay as they went, right? They were gonna save up and I said, I'm going to take that same number, your $300,000 a year, and I'm going to tell you what your debt is going to look like using that money to repay it. You, Mayor— so I'll do that, I'll be able to justify it, validate it all day long, that we can get these interest rates and whatever else. You— so I'm not going to weigh in on it. You, Mayor, you go talk to whoever professionals you want. And see what that road is going to cost you over time as you try to save up that $300,000 every year, right? When are you going to get that road? And he said, okay, that sounds good. I think I can get on board with that. And I go, okay, great. So we went our separate ways, came back, and guess what? They could get their road in like like 8.5 years or whatever it was. I mean, he, you know, put that money in, they invested it, he had investment earnings. I mean, he did all those right things. And I said, well, that same $300,000, right, you get your road today and you pay for it in 9 years, but you get it today. Lives saved, possibly, right? Happier citizens, possibly. So you need to think about who's going to be paying for it, right? If you're going to save up for— heaven forbid, because you would be out of water probably— you're going to save up to do a big water project, right? Well, all your citizens now are going to be paying for it, but it's the future that's going to be using it. So you have to balance that. Does that mean you should borrow for everything? No, not even close. You've got cash.

Cash.

Use that cash, but you also need to maintain your fund balances. Let's see, okay, moving on. I don't even know what else I have left. You'll probably be glad to know I'm going to be done soon. Oh gosh, I went way long.

Oh, ta-da!

She saw 4 slides.

So I do want to say I do want to be a resource. You know, my staff and I love answering questions for you. You can certainly filter them through your staff, but you're also more than welcome to call me or text me, email me, and we'll get our answers back to you as soon as we can.

Yes.

And Lori, did you say when you think he might be back, or Fred might be back, to continue to talk through forums?

Yes, my understanding is he wants to meet with you and whoever else you want to bring in the room to have that reality check.

Okay, here was the—

again, I'm going to call it wish list. They would not perceive it as such, but here was your wish list, and we are not going to raise taxes by whatever that big fat number is. So let's get real. You know, you can help drive some of that part. Prioritization, and then we'll turn that— I think he's hoping to have it done and deliverable in February, probably mid to late February, is what I currently understand.

I'd be so curious because we're so proud that we paid cash for the City Hall. I'd be curious to see Based on what Laura said 10 years ago, had we built it and financed it, what would have been the cost compared to today? You know what I mean? It's just, I think it'd be a realistic number that, I don't know, make you scratch your head.

Let me tell you, I just remodeled my house in like a gut job remodel. I can't begin to tell you how I would have wished I would have done it. Because I paid—

I wish I would have done it Well, and that was the success of the Canyon School District right after they split.

Did you help them?

We did a study on the split, but we didn't help them either.

Because right after— I spoke with their business manager right after, and people were ticked, right? Right after they split, they did this huge bond. They built— we built 4 high schools, 5 middle schools, 5 elementary schools, all within 14 years. talked to their business administrator probably 9 months ago, 6, 9 months ago.

He said, yeah, we're probably not going to have to bond again.

I think we're good. And they just bought the Google campus.

Dave, which one was that?

I can't remember what it was.

Anyway, yeah.

So anyway, you have to think about all those things. Any other questions? Bored you to tears?

No, very helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Very powerful.

3 for 3 on the bugs.

Okay. I was hoping for a 6th coming.

There's one on Chris's head.

Look at that.

Our hamster. Right.

Well, thank you, Laura. All right, Brandon, appreciate it. Um, before, before we talk about or show the commission assignments, were there hard copies or is it just on the screen?

Hard copies of the commission assignments? I did not make hard copies, but I can email it out.

Okay.

But I did sort it, um, on the form.

There's one that's sorted by alphabetical, By the commission, and then there's one sorted by each person.

Okay, so before you do that, I just wanted— like I told you before, it was a— it took a lot of work. I appreciate you all giving me your thoughts and ideas about where you would like to serve, but there are some of you where you do not want to serve. And so I tried So I had to take that into account. And so I had some different factors. One was I wanted to try, really try hard to mix it up. So if you were on a commission last year, you were— I was working to have people be on different commissions this year. There are a couple of them that that isn't the case. There's some that are staying over on a commission. I also wanted to try and Even it out with time, because some of the commissions meet once a year. Some of them will end this summer. Others meet twice a month. And so I wanted to try and take that into consideration as well. So your interest, the time, and I tried to make it so everybody except me had about the same number of assignments. So you probably are going to— I was in there counting yesterday, between 5 and 6 different assignments. Some of them I don't know, don't know exactly all that they do. What it says is you're the, like the Neighborhood Commission, for example, Neighborhood Commission 1, Neighborhood Commission 2. I don't know if both people attend that, but, or if it's just one and then the And then there's a backup, but then there are others that I think everybody attends. So I put that in there, and so as we look at these, if there's something that you're like, Karen, this will just turn my life into a living nightmare, talk to me, okay? And let's see what we can do. And again, it was— I tried really hard to give what I could to what people wanted. So with that, let's—

Unveil.

I'm going to go through line by line, okay?

Okay.

So we have, okay, Chris. Oh wait, do you want to go per—

do you want to go by person or by—

Let's go by committee.

Okay.

So we have the America 250 Committee 1 and 2, because that I believe is going to end pretty soon. Um, just kept, kept, uh, Lynette, Councilmember Miller, and Councilmember Gale on it. Okay, are you okay if I call you?

No, of course.

Okay, I want to be respectful. Okay, Audit Committee, I think they meet like once a year, so Quinn, you get to do it. Um, we have 2 seats on the Care Advisory Commission, and so Jen and Quinn. CDBG Advisory Commission, Chris. Cultural Arts, Quinn. Then Economic Development Corp Board of Directors, I kind of kept the ones that Mary Young had, so you'll see me in a few of those. The Events Advisory Commission, I have Crystal and Jeff. Jeff with Historic Preservation, Jan with IHC Outreach. There are rumblings that that might be a short-lived, just, whole existence of it. So, but for now, well, uh, Quinn with Library, then the mag— the mags, uh, the NPO. And then, um, Lenee will be the backup on the NPO because you'll see farther down she's not with the Transportation Advisory Commission. Miss Orem Scholarship, Chris. Natural Resources, Jen. Neighborhood Advisory Commission, Chris. Except that I would like, because I just have, I have had a lot of experience with it, I would like to be involved with the My Hometown piece.

Yeah.

Of that. Orem Community Foundation Board, I have me and Jeff. Youth Council, Crystal and Chris. Planning Commission, Quinn. And then rec, let's see. Public Works, Crystal. I thought, you know, after our tour, I thought that would— and then Linné, the Recreation Advisory Commission, and then Sleepy Ridge Committee with the golf course because of our contractual relationship with that. Jeff, Jeff, I don't know if we still have things with the station area plan. That's one I don't know. Do you know?

So there's one more meeting.

Okay.

I would probably just— I wouldn't recommend you go to that. I mean, it's just a wrap-up for Payson's stationary plan. I don't know, you can go to that if you want. I don't know if you even know what it's going to be. You're just going to go and vote.

Okay, well, you've been involved in that, so why don't you go ahead and see it through?

Yeah, I think it's—

I mean, you're welcome to. It's up to you. February, I think.

And then Timpanogos Regional Hospital Board, that's a new one to this list. But it's my understanding, Jeff, that you've been asked to serve on that.

Mm-hmm.

And so typically they do have an elected official serve on that board. Transportation Advisory Commission, Lynnae. The UCCU Event Center Board member, that's me. I've done that before. The League of Cities and Towns with the CHAW, that's the housing affordability, right?

Yeah, so those are appointed, right?

Don't you apply? I'm trying to remember how I got on that.

I think ULCT asks you, 'cause they asked me but I couldn't do it at the time.

Oh, so they might—

Steve, you're looking into that, right? Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think the ULCT makes the request Request that the person serve on that.

Oh, oh, okay. That's strong. But I mean, you can count on the 40 to elect too.

So if you call them and say, hey, I want to be on the paper.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, I think they would certainly take our input on this. Totally. Okay.

Okay. I did, I did not know that.

So that's good to know. Sorry, I don't know if I'm still on. So we'll find out. Okay.

I mean, I'm still getting emails and meeting.

Yeah.

Then the League Legislative Policy Committee, um, BB and Crystal. Then the COG is me. There's some other commissions that I'm on, that reminds me, some other things that are not on this list. But last night at the COG meeting, I was appointed to be on the Winter Response Task Force dealing with homelessness in Utah County.

So I'm be doing that.

I'm going to be doing the Utah Lake Authority if y'all will approve me at next Tuesday's meeting to be our representative there. Jan, our Utopia board. Then the UVU, Utah Valley Chamber Board of Governors. I did those. It just gave us— I don't know what they all— I know what the Board of Governors does, but I know I'm familiar with public policy. And then the UVU Business Resource Center. have Chris, Jen, and then we're going to be having at some point a new economic development director. And then UVU community outreach, I have me and Lynnae. I don't know, I know what it exists right now as, but I'm hoping to learn more about it. If it's going to be where they call, they call us and we have events where they, we all meet together versus How do we strengthen the relationship between UVU and Orem City? I don't know, I don't know what that's looking like yet. So that's, that is my best effort. And if there's something, again, if there's something that you're like, Karen, I don't know what you were, what were you like doing this at 4 in the morning after being awake for 60 hours or whatever.

I'm not awake.

Talk to me, please. I want to make sure that you have a positive experience representing Vino Lina Zone as you learn, and that you get— you have the opportunity to share your thoughts with those different boards and commissions and to represent the city.

You're gonna see.

So, um, anyway, any questions for the group just in general that— or anything that And if you're gonna cry, please don't cry in front of me because I'll cry. So, all right.

I don't know, Mayor, do we have your approval to send out books?

Well, as far as I'm concerned, again, uh, council members, let's— if you want to visit, let's Tentatively, yes, unless I hear from, from somebody that I need to make—

Version 1, and then it could come out for version 2.

Yeah, so right now, yeah.

So we would just send it to the resident council as draft.

Draft. I mean, for me, I'm fine with it as it is, but I, I want to make sure that— I mean, So thank you. Well, you had a standing ovation. I'm full of food. There's always the last one.

We've done really good on time then. So from here we'll have dinner at— let's see.

Lori?

6:30 next door.

Okay, and it's the Zermatt that's catering it? Okay, and what's being served?

We've got some— let me just read it, okay? We have mixed green salad, there's a pasta salad, herb roasted chicken, salmon, grilled strip loin, roasted garlic potatoes, toasted broccoli.

Broccoli.

Rice pilaf and chocolate mousse tart.

And everyone's plus one is invited.

I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to share your answer. I'll start off. This is something that I was asked as part of when I served on the— I served on the You Serve Utah, the volunteer service commission for the state, and they kind did a get-to-know-you, and this question cracked me up. It said, if blank were an Olympic sport, I would win a gold medal. So yesterday, as I watched Laura with those bugs, I was just like this, because if fly swatting were an Olympic sport, I would get a gold medal because I am the best fly swatter.

That's awesome.

So we'll start.

I don't know who wants to start.

wants to start?

We'll go around.

If you have something that you just—

if some—

whatever it is, it was an Olympic sport, you'd win the gold medal. Oh, let's see.

Where—

does anybody want to—

Chaos.

Okay.

There's hide-and-seek.

Oh, really?

Okay.

My kids and my wife do it to me all the time. What is this, Dad?

So which way should we go from Brandon?

Crystal or Chris? Do it out.

I'll say baking's a little bit of a—

Baking?

Yeah.

Ooh, I can totally relate to this. I make a mean loaf of sourdough sometimes.

Challenge accepted. Yes.

So you're gonna go that way, or I'll also go since then you'll still have to decide your choice.

You guys just keep—

we don't—

you don't have to answer.

I don't want to make you—

so I would say, uh, the barbecue grill cooking steak.

My family says that that's probably my non-trick one quality that I have. Only one.

So you bring the bread, you bring the steak. I'll do insect control. You're real high. All right, does anybody else want to share before we have lunch? Oh, come on. Are we awake? Was the nightlife in Midway too much last night?

Yes, exactly.

I think you had answered it before.

Because I'm like, I can think of one for Pete. It's hard to do my own.

I would say for me, laughing at inappropriate times.

I think one of my kids wants to compete against you.

Pete's our goal.

Anybody else?

You'd win the gold medal?

Yeah.

It would be naked ultra-distance running because nobody else would do it.

Don't approve it.

Challenge accepted.

No challenge issued.

Dramatic decrease in registrations this year. Naked on State Street.

He's doing promo. Yeah. True. All right, I got one.

Oh, Ryan's got one.

Vacation planning and maximizing every minute so that you're never sitting around doing nothing.

I'd like to hire someone.

I got one too, then. Sitting around at the beach doing nothing.

They'd have to bounce several ones.

Those are great. Anyone else?

It's humiliating and embarrassing, but if watching Hallmark Christmas movies counted to explore, I would win.

I watch Hallmark. I'm a compadre in Hallmark.

Well, I can't get any of my family to watch with me, so next year we're going to watch some Hallmark.

My kids, we like the royal ones. The ones that have—

Oh, the royal?

The royal, you know, the trope-filled, oh, I didn't know she was a princess one. No, I'm sorry. Okay, oh, that's great to know. Okay, I have someone to watch them with.

Anyone else?

I see lots of chuckling, but I don't hear anything.

Poke.

Okay, that's not good information.

I get a gold medal in being a wannabe. I like to follow other people's passions and, you know, dab Dabble in it a little bit and then find something else.

You want to go for a run?

That's a lot of dabbling.

So what is your creation? Thank you.

It's probably Ultimate Freedom. Playing Frisbee and reading fantasy books.

Okay.

The escape from the real world for a few minutes.

Yes.

All right, well, if there's anybody else who wants to do this, we'll turn the time over to Quinn. Quinn, thank you for coming. Wait, thank you for being here. Even though you're kidding, just be willing to share your expertise and some things, the things that you've learned, and I look forward to learning from you.

Thank you. If I was to win a gold medal nominated by my family, it would be for showing funny YouTube videos that no one wants to watch. So I— that's— it's popular in my family to ignore me when I try to show them an SNL clip or something I found compelling. Well, I had such a great day yesterday. I learned so much from everybody, and I'm just really grateful to get to know you and get to It's great to be with you and to learn from you. I'm grateful for your sense of humor. The way that you treat each other is just really remarkable. A few weeks ago, Bren, who was aware that I had been doing some research on cities focusing in the Midwest, said, hey, would you be willing to share some of the highlights from your research? And I said I'd be happy to do that. Work in progress. I haven't published anything on this yet. But I thought I'd take a little bit of time to tell you what I'm interested in and how I'm trying to answer the questions I'm answering, because I think they are relevant to our jobs and what we do in the city of Orem. I see if this will come up. So I'm really interested in 3 questions. And I'm looking at it primarily at the city and county level in the United States. But I'm interested in how people relate to their communities. And the 3 questions I'm trying to answer is to try to explain how much people love their communities. So I call that affection. How much do I identify with my my community, meaning how central is my community to who I think I am. And then the third is how much do I participate in my community. So this is community engagement. And I was trying to build some theories and understand what is predictive of how much somebody's going to love where they How much— what's predictive about how much they identify and say, I have— this is my hometown, going back to what the mayor said the other night. This is where I'm from, and this is really important to me that I'm from here. And then, because I care a lot about people's participation, I'm interested in why some people participate more than others. And I like maps a lot. I look at maps. And a number of years ago, I just, I was just interested, intrigued by this part of the country. We have a Four Corners area in Utah, right, in southern Utah. But there's also a Four Corners area in the Upper Midwest. And that Four Corners area is Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. And they all connect here. And they're kind of bound by 2 cities. One is Sioux Falls, South Dakota. One is Sioux City, Iowa. And geographically, what's interesting about that space is that it's, it's all the same geography. It's, it's very agricultural. There's a lot of small towns. There's a lot of farms. There's a lot of meat processing. A lot of manufacturing. And a lot of farming.

A lot of corn.

A lot of corn and soybeans. And yet it's divided into 4 states. So it's like you're taking the exact same part of the country with the same economy and you're slicing it into 4 pieces. So I was originally intrigued by what— does it matter what state you're in, right? Do people's politics differ based because they're on the Minnesota side of the border instead of the Iowa side of the border, even though the communities are almost exactly the same. So I was pretty interested in that. And I sent a couple of students on my research team out, and we decided we were going to just explore everything that mattered politically in this particular part of the Upper Midwest. We were interested in social outcomes, we were interested in why people vote the way they do. We were interested in why people make the policies that they do locally. But the question I was most interested in is which of these communities are thriving? Where are people happiest? And where are they not, right? And what I'm going to do today is to share a little piece of this project. I'm only looking at the question, why do people love where they live? So we're not trying to answer why are people engaged in their community or why do they identify with their community in our time today, but just why do they love where they live? And I was able to do a survey across these 4 states: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota. And then I also zoomed into that particular Four Corners area right there. And we just went out and we interviewed every city manager and county administrator and lots of elected officials and lots of Chamber of Commerce people and across 43 cities and 40 counties. And so what that does from a scientific perspective is that just gives us a lot of variation. Like, we get to see, oh, these cities are really happy and these cities are less happy, right? And so this is kind of a fun project and it's still ongoing, but I thought it would be interesting for you to see a little piece of it. This is one of the questions of the survey that we did this past— in 2025. And the question is, how much do you agree with the following: I love living in my community. And this is the distribution.

We have—

we got more than 1,000 respondents, but in terms of kind of the types of responses we think were really high quality, we've got a little over 800, which gives us good statistical power. And that's a little bit what the distribution looks like, right? On average, in this area, 50% Agree or strongly agree that they love living in their community. Another quarter somewhat agree, and then another quarter are pretty ambivalent. Either they don't like it or they just really can't tell if they like it. But a quarter kind of like living there, and then 50% say yes, I like living there, I really like living there, right? And so I was inspired a little bit by Pete Yesterday, and I thought the best way to talk about this question is actually by quizzing you rather than showing you statistical tables. So we're going to do another Slido. I texted Pete early this morning and said, hey Pete, how do I do this? And, and so we're going to do a little quiz and just What I'm asking you to do is put your brain in the mode of, why do I think people love where they live? That's the question we're focusing on today. Okay? Was that successful?

Yes.

Okay, let's see if I can pull this still working. Okay, here it is. Okay, so we ask— are you seeing this on your device?

Yes.

So we ask everybody all of these kinds of questions, and we also ask them how much do you love where you live, right? And so which of the following do you think are correlated with how much I love my community? Age, gender, income level, ethnicity, education level, or political party affiliation? Just select as many as you want, as many as you think matter.

She got a lot harder than Pete's questions.

About police.

Yeah, this one's tough.

Okay, how do we look at the at the answers?

Yeah, should just there should usually there's a little checkbox, but the reconnection. You see what one's there next.

Okay, connection lost.

I'm just interested in. It's in trying to understand what they put, right?

Usually the buttons are right there to show it.

I think the Wi-Fi is down on this computer.

Yeah, Pete, the connection's lost.

There's no Wi-Fi.

That same connection.

Remember you're talking to the hotel and the clever girl.

Oh yeah, he's locked out.

Oh great, survey over.

Did I get my answers wrong on that one?

Yeah, it was cute.

Okay, well, we'll, um, we'll wait for that to reload for a minute. Uh, oh, there we go, it just showed up. Wait, still disconnected, trying to reconnect.

Are you on the Zimot conference point then?

I am.

Those are my guests.

Sorry, I tried to switch to the conference one.

What was the password?

Midway with a capital M, 2026 apostrophe.

I mean, 2024 apostrophe.

I just shared it with him, so he should have it. I mean, that's my—

you shared it with me?

It said, do you want to share it? And I said yes.

Nice.

Wow.

Apple.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is, this is what you guys came up with. Um, age is the most popular one. Any comment? The education level, a little bit. Okay, uh, the answer to this is none of these.

Oh, okay.

I was gonna say that, but I didn't want That's true.

So I think this is really interesting. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter your gender. It doesn't matter your income level. That's actually not quite true. If you are below the poverty level, it matters. But if your household income is above $20,000 a year, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter your ethnicity. It does not matter your education level. People who graduate from high school, people who graduate from college, people who graduate from graduate school, all are equally happy and equally grumpy about their communities. And if you're a Republican or a Democrat, it doesn't matter at all.

No.

It doesn't matter if you're a libertarian. Libertarians do not like living in their communities.

Quinn, this is the information your research team brought back.

This is from our survey data.

Survey.

Yeah, this is our survey data. So I don't know what that is, but—

Because they don't like anything.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think they don't want to invest in public schools and roads and things like that. But anyway, I find that kind of interesting. Okay, next one.

Well, we gotta have, why do they like it then?

Okay, let's try this.

It goes against their constitutional right to ask.

Okay, oh, we did that one. Let's try this next one. How much does the length of time you have lived in your community matter?

I don't trust your answers anymore.

There is an answer on this one. Okay, how do I look?

So this shows you how many people have answered.

Okay.

So I was waiting for about 17.

And then what do I do?

And then you click the roll set dice.

Okay, that's The correct answer— but how do I find what people said?

Oh, it doesn't— on these one type, it doesn't have to show like how many people voted for—

Okay, the answer here is length of residence doesn't matter after I've been there for a few years.

What?

Wow.

So, um, people who have lived there for 30 years and people who've lived there for 5 years, doesn't matter. Um, if you've— if you're pretty new to a community, um, uh, it takes a while. To figure it out and to get adjusted to it. If you grew up there or went to school there, or if you moved in, it doesn't seem to matter. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

But it does, does tend to matter. Things don't tend to matter after a few years.

Yeah.

Let me call them foul. If I don't get one of these right, foul.

Okay, which of the following types of communities do people love living in the most? We've got very rural, somewhat rural, small town, small town next to big city, medium-sized city, 20 to 70K, large city, which I guess Warren would fit in, 70K, or none of the above.

These are people surveyed?

People surveyed. We surveyed people. There are 2 big cities in our survey, which are Sioux Falls and Sioux City. Other people live in either medium-sized cities or small towns or rural.

Is there an all of the above? It could be all—

none of the above or all of the above would just be they're all equal. Yeah, equally.

So that would be none of the above then?

Yeah.

There'd be no preference?

Yeah, that's what I meant by that. Okay, I do kind of want to see what people are Yeah.

How do you figure that out?

Maybe try to go back to like before you do the percent mode.

This one was a different type of question though.

It might populate like the first question did.

Yeah, see what happens if you hit the checkbox. It just shows that.

None of the above.

No way.

In other words, if you live in a very rural community, a small town, medium-sized city, a big city, that is not predictive of how much you love living there. There's one exception, which is that if you're in a really rural community, you're very divided. Either people love it or hate it.

I think it depends on how old you are too.

It's not linear. I think it depends on how old you are.

You want to get out of town.

But the people that hate living where they live the most tend to be in really rural areas, and people who love living there the most are in really rural areas. But what this tells me is that there are multiple pathways to success, right? The structure of your community, the size of your community is not predictive of how much you will love living there. I, as somebody who really likes small towns, I thought small town all the way, but there's just multiple pathways there.

Okay, so I'm gonna Do you think people choose the community to live in of the type of community they like to live in?

I suspect there's a lot of that.

Plus jobs, right?

Yeah.

So you're going to that question. Yeah, they're the results.

Okay. All right. I love my community more if I participate actively In which types of institutions? Let's try that.

Excuse me.

OK, so we asked people how much they participate in these various things and tried to correlate that with love for their community. You can choose as many as you want, I think.

Hunter, if you go to your next tab to the left on it, because it didn't look the other sense.

OK. Oh, that's it.

Now we can go back and forth.

Nice.

OK.

I'm glad I sat next to you.

OK.

There you go. The answer is these 3. Religious congregations is the strongest. People who are actively participating in religious congregations are community people. They love their communities, they find community there. Volunteer civic organizations also matter. Local government meetings matter a little bit less, but they matter a little bit. People who vote, doesn't really matter. Local sports teams, unions, professional associations, school groups don't really matter.

Interesting.

School groups, you would think would.

You would think that. We're going to talk about schools in a minute. OK, that's a good one. People love their communities more—

Sports team wins.

More if they describe their community as— so I asked people to describe their community in all of these directions. And some of these show up as useful in predicting love, and some do not. Okay, here is what you said right here. Okay, you're right. United and engaged. People, if they see their community as united, if they see their community as engaged, they're much more likely to love it. Interestingly, I wasn't sure about homogeneous versus diverse, but people who see their community as diverse love their communities more. People who see their communities as homogeneous. The other stuff— liberal, conservative, tranquil, fast-paced, traditional, innovative— doesn't seem to matter quite as much. OK, are we having fun?

Oh, yes. Yes.

Hey, people who love their communities are most likely to say— rank the top 3. Sorry, people who love their communities love which of the following most? Rank your top 3. All of these matter, by the way. Okay, the answer is— okay, this is— these are your answers: events, traditions, places, community culture, other members, the community leaders, the community. All of these matter, but the top 3 are actually— number 1 is other members of the community. People who love neighbors love their communities more. The next is places, and the next is community culture. So people really value the fact that They can say, my community has a culture, and this is what that culture is. Leaders, they matter, but they matter the least.

Do you find places, it's like, hey, I love the local Hy-Vee's, Big A's, or like—

Yeah, it could be the place I went on my first date, or the park that I run around every day, or the drive-in movie theater, or things like that.

Quint, how do they differentiate between community culture and events? events and traditions in the community?

I don't know. I mean, it would be hard to speculate on that. I mean, community culture is created by events and traditions, right?

All I can say is they've never been to Ouroboros Fest.

I know. We have lots and lots of evidence that events really, really matter.

Traditions really matter.

But people who see their community as represented something and having a purpose and an identity, which is often created by that, that tends to matter a lot. Okay, let's try this. People who love their communities are most likely to say— rank the top 3. I need to go back here.

Oh man, just hit present again.

Everybody needs a Pete.

Oh, the previous.

Okay, gotcha.

Okay, can you see this on your phone?

Yes.

Okay, and for some reason it's not showing up on mine. They ranked your top 3. People who love their communities are most likely to To say.

Okay.

No whammies.

All right, we're doing pretty good here.

Oh, how do I do that?

Yeah, then find it on the left.

This one? On the column.

Here?

Yeah, just scroll down to your— that question.

There we go.

Okay, this is what you came up with, and that's actually the exact same. That's the right order.

Oh, nice.

So way to go.

You know, this raises lots of questions, but if people believe that it's important that their community is successful—

I suck at this.

They love it.

Memories matter a lot. Being a part of my community is important to who I am. But also that distinct culture and the history of the community also matter quite a bit. Just that if, if I as a resident see that I have a common purpose in my community's being successful, that's, that's the big thing.

That's the winner.

I think we did this one, right? Okay, let's try. Which of the following What word best describes people who love their communities?

This is multiple choice.

I'm going with the same one.

Okay.

All of these things matter a lot. If there's one that matters the most, it is that first one, which is that they actively participate with other people. So people who are out and about, just— there's no stronger correlation between whether you love your community than whether you participate actively in it. Community things. And so if we want people to love our community, I think one of the implications there is we just need to get them out there participating. And I've seen all kinds of statistics in the last few weeks that people are doing that more and more and more. So my prediction is, is that people are loving Orem more and more and more because they're really ramping up in participation, whether it be in subscriptions at the rec center or library or Orem Fest or all those kinds of things. Okay, let's do a few more.

Okay.

People who love their communities believe the following. Rank your top 3. Once again, all of these things matter. They're all correlated with love for your community. The most important one on this list is community leaders try to serve the interests of all members of the community.

Mm-hmm.

The second is schools create meaningful community connections. So I don't know exactly how that plays in with the school groups that we talked about before, but people actually care more about schools as a social place than the quality of the school overall. Quality of school matters less, but the fact that I can go and meet people at the school and that I spend time with people because they have kids at the school along with my kids is really huge. And I think that's where public schools matter a lot. Community leaders effectively representing my interests is extremely important as well. And then we have a bunch of open-ended questions. We just say things like, when leaders don't represent your community very well, What do they do wrong?

What goes wrong?

So here are some choices that you can play with here.

Let's see.

Select 3 of these. All of these, we got responses on all of these.

Everybody—

there were respondents who answered each one of these things, but there were some that showed up as being very, very Very popular in the survey. This is what we learned. The top 3 in our survey were focus on their own agendas was number 1. Number 2, do not do enough community outreach. And the comments reveal what people mean by that is that leaders are not out in the community asking for opinions as much as they should be. And then third, ignore marginalized groups. And some of these others that kind of show up here are new residents. People— new residents feel often very marginalized. Marginalized by cities because they feel like there are cliques, that people— it's just like an old boys club often. And a lot of seniors feel neglected as well. A lot of ethnic minorities feel neglected. And so a lot of that kind of plays into these marginalized groups. A lot of people are concerned that people serve the interests of the people and money as well. But all these things do show up. Okay, next one. What do people love most about their communities? You get to select 3. All of these show up as being meaningful things people love.

I know what should be number one.

I know, I bet you do.

Mark's a big history guy.

Yeah, loves history.

That's me! All I know is it's a good thing I'm done with school because I could never take a class with quinks like that.

Okay, here are the top 3: safety and security.

Oh, hallelujah!

Mutual concern for each other and friendliness and respect. If there's one that is the most popular there, it's actually mutual concern for each other. If people feel like if they have an issue and the community comes together and rallies behind them, that is huge. A lot of these people who are taking the survey are also in smaller towns than we are. So people know each other a lot. But over and over and again in our interviews, we just heard, you know, when people say they love living there, they say, if you have an issue, people will rally around you and take care of you, and people have your back. So that, that sense that I belong to something bigger than me, that people are watching out for me, is huge. People really like it when they feel safe and secure. Right, and they really feel good when people can be trusted to treat them with respect and be friendly, and that there's a norm in the community. Part of the community culture is that we are all in this together and we treat each other well.

It's interesting because smaller towns, rural, don't have the safety and security as big cities. I mean, they feel so different, but We just don't have the same kind of resources. It's interesting.

But you also leave your doors unlocked and your keys in your car.

Yeah, that's right.

And they really like being in the water.

They have a different kind of safety and security, I think, because they provide it for each other a lot more than they rely on first responders.

Well, I just trashed my answers.

We don't need you as much, I think.

I know.

I would say you're still valuable.

We love you. Yeah. Mark is the director of community.

I think they just don't have the luxury of having that, and so they they learn to write it themselves.

Two honorable mentions here that people did mention a lot were amenities. People really like being able to go out to eat. People really like being able to go to Costco. People really like being able to have basic amenities. And that's not to be taken for granted in rural communities, right? And they really like parks and trails.

Yeah.

That's, that's a very popular one as well. It comes second to the way we treat each other. But it's pretty important. Okay, what do people like least about their communities? Select 3. All of these showed up in the survey as being relevant. Yeah, I just love, love seeing what you have to say here. There are a couple of So there are a number of communities in the survey that are Orem-sized or have some similarity, a lot of similarities to Orem. Some of them are much smaller too, right? But this is what we have learned here. The top 3 are crime, people know all about your business, I grew up in a small town, I can relate to that one. And lack of affordability. Those are the things that people are just particularly sensitive to. Throughout our survey, we see a tension between people who feel like there's too much development, too much traffic, and people who say there's not enough development, there's not enough to do. Part of that depends on the kind of place you're from. Political polarization is a big issue, even in the friendly Upper Midwest.

And all these other things matter to some extent.

So I'm gonna stop there. I think my time is up. I just wanted you to try that out with me, see what we can learn from folks outside of our city boundaries. If I was to say the 2 or 3 things that I take away that are most powerful and most impactful for me, in terms of trying to create an environment where people are going to love living here. It is— they need to have avenues for participation. They need to have places where they feel safe and secure and that people are watching out for their interests. We saw a lot of— particularly in our bigger cities, we saw a lot of evidence that people may have a hard time relating to everybody in the city, but their neighborhoods really matter. So if, if they feel like they belong in their neighborhood, that gives them that sense of connection, that gives them that sense of security as well. And I just think it's really interesting, but there are so many paths to success, right? You, you don't have to be a particular size. You don't have to have a particular set of amenities. You just need to create opportunities for connection, for culture building, for participation. And the more people feel like they have leaders that represent their interests, that communicate really effectively— we saw a lot of of comments about how important it was for leaders to communicate issues with transparency. Whenever something big comes up, they need to know and be able to trust their leaders to tell them the truth about it. And they have lots of avenues, and this is where I think Pete is killing it, just lots of avenues for learning and engaging with what's going on because that Feeds into their desire to participate. It feeds into their understanding of the community identity. It feeds into the culture. And we've got a lot of great stuff going on that I think we would get some really good feedback. I'd love to run the survey in Orem and see what we learn about Orem as well, just so that we, we get as good of data as we can.

Thanks.

That's all I have.

Thank you, Quinn. That's a lot to think about, and I think as you were doing that, as you were presenting that, I thought about the different things we talked about at the roundtable yesterday. And I'm excited, I'm excited for it. I'm excited for the discussion that's coming next, but I'm also excited about these things that's happening. So turn the time over to Bryn and presentation on potential major projects for fire, police, parks, recreation, library, and utilities.

Yeah, so much like we did in going through a Accomplishments as an accessible team, we wanted to kind of go through and at least share what we're currently sort of projecting. And we want to share, I guess, a little bit of our crystal ball, or what from our perspective do we see kind of in the queue or coming down the pipeline. These are perspective. We share these not to like you know pinch in a corner and say that you know this all has to be done you know immediately, but more just to continue to generate and spur the ideas and you know to try to take it into account as then as mayor said as we transition. Into setting goals and additional tasks and what we think can feasibly be accomplished in the coming year. So I think we'll jump into it. We did— I'm looking at the date. It was a handful of years ago. It was definitely pre-COVID. We actually surveyed around and looked at budget documents and websites of dozens of cities around the country and tried to figure out, okay, what visions do they set? What goals? What areas of focus do they tend to establish for their cities? And much like in Quinn's survey process, we found essentially some general themes that were pretty universal. And so we brought those 5 themes to the council at the time. And it seems like these 5 themes, these areas of focus, pretty well cover those all the things that cities and elected officials and our public wants us to accomplish. That isn't to say that I think we tweak these and adjust or emphasize or highlight different aspects of them a little bit more or a little bit differently every year, but by and large, these are the kind of the areas that we try to follow. under and that we want to continue to flesh out and make sure we're making progress in these different areas. Again, even as Quinn's talking, or yesterday during the roundtable, immediately I'm thinking, okay, what do these different things fall under as it relates to our areas of focus? And Teresa was helpful to me this morning in We've even taken some of those roundtable items and we've tried to categorize them under these areas of focus. So as we get into that, we'll continue to do that. We'll also take the suggested projects or ideas from exec staff that we're going to share and again try to put them in these areas of focus. Make sure that, you know, we're building up into this kind of common Do you mind? So as I was thinking about things that I, that myself and Ryan and Carrie and Lori would focus on the coming year, we've made some pretty darn good progress the last few years in getting me more out with all different employee groups across the organization. And so this coming year, I wanted to specifically focus on kind of our middle management, our next level of management after our exec staff, and get to know them better and You know, making sure that they're feeling part of the team. And so that's a big deal for me. We had Laura Lewis come and talk about a financial sustainability plan. So essentially figuring out and starting to implement and work towards this long-term financial plan for, especially for the general fund, is important. Thank you. We've now been tackling this heart of downtown study for the last year, and so I'm hoping that we can start to implement some of those recommendations in the coming year. We've had some turnover in our economic development division, and we've seen great success as we brought a bunch of different employees from around the organization as it related to. traffic response and efforts. So I'm hopeful to put some greater emphasis on economic development and again, bring a team that's sort of multidisciplinary together to meet regularly and follow up proactively on economic development efforts. And then of course—

Does a jacket go with that?

We will definitely do a jacket. And we will have a design, and it will become the new Envy.

It doesn't have to be a tiger either. I was an tiger, so I'm a little bit partial to that.

Yeah, and then finally, obviously, we've done a— we've tried to be helpful to the new school board. And I think that there will be increasingly more ways to essentially to find win-wins and work together to help make sure that school properties are— continue to be sort of community centers. And of course, we interact a lot with our police Department and the school district. So just wanting to be proactively interactive with them. And of course, I know that you as a council want to have meetings with the new school board and with the elected bodies that immediately border our city. Any questions about that?

Okay.

Um, looking at time right now, we think about May-ish is when the Gold Star Family Monument will be dedicated. We wanted to make sure that all the landscaping and everything was going to be complete. We also want to make sure that we were planting the new fruit Freedom Tree at a good time so that it doesn't, you know, die quickly afterwards.

That would be awkward.

That's a— Ryan, it's in flux.

As soon as we can, we'll do it, but we want everything done. Yeah, but you're right, the earlier the better for the tree and Christmas revival. trees in a month with an arm.

He's not lying about that.

That's a little—

that's a little—

Gary, you're up.

Okay, so, uh, with community development, uh, one of the things that we're working on is that streamlined construction permit process. A lot of people come in to us to get Building permits, and there's lots of things that go into that. There's building code review. There's there's infrastructure issues that need to be looked at. There's planning issues that need to be looked at. There's fire protection issues that need to be looked at, and so it's not just. you would think of building inspectors or the building safety division. There's really a lot of across department or interdepartmental input into that. And so this year we want to begin a process where we bring in all the stakeholders, try to make it as friendly for the community to get through that process as quickly as they can, as transparently as they can, yet without missing any of the important things. And so we anticipated it might change some of the way we thought about our— how we go about doing business, or maybe combining inspections. Just a quick little example of that is we might have dozens and dozens of individual inspections on a project, and it can be frustrating when fire shows up and building inspection shows up and public works shows up, and we all look at very similar things. And to try and get economies of scale of what we're doing. Business licensing, one of the failures we've seen with business licensing is, is we need to go through it and audit all of our addresses, make sure we have an accurate count of how many businesses we have, and to make sure that the addresses that are in Orem, the sales tax revenue comes to Orem. Occasionally that doesn't happen. That on their Their sales tax information with the state and how they divvy it out, they may have a separate address than the address in Orem from which they are operating. And so that's a big issue that we need to go through and figure that out. With the general plan, we're in the middle of that, the heart of downtown. On the 27th of this month, Our consultant will be in. They've got some interesting ideas and projects and things that we can look at and hopefully move forward on some elements of it. And active transportation plan— that's not the overall transportation plan, but just dealing more with active transportation, biking, walking, transit, things like that. We also have seen come up issues dealing with height of buildings, residential homes in particular. Our code in the building codes typically design or describe the box within which you can build a building. Rarely, if ever, do we have somebody who builds the actual box, which which we've had happen recently. So we're dealing with that, and that's driven conversation for how do we deal with deep lots and double frontage lots. A home that has the front yard is on the street, the backyard's on the street, and how do we deal with those? And the subdivision where everybody's backyard is a long street. And how do we deal with that with our landscaping standards and things like that? And then the training and certifications for our staff, we're trying to get, for instance, like our building inspectors, everybody at the highest certification level we can get. It gives us more flexibility in who we can send out for inspections. And so when people are on vacation, and things like that. If I can send any inspector out on any inspection call for service, that just gives us so much flexibility and ability to help people through a process quickly rather than waiting around to get people who have the only expertise to be able to do that. And that's not just in building inspections. But it's also cross-training in other disciplines, especially like at our front counter. Not necessarily that there's inspection, but they're cross-trained and they can help with a planning issue, a business licensing issue, or a building safety issue. That's it. Applause.

There's, I think, a couple of other things still on here though.

Oh, well, we take back our— yeah, take it back.

Wait, uh, so Gateway Project, 800 North, Center Street beautification, looking at the primary entrances into the community, making sure they're up to standard. We're in the middle of and looking at State Street. We're looking at our big corridors like State Street, Geneva Road, the Parkway. Uh, it's hard for us who have lived in the area or we work here. We're trying to go drive these corridors and see them with new eyes that a visitor would see, or somebody for the first time driving. And, you know, trying to work with property owners and be more incentive approach rather than a punitive stick approach to try and increase those— the area and the aesthetics of it.

Gary, can I add?

The engineering team has been working with a consultant. It's the same consultant that designed Hillcrest Park.

Sorry.

That project is in the contract phase right now to beautify the entrance from I-15 into the city on Center Street and 800 North. So you'll see about half a million dollars of improvements that will be done that Brynn budgeted for us over the last 2 years, that Brynn's really been pushing for that effort. We'll see that here in the spring start construction.

Yeah, and all of those important corridors like that.

What happened to our, um, imprints on the intersections?

The state of Utah will not allow us to put them into their road intersections.

They—

the turkey has fought the good fight and we got multiple blasts, multiple denials.

He's bloody but unbowed.

Yeah. There's a UVU logo in the middle of it, and in Provo there's probably 4 BYU logos, and they've allowed those, but they won't do it for us.

They have an agreement with BYU which allows them to do that, and I called them out on it, and they said, well, it's a safety concern. And I said, well, if it is a safety concern, then why don't you get them out there and remove it right away?

Silence. That's where we are. It's frustrating.

We may have to do some tactical urbanism where we go out in the night and do it ourselves.

Where's the arts department?

The arts department could do lots of little stencils. If they got one logo, one big logo on the intersection or something, then we could have like 20 little logos.

Sounds like a good project for the Arts Council.

Well, they've got those crosswalks.

Have we got those approved?

Where's Pete?

Uh, that's on pause because of the federal standards.

Oh.

Yeah.

Everyone's with these same federal standards.

I know, they're cramping our style.

The Tiger Team does have ninja outfits.

There we go.

We'll definitely keep at it.

Okay, heart of downtown, looking at the Sierra from Tiger Way on the east of Sierra Park all the way over across State to the boulevard, and from the Sierra up north to— what is that?

400.

In looking at that area, our consultant has been looking at taking examples from across the country of what have made successful projects that people have been successful doing and helping us imagine some possibilities. So when you see this, what we envision this plan as being is kind of a toolbox of So, we're just trying to come up with a whole bunch of different tools and projects and things for you to ultimately make some decisions about what we do and how we go about it. But we're just trying to lay out all of the feasible possibilities.

Well, many people say accountants are boring and just do the same thing over and over again.

Here's proof of that.

Obviously, so last year, so we've been using a third-party software. It's actually ClearGov, not OpenGov, but ClearGov, because OpenGov is a different company. With that software, we started using it for our operational expansions, and just last year we used it for the first time in their full suite of products. So our entire budget is run through that cloud software, cloud-based. And so it was quite a challenge, and we're still, to be honest, still kind of learning the product. So you may run across that as we continue to learn and figure out the things we can and can't do within that product.

So, Brad, even, even last year when it rolled out, it was still a better process than before.

Yeah, the big advantage of that, besides the fact that it takes some of our IT people, can now do something else because budgeting is kind of a one-time-a-year, if you will, kind of things. So it made it nice to be able to have that product just be— and it's a more embellished product as well, to Mark's point. So I can do a lot more things. Eventually, once we've, so to speak, mastered the product, it will— you can create your website and have an interactive website with your budget document. So that's the ultimate goal that we are striving to get to. So anybody can go in and say, hey, I want to dig into this, and they can carve it up all kinds of different ways that you may want to look at it. Second item, obviously we've touched on the— our annual comprehensive financial report, which is referred to as an ACFR. The continuing We're continuing to try to produce the best quality act for that we can, and we receive— there's an award that we receive each year as we do that. That's, as he mentioned, the 38 years in a row. No pressure on us. Our court deals pretty heavily with the Spanish community, and sort of So obviously we try to get more and more of our things that they need in Spanish. A number of our personnel over there speak Spanish, as well as, as you may or may not know, on our 311 help desk, as they deal with a lot of Spanish-speaking people as well. And so, well, in reality, both areas, we hit that pretty heavily. Improving help center operations. Help center is always needing different things to be able to help our customers as they come in, or as— you know, I was really surprised at how many— you would think with the advent of the internet and so many different things, but we still see over 10,000 people in the office.

Wow.

Now, granted, a large portion of those are passport-related, but the fact is that our customer service area deals with a lot of people still, whether it be through chatting, through email, through phone call, or in person. So the number doesn't necessarily go down, it may just morph into different areas at different times of the year.

Strange.

Interestingly enough, January passports go through the roof. And then, you know, I guess everybody decides they're going on vacation in the spring and forgot something for Christmas or whatever. January's a big month for them. And so we're always trying to find things that can help them be more efficient, be able to answer questions better, and be the best that they can be. So, along with our IT staff, number 5, I'm sure you are— have seen in many, many news articles about various fraud schemes and particularly government money getting stolen or whatever it may be. Sometimes it's not money. A lot of times now it's just data, right? It's not necessarily the money they're coming after. And so, Along with our IT team, we are constantly trying to ensure that not only do our systems have the things in place to stop that from occurring, or at least minimize it to the most— biggest degree possible, but we're also— we also train staff, not only our staff but the city staff, as to why, why is it important. And, and this has been really nice because all too often as you may have ever dealt with in accounting, you'll hear the term internal controls. And it's been really hard to, in the past, to really explain to people why internal controls are important. And now, all these fraudsters are really bringing it to bear as to why, for all these years, have accountants talked about internal controls. And so, we continue to find ways to be able to train everyone in the city on that, as well as working with, you know, various vendors and/or our staff, IT staff, to make sure that we can keep the money that we do get and keep it safe. Any questions or things that maybe you've wondered about on the finance? We're a relatively small team, so that's always an interesting piece to be able to work with as far as a number of staff members that try to deal with most of those elements.

So just to clarify, your first point, your goal is to get to this website that is available to the public.

They can just dig through whatever part of the budget they want to dig through. Yep.

You want to see the general fund? Great. You want to see the police department within the general fund? You can see that. You want to see the various accounts within the police department?

You can do that.

Or you can go the other way.

I want to see what kind of equipment is being bought. You can go across all funds and identify that.

What do you think your timeline is for that?

Probably 2 years from now is my guess.

Nice.

Great work on that.

Thanks, Brenda.

Mark?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is, I mean, everything we do is based around the acronym LIL: life safety, incident Stabilization and property preservation. And so we try to keep those things in mind as whatever it is that we're doing. But our goals obviously are to complete the— and open the training fire facility. I think the last we heard last week is the end of February. So we'll be anticipating an open house as soon as it looks like we get some warmer weather. And maybe We're going to make a big deal about it. I mean, it is a regional facility. We just currently toured Provo's administration, and we're getting calls from lots of different administrations. It's city managers and fire chiefs bringing key staff down, and they want to see what we're doing. So this is just one more thing that puts us on the map. It's amazing. This is probably I think the number 2 is one of probably our biggest areas that we really need to focus. We have an engine manual and a truck manual that— and seat assignments. So regardless of what your seat assignment is for the day, you pull up behind it, you already know. Our guys get off the rigs and they know their assignments. We're very much command manual driven type of operation versus a battalion chief, all of our guys going into a staging mode, and then the battalion chief giving orders. In comparison to Provo, who runs opposite of us, their battalion chief, until they really show up, you have a captain that's running the incident and making assignments. Our guys just show up and go to work. Our battalion chief, our supervisors know what's going to take place, and based off the trucks showing up and An engine showing up, the ambulance showing up, and it is, it's, I mean, honestly proving that fires that used to take us 30, 45, 60 minutes and then we're there for several hours mopping up, in the first 10 minutes these fires are being extinguished, which is huge with property preservation. And like the recent save in South End where we pulled the guy out of the second-story window So, I mean, getting there and to have a resident unconscious who would have died in the fire, to rescue him in the first 7 minutes of an incident is just— it's amazing what our guys are doing. This command manual now is going to put the focus on our battalion chiefs or a captain that's stepping into that role and give them more clear direction. than just based off their own personal experiences. And so having— this has been something I've been trying to get completed for 2 years, and I finally just laid the law down and said it has to be done by summer. So I expect this to be— Chief Myers is spearheading with the battalion chiefs, and they're meeting on a weekly basis, and I expect it to be done quickly.

Thank you.

Implementing LIV for code compliance. This is an awesome tool that it's a third-party company. We contracted with them. There's no cost to the city. Our business owners are already paying into this company. It's a requirement based off of the fire code, and it allows— it just allows for compliance. So you open a business, you have a sprinkling system, Because we can't get out to every— we can't— compliance for our guys are so hard to check every sprinkling system, check every fire extinguisher in a business. So this company, based off of the requirements from fire code, they send us notification when a business is out of compliance. And so then we follow up on those. So it's more of a—

It's proactive.

It's proactive, but it's giving us It's proactive on the process, but it gives us a reactive process so that you stay ahead of anybody that falls out of compliance. And it's huge, and especially where it's at no cost to the city. And then evaluating replacement needs. I mean, obviously the fire engine, fire truck, ambulances, they're a huge expense. I mean, a fire engine The Tiller in Pleasant Grove that I purchased in 2008 was $795,000. But we just contracted with Sids and Martin. 5 years from now, that same truck's $2.5 million. It's crazy, the expense. And so we're really evaluating the length. How long do we keep them in service before we move them to a backup? And we've been really fortunate. We've turned over vehicles probably sooner than needed. We've actually started to push the timelines back because our guys— because they're so well maintained by the shops and Thane's guys, and then the daily maintenance that we're doing on our apparatus, we can push that replacement process out several more years, which is, over a span of a career, is noticeable. of dollars of savings. So it's huge. And then one of the major goals we've had— we've had a couple of incidents. We talked about it, I think, a little bit yesterday. Heath's going to be presenting to you guys Tuesday, but we want to have a citywide EOC emergency exercise. That way each one of the elected officials, all the command staff, executive staff, and all our employees just know their roles and responsibilities because we don't have time to try to figure that out when it happens. And so we've been pretty successful. The Charlie Kirk incident was the most recent activation, and it just so happened several of us were back in Wisconsin building a fire truck, but Chief Spencer stepped up with the staff that was involved in that.

And I think that's a great example of the And it ran pretty dang smooth.

And so polishing up that, assuring you guys all know what your responsibilities is, will make a huge difference when it boils down to something being big. That's a picture of it. I can't wait for it to be finished. Gosh, it's just going to be amazing out there.

Yeah, look at that.

That's pretty cool.

I mean, the 3— you have the training facility with the apparatus bays. This building's, I mean, 3-story, multiple— we actually can do live fire burning in these rooms, which is something that we've been doing in connexes, and it's just not realistic. The other building, if we have a picture of— oh, we don't have enough pictures. We call them Grandma's house. They all have a name, but Grandma's House actually— we actually can build the walls internally. It doesn't cost very much, so we have the ability to change the room configuration. And so our guys just don't— if you go into a room that's training and you always make a right-hand turn, we're going to switch it up. And so whether it's annually, every 6 months, whatever training division comes up with, It's just an amazing facility. I can't wait, I can't wait to tour you all through it.

This building and Grandma's house are done.

Yeah.

They're completed.

Right.

It's the classroom building we're waiting on.

It's the classroom and it's really the parking lot. We're waiting for the UDOT connection with the water, with the pipe to get to Utah Lake from Juneau. And so we could probably start training, it's just I want it completed before we do anything. So we're dragging our feet a little bit. bit with our operations. Our guys are just chomping at the bit to get in there because it's an amazing opportunity.

Thank you.

All right, so basically our priorities or goals is number one, timely completion and ongoing management of all those legal matters. You know, there's a pretty large volume of work that comes into our office on a daily basis, and our— my biggest goal is just basically to stay on top of it and to get things done as they come in, to make sure, you know, we're supporting oftentimes other departments. And so our goal is to make sure we We're getting them the legal work, the answers, the documents that other departments need to perform their functions. And so yeah, that's probably our number one top priority. Number 2, we've got a couple of new, relatively new and young attorneys in our office, and so one of our goals is just to continue providing training and mentoring to these young attorneys. I mean, it's amazing the—

how would you say this—

the level of performance or quality of work from between somebody who's relatively new versus somebody who has experience. And so really providing that training to get them up to the level that we want is really critical. One other goal that I'd like to start doing is providing periodic updates to the City Council on the status of existing lawsuits and the filing of new lawsuits. Typically and historically, I think we have come to the Council most often in closed meetings when usually it's at the stage where we're looking at settling a case, and we come to the Council and brief you on You know what the facts are, and you know what the proposed settlement is, and then get council direction either to go forward with that or to go to trial. I thought maybe it would be nice if we could provide earlier updates to council so you kind of know what's on the horizon potentially.

Especially, you know, we get we get a lot of lawsuits that are sort of run-of-the-mill.

Yeah.

You know, garden variety, you know, traffic accident with $50,000 in damage.

And, you know, those aren't really the critical ones, but the more severe cases where we have, you know, damages in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars are the ones that I think that I'd like you to be aware of and to know what's going on.

And then number 4, Sure.

Kind of one of our biggest things that's on the radar in terms of an issue we're working on with the City Council is the short-term rental situation. And I think we've come a long way already. I think we've got a pretty good draft. Not to say that that's going to end up being the final version, but it's a, it's a good starting point at least, I think, to determine where we want to go. go from here. But I think that that's obviously dependent on the City Council, what you decide to do. But something we would like to see if we can resolve in this upcoming year is figure out how we want to regulate or not regulate short-term rentals. I think it's a, it's a big issue in the city right now. There's, you know, you've heard the estimates of 300 to 400 short-term rentals operating in the city right now. And Technically, our ordinance does not allow short-term rentals, and so technically these, these operators are all doing so illegally right now. And as you know, we get neighbor complaints on these on a fairly regular basis. And so just hoping that we can get some, some finality with regard to that issue.

Thanks. All right, for the library, um, a couple of these are pretty related.

We are wrapping up phase 1 of our library remodel right now. A big emphasis there is creating space for our staff to be able to collaborate and work efficiently. The other half of it though is to give additional spaces to our residents. And so we hope the same timeline as the Gold Star, the significant construction will be done sooner, but landscaping and all the details coming in this spring. For those of y'all that are new, a lot of this has come about from 3 years of rearranging the funds that go to the library. We have reduced our full-time staff, we have increased some of our other operating budgets. And so these spaces and the changes to these spaces sort of support that. We are able to run a more efficient operation and move more of our people closer to the residents rather than back of house. And so number, number one, they're completing the second phase will allow us to continue that. It'll move our third staff group to another collaborative space. That's our patron experience team. And then once we have our staff in those new spaces, we will have a plethora of old spaces that we want to repurpose and redesign to patron-facing spaces. Some of those are really fun spaces like the greenhouse. We believe that a library cafe area where people could come, we relaxed some of our rules around food and drink in the library so they're willing to be there longer, have more fun, more social experiences before and after a show. Other spaces though would just support core function. We had, we We increased, I think, 20,000 study uses this past year. So people coming to sit at a desk and complete work, complete, you know, study for school. And so building additional study rooms and additional spaces where they can sort of get that core library work done. So 1 and 2 sort of working together, getting our staff to their new collaborative environment so they can work efficiently, and then repurposing the old spaces. And the number 3 fits right into that as we then have some of these spaces, we want to both hire some staff and then better partner with organizations that have the subject matter experts. And so for the greenhouse, we want to have a program where we're able to do some in-library programming, come and learn how to, you know, do some really basic things with the garden bed or with smart landscaping, how to do fun things like floral arrangements. But then we also want to work with You know, with NRAC or with UVU, with Conserve Utah Valley, where they can come in and use this space. We have people that already do this, we just provide the space for them to come and be with us. So really excited about that. That also feeds into number 4. As we have changed our staff model, we used to have staff that tried to be jack of all trades and do everything. And so we'd have a program person that had to know how to host a book club and And then turn around and try to deliver a safety message and then turn around and try to, you know, do something with horticulture. Instead, we have someone that can help coordinate. We can bring these different groups in and bring their traffic to the library. And we view, again, the library sort of both as the inside physical building, but with the completion of the new plaza, with the courtyard space, we really just want groups and people to come and be at the library. So, and then number 5, just continue to improve the patron experience. This has been awesome. We have more people coming. They're doing really rich experiences there. The goal is to make our errands to the library faster and easier. Hold pickups, picking up material, finding a book in the catalog, and then the experience is a little bit richer. Our staff have more time to be with you and take your time while you're at the library. So trying to sort of bifurcate why are you here and can we make it quicker and easier or can we make it a little Anything I should say about the phase 2? No, any questions on, I guess, on phase 1 is greenhouse and hub. Phase 2 would be the Hive, which is very similar to the hub but over on the other side in the old acquisitions and collection maintenance space. And then perhaps the library cafe, media auditorium, a dedicated teen space. We'll sort of work with our, with probably with Method Studio to design what that might look like.

I'm just gonna say the PERC, thank you for saving that. Yeah, thank you for— yeah, because that, it was in the basement, nobody knew about it. I loved it.

The use almost doubled this year.

It was pretty cool to see how much more it got used. Thank you for—

yeah, I know you have great plans for that.

I think it went up to— I think we circulated 12,000 items from those, just from that shelf of PERC this year, where I think last year it was 7,000. So really cool to see those.

For our new elected officials, what is PERC?

PERC is the Parent Education Resource Collection. It is a lot of STEM and education-based library of things. It used to be down in the basement, run in a partnership with Alpine School District for 40 years through all the libraries. All the other libraries got rid of it except for ours, and our collection was slowly dying. Because it was a— it was run by its own group within the library. They had different hours, different policies, different rules, very confusing for residents. So we have their collection on long-term loan. We moved it upstairs and then we put it— it took, I mean, hundreds of hours from our collection maintenance staff and our cataloging staff, put it into our collection. So when you go in and see our collection, PERC is right there. And so to the resident, they have no idea that that it's actually 2 separate collections. But a really cool backend process to just make it—

So it's like if you've heard of Discovery Toys, that's kind of your high-end education toys. I sold those when I was—

Perk users.

Yeah, really high-level educational opportunities for families.

Interactive, hands-on learning.

Shelves and shelves and shelves.

It's beautiful to walk through.

Even games for family home evenings.

We see a lot of families pull them off the shelf, play with them, and read them.

It's really lovely.

It coincided with the desire to make the library more accessible.

I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to share your answer. I'll start off. This is something that I was asked as part of when I served on the, I served on the You Serve Utah, the Volunteer Service Commission for the state, and they kind of did a get-to-know-you I know you, and this question cracked me up. It said, if blank were an Olympic sport, I would win a gold medal. So yesterday, as I watched Laura with those bugs, I was just like this, because if fly swatting were an Olympic sport, I would get a gold medal because I am the best fly swatter.

That's awesome.

So we'll start. I don't know who wants to start.

We'll go around.

If you have something that you just— if some— whatever it is, it's an Olympic sport, you'd win the gold medal. Oh, let's see.

Where—

does anybody want to—

Chaos.

Okay.

There's hide-and-seek.

Okay.

My kids and my wife do it to me all the time.

What is this, Dad?

So which way should we go from Brandon? Crystal or Chris?

Do it out?

I'll say baking.

Baking?

Yeah.

Ooh, I could totally make that. I make a mean loaf of sourdough, so.

Oh, wow.

Challenge accepted.

Yes.

So you're gonna go that way or I'll also go since then you'll still have to decide which way.

You guys just keep—

we don't—

and you don't have to answer.

I don't want to make you—

So I would say, uh, the barbecue grill cooking steak.

My family says that that's probably my one true—

one quality that I have.

Only one.

So you bring the bread, you bring the steak. I'll do insect control. Rolling your wheel high. All right, does anybody else want to share before we have lunch?

Oh, come on.

Are we awake?

I think you had to answer it for the first time.

Because I'm like, I could think of one for Pete. It's hard to do my own.

I would say for me, laughing at inappropriate times.

I think one of my kids wants to compete against you.

Pete's our goal.

Anybody else?

You'd win the gold medal?

Yeah.

It would be naked ultra-distance running because nobody else would do it.

Don't approve it. Challenge accepted. No challenge issued. Dramatic decrease in registrations this year.

Fired too early. Naked on State Street.

He's doing pro.

True.

All right, I got one.

Oh, Ryan's got one.

Vacation planning and maximizing every minute so that you're never sitting around doing nothing.

I got one too, sitting around at the beach doing nothing.

They'd have to count several ones.

Those are great. Anyone else?

It's humiliating and embarrassing, but if watching Hallmark Christmas movies were an academic sport, I would win a gold medal.

Very good.

I watch Hallmark I'm a compadre in Hallmark, yes.

Well, I can't get any of my family to watch with us, so next year we're going to watch some Hallmark.

We like the royal ones, the ones that have—

Oh, the royal?

The royal, you know, the trope-filled. Oh, I didn't know she was a princess.

That's great to know.

Okay, I've got someone to watch them with. Anyone else? I see lots of chuckling, but I don't hear anything.

Poke.

Okay, that's not good information.

I get a gold medal in being a wannabe. I like to follow other people's passions and, you know, dabble in it a little bit and then Find something else.

You want to go for a run? That's a lot of dabbling.

It's cold outside.

What is your creation? Thank you.

It's probably Ultimate Frisbee and Let's see, reading fantasy books.

Okay.

The escape from the real world for a few minutes.

Yes.

All right, well, if there isn't anybody else who wants to do this, we'll turn the time over to Quinn. Quinn, thank you for coming. Wait, thank you for being here, just as a counselor.

Boy, I love it.

Glad you could share it. Thank you so much for being here.

Even though you're kidding, just be willing to share your expertise and some things, the things that you've learned, and I look forward to learning from you.

Thank you. If I was to win a gold medal nominated by my family, it would be for showing funny YouTube videos that no one wants to watch. That's— it's popular in my family to ignore me when I try to show them an SNL clip or something I found compelling. Well, I had such a great day yesterday. I learned so much from everybody, and I'm just really grateful to get to know you and get to be with you and to learn from you. for your sense of humor. The way that you treat each other is just really remarkable. A few weeks ago, Bren, who was aware that I had been doing some research on cities focusing in the Midwest, said, hey, would you be willing to share some of the highlights from your research? And I said I'd be happy to do that. This is work in progress. I haven't published anything on this this yet. But I thought I'd take a little bit of time to tell you what I'm interested in and how I'm trying to answer the questions I'm answering, because I think they are relevant to our jobs and what we do in the city of Orem.

I—

let's see if this will come up. So I'm really interested in 3 questions, and I'm looking at it primarily at the city and county level in the United States, but I'm interested in how people relate to their communities. And the 3 questions I'm trying to answer is to try to explain how much people love their communities, so I call that affection. How much do I identify with my community? Meaning how central is my community to who I think I am? And then the third is how much do I participate in my community? So this is community engagement. And I was trying to build some theories and understand what is predictive of how much somebody's going to love where they live. How much— what's predictive about how much they identify and say, I have— this is my hometown, going back to what the mayor said the other night. This is where I'm from, and this is really important to me that I'm from here. And then, because I care a lot about people's participation, I'm interested in why some people participate more than others. And I like maps a lot. I look at maps. And a number of years ago, I just, I was just interested, intrigued by this part of the country. We have a Four Corners area in Utah, right, in southern Utah. But there's also a Four Corners area in the Upper Midwest. And that Four Corners area is Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. And they all connect here. And they're kind of bound by 2 cities.

Sioux Falls.

One is Sioux Falls, South Dakota. One is Sioux City, Iowa. And geographically, what's interesting about that space is that it's, it's all the same geography. It's, it's very agricultural. There's a lot of small towns. There's a lot of farms. There's a lot of meat processing. A lot of manufacturing.

A lot of corn.

A lot of corn and soybeans. And yet it's divided into 4 states. So it's like you're taking the exact same part of the country with the same economy and you're slicing it into 4 pieces. So I was originally intrigued by what— does it matter what state you're in, right? Do people's politics differ because as they're on the Minnesota side of the border instead of the Iowa side of the border, even though the communities are almost exactly the same. So I was pretty interested in that. And I sent a couple of students on my research team out, and we decided we were going to just explore everything that mattered politically in this particular part of the Upper Midwest. We were interested in social outcomes, we were interested in why people vote the way they do. We were interested in why people make the policies that they do locally. But the question I was most interested in is which of these communities are thriving? Where are people happiest? And where are they not, right? And what I'm going to do today is just share a little piece of this.

project.

I'm only looking at the question, why do people love where they live? So we're not trying to answer why are people engaged in their community, or why do they identify with their community in our time today, but just why do they love where they live? And I was able to do a survey across these 4 states, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and then I also zoomed into that particular Four Corners area right there. And we just went out and we interviewed every city manager and county administrator and lots of elected officials and lots of Chamber of Commerce people and across 43 cities and 40 counties. And so what that does from a scientific perspective is that this gives us a lot of variation. Like, we get to see, oh, these cities are really happy and these cities are less happy, right? And, uh, and so this is kind of a fun project and it's, it's still ongoing, but, uh, I thought it would be interesting for you to see a little piece of it. Uh, this is one of the questions of the survey, uh, that we did this past— in 2025. Uh, and the question is, how much do you with the following: I love living in my community. And this is the distribution.

We have—

we got more than 1,000 responses, but in terms of kind of the types of responses we think were really high quality, we've got a little over 800, which gives us good statistical power. And that's a little bit what the distribution looks like, right? On average, in this area, 50% Agree or strongly agree that they love living in their community. Another quarter somewhat agree, and then another quarter are pretty ambivalent. Either they don't like it or they can't tell if they like it. But a quarter kind of like living there, and then 50% say yes, I like living there, I really like living there, right? And so I was inspired a little bit by Pete Yesterday, and I thought the best way to talk about this question is actually by quizzing you rather than showing you statistical tables. So we're gonna do another Slido. I texted Pete early this morning and said, hey Pete, how do I do this? And, and so we're gonna do a little quiz and just What I'm asking you to do is put your brain in the mode of, why do I think people love where they live? That's the question we're focusing on today, okay? Was that successful?

Yes.

Okay, let's see if I can pull—

I'm still working on it.

Okay, here it is. Okay, so we ask— are you seeing this on your device? Okay, so we ask everybody all of these kinds of questions, and we also ask them how much do you love where you live, right? And so which of the following do you think are correlated with how much I love my community? Age, gender, income level, ethnicity, education level, or political party affiliation? And you just select as many as you want, as many as you think matter.

She got a lot harder with these questions.

Go where?

About police. Yeah, this one's tough.

Okay, how do we look at the at the answers?

Yeah, I should just there should usually there's a little checkbox, but there's a little reconnection.

Yes, you are next.

Okay, connection lost.

I'm just interested in. Is in trying to understand what they, what they put, right?

Usually the buttons are right there to show it through.

I think the Wi-Fi is down on this computer.

Pete, the connection's lost.

There's no Wi-Fi?

That same connection.

Remember you're connected to the hotel and not the public?

Oh yeah, he's locked.

Oh great, survey over.

Dude, I got my answers wrong on that one.

Okay, well, we'll wait for that to reload for a minute. Oh, there we go. It just showed up. Wait, still disconnected.

Trying to reconnect.

Are you on the Zimot conference point?

I am.

That was Zimot, yes.

Sorry, I tried to switch to the conference one.

What was the password?

Midway with a capital M, 2026 apostrophe.

I mean, 2024 apostrophe.

I just shared it with him, so he should have it.

You shared it with me? It said, do you want to share it?

And I said yes.

Nice. Wow.

It's Apple.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is, this is what you guys came up with. Um, age is the most popular one. Any comment? Let's see the education level a little bit. Okay, uh, the answer to this is none of these.

I sat down, but I didn't want to talk.

So I think this is really interesting. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter your gender. It doesn't matter your income level. That's actually not quite true. If you are below the poverty level, it matters. But if your household income is above $20,000 a year, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter your ethnicity. It does not matter your education level. People who graduate from high school, people who graduate from college, people who graduate from graduate school, all are equally happy and equally grumpy about their community. And if you're a Republican or a Democrat, it doesn't matter at all.

No.

It doesn't matter if you're a libertarian. Libertarians do not like living in their communities.

Quinn, this is the information your research team brought back.

This is from our survey data.

Survey.

Yeah, this is our survey data. So I don't know what that is.

Because they don't like anything.

Yeah, maybe.

I mean, I think they don't want to invest in public schools and roads and things like that. But anyway, I find that kind of interesting. Okay, next one.

Oh, we gotta have, why do they like it then?

Okay, let's try this.

It goes against their constitutional right to ask.

Okay, we did that one. Let's try this next one. How much does the length of time you have lived in your community matter?

I don't trust your answers anymore.

There is an answer on this one. Okay, how do I look?

So this shows you how many people have answered.

Okay.

So I was waiting for about 17.

And then what do I do?

And then you click the most.

Okay, that's The correct answer. But how do I find what people said?

Oh, it doesn't— on these one type, it doesn't have to show like how many people voted for it.

Okay, the answer here is length of residence doesn't matter after I've been there for a few years.

What?

Wow.

So, um, people who have lived there for 30 years and people who've lived there for 5 years, doesn't matter. Um, if you've— if you're pretty new to a community, um, uh, it takes a while. To figure it out and to get adjusted to it. If you grew up there or went to school there, or if you moved in, it doesn't seem to matter as much. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah.

But it does, does tend to matter. Things don't tend to matter after a few years.

Yeah.

Let me call them foul. If I don't get one of these right, foul.

Okay, which of the following types of communities do people love living in the most? We've got very rural, somewhat rural, small town, small town next to big city, medium-sized city, 20 to 70K, large city, which I guess Warren would fit in, 70K, or none of the above.

These are people surveyed?

People surveyed. We surveyed people. There are 2 big cities in our survey, which are Sioux Falls and Sioux City. Other people live in either medium-sized cities or small towns or rural.

Is there an all of the above? It could be all—

none of the above or all of the above would just be they're all equal.

Yeah, equally.

So that would be none of the above then?

Yeah.

There'd be no preference?

Yeah, that's what I meant by that. Okay, I do kind of want to see what people are Yeah. How do you figure that out?

Maybe try to go back to like before you do the percent mode.

This one was a different type of question though.

It might populate like the first question did.

Yeah, see what happens if you hit the checkbox.

It just shows that.

None of the above. In other words, if you live in a very rural community, a small town, medium-sized city, a big city, that is not predictive of how much you love living there. There's one exception, which is that if you're in a really rural community, you're very divided. Either people love it or hate it.

I think it depends on how old you are too.

It's not linear. I think it depends on how old you are. But the people that hate living where they live the most tend to be in really rural areas, and people who love living there the most are in really rural areas. But what this tells me is that there are multiple pathways to success, right? The structure of your community, the size of your community is not predictive of how much you will love living there. I, as somebody who really likes small towns, I thought small town all the way, but there's just multiple pathways there.

Okay, so I'm gonna Do you think people choose the community to live in of the type of community they like to live in?

I suspect there's a lot of that.

Plus jobs, right? Yeah.

So go back to that question. Yeah, there are the results.

Okay.

All right. I love my community more if I participate actively In which types of institutions? Let's try that.

Excuse me.

OK, so we asked people how much they participate in these various things and tried to correlate that with love for their community. You can choose as many as you want, I think.

Hunter, if you go to your next tab to the left on that, because it didn't make any other sense.

OK. Oh, that's it.

Now we can go back and forth.

Nice. OK. I'm glad I sat next to you.

OK.

There you go. The answer is these 3. Religious congregations is the strongest. People who are actively participating in religious congregations are community people. They love their communities, they find community there. Volunteer civic organizations also matter. Local government meetings matter a little bit less, but they matter a little bit. People who vote, it doesn't really matter. Local sports teams, unions, professional associations, school groups don't really matter.

Interesting.

School groups, you would think would.

You would think that. We're going to talk about schools in a minute. OK, that's a good one. People love their communities more—

Sports team wins.

More if they describe their community as— so I asked people to describe their community in all of these directions. And some of these show up as useful in predicting love, and some do not. Okay, here is what you said right here. Okay, you're right. United and engaged. People, if they see their community as united, if they see their community as engaged, they're much more likely to love it. Interestingly, I wasn't sure about homogeneous versus diverse, but people who see their community as diverse love their communities more. People who see their communities as homogeneous. The other stuff— liberal, conservative, tranquil, fast-paced, traditional, innovative— doesn't seem to matter quite as much. OK, are we having fun?

Oh, yes.

Yes. Hey, we're in a rhythm.

People who love their communities are most likely to say— rank the top 3.

Children's birth.

Sorry. People who love their communities love which of the following most? Rank your top 3. All of these matter, by the way. Okay, the answer is— okay, these are your answers: events, traditions, places, community other members of the community, leaders of the community. All of these matter, but the top 3 are actually— number 1 is other members of the community. People who love neighbors love their communities more. The next is places, and the next is community culture. So people really value the fact that They can say, my community has a culture, and this is what that culture is. Leaders, they matter, but they matter the least.

Do you find places, it's like, hey, I love the local Tigers, big A's, or like—

Yeah, it could be the place I went on my first date, or the park that I run around every day, or the drive-in movie theater, or things like that.

Quint, how do they differentiate between community culture and events? events and traditions in the community?

I don't know. I mean, it would be hard to speculate on that. I mean, community culture is created by events and traditions, right?

All I can say is they've never been to Orem Fest.

I know.

We have lots and lots of evidence that events really, really matter. Traditions really matter. But people who see their community as represented representing something and having a purpose and an identity, which is often created by that, that tends to matter a lot. OK, let's try this. People who love their communities are most likely to say— rank the top 3.

You need to go to the next one.

I need to go back here.

Oh man, just hit present again. Everybody needs a Pete.

Go to the next tab, or actually that down at the bottom where it says next. Oh, the previous.

Okay, gotcha.

Okay, can you see this on your phone?

Yes.

Okay, and for some reason it's not showing up on mine. They ranked your top 3. People who love their communities are most likely to To say.

Okay.

No whammies.

All right, we're doing pretty good here.

Oh, how do I do that?

On the left.

This one?

On that column.

Here?

Yeah, just scroll down to your— that question.

There we go.

Okay, this is what you came up with, and that's actually the exact same. That's the right order.

Oh, nice.

You know, this raises lots of questions, but, but if people believe that it's important that their community is successful—

I suck at this—

they love it. Memories matter a lot. Being a part of my community is important to who I am. But also that distinct culture and the history of the community Community also matter quite a bit. Just that if I as a resident see that I have a common purpose in my community being successful, that's the big thing.

That's the winner.

I think we did this one, right? Okay, let's try. Which of the following best describes Which best describes people who love their communities?

This is multiple choice.

I'm going with the same one.

OK.

All of these things matter a lot. If there's one that matters the most, it is that first one, which is that they actively participate with other people. So people who are out and about— just, there's no stronger correlation between whether you love your community than whether you participate actively in the community.

Mm-hmm.

And so if we want people to love our community, I think one of the implications there is we just need to get them out there participating. And I've seen all kinds of statistics in the last few weeks that people are doing that more and more and more. So my prediction is, is that people are loving Aura more and more and more because they're really ramping up in participation, whether it be in subscriptions at the rec center or library or Orem Fest or all those kind of things. Okay, let's do a few more.

Okay.

People who love their communities believe the following. Rank your top 3. Once again, all of these things matter. They're all correlated with love for your community. The most important one on this list is community leaders try to serve the interests of all members of the community. The second is schools create meaningful community connections. So I don't know exactly how that plays in with the school groups that we talked about before, but people actually care more about schools as a social place than the quality of the school overall. Quality of school matters less, but the fact that I can go and meet people at the school and that I spend time with people because they have kids at the school along with my kids is really huge. And I think that's where public schools matter a lot. Community leaders effectively representing my interests is extremely important as well. And then we have a bunch of open-ended questions. We just say things like, when leaders don't represent your community very well, What do they do wrong? What goes wrong? So here are some choices that you can play with here. Let's see. Select 3 of these. All of these— we got responses on all of these.

Everybody—

there were respondents who answered each one of these things, but there were some that showed up as being very, very Very popular in the survey. This is what we learned. The top 3 in our survey were focus on their own agendas was number 1. Number 2, do not do enough community outreach. And the comments reveal what people mean by that is that leaders are not out in the community asking for opinions as much as they should be. And then third, ignore marginalized groups. And some of these others that kind of show up here are new residents. People— new residents feel often very marginalized. Marginalized by cities because they feel like there are cliques, that people— it's just like an old boys club often. And a lot of seniors feel neglected as well. A lot of ethnic minorities feel neglected. And so a lot of that kind of plays into these marginalized groups. A lot of people are concerned that people serve the interests of the People and money as well. But all these things do show up. OK, next one. What do people love most about their communities? You get to select 3. All of these show up as being meaningful things people love.

Community.

I know what should be number one.

I know, I bet you do.

Mark's a big history guy.

Loves history.

That's me!

All I know is it's a good thing I'm done with school because I could never take a class with queens.

Okay, here are the top 3: safety and security.

Oh, hallelujah!

Mutual concern for each other and friendliness and respect. If there's one that is the most popular there, it's actually mutual concern for each other. If people feel like if they have an issue and the community comes together and rallies behind them, that is huge. A lot of these people who are taking the survey are also in smaller towns than we are. So people know each other a lot. But over and over and again in our interviews, we just heard, you know, when people say they love living there, they say, if you have an issue, people will rally around you and take care of you, and people have your back. So that, that sense that I belong to something bigger than me, that people are watching out for me, is huge. People really like it when they feel safe and secure.

Right.

And they really feel good when people can be trusted to treat them with respect and be friendly, and that there's a norm in the community. Part of the community culture is that we are all in this together and we treat each other well.

It's interesting because smaller towns, rural, don't have the safety and security as big cities. I mean, they feel so different, but We just don't have the same kind of resources. It's interesting.

But you also leave your doors unlocked and your keys in your car.

Yeah, that's right. And they really like being in the water.

Yeah, true. They have a different kind of safety and security, I think.

Yeah, probably.

Because they provide it for each other a lot more than they rely on first responders.

Well, I just trashed my answers.

We don't need you as much, I think.

I know.

You're still valuable.

We love you.

Give me Jim a budget.

Yeah.

Mark is the director of community affairs.

I think they just don't have the luxury of having that, and so they learn to write it themselves.

2 honorable mentions here that people did mention a lot were amenities. People really like being able to go out to eat. People really like being able to go to Costco. really like being able to have basic amenities. And that's not to be taken for granted in rural communities, right? And they really like parks and trails.

Yeah.

That's, that's a very popular one as well. It comes second to the way we treat each other. But it's pretty important. Okay, what do people like least about their communities?

Select 3.

All of these showed up in the survey as being relevant. I just love, love seeing what you have to say here. There are a couple of Of communities in the survey that are Orem-sized or have some similarity, a lot of similarities to Orem. Some of them are much smaller too, right? But this is what we have learned here. The top 3 are crime, people know all about your business.

I grew up in a small town, I can take that one.

And lack of affordability. Those are the things that people are just particularly sensitive to. Throughout our survey, we see a tension between people who feel like there's too much development, too much traffic, and people who say there's not enough development, there's not enough to do. Part of that depends on the kind of place you're from. Political polarization is a big issue, even in the friendly Upper Midwest. And all these other things matter to some extent. So I'm going to stop there. I think my time is up. I just wanted you to try that out with me, see what we can learn from folks outside of our city boundaries. If I was to say the 2 or 3 things that I take away that are most powerful and most impactful for me, in terms of trying to create an environment where people are going to love living here. It is— they need to have avenues for participation. They need to have places where they feel safe and secure and that people are watching out for their interests. We saw a lot of— particularly in our bigger cities, we saw a lot of evidence that people may have a hard time relating to everybody in the city, but their neighborhoods really matter. So if, if they feel like they belong in their neighborhood, that gives them that sense of connection, that gives them that sense of security as well. And I just think it's really interesting that there are so many paths to success, right? You, you don't have to be a particular size. You don't have to have a particular set of amenities. You just need to create opportunities for connection, for culture building, for participation. And the more people feel like they have leaders that represent their interests, that communicate really effectively— we saw a lot of comments about how important it was for leaders to communicate issues with transparency. Whenever something big comes up, they need to know and be able to trust their leaders to tell them the truth about it. And they have lots of avenues, and this is where I think Pete is killing it, there's lots of avenues for learning and engaging with what's going on because that Feeds into their desire to participate. It feeds into their understanding of their community identity. It feeds into the culture. And we've got a lot of great stuff going on that I think we would get some really good feedback. I'd love to run the survey in Orem and see what we learn about Orem as well, just so that we, we get as good of data as we can.

Thanks.

That's all I have.

Thank you, Quinn. That's a lot to think about, and I think as you were doing that, as you were presenting that, I thought about the different things we talked about at the roundtable yesterday. And I'm excited, I'm excited for it. I'm excited for the discussion that's coming next, but I'm also excited about this discussion that's happening. So I'll turn the time over to Bryn and we're here for presentation on potential major projects for fire, police, parks, recreation, library, and utilities.

Yeah, so much like we did in going through a Accomplishments as an accessible team, we wanted to kind of go through and at least share what we're currently sort of projecting. And we want to share, I guess, a little bit of our crystal ball, or what from our perspective do we see kind of in the queue or coming down the pipeline. So, These are perspective. We share these not to like you know pinch in a corner and say that you know this all has to be done you know immediately, but more just to continue to generate and spur the ideas and you know to try to take it into account as then as mayor said as we transition. Into setting goals and additional tasks and what we think can feasibly be accomplished in the coming year. So I think we'll jump into it. We did— I'm looking at the date. It was a handful of years ago. It was definitely pre-COVID. We actually surveyed around and looked at budget documents and websites of dozens of cities around the country and tried to figure out, okay, what visions do they set? What goals? What areas of focus do they tend to establish for their cities? And much like in process, we found essentially some general themes that were pretty universal. And so we brought those 5 themes to the council at the time. And it seems like these 5 themes, these areas of focus, pretty well cover the all the things that cities and elected officials and our public wants us to accomplish. That isn't to say that I think we tweak these and adjust or emphasize or highlight different aspects of them a little bit more or a little bit differently every year, but by and large, these are kind of the areas that we try to follow. under and that we want to continue to flesh out and make sure we're making progress in these different areas. Again, even as Quinn's talking, or yesterday during the roundtable, immediately I'm thinking, okay, what do these different things fall under as it relates to our areas of focus? And Theresa was helpful to me this morning in We've even taken some of those roundtable items and we've tried to categorize them under these areas of focus. So as we get into that, we'll continue to do that. We'll also take the suggested projects or ideas from exec staff that we're going to share and again try to put them in these areas of focus and make sure that, you know, we're building up into this kind of common Do you mind? So as I was thinking about things that myself and Ryan and Carrie and Lori would focus on the coming year, we've made some pretty darn good progress the last. Few years in getting me more out with all different employee groups across the organization. And so this coming year, I wanted to specifically focus on kind of our middle management, our next level of management after our exec staff, and get to know them better and You know, making sure that they're feeling part of the team. And so that's a big deal for me. We had Laura Lewis come and talk about a financial sustainability plan. So essentially figuring out and starting to implement and work towards this long-term financial plan for, especially for the general fund, is important. Thank you. We've now been tackling this heart of downtown study for the last year, and so I'm hoping that we can start to implement some of those recommendations in the coming year. We've had some turnover in our economic development division, and we've seen great success as we brought a bunch of different employees from around the organization as it related to. traffic response and efforts. So I'm hopeful to put some greater emphasis on economic development and again, bring a team that's sort of multidisciplinary together to meet regularly and follow up proactively on economic development efforts. And then of course—

Does a jacket go with that?

We will definitely do a jacket. And we'll have it designed, and it will become the new Envy.

It doesn't have to be a tiger either.

I was an tiger, so I'm a little bit partial to that. Yeah, and then finally, obviously, we've done a— we've tried to be helpful to the new school board, and I think that there will be increasingly more ways to essentially to find win-wins and work together to help make sure that school properties are— continue to be sort of community centers. And of course, we interact a lot with our police Department and the school district. So just wanting to be proactively interactive with them. And of course, I know that you as a council want to have meetings with the new school board and with the elected bodies that immediately border our city. Any questions about that?

Okay.

Um, looking at time right now, we think about May-ish is when the Gold Star Family Monument will be dedicated. We wanted to make sure that all the landscaping and everything was going to be complete. We also want to make sure that we were planting the new fruit trees. Freedom Tree at a good time so that it doesn't, you know, die quickly afterwards. That would be awkward. That's saying that Ryan—

It's in flux.

As soon as we can, we'll do it, but we want everything done. Yeah, but you're right, the earlier the better for the tree. trees in a month with an arm.

He's not lying about that.

That's a little—

that's a little—

Gary, you're up.

Okay, so, uh, with community development, uh, one of the things that we're working on is that streamlined construction permit process. A lot of people come in to us to get Building permits, and there's lots of things that go into that. There's building code review. There's there's infrastructure issues that need to be looked at. There's planning issues that need to be looked at. There's fire protection issues that need to be looked at, and so it's not just. You would think building inspectors or the building safety division. There's really a lot of across department or interdepartmental input into that. And so this year we want to begin a process where we bring in all the stakeholders, try to make it as friendly for the community to get through that process as quickly as they can, as transparently as they can, yet without missing any of the important things. And so we anticipated it might change some of the way we thought about our— how we go about doing business, or maybe combining inspections. Just a quick little example of that is we might have dozens and dozens of individual inspections on a project, and it can be frustrating when fire shows up and building inspection shows up and public works shows up, and we all look at very similar things. And to try and get economies of scale of what we're doing. Business licensing, one of the failures we've seen with business licensing is, is we need to go through it and audit all of our addresses, make sure we have an accurate count of how many businesses we have, and to make sure that the addresses that are in Orem, the sales tax revenue comes to Orem. Occasionally that doesn't happen. That on their Their sales tax information with the state and how they divvy it out, they may have a separate address than the address in Orem from which they are operating. And so that's a big issue that we need to go through and figure that out. With the general plan, we're in the middle of that, the heart of downtown. On the 27th of this month, Our consultant will be in. They've got some interesting ideas and projects and things that we can look at and hopefully move forward on some elements of it. And active transportation plan— that's not the overall transportation plan, but just dealing more with active transportation, biking, walking, transit, things like that. We also have seen come up issues dealing with height of buildings, residential homes in particular. Our code in the building codes typically design or describe the box within which you can build a building. Rarely, if ever, do we have somebody who builds the actual box. Which which we've had happen recently. So we're dealing with that. And that's driven conversation for how do we deal with deep lots and double frontage lots? A home that has the front yard is on the street, the backyard's on the street.

Yes.

And how do we deal with those? And a subdivision where everybody's backyard is a long street. how do we deal with that with our landscaping standards and things like that. And then the training and certifications for our staff, we're trying to get, for instance, like our building inspectors, everybody at the highest certification level we can get. It gives us more flexibility in who we can send out for inspections. And, and so when people are on vacations and things Things like that. If I can send any inspector out on any, uh, inspection call for service, that just gives us so much flexibility and ability to help people through a process quickly rather than waiting around to get people who have the only expertise to be able to do that. And that's not just in building inspections. Well, It's also cross-training in other disciplines, especially like at our front counter. Not necessarily that there's inspection, but they're cross-trained and they can help with a planning issue, a business licensing issue, or a building safety issue.

That's it.

Applause.

There's, I think, a couple of other things still on here though.

Oh, well, we take back our—

yeah, take it back.

So Gateway Project, 800 North Center Street beautification, looking at the primary entrances into the community, making sure they're up to standard. We're in the middle of and looking at State Street. We're looking at our big corridors like State Street, Geneva Road, the Parkway. It's hard for us who have lived in the area or we work here. We're trying to go drive these corridors and see them with new eyes that a visitor would see or somebody for the first time driving. And You know, trying to work with property owners and be more incentive approach rather than a punitive stick approach to try and increase those— the area and the aesthetics of it. Gary, can I add? Yeah.

The engineering team has been working with a consultant. It's the same consultant that designed Hillcrest Park, sorry. That project is in the contract phase right now to beautify the entrance from I-15 into the city on Center Street and 800 North. So you'll see about half a million dollars of improvements that will be done that Brynn budgeted for us over the last 2 years, that Brynn's really been pushing for that effort. We'll see that here in the spring start construction.

Yeah, and all of those important corridors What happened to our entrance on the intersection?

The state of Utah will not allow us to put them into their road intersections.

They—

Cherokee has fought the good fight and multiple blasts, multiple denials.

He's bloody but unbound.

Yeah. 8 South State Street has a UVU logo in the middle of it, and in Provo there's probably 4 BYU logos, and they've allowed those, but they won't do it for us. They have an agreement with BYU which allows them to do that, and I called them out on it, and they said, well, it's a safety concern.

And I said, well, if it is a safety concern, then why don't you get them out there and remove it right away?

Silence. That's where we are. It's frustrating.

We may have to do some tactical urbanism where we go out in the night and do it ourselves.

Sounds like a good project for the Arts Council.

Well, they've got those crosswalks.

Have we got those approved?

Where's Pete?

Uh, that's on pause because of the federal standards.

Oh yeah, what's with these same federal standards?

I know, they're cramping our style.

The Tiger Team does have ninja outfits.

There we go. We'll definitely keep at it.

Okay, heart of downtown, looking at the Sierra from Tiger Way on the east of Sierra Park all the way over across state to the boulevard, and from, from the Sierra up north to What is that?

400.

In looking at that area, our consultant has been looking at taking examples from across the country of what have made successful projects that people have been successful doing and helping us imagine some possibilities. So when you see this, what we envision this plan as being So what we're presenting to you this evening is kind of a toolbox with a whole bunch of different tools and projects and things for you to ultimately make some decisions about what we do and how we go about it. But we're just trying to lay out all of the feasible possibilities.

Well, Many people say accountants are boring and just do the same thing over and over again.

Here's proof of that.

Obviously, so last year, so we've been using a third-party software. It's actually ClearGov, not OpenGov, but ClearGov. OpenGov is a different company. With that software, we started using it for our operational expansions, and just last year we used it for the first time in their full suite of products. So our entire budget is run through that cloud software, cloud-based. And so it was quite a challenge. We're still, to be honest, still kind of learning the product, so you may run across that as we continue to learn and figure out the things we can and can't do within that product.

Right, and even last year when it rolled out, it was still a better process than before.

Yeah, the big advantage of that, besides the fact that it takes some of our IT people, can now do something else because budgeting is kind one time a year, if you will, kind of thing. So it made it nice to be able to have that product just be— and it's a more embellished product as well, to Mark's point. So I can do a lot more things. Eventually, once we've, so to speak, mastered the product, it will— Here you can create your website and have an interactive website with your budget document. So that's the ultimate goal that we are striving to get to. So anybody can go in and say, hey, I want to dig into this, and they can carve it up all kinds of different ways that you may want to look at it. Second item, obviously we've touched on the— our annual comprehensive financial report, which is referred to as an ACFR. They're continuing to try to produce the best quality act for that we can, and we receive— there's an award that we receive each year as we do that. That's, as he mentioned, the 38 years in a row. No pressure on us. Our court deals pretty heavily with the Spanish community, and So obviously we try to get more and more of our things that they need in Spanish. A number of our personnel over there speak Spanish, as well as, as you may or may not know, on our 311 help desk, as they deal with a lot of Spanish-speaking people as well. And so both, in reality, both areas, we hit that pretty heavily. Improving help center operations. Help center is always needing different things to be able to help our customers as they come in, or as— you know, I was really surprised at how many— you would think with the advent of the internet and so many different things, but we still see over 10,000 people in the office.

Yes.

Now, granted, a large portion of those are passport-related, but the fact is that our customer service area deals with a lot of people still, whether it be through chatting, through email, through phone call, or in person. So the number doesn't necessarily go down, it may just morph into different areas at different times of the year. Strangely enough, January passports go through the roof. And then, you know, I guess everybody decides they're going on vacation in the spring and forgot— got something for Christmas or whatever.

January's a big month for them.

And so we're always trying to find things that can help them be more efficient, be able to answer questions better, and be the best that they can be. So, along with our IT staff, number 5, is— I'm sure you are and have seen in many, many news articles about various fraud schemes and particularly government money getting stolen or whatever it may be. Sometimes it's not money. A lot of times now it's just data, right? It's not necessarily the money they're coming after. And so, So along with our IT team, we are constantly trying to ensure that not only do our systems have the things in place to stop that from occurring, or at least minimize it to the most— biggest degree possible, but we're also— we also train staff, not only our staff but the city staff, as to why is it important. And this has been really nice because all too often, as you may have ever dealt with in accounting, you'll hear the term internal controls. And it's been really hard to, in the past, to really explain to people why internal controls are important. And now all these fraudsters are really bringing it to bear as to why, for all these years, have accountants talked about internal controls. And so we continue to fight ways to be able to train everyone in the city on that, as well as working with, you know, various vendors and/or our staff, IT staff, to make sure that we can keep the money that we do get and keep it safe. Any questions or things that maybe you've wondered about when filing We're relatively a small team, so that's always an interesting piece to be able to work with as far as a number of staff members that try to deal with most of those elements.

So just to clarify, your first point, your goal is to get to this website that is available to the public.

The public that can just dig through whatever part of the budget they want to dig through. Yep.

You want to see the general fund?

Great.

You want to see the police department for the general fund? You can see that. You want to see the various accounts within the police department?

You can do that.

Or you can go the other way. I want to see what kind of equipment is being bought.

You can go across all funds and identify What do you think your timeline is for that?

Probably 2 years from now is my guess.

Nice. Great work on that. Thanks, Karen.

Mark?

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is, I mean, everything we do is based around the acronym LIL, life-saving Safety, incident stabilization, and property preservation. And so we try to keep those things in mind as whatever it is that we're doing. But our goals obviously are to complete the— and open the training fire facility. I think the last we heard last week is the end of February. So we'll be anticipating an open house as soon as it looks like we've got someone on the way. And make it— we're gonna make a big deal about it. I mean, it is a— it's a regional facility. I mean, we are— we just currently toured Provo's administration, and we're getting calls from lots of different administrations. It's city managers and fire chiefs bringing key staff down, and they want to see what we're doing.

So this is—

this is just one more thing that puts us on the map. It's amazing. This is probably the number 2, is one of probably our biggest areas that we really need to focus. We have an engine manual and a truck manual that— and seat assignments. So regardless of what your seat assignment is for the day, you pull up by an incident, you already know. Our guys get off the rigs and they know their assignments. We're very much command manual driven type of operation. versus a battalion chief, all of our guys going into a staging mode and then the battalion chief giving orders. In comparison to Provo, who runs opposite of us, their battalion chief, until they really show up, you have a captain that's running the incident and making assignments. Our guys just show up and go to work. Our battalion chief, our supervisors know what's going to take place. And based off the trucks showing up, an engine showing up, the ambulance showing up, and it is, it's, I mean, honestly proving that fires that used to take us 30, 45, 60 minutes, and then we're there for several hours mopping up, in the first 10 minutes these fires are being extinguished, which is huge with property preservation. And like the recent save in South End where we pulled the guy out of the second-story window. I mean, getting there and to have a resident unconscious who would have died in the fire, to rescue him in the first 7 minutes of an incident is just— it's amazing what our guys are doing. This command manual now is going to put the focus on our battalion chiefs or a captain that's stepping into that role and give them Mm-hmm. More clear direction than just based off their own personal experiences. And so having— this has been something I've been trying to get completed for 2 years, and I finally just laid the law down and said it has to be done by summer. So I expect this to be— Chief Myers is spearheading with battalion chiefs, and they're meeting on a weekly basis, and I expect it to be done.

Quickly.

Implementing LIV for code compliance. This is an awesome tool that it's a third-party company. We've contracted with them. There's no cost to the city. Our business owners are already paying into this company. It's a requirement based off of the fire code. And it allows, it just allows for compliance. So you you open a business, you have a sprinkling system, because we can't get out to every— we can't— compliance for our guys are so hard to check every sprinkling system, check every fire extinguisher in a business. So this company, based off of the requirements from fire code, they send us notification when a business is out of compliance. And so then we follow up on those. So it's, it's more of a— It's proactive, but it's giving us— it's proactive on the process, but it gives us a reactive process so that we stay ahead of anybody that falls out of compliance. And it's huge, and especially where it's at no cost to the city. And then evaluating replacement needs. I mean, obviously the fire engine, fire truck, ambulances, they're huge expenses. I mean, a fire engine, a tiller in Pleasant Grove that I purchased in 2008 was $795,000. But we just contracted with Sids and Martin. 5 years from now, that same truck's $2.5 million. It's crazy, the expense. And so we're really evaluating the length. How long do we keep them in service before we move them a backup, and we've been really fortunate. We've turned over vehicles probably sooner than needed, and we've actually started to push the timelines back because our guys— because they're so well maintained by the shops and Thane's guys, and then the daily maintenance that we're doing on our apparatus, we can push that replacement process out several more years, which is— Over a span of a career. Millions of dollars of savings. So it's huge. And then one of the major goals— we've had a couple of incidents. We talked about it, I think, a little bit yesterday. Heath's going to be presenting to you guys Tuesday, but we want to have a citywide EOC emergency exercise. That way each one of the elected officials, all the command staff, executive staff and our employees just know their roles and responsibilities because we don't have time to try to figure that out when it happens. And so we've been pretty successful. The Charlie Kirk incident was the most recent activation, and just so happened several of us were back in Wisconsin building a fire truck, but Chief Spencer stepped up with staff that was involved in, it ran pretty dang smooth. And so polishing up that, assuring you guys all know your responsibilities, will make a huge difference when it boils down to something being big. That's a picture of it. I can't wait for it to be finished. Gosh, it's just gonna be amazing out there.

Yeah, look at that.

That's really cool.

This, I mean, the 2, the 3, the 3, you have the training facility with the apparatus bays. This building's, I mean, 3-story multiple. We actually can do live fire burning in these rooms, which is something that we've been doing in connexes and it's just not realistic. The other building, if we have a picture of, oh, we don't have enough pictures.

Grandma's House.

We're calling it Grandma's House. They all have a name, but Grandma's House actually— we actually can build the walls internally. It doesn't cost very much, so we have the ability to change the room configuration. And so our guys just don't— if you go into a room that's training and you always make a right-hand turn, we're going to switch it up. And so whether it's annually, every 6 months, whatever training division comes up with, It's just an amazing facility. I can't wait, I can't wait to tour you all through it.

This building and Grandma's house are done.

Yeah.

They're completed.

Right.

It's the classroom building we're waiting on.

It's the classroom and it's really the parking lot. We're waiting for the UDOT connection with the water, with the pipe to get to Utah Lake for the new road. So we could probably start training, it's just I want it completed before we do anything. We're dragging our feet a little bit with our operations. Our guys are just chomping at the bit to get in there because it's an amazing opportunity.

Thank you.

All right, so basically our priorities or goals is number one, Timely completion and ongoing management of all assigned legal matters. You know, there's a pretty large volume of work that comes into our office on a daily basis, and my biggest goal is just basically to stay on top of it and to get things done as they come in to make sure, you know, we're supporting oftentimes other departments, and so our goal Our number one goal is to make sure we're giving them the legal work, the answers, the documents that other departments need to perform their functions. And so yeah, that's probably our number one top priority. Number 2, we've got a couple of new, relatively new and young attorneys in our office, and so one of our goals is just to continue providing training and mentoring to these young attorneys. I mean, it's amazing the—

how would you say this—

the level of performance or quality of work from between somebody who's relatively new versus somebody who has experience. And so really providing that training to get them up to the level that we want.

is really critical.

One other goal that I'd like to start doing is providing periodic updates to the City Council on the status of existing lawsuits and the filing of new lawsuits. Typically and historically, I think we have come to the Council most often in closed meetings when usually it's at the stage where we're looking at settling a case, and we come to the Council and and brief you on, you know, what the facts are and, you know, what the proposed settlement is and then get council direction either to go forward with that or to go to trial. I thought maybe it would be nice if we could provide earlier updates to council so you kind of know what's on the horizon potentially.

Especially, you know, we get a lot of lawsuits that are Sort of run-of-the-mill, garden variety, you know, traffic accident with $50,000 in damage.

And, you know, those aren't really the critical ones, but the more severe cases where we have, you know, damages in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars are the ones that I think that I'd like you to be aware of and to know what's going on. And then number 4, kind of one of our biggest things that's on the radar in terms of an issue we're working on with the City Council is the short-term rental situation. And I think we've come a long way already. I think we've got a pretty good draft. Not to say that that's going to end up being the final version, but it's a, it's a good starting point at least, I think, to determine and where we want to go from here. But I think that that's obviously dependent on the City Council, what you decide to do. But something we would like to see if we can resolve in this upcoming year is figure out how we want to regulate or not regulate short-term rentals. I think it's a, it's a big issue in the city right now. There's, you know, you've heard the estimates of 300 to 400 short-term rentals operating in the city right now. And technically, our ordinance does not allow short-term rentals. And so technically, these, these operators are all doing so illegally right now. And as you know, we get neighbor complaints on these on a fairly regular basis. And so just hoping that we can get some, some finality with regard to that issue.

Thanks.

All right, for the library, um, a couple of these are pretty related. We are wrapping up phase 1 of our library remodel right now. A big emphasis there is creating space for our staff to be able to collaborate work efficiently. The other half of it though is to give additional spaces to our residents. And so we hope the same timeline as the Gold Star— the significant construction will be done sooner, but landscaping and all the details coming in this spring. For those of y'all that are new, a lot of this has come about from 3 years of rearranging the funds that go to the library. We have reduced our full-time staff We have increased some of our other operating budgets, and so these spaces and the changes to these spaces sort of support that. We are able to run a more efficient operation and move more of our people closer to the residents rather than back of house. And so number, number one, they're completing the second phase will allow us to continue that. It'll move our third staff group to another collaborative space. That's our patron experience team. And then once we have our staff in those new spaces, we'll have a plethora of old spaces that we want to repurpose and redesign to patron-facing spaces. Some of those are really fun spaces like the Greenhouse. We believe that a library cafe area where people could come, we relax some of our rules around food and drink in the library so they're, they're willing to be there longer, have more fun, more social experiences before and after a show. Other spaces though would just support core functions We had, we increased I think 20,000 study uses this past year. So people coming to sit at a desk and complete work, complete, you know, study for school. And so building additional study rooms and additional spaces where they can sort of get that core library work done. So 1 and 2 sort of working together, getting our staff to their new collaborative environment so they can work efficiently, and then repurposing the old spaces. And then number 3 fits Right into that. As we then have some of these spaces, we want to both hire some staff and then better partner with organizations that have the subject matter experts. And so for the greenhouse, we want to have a program where we're able to do some in-library programming. Come and learn how to, you know, do some really basic things with the garden bed or with smart landscaping, how to do fun things like floral arrangements. But then we We also want to work with, you know, with NRAC or with UVU, with Conserve Utah Valley, where they can come in and use this space. We have people that already do this, we just provide the space for them to come and be with us. So really excited about that. That also feeds into number 4. As we have changed our staff model, we used to have staff that tried to be jack of all trades and do everything. And so we'd have a program person that had to know how to host a book club and then turn around and try to deliver a safety message and then turn around and try to, you know, do something with horticulture. Instead, we have someone that can help coordinate. We can bring these different groups in and bring their traffic to the library. And we view, again, the library sort of both as the inside physical building, but with the completion of the new plaza, with the courtyard space, we really just want groups and people to come and be at the library. So, and then number 5, just continue to improve the patron experience. This has been awesome. We have more people coming. They're doing really rich experiences there. The goal is to make our errands to the library faster and easier. Hold pickups, picking up material, finding a book in the catalog, and then the experience is a little bit richer. Our staff have more time to be with you and take your time while you're at the library. So trying to sort of bifurcate why are you here and can we make it quicker and easier, or can we make it longer and richer?

Anything I should say about the phases?

No, any questions on, I guess, on phase 1 is Greenhouse and Hub. Phase 2 would be the Hive, which is very similar to the Hub but over on the other side in the old acquisitions and collection maintenance space. And then perhaps the library cafe, media auditorium, a dedicated teen space. We'll sort of work with our, with probably with Method Studio To design what that might look like.

I was just gonna say the PERC, thank you for saving that. Yeah, thank you for— yeah, because that, it was in the basement, nobody knew about it. I loved it.

The use almost doubled this year.

It was pretty cool to see how much more it got used. Thank you for— see families back there all the time.

Yeah, I know you have great plans for that.

I think it went up to— I think we circulated 12,000 items from those, just from that shelf of PERC this year, where I think last year it was 7,000. So really cool to see those things.

For our new elected officials, what is PERC?

PERC is the Parent Education Resource Collection. It is a lot of STEM and education-based library of things. It used to be down in the basement, run in a partnership with Alpine School District for 40 years through all the libraries. All the other libraries got rid of it except for ours. And our collection was slowly dying because it was a— it was run by its own group within the library. They had different hours, different policies, different rules, very confusing for residents. So we have their collection on long-term loan. We moved it upstairs, and then we put it— it took, I mean, hundreds of hours from our collection maintenance staff and our cataloging staff— put it into our collection. So when you go in and see our collection, Perk is right there.

there.

And so to the resident, they have no idea that it's actually 2 separate collections, but a really cool backend process to just make it right for them.

So it's like if you've heard of Discovery Toys, that's kind of your high-end education toys. I sold those when I was—

Perk users.

Yeah, really high-level educational opportunities for young families.

Interactive, hands-on learning.

Shelves and shelves and shelves.

It's beautiful to walk through.

Even games for family home evening.

Which is great.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

We see a lot of families pull them off the shelf, play with them around, and it's really—

It coincided with the desire to make the library more experiential.

Yes.

More applicable. So I was very pleased when Bryce and library teams saw that as an opportunity to support—

Because it's a great collection. Okay, for management services, as you know, my department is very diverse.

We have all the internal services for the city, so it's hard to come up with just 5 things for our department. But the first one is to collaborate more with UVU. And with that, I— we did a great project with the botany class this last year at the Arboretum and identified all the species of trees at the City Center Park. That was a really great project, but looking at other ways that we can connect with the other schools of learning at UVU. But not just that, but also invigorating the college students to be more engaged in Orem City.

So maybe participating more in My Hometown service projects or being teachers and leaders in the CRC.

Thank you.

So we're looking at ways that we can improve for students to be more engaged. We already talked a little bit yesterday about subrogation with risk management. With the new risk management manager and reevaluating and reinvigorating risk management in general, we're hoping to continue to bring in more money through subrogation and And that's been through a lot of efforts with Public Works and the Police Department, because if the Police Department gives us good records and good police reports for those accidents, it helps us do that. So it's a multi-department effort. Appreciate that. We're going to create a 5-year strategic plan for IT. That's on the operations side, the development side, and the security side. As you know, there's been a lot of technology advancements in the last few years with AI and a lot of other things, but we've also enhanced our Wi-Fi capabilities in our parks and our networking at our new capital projects. So those will have to continually be maintained. Technology, once you put networking in, it doesn't just stop. You always have to continue to advance in those ways. So we're looking for a strategic plan on that. And And then Theresa, as the city recorder, is going to digitize city council minutes books and send them to the State Archives. This is a Herculean task.

She's looking—

this is one really cool way that you see that Orem's very different. We're, we're so intermingled that we're willing to work across department lines.

And Brandon has 2 AP clerks who work part-time for him. but are always looking for a couple more hours. And even though they're in different departments, they are working for Theresa as well, scanning in a lot of documents.

So really appreciate that your department will help with that.

And then the last one is what I'm most excited about.

We are going to be launching that MyOrem resident portal.

We've talked to you a couple of times about this in work sessions.

Because of a new federal mandate that Just came out about accessibility for people with disabilities on websites. It's going to be pushed back till April, but once it launches, that will be your one-stop shop. It'll start with your utility billing, so people can go in and do their utility billing, and then business licensing will come online after that. And then we're also looking at starting our recreation programming and revamping all of that. And it be the one-stop shop where you can do everything, every service that you do at the city in one location.

Very unique to any other cities, and we're really excited for that to start launch.

So the parking lot security fence, this has been a, like, on our wish list for several years, and now Now it's a need. And so I'm glad that we've got the support and we're getting—

how many?

I think we have 3 different concepts now that we're kind of looking at. In the years leading up to this, we've done everything from signs to kind of a few painting, like almost a little small little crosswalk that says police only.

And our little—

we're talking about the Our east access, so as you come into the main parking lot, and then instead of turning left or right, you keep on going straight into our PD. So if you can imagine, just keep on going straight, there's nothing stopping a vehicle from going straight into our building.

It's actually a nice handicap ramp, so the car wouldn't even have a little curb to hit.

So it's been exacerbated With the new city center and parking, and it just is going to create a buffer between officers and the safety zone for officers as they're walking out of the building. We're kind of the first people that people interact with.

Hey, where—

how do I get to the court? How do I get to the library? How do I get to 311? We've had probably last couple years, 5 or 6 incidents where we've had some near misses just with not so positive interactions with the public there as we're coming out. And so, um, I'm excited about that. The officers are extremely— this is like, if you could tell them, hey, give me your wish list, this is their number 2 after, you know, salary. And so this is It's an important thing for them, an important thing, and it's needed. So I'm excited for that, to see what that is going to be. Complete the rollout for the NIT code enforcement matrix. We talked a little bit about that yesterday when I went through the stats. This will probably be the biggest volume of calls that you are calling me in regards to, is public coming to you with NIT issues. And so being able to provide our NIT officers with kind of some guardrails left and right as to what you guys are wanting, how you're wanting it enforced. I would say Orem, by comparison to other cities, we are very compliance encouraging, more so than any other city. I don't have a problem with that. If you guys want to be more enforcement-minded, If you're not getting what you needed, then you need to adjust that matrix as to how you want it to be.

Define for me. Define your compliance versus enforcement definition.

How many times are we asking you to remove your car? How long are we giving you to clean up your yard? How long are we— and that's where, you know, the citizen is going to come to you and say, hey, I told you about this. January 1st, and here we are in June.

So you guys want guidelines?

Yeah, we just want to know how many, how many more, how many times do you want, how many warnings, how many times. And then again, we want to remain solutions-oriented, and there's going to be some times where we're going to need to adjust with people and give them more time based on certain circumstances. But just to kind of narrow down some of the outliers that we have in order to to give our NIT guys a little more— because they, they're doing exactly what we ask them to do.

Yeah.

They are.

And then we bring them a new something out of left field as to why this— why, you know, why are we adjusting? And sometimes that's a little difficult for them to understand. And so just trying to— here's the matrix, this is what we want you to, to do, this is what city council where they—

where you want us to be.

And we're close. I don't think that it's not going to be a big change. We just want to kind of really just get something down for them to be able to see. And it's not easy because it's very— there's a lot of different things that encompass NIT.

So—

Yeah.

I would say it's close to Steve's vision.

VRBO.

Yeah, there's a lot that goes into that. If I can just add to that real quick.

You know, there's a spectrum between ultimately getting to the outcome of a cleaner, beautiful, you know, no-nonsense city versus, well, I guess the other side of the spectrum would be, you know, getting a bunch of fines and tickets out there in the meantime. And so we've been on the side of the spectrum of carrot education, you know, holding citizens' hands along to get them to ultimately just compliance and a positive outcome. Less so on the, you know, let's get some fines and the stick side of enforcement. So I think we're— I think we actually do a really well— like she said, we do a better job, I think, than anyone of getting to positive compliance, but doing it in a carrot sort of way versus a stick.

I mean, what does the citations get us?

Angry people.

Yes, angry, and the problem still exists. Citation after citation after citation. And so what I'm saying, what I'm— this matrix will be able to say, to help you provide your constituents, citizens, to say, hey, this is the framework that we're going with. You need to be more patient or more understanding. We are working on it. We are addressing it, and it's within the matrix. And so frustrated people come to you saying nothing's being done, and then you give me a call and I report back to you, we're on it, we're within the matrix, and we need more patience to allow that to come to its completion.

Or a new service project for my hometown.

Yes, we've done that too. Yeah.

So, as far as like any team that does more with less, NIT by far. And so they are extremely busy. They are extremely— they do a good job of— I mean, that's not— imagine, you know, those type of conversations come up and they can be confrontational, but they most of all Almost always are not. And it's based upon those 3 individuals in there and how they go about their business.

And I, I don't have a poker face, just so you know that. So you can just kind of— if you watch me, what you see, like, I feel woefully unqualified to determine whether or not we— what you're asking. I'm very grateful for the current approach. Wondering if it's something that— what would be the value of taking that to the Neighborhood Commission? Because I, I— what I don't want to do is create— have the City Council create these standards in a matrix just by ourselves. I would like to in some way to have some other input. And of course, we may have people say, you know what, you need to write a ticket for every single possible No, no carrots, all sticks. Then we're going to have people who say we'd love carrots. But what I want to do is I would like— we have the responsibility to make that decision. I'm not shirking that decision. It's just that I feel that maybe, maybe, I don't know how you feel about broadening how do we input on that. You know, these are huge issues. You get people, that's what we get a lot of calls on. And I don't know, what are your thoughts?

I think it's a good idea.

What are your thoughts? Sorry to hijack your discussion.

So I'm sensing, and I don't know, I could be totally wrong here, but I'm sensing that NIT just wants some backup. They just want some, um, so they don't have some consistency from us as a council. And I'll give one example of something that happened with Jameson, right? There was a house burned down or sitting there as burned out for over a year. Some dispute with the insurance companies, right? So neighbor came to me, what's going on, complain, how come you guys haven't done anything, da da da, and gave me some information that said that this investor, this landlord, had received a formal denial from the insurance company, the time for him to appeal had expired. And so I took that information to Jameson and he's like, oh, That's new information. We can move on this because he's been telling us he's appealing his insurance denial. So sometimes there's just some information that needs to be connected.

Yeah.

No, and that's what I—

And I don't know if the people were bothering MIT, you know, but I'm sensing that that's maybe— I'd like to figure out how to do the backup so we're not— I don't necessarily want I like what Brent's saying. Let's do the carrots.

Carrots.

Yeah.

So it sounds like what we need to— it sounds like from what you're saying is maybe— is MIT looking for the city council to fine-tune or bless or whatever the matrix that's existing? Or are we looking at rebuilding the matrix?

I think how we're operating is established.

Okay, okay.

And I just want that to be formalized, formalized, so you guys know exactly where—

Okay, okay.

When we do have information, never hesitate to call me on an issue, right? It's not what I'm saying. It is just so that you know where the left and rights are, so when you're talking with constituents, you're aware of those. And then when you have that call back to me, the check and balance is there of are Are we doing what we're supposed to? Are we not? And you know what we are and what we're not supposed to be doing.

Okay.

As, you know, somebody calls in and says, hey, I called in on this on January 1st, and here we are on the 10th, why is this not taken care of? Well, you know, we're going to allow them some time to get it taken care of.

Gotcha.

And back to your point of everybody wants somebody written over for 2 miles over the speed limit until it's them.

Or until, you know.

work the same way that when you guys write a ticket, the mayor and council have information saying, yeah, but they were warned 15 times or whatever, you know.

Okay, so it's taking what's— okay, that helps me understand. So thank you for bringing up that question.

And maybe too, because, I mean, because I've chatted with quite a few about a few things, but I think even for the new people, I think it would be nice if maybe Pete could help us wordsmith something about the process to give to the reporting party so they understand that this could be a 6 to 8 month process.

Once we define this framework, it allows us to be able to better educate, okay, those that are getting, you know, warnings, or our neighborhood commission, or the public, or, you know, you, as anyone inquires about it.

Because we'll have our—

of course we'll have our connect.orm.gov, and I would imagine this will be Chief says we'll get some of our most tickets on this subject.

And there's privacy matters, I've been told, right? Their privacy on some of the process that some properties are in. Um, for like, I've had neighborhood commission members come back to me and say, what's— I gave you all these addresses, so there's no, you know, but what can we tell them, Pete? I mean, that's what Well, what can we say?

There would like—

I'd like to have maybe— I think you did a good response.

I think an important thing to help residents understand is that government is inherently designed to move slow. It's part of that social contract that people give up part of their freedom to the government to have these amenities that we provide of water, sewer, roads, safety, those kinds of things. And so it has to move slow in order to protect those individual freedoms from the government overstep, right? And so when somebody complains about something, the reason government doesn't move super fast is to protect people's individual freedoms. I don't know how you say that to the general public and get them to understand that, but that's the principle behind it, is government can't move fast because then we're accused of overstepping our bounds.

Thank you.

Other council members weighing in on this, on this NIT?

That's good public feedback.

I think the way that you've been handling it has been, has been very good, and the compassion element, you know, kind of looking at each situation and bringing that to bear. there, and, you know, the repetitive, you know, some of the people you're dealing with over and over and over again. So I like what you're suggesting to support that.

I think we have on the calendars for our new elected officials, you know, an opportunity to go through what we have so far.

And so, okay, and those of you that have received those Compliance kind of know, yeah, the workings of that. And so, Kelly, when you guys kind of help adjust that as needed— by no means am I saying stop calling me about NIT issues. It is I just want my guys to be able to find out where the left and right is so they feel confident. And no, I keep giving this person a warning, I keep getting this personal warning, asking for compliance, as opposed to—

When does it escalate?

Yes.

They're great guys. They're in Girl Scouts.

Yes, that's a tough job. That's a real hard job.

They do a great job.

Thank you. It wasn't quite a detour.

A little, sorry.

Tiny detour.

So number 3, proactive domestic violence programs. So it's like, how do you prevent that? So just trying to provide some education Education, some information, and offering up times into schools, into colleges, into community groups, church groups, wherever you can, to know, you know, what domestic violence is, one. What resources are available if you are a victim of domestic violence. And so, to give these—

A.

Unknown victims, better courage, better access, better whatever information to get out of those type of situations.

Do we have a Hispanic community focus?

Someone who—

okay.

I've heard that that's true.

And then, so we have currently, we have an AI that helps us with our reporting system. We've been testing that, I want to say since March we tested it. it for 3 or 4 months. We purchased it in September. We've been using it on non-arrest reports, and basically what it does is it takes audio from the officer's body camera and basically creates a report that dictates it by what is said back and forth. It's pretty good.

Is it a closed system AI? Is it a closed system AI or open? Meaning, is it in like All self-contained?

Yes.

Yeah. And so it throws in like random sentences like, you know, I had a coke with a polar bear in there. So then the officer has to go through and kind of spell check it and delete those type of, you know, bogus sentences out of it. We're getting close to getting them approved to be used on arrest reports.

Yes.

And it's, you know, 5 years from now, it's—

that's just going to be the norm.

And so that's good. It is a time-saving. Back in the day, I'd go out and take a crime report from you, and I'd write down some notes as to what I needed and things like that. And I'd go back in my car and I'd, you know, type that report down based on my information and my notes. And now with You instituted body cams, and it's like, okay, how did I exactly see that?

How did—

what did they exactly say? You know, that's coming up in that report. So the time that it would take to go back and review that and do that— body cams are good, we have this mass amount of data that we, that we have, but this AI tool is, is going to be an extreme time saver. And so officers are excited about that. And then development of Employee career improvement tracking system. So a lot of movement within the police department, you know, from a patrolman, they're there for a while, they go to investigations, they have new supervisors. We have a rotating bid schedule now that we've done for the last— I think this is our 3rd year that we've done it starting January. And so they're rotating around from different supervisors. We kind of have archaic Google Sheet type stuff of passing along what, you know, this officer's goals are. And then, you know, they're my sergeant, they're under me, and then they go to Renee or whatever the next sergeant is. Are you up to speed on what their goals are? And so trying to just have a, almost a folder that goes with that officer around from supervisor to supervisor to kind of keep them on track, keep them focused on What their career goals are, improvements. And so, it's, you know, some officers want to do a little bit of everything in the department, which isn't feasible. Okay, what direction do you want to go right now in your first 5 years and after that to build? And so, Deputy Chief Scott Speece is working on—

Mr. Scott Speece.

Something more formalized with that. There is software out there that does that if you want to pay $9,000, $10,000 a year to keep on doing that. We're trying to find something more cost-efficient than that. And so we're excited about that too.

Is that something our IT department could develop? I mean, it doesn't sound like it would be—

Yes and no, but they're developing so many other things. And, you know, it's not a get-in-line, but it's— I think we're able to come up with something on our own. We have talked with them about that and building that. So we're trying to find a happy medium with us paying a software company an annual, you know, service fee of $4,000 or $5,000 a year. So what we're doing now is inadequate. We need to make it better.

But we're not too far from a career tracking. Any questions?

Don't ever hesitate to call me if you have anything.

If I can try to I'm—

What's your question?

When I saw the domestic violence one, I was thinking back with my time at Community Action. That's kind of a group that we don't really— we don't see out in the community, but at Community Action, we would see families, women and children, they live in cars, or they would just— they're homeless. The domestic violence piece, the fact that that's happening in It has a— really impacts homelessness. You can look at homelessness numbers, and we do point-in-time counts. The number of people who are homeless because of domestic violence, it should be zero, and it's not. But it's— there are quite a few people who don't— just don't have anywhere to go. And so I'm—

And there are more programs, resources. I mean, more agencies have victim advocates. Now than they ever have before. So there is more resources for victims of those type of crimes than ever before. They might just not know about it. And so this is an effort, a proactive effort, to reach out to those people. And, you know, it may not be you that's Whitney Sam, but you go to this and you hear somebody else, or you have a friend or somebody like that, that you can do that. And so just trying to at least get that message out there, expand those circles so that they get the resources that they need.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Ryan or DJ, any detail you'd add too about Phase 2 and 3?

Yeah, so we're just finishing up with our main remodel on the main floor, which we got fire out.

I miss seeing Mark's face. I do miss that.

It is nice to have a little more breathing room, but we— I can't have—

I don't have the sports footage, but it massively almost doubled our evidence space.

Joking.

And yeah, that's great. It'll be 2 years and it'll be full. And so that's been huge, increased our gym space, our kitchen and break room space, kind of revamped what our report room actually looks like. And so that's been good. We're next doing our locker rooms and our bathrooms. That'll be the kind of the first upgrade since the building was made, built in 2001, 2000?

'90s.

That was '90s. It was in the '90s before I was—

okay.

So that will be great. They're looking forward to that. And so I think that's already— the locker rooms have gone out to bid. That's going to start in the next 3 constructions next week.

Lovely.

Our contracts are all signed.

That's awesome.

So Ryan and Lieutenant Hadlock have been spearheading those efforts there. And so they're excited about that. People in City Hall will be excited that we're not in their gym anymore and using their bathrooms and their locker rooms and things like that.

So that'll be good.

Um, to go back to the domestic violence, just an update on the refuge that many of you are aware of. It's proposed to go on the corner of 8th North and State Street behind the Dutch Bros. They have reached out for a letter of support, Mayor, that will be coming your way.

Okay.

So they can acquire some state grants.

Okay, happy to do that.

Rumor is their goal is to start construction end of the year if they can acquire all the funding.

Thank you.

Nice. All right, for recreation, um, first one is to streamline the rental process.

We have several Fields, a couple dozen fields that we rent out to either tournaments for like an entire weekend or one-offs for club use. And that is a paper-heavy and staff-heavy process right now. It doesn't need to be, but with risk and insurance and all that, it is. So we're going to really work— Carrie mentioned activating this portal so we can get all of our residents in an easier place, easier to pay invoices. And so So really excited about that. The fitness center continues to grow with 20,000 members there now. We're going to need to be adding some classes and programming. The goal is for our staff to play air traffic control so it never feels like there are 20,000 members there. It always feels like we've just been waiting for you to get there all day. Number 3 is to prepare for the Ironman race and explore other fun races to host. I did a presentation a couple of months ago, but looking at maybe 2027 for bringing the Ironman group to host a race here in Orem. It's not about Ironman, it's about bringing in these events. These events can be sports tourism, they can be regular tourism, they can be cultural events. And so yes, it's great that we'll have a first, and Gary mentioned the heart of downtown. The course we've designed will bring them to finish at Sierra Park at the new downtown and to activate the public spaces. And our restaurants in that area, they estimate 10,000 hotel nights for a single Ironman race. And so our goal is to replicate the process, not necessarily more road races, but more events that we can bring in and activate in our city so that we can have a robust relationship with our CB— or with our Convention and Visitors Bureau. Lynna, you mentioned it yesterday, we want to go after those TTAB dollars again. And so by playing good with the county, we're able to show that we are an active partner in this. We're able to then produce the data that shows the economic impact we can have for the county, and then we take that money and invest it in our parks and our recreation facilities so that our residents are getting the facilities to use while it's being funded through this sports tourism model. So we've got a really nice foundation there, really excited to grow that and make sure that we grow it responsibly so that our residents don't get boxed out by Too many of these things, but we think a handful of them across different types of races or different facilities or different impacts would be a good portfolio for us to have. Number 4, as we've mentioned, events have grown rapidly the last couple of years, as has the demand and the expectation of safety and security at these events. And so our goal is to make sure that we are growing the events in a way that is sustainable for our police and They are sustainable for us to ensure traffic safety, pedestrian safety, getting to and from the events, parking, everything like that. Some of that means for our massive 100,000-person OrmFests to look at the types of amenities and how we're building that. The other goal is to maybe focus on a higher frequency of 5,000-person events, which is right in the wheelhouse if we can do it with minimal impact to public safety, minimal impact on the neighborhood and parking. Minimal impact on some of our crosswalks and other logistics. And so both continuing to love Lights On and Aurum Fest and Taste of Aurum, maybe Touch a Truck that are in that massive event range, and then maybe we can increase frequency for the other events at the neighborhood level or area level so that they're easier logistically for us to run. And then finally, increase the use at Hillcrest, Hillcrest Hillcrest opened in '24. It's been awesome. It's been incredible for our programming team to be able to fill. But I think there's some knowledge and awareness that we would love to increase at Hillcrest. This is an awesome community space. It is a low cost comparatively to other facilities. And so as neighborhoods, congregations, graduation parties, things like that need a space, we want to just make sure that they're aware of that. Everyone who has used it has loved it. And so trying to get it closer to the understanding of pavilion rentals in the parks or the pool, which like sells out and books out every summer. We just want people to know that Hillcrest is another option. It's an indoor option and it's really simple for groups to use. Oh, and then bonus, it's America 250. I think most of us are aware of that, the national push for America 250 for our bicentennial.

For 250 years.

And so I think you'll continue to see that, at least now until July 4th. You'll see that in each of our events. We've got a great Memorial Day plan. We'll make sure that you'll see that all throughout Orem Fest with the theming, everything like that. But make sure we have an extra increase in patriotism this year.

Chris, before we jump into Public Works, I think we'll just take a Mayor, a 5-minute break?

Okay.

Making sure that we have our recording going and all of that, so thank you so much, Teresa. And because it's, you know, our opening day, I thought I do believe that Orem has a first ever where we have a majority on the council who are women who are helping us, you know, move forward. So I think, I think we should, you know, just publicly recognize that and maybe even give it a round of applause.

Okay, but it's so funny, someone told me that and I was like, Really? I didn't even— I didn't even think about that.

So cool. Awesome.

And I think, I guess, even though we're still— I guess even though we're slightly behind schedule, we actually are making very good time. I have had retreats that have gone even as late as 4:00 or 4:30 or whatever. So maybe just— One last thanks to exec staff for coming prepared with, with so much and coordinating with Pete and putting together those presentations. And Pete already has stuff planned for a recap at our council meeting on Tuesday. A big thanks to you as council for coming prepared with quick feedback and input.

I think we've asked all the questions. Shout out to Bren and the executive team as well. Oh my God. Coming prepared and having those goals. I'm really, really excited.

That's a—

I was trying to think of a word to describe how I feel. A couple words: hopeful and excited. I just am so excited about what we have in the coming year, and I've really appreciated the energy that's been here. And I'm going to do my closing remarks now. Never mind, let's go to this. I'll take— I'll save that for later. But do you want to pick up where we left off, Council? Safe, livable, connected, and engaged neighborhoods. Artists and writers in residence. Quinn?

I'll just share a couple of thoughts on this and what it might look like and maybe some next steps if we decide it's a good idea. I was talking to I was talking to Gary yesterday, and it seems like that might be a really nice addition to the Heart of Orem project. There's the possibility of maybe a residential studio or space or something within that space, and it seems like that could be a way of making that kind of a signature project. I think we We need more information, so we would need a financial model around that, what that would look like. I suspect that there are grants available that could help support that. We may not be on the hook for all of it. There are lots of humanities grants and other things that are out there. Some of that might be where we pay a portion of it and a grant— provider would pay a portion of it. But I'm wondering if maybe Heather Cox could help us think a little bit about what that might look like. I also think that Library Hall is a really good space for this kind of thing, and so thinking about integrating the Library Hall art into this program might be an easy win to do that. I think I think one of the things that I would be excited about here is if we could bring people to Orem, right, to collaborate with people in Orem and to be a resource in Orem. So we would need to figure out what the right kind of tenure would look like. Is it 6 weeks? Is it 3 months? Is it 6 months?

I don't know.

I think it's 3 months. And figure out how to integrate that person into programming through the library and through the Sarah and other things. I just, I think there are lots of stakeholders that might be interested in that. I don't think it's particularly expensive. I do think it has potential to make a big difference in terms of our brand as a cultural site and put us on the map in ways ways that might not be always on the map. And we'd have to figure out a way of having people apply and vetting them, have a process for that too. So there are some things we could explore.

Are you open to like partnering with UVU, BYU? Because back in the day with storytelling, they bring people in and they do like a performance at UVU and BYU, and if necessary, you know, we kind of share the load.

Yeah, that's great.

Okay.

Yeah, I think the more we Without the bigger names, we might be able to—

For sure.

So is it to bring someone from outside in or to highlight a local artist?

Someone from outside in, because it would be in residence for a short period of time. But the idea is that it would benefit our artistic and writing community enorm because we would— it Those are some thoughts about potential next steps, but I'm open to ideas or feedback as to whether you think it's a good idea.

Could we, Theresa, who are on there, flesh it out further with heart of depth? So logistics review through heart of depth.

Through part of downtown?

Yeah.

And then on possible partnerships, let's add on there the CIRA as well since it's right there.

And this could be artists of a variety of types, right? It could be visual artists, but it could also be dancers. It could be musicians. And just dreaming out loud, I would love to have an artist in residence and a writer in residence each year. Because I think those are 2 different communities that could benefit a lot from that.

Where it would be contract over a specific time, that makes it more possible, even just to test out.

You know, like Zion Park, for example, has a cabin just down below Angels Landing that is their writer-in-residence. Yeah, and you can apply to go and write there for 6 weeks and stare at the red rock and be inspired. And in return for that, right, you provide some programming and give talks and things in the park while you're there.

Bryce, do you think this is something that Mike Smith and Nathan Robinson can help us look into and maybe see what others have done?

Yeah, I think where we're going with the partnerships is where it's most exciting to me. We have done this with a number of shows, not anywhere on this scale, but where we write into the contract a mandatory programming or mandatory art gallery exhibit. exhibit in addition to these shows, and those have easily had the best return on impact from our residents. And so I think a process there—

and I can't—

I don't remember who is now on the Arts Council as liaison.

I am.

Okay, even better. So I think a process where you have a number of people inputting on what we're looking for, and then you work with Adam at the SIRA or with our Library Hall staff to go through how do you write contracts and writers and what can we, you know, sort of what tier we're looking at affording. We did a lot of our stuff with Alpine School District classrooms as well. And so we brought in Svetlana as a performance artist and then she went into each of our 3 high schools and did these workshops with the students and all that. So I think, yeah, using the Arts Commission, using our city staff and then the CIRA staff, I mean, I think it'd be awesome to start.

I think it's a great idea.

to look for a 6-month or something like that, but I think we could probably also start immediately. We have outreach dollars and we could maybe build towards that without having to go, you know, wait for an entire grant or something like that if we want to get like a proof of concept. We could start sooner.

I think that's a win-win for us and for the artist or writer because it gives them lots of publicity and lots of opportunity here.

And we just learned that there's an Orem chapter of the Utah League of Writers.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. We're discovering that. Is that Shelley Spotts?

What's that?

Shelley Spotts.

Yeah, you and I had spoken about Shelley as well.

Yep.

And so, a great opportunity for them to be able to learn from.

The writer.

Yeah, for writers.

I'm totally getting into the weeds. The Designs Program is really cool because the artist has to create a piece of art for Designs National Park that is kept or put into their museum or sold. And that's the trade-off for them staying there, is sometimes they have to earn a cost. So maybe that's a way to grow our art collection more.

Yeah, I like that.

All right, thank you. Anything else on that? Now, this— the poet laureate— laureate, laureate, I don't know how to say it. I'm sorry.

However you say it, it's right. Except for the way he says it. That's how you say it in PG.

So the thought behind that, and that just kind of came yesterday, I was just kind of reflecting back years ago, but the job of the poet laureate is to capture moments in time with writing. And it doesn't have to be poetry that rhymes, but just beautiful writing to create a situation like we have 4 amazing women on the—

as mayor and city council.

That's never happened before.

So, you know, just an opportunity to write something about that and put it to the history, to share it with the public, to put it in the newspaper, whatever.

And so it's— I think it would need to be a process of finding out who would want to do that, who could do that, and whether or not that's something we would even want to do.

Do you remember when that poet was writing kind of mean-spirited poems about the city council?

We don't want that guy.

He would make a ton of copies and go around putting them in people's mailboxes, and the line that always stuck out to me was, Margaret in the red black.

So at the swearing—

at the oath of office, Margaret and I were joking about that, and like how those were the The good old days.

Yeah, exactly.

So on this one, I'm kind of looking again to this corner here, but Pete and Teresa, I mean, what the recorder is charged to some extent with helping keeping an ongoing history, but Pete, when we at the when we did the same. Centennial, we engaged with a contractor to do our Centennial booklet. To me, this kind of seems like almost like someone on retainer that helps us do that sort of thing on an ongoing basis.

That'd be nice.

And it might—

it may be like once a year or twice a year.

It's not a major thing, but someone that could capture it in a way that And not the official history or any official document. I'm just, uh—

Well, I was thinking about it. It would have been nice to do it at like the grand opening of the City Hall, right? Is that would have been a special moment.

Yeah.

Where someone just kind of memorializes this cool part of our history.

So we do have the Google Store Memorial, um, coming up.

Yeah, yeah, that'd be another perfect opportunity. Maybe even water reuse.

That's cute. Yeah, that could be a fun one.

Sorry, this is largely sarcastic, but we could take turns at every event. One member of the city council could write a poem.

I'm glad that's sarcastic. Also, wait a minute. So is the point that we that it's some Is it someone who's skilled in writing poetry?

Or is it—

because Pete comes up with some great stuff. Is it just a historical perspective?

I think it's almost ceremonial in some ways.

It's a bit more ceremonial.

Yeah.

Because, you know, like when a new president is sworn in, the poet laureate comes up and does something. So yeah, it could be kind of based on that.

So Pete, maybe we would assign you to We already have sort of communication contract dollars, and so maybe this is something we look into, see what it costs, see what it would take, and then as long as it's all reasonable—

If not, Quinn can come up with something.

Pete, on poets.org, they have guidelines for creating one of these in your city.

Oh, cool.

Does that sound reasonable? That's great, yeah. Okay, so Jen, the next one there is art around the city.

Have we—

we haven't captured that, right?

Well, I think it was more specifically on the trails as we were talking about corridors and trails. But as I traveled— I travel a fair amount actually in the United States and outside the United States, and then I see art installations in the different cities That's just really a fun thing, and I think we just really have gotten started with that. I think Renee's done a lot of work on that. I think it sounds like Quinn is willing to do a lot of work on that, but I just would like to see more of that in more places.

I think it's such a fun opportunity for us. And maybe this is an Arts Council thing, but just, you know, what can we do along the trails?

And right off the Nile Trail, are there just fun, you know, just fun random things? Sometimes I see random citizens have gone out and painted little rocks and put them out there, but I think it'd be really fun to do just that. see things that reflect our people and our values that are fun or quirky or, you know, I don't know. That's an Arts Council thing probably, so I don't think there's like a huge thing that we need to say or initiative that we need to do now other than just say, Quinn, do some cool things.

But we could use the Arts Council to help us figure out what that looks like.

Yeah.

I do think compared to most cities our size, we have a terrible record of public art, and we just have not invested in that, which is a city.

Yeah.

I think investing in public art is always a little bit tricky because every piece of art, some people will like it, some people will not. So I just think that maybe we start slow and we see how it goes, but I'm fully supportive of the idea that as we travel around the city, people can recognize particular pieces of art, maybe it's a sculpture, Or something where they say, oh, you know, that's an artwork.

Yeah, that would be great.

Or just at a random park, or just, you know, in our day-to-day lives.

That would be really fun.

Jen, one of my favorite public art projects is— look up Aberdeen, Washington. They have the creatures, and there's these kind of fantastical mythical creatures kind of cobbled together in their different street corners. That you can see. And the person who did it actually was a BYU engineering grad, was the director of public works there. And then they also have in the sidewalks in the area a kind of a Walk of Fame of different people from the area, like Kurt Cobain actually is from that city and others. But it's a really— I'm not saying we do that, but it's It's just kind of a really interesting thing that this small community did.

That integrates art into our day-to-day lives.

Yeah.

Well, and the historical part, like the Pioneer Babies Memorial, you know, we—

that—

what am I trying to call it? That plan has some statues. There's a significant amount of money that has some ideas for connection. To our city and historical value and art value, artistic. So kind of blending all of that would be pretty cool.

Love it. And the hardware might also be an anchor for this. Like, I, I could imagine a wall with murals on it, for example, that is part of the pedestrian space. That it just could be a place where we start to conceive of what that might look like.

And I think beautifying spaces that we have around the town, around the city, that are just blank right now.

You know, I love the painted utility boxes, things like that.

Or didn't Tippett Oaks High School paint on the water thing on 1600 North?

I don't know what that's called.

Yeah. That was getting tagged all the time. It was getting tagged, and so they went and did an art project on there. Um, so just, we have blank spaces.

Let's beautify them.

I love the idea of getting the community involved to have them help do the art.

Yeah, I'm sure high schools would love campuses to work on school murals or, you know.

Teresa, what's my experience with culture working with like the other schools, different high schools and junior highs and stuff? And Pete, yeah, give the elevator pitch on the, um, the new printer that we've used on a couple of walls.

Oh yeah, so if you've been up in the management services area, we found this local company that can take a big printer basically and print directly on any surface. So we have 2 of them done up in our little workspace. So there's one in the conference room that's kind of a drone shot of Orem, and then there's one on wall, it's kind of like a photo from lights on. And that can be done inside, outside, cement wall, plaster, whatever. Pretty much there's not a surface it couldn't go on. And it's a really fast and affordable way to get more art in more spaces.

Teresa, will you scroll down on the big screen?

Oh, and then Pete, maybe just bring the council up to speed on— we do have budgeted for an art piece at The Sierra Park and Sierra Pool. It's been on hold as we go through this Holiday of Tents study.

Yeah, so there's this idea— there's this artist in Lindon who does everything out of scrap metal, and he has one piece at the Altogether Playground if you've seen that. It's kind of a storybook thing. But he did a piece for St. George of a dragon that's made out of Utah license plates, and it looks really cool, especially at night, because when your headlights hit the light, the dragon kind of like lights up. That was what this And so our idea is to do one of a mammoth made out of Orem street signs. And so we're just kind of waiting for things to settle on this part of downtown to get that going. But he's committed, we've got the money, we can do it just when the time's right.

Oh, that's amazing.

Yeah, but it'll be cool. Like, you might see your street, you know, because it's going to be big.

So just know there are some existing things in the words that will help us kind of make real progress on this quickly.

That's great.

All right.

Thank you. Anything else on the—

hey, look at that.

Jeff, did we— we talked a little bit about affordable housing. I don't know what—

I would move that up with our previous discussion.

Okay. So motorized scooters and e-bikes.

Can we bump that to the legislative?

Um, we leave that one. Okay, we leave that one up to the legislative.

Yeah, well, working with legislators to see if we can have some feedback on— I think that means—

doesn't that have to be on the state level? I'd rather have it be at that level than—

so Teresa, let's move motorized scooters and e-bikes, do a copy and paste up in this section. when we talk about state legislative efforts.

Can we get an update though on—

You're talking about Fort Worth?

Yeah, probably can.

Both of those.

Both of those. That kind of go with we need help from the state.

I'd just love to know. So we got an email from a citizen, she wasn't even in Orange, she was in Pueblo I think, but she had serious concerns about the motorized bikes that you've seen them at the face of the canyon and people get them, rent them, and they ride them up that canyon road. And she had approached us about it and we talked And Ryan and these guys are trying to make a coalition of people to meet and discuss that as a whole, and I think that ties to this discussion.

Where does that stand?

I sent a memo out summarizing all of that, and I didn't receive any feedback at the time. But basically what we found out is that the county trails fall under state law as to what's allowed on them, which is also the same as sidewalks. And Steve can correct me if I'm wrong, but class— I think up to class 3 bikes can be ridden on sidewalks. We can restrict that code as a city and decide to make it more tight and eliminate it. But one of the challenges is a lot of people could be very frustrated and upset with that. So right now, if you were to require by state code or by city code or by business restriction that voltage cannot remain clocked Class 3 bikes, which are the fastest ones. Um, that's great, but I'm going to tell you, most of the people on the trail are on Class 3 bikes. And so how do you regulate all that unless you have police officers up there regulating it? And so it's, it's a really tricky—

The other part of it was maybe not necessarily being the only city that regulated it too. And so we wanted to partner with county and state to make sure it's a Consistent across-the-board regulations so that then we can coordinate with other law enforcement agencies to all do the same thing.

I guess I would like to just see us be pretty proactive about approaching our legislators or whatever we need to do because I think they are really dangerous, especially in Pueblo Canyon and just anywhere on that.

Yeah, it's, it's very interesting, Jen, because I went up there and did some visual watching and people on foot are almost more dangerous than e-bikes, to be honest, because they walk on the wrong side of the trail.

We do that also.

And people on road bikes were going faster, as fast or faster than e-bikes. And so it's such a busy trail, it's a fine line. Um, and we can regulate, we absolutely can. And e-motorcycles are a huge problem, and I think in that memo the recommendation was to do something about e-bike motorcycles. Provo has very restrictive We have codes right now that they've put into place, and we could replicate that. And I'll send that memo out again, and it has Provo's code in it. And if you'd all like to review it, any feedback you have would be great.

The scary thing to me is, is just the amount of speed and the age of the people that are going so fast. These are people that don't have a license to drive, and they're going very fast in Parks and sidewalks and places that— it scares me.

There's also a skill and ability level thing where people who are going on trails and places that they don't have the skill and ability to navigate because they haven't invited us to assist them. There's that part.

And I think public education is a big component of this.

It was mentioned yesterday. I think that was in the memo as a recommendation. Parents are seeing these at Costco and they're just, oh, tool for my kid, here you go. I mean, I witnessed it just 2 nights ago. I'm heading home on State Street and a kid's riding on the sidewalk on State Street on an e-bike flying.

And he's probably— Faster than yours, probably.

He probably was. There's less traffic on the sidewalk.

So from a solution standpoint, maybe what can we do So right now I see the problem. What I would like to see is a wide enough path, a wider path where you can have like a road where you can have a division, e-bikes only, you know, on each side. Or on a road, we do the white line. I don't know what the right-hand lane, the one on the right side, so it gets cars to the middle so e-bikes can be on the road safely.

If we're going to bump them off the sidewalk, we have to provide—

you have to somehow protect them because the cars are going to stay wandering, you know, where you have a wider road that doesn't have— I don't know what that line is called. Chris, what is that line called?

The fault line?

Shoulder line.

Shoulder line.

Okay.

So, you know, I just feel like somehow we're going to have to code exist here. So we put the e-bikes on the road, then we need to maybe, you know, quickly—

solution is we got to be willing to paint that white line.

Um, as a parent, I don't want my kid on the road. I just tell—

I know you're not supposed to be on the sidewalk, but ride safe and be on the sidewalk.

Especially I live off 1600 North, right? I hardly ever even let my kids ride there because it always freaked me out. But, um, so I guess my ask would be Can we— I would like to see wider sidewalks, wider paths, and creating an area for faster traffic.

And that would tie in with our active transportation plan that we're working on.

Can we make sure that that's sort of fleshed out?

That's what I see we have control over.

I don't know.

Yeah, that's a definite issue. One of the constraining factors Uh, can be width of the roadway. Do you have enough room and things like that? The other thing is perhaps looking not at individual roads, but the network that people can use. Not every road has to have every type of transportation on it.

Right.

But we may have better designated corridors for bikes. And maybe even more local roads. And think about this idea in, in on your local street doing sharrows, you know, signage that shows bikes are on the road as much as cars on a local street where the speed limit is 25 miles an hour.

Provo has a lot of those.

Yeah, Provo has a lot of those. And so it's, it's a variety of options. There's no perfect solution. But we're definitely going to look at that. So if you have any questions or concerns or want more information on it, let me know, or good ideas, or you've seen something in another community, we'll look at it.

So Theresa, let's put on here, uh, include— let's see, I'm trying to think how to say this— include it, include, um, Yeah, I just want to make sure we capture— we include this as a subject as part of our active transportation.

So along with seeking help from the state, would talking to the County Commission also be helpful to try to— since this is something that crosses city boundaries?

Yes, absolutely, because their staff right now is not They're not interested, it sounds like to me, in tighter regulations than what the state has.

Well, and right now we're doing Geneva Road, right? We're doing the whole Linton Parkway and stuff like that. Why can't we do a wider active transportation lane, divided? You know, we talked about that when they presented to us 2 or 3 years ago. You know, I put out that, can we have an elevated path like they do on University Parkway? Or I'm sorry, on University coming from the east. Canyon. That path is so divided and, you know, protected. I feel like I understand it's real estate and I understand they like this whole road diet stuff, right? But really this is about protection and the active— encouraging active transportation. So can we plan?

We've included it. It's on the plan.

So is it elevated?

Is it right next to the land It's adjacent to the right of the street.

Yeah, I think it should be separated.

It is.

A little more.

Yeah, it's a mixed-use path that's on there.

Is it?

So how is it— is it the standard width or are we getting wider? Because now we're having, we're having walkers, we're having longboarders.

It's standard width for mixed-use paths.

Yeah, I'm saying we have to go wider.

It's like 10 to 12 feet.

What's the Canyon Trail? How wide is that?

I think it's 10. 10?

It's not wide enough.

I've been on there with a bike. Yeah, it's scary. I can hear a longboarder coming behind me and I'm walking and, you know, so I don't know, maybe these conversations, I don't know, divided traffic, divided foot and bike traffic. I don't know what the answer is.

Active transportation planning. And then on your next one, you say wider sidewalks. Let's just say, let's see, safer, safer, explore safer ways to separate the trails from streets.

Because now we're having to not only separate from the vehicular traffic, but Separate from the active transportation traffic, right? The different modes.

And there's lots of different levels in active transportation. You wear— below us is kind of like a share aisle. You share the street to a bike boulevard. Think of, uh, what do they call it now? Cougar Boulevard or Provo Boulevard. Down by Chick-fil-A in the hospital in Provo, you know, to where they're really separated.

Yeah, and that can include ballards and signage.

Yeah, yeah, and there's lots of different— that's kind of like the most protected that you would see down to a sharrow, and there's quite a few gradations through there. Uh, that lane I believe they do.

And so that includes motorized e-bikes?

It would include— well, up to the motorized to a certain level. I think they have to have pedals. If it's just like an e-motorcycle, no.

So a throttle versus a pedal assist.

Yeah.

Because I have my e-bike, can you go— It's a pedal assist. And it doesn't go that fast because it only goes as fast as it boosts what I do. But the ones with the throttle are the ones I think we're talking about. They have pedals, but it— you don't have to pedal to make it move.

And that's in— that should be covered in that Provo City ordinance that Ryan was talking about.

Yeah, I'll share that with all of you.

So are they prohibited, or is the speed— is there a speed limit?

They do not. I don't remember exactly. They don't allow them on sidewalks. Yeah.

So what I recall, but it's that they should be allowed.

Like the whole Provo ordinance. And then Chief Robinson sent me last night the bill, the House bill that is being pursued by Draper City.

And I'll just add there, it's not just Provo. Every city is dealing with this.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we are not the first one that has tried. So it would probably be worth our time to do a few case studies of different cities that have actually tried something out and interviewed them to see how it went. I think you can learn a lot quickly that way.

What was the city that stood the housebound?

Grapevine. Grapevine.

Because you also have the cargo bikes, and that's— the people who have those are often using those as their mode of transportation. So do they want— if they're on the road, are we good with it if they go over— if they go 30? Or do we care how fast they go if they're on the road? I guess that's my question. Ryan, what's the ordinance? Is it all about the sidewalks?

I think the rule of thumb is they have to go within the speed limit of vehicular traffic. Sure, yeah. Yeah, anybody that's in the lane, regular lanes of travel, has to follow the regular speed limit.

There's not a minimum requirement on State Street though, right?

No.

There's not a what?

Minimum speed limit.

And just so you know, I've had a couple of planners attending, co-sponsored by UDOT, I think MAG, an active transportation planning e-conference, and they've been talking about e-bikes and things like that with it.

So is it the one that I'm part of?

Oh yeah, absolutely, that's right.

Yeah, that he and Karen and I are part of, talking about how to incorporate, incorporate active transportation into the pavement sidewalks. And Salt Lake City has done some amazing things to protect cyclists. pedestrians and then e-bikes.

And like I think we're coming up with best practices from different communities.

Yeah, yeah, we're working. Yes, we just did that yesterday.

Yeah.

So, Teresa, I think we, I think we pull this whole section on motorized scooters and e-bikes back into safe and livable neighborhoods. Because it's It's honestly going to be bigger than just my name list. And then if you can scroll down on the screen that we see, scroll down a little bit more.

Right there.

There it is.

So then we have The next item there is engage neighborhoods and revitalize the neighborhoods.

Chris?

That was just part of the legacy. I know Ogden has done— has actually gotten quite a ways on this over the last—

because they've been legacy longest, probably, of those that we know.

And so, and just some communication with them at ULCT meetings and other places, they had some ideas. It's just an opportunity to know what the current legacy city models and what they're doing, and then just look at that as we move forward.

Options, opportunities. So I think we want to add there researching what Ogden and other cities have done to revitalize neighborhoods. And then Gary at lunch was saying that maybe there are things that we Is there anything that we can look at from a, I guess, development process where maybe we can make it easier for people to renew and revitalize their homes? And then Steve, what were you going to say? I was just going to say one of the things that I've heard that Ogden does, and this is from the League, is they will take— they'll buy homes that are dilapidated, they'll renovate them, fix them Fix them up, whatever, turn around and sell them, and then also deed restrict them to owner-occupied. So they kind of accomplish 2 goals in one shot by doing that. That's something we've talked about doing, and the state has actually made some funds available for that purpose for cities that want to kind of follow that model.

How would we finance that upfront? Rent? Do we have the money now?

I'd say let's Do it.

Start using CDBG money.

Or borrow from one of Chris's funds. I don't think we have enough now.

But I think we should see what's available from the state. And then, and let's get started. So I think we can take some from CDBG, some from the state, maybe there's other— We can look at other grants, and then we may have some capital project funds that we could essentially cobble together to get started with one and build from there.

Ideally, that money would roll into the next project.

Yes, yes.

And actually, it would be growing as you would sell and take the profit and reinvest. And I think a partnership with like Habitat for Humanity, who, you know, can get cheaper labor, cheaper Or even like the school district, if they have their building there.

Yeah, so yeah, we have a lot of houses here.

That's right.

I'd love to see us jump on that right away.

So yeah, that possible funding sources and partnerships.

Oh wait, sorry.

Is that possible funding sources?

Funding and—

And partnerships.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

Can I just add one thought here? This is not exactly what you were talking about, Chris, but in the spirit of trying to bring neighborhoods together, together to do things together. I know we have neighborhood grants available, and I know that almost no one uses them. And I would love to see a way in which, maybe through the Neighborhood Commission or others, that neighborhoods are really applying for those grants and using them. And they don't need to be big-ticket items, But they're doing something that the neighborhood says this would improve things in our neighborhood. How do we—

So do you want to add on there service projects? So one way that we started doing this is through My Hometown. We think that's identified cleanup projects, and that has had a money component to it, whether it's to trim up trees or add some sod or things of that nature. So I think we can maybe use the My Hometown process as a way to essentially expand and find out how to best expand. I love the idea of asking these neighborhoods You know, is there a problem that you see that you think we might be able to resolve? We do have the funds available, like Quinn said, in our solid waste fund. One thing that we're looking at, and Pete can maybe speak to this a little bit more, is West Jordan has a program where they make— they have an agreement with Waste Management to provide dumpsters that can be rented cheap— cheaper, that a neighborhood can all throughout the year go and get access to, to help them then do more projects more throughout the year. So that could relate to this as well.

And in our last neighborhood commission meeting, we had actually floated that idea because right now we're kind of— my hometown is in particular areas.

That's all that they service.

Right.

But following that same model, we asked our resident representatives if they would be willing to help us determine mini service projects in their particular areas, and they all seemed very positive about doing that, with the idea being that they would determine the project and then we would kind of follow that same format. format, but on a much smaller scale than the My Hometown, to bring to pass that, those service opportunities in those areas. But that was just presented at the last meeting and hasn't really been put into play yet. So, you know, who's over that?

I am. Now you're over it?

What staff member? Um, it will—

she's We do too.

You know, whoever Pete hires to—

Melissa.

Oh, you're hiring?

Okay. So Debbie did a fantastic job with that, and she'll continue until we have somebody in place.

So we can learn a lot from my hometown, but as Lynnae's saying, we don't want to restrict this to my hometown neighbors.

And the education component, like in the neighborhood, just have some educational pages with the candidates.

Perfect. I think it's easy to use a similar process but get it— essentially do more of it across the entire school.

All right. Thank you.

All right, Chris, you're the next one too.

So I think that's what we've already been talking about for some time is how do we help businesses make their fronts look better? How do we enhance and make it probably either easier or encourage our businesses to have an opportunity to either grow or come into or just, you know, enhance their look and appeal along our corridor, our business corridors? So that's all that was basically Just trying to help encourage that continued sales tax revenue stream to keep flowing and encouraging, instead of having some folks, you know, they get big and then they leave the city or other applications.

I think too, thank you. I think too what I pictured with this too, and I think as we hire an economic development director, we have the economic development tiger team. I would like to get input from businesses just on what barriers, what things are working with the city, what barriers in working with the city. Just to work on that relationship at the monthly meeting with the lunch.

Right.

That's great, and I want to expand on that and have maybe some more direct conversations with businesses. I thought about just walking in State Street and just going door to door and talking to them about about their business and what is what's good about being in Warren? What is it that's challenging about being in Warren or whatever? And and just get get input that way, so we can have the businesses feel like we are listening to them and that we appreciate them. Excuse me, and that we.

Is that something you see happening like through the Orem Business Alliance, or is that something where you would see creating a commission, essentially a business commission where you have representatives from every business, or how do you see that?

The Business Alliance, I'm not— I've gone to the events, but I'm not— well, I need to learn more about like the details of if they have a mission statement or vision, or would that fit in the Orem Business Alliance. Otherwise, I would see something, a group, just if it was an informal group that almost like what Quinn was talking about yesterday, a group of businesses, we get together, let's talk. And then we can either talk to a different group or we can say, okay, I don't want to make committees if we don't need them. But I would like to have more intimate conversations with businesses. So I need to do some homework on the business alliance to see if that's already in place or something, that a mechanism like that's in place. But that's what I envision as a—

Or is there a way to just add that into what they do?

Yeah.

So instead of creating a whole new ST—

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

When they apply for a business license, do we have an email? Could we email out what are your suggestions, you know, and just get feedback that way and categorize the different areas for them to give suggestions on.

Yeah, I don't think we've ever done a business survey.

We actually have.

Oh, we have?

A while back we did a business license survey to everyone that has a business license in the city as to— the governor actually asked us to do this back when Governor Herbert was in. We did a study on it and we asked what are your pain points, what frustrations do you have with Orem, and from a business perspective, and And we actually came out looking pretty good. We could do that again. Some other things are you could have your economic development director target certain businesses for visits, which we've done in the past, based on top sales tax producers, top employers, top— you can put your efforts in any direction you want, but where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck? Those are some things to think about.

Right.

Those are just some of the possibilities and tools you can use.

And if we— okay, maybe I'm just being weird here, but I feel like sometimes we know that the issues don't always change. So rather than spend $80,000 on a survey, let's put that $80,000 into fixing the issues that we found out about in the last survey and then kind of resurvey and see, has this worked for you? You know, what could we do better?

Yeah, I mean, just some thoughts.

Did we take care of some of those things that were brought up in that last survey?

One of the things—

a lot of things that were brought up actually were more frustration with the state government, and so we passed those all on to the state.

They do think it's us, but we did report back to them and say thank you for your concerns, we've passed this on to the state.

One of them was, uh, the manager of a store that's located across the street from City Hall, and she's the owner of the business, and she's very frustrated that we have a— that area has turned into basically a liquidation and secondhand store area. And we have Savers, and we have the liquidation team, and I don't know if this word is even out yet. I just saw this this week on our building permit system that Goodwill is coming across the street from City City Center. So now we're going to have 3 of these in one location.

So her frustration with that is, here you go, here comes another one, right?

There wasn't really a lot we could do with that unless we specifically did an SLU code removal and didn't allow thrift stores on State Street or something like that, right? But that's something we could do.

Right.

Do we have ordinances to improve parking lot surfaces?

To improve them in what way?

Like where they can't let them get crumbly. Yes. I mean, that area has that.

There might be something like in the general site plan ordinance where you have to maintain improvements in a reasonable, reasonably good condition or something like that.

I can look it up real quick.

Because it does have the Costa Who— what, not Costa Vida, but the other cafe, Rio, and the new furniture store. You know, it's—

Yeah, and to your point, Lynnae, it's super frustrating. And you would think that the tenants would have that in their contracts so they could force the landowner to make sure they're maintained properly, but I, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what we can do on that.

The old Paul Erickson's, that was a Albertsons.

I think it's the one north across the street.

Albertsons was there, and then they moved across the street.

Oh, I see.

To the south. How long built that store?

Now you're showing your age, Chris. I'm so sorry.

But I remember that.

I was a, I was a bad boy at that original Albertsons.

I remember that Chuck E. Cheese.

My dad worked there.

Or Jerry Ashworth.

And on Tuesdays. This coming Tuesday at 11:30 is an ODA meeting at Library Hall, and hopefully that's on your calendars. If it's not, let me know and we need to make sure it is.

It is kind of hard that it's the second Tuesday. Yeah, yeah, council day, because then it's like the whole day. I don't know if that's something we can think about.

Is it too late to say sign up to come?

No.

Okay, because I'll come.

Okay.

11:30 on the 13th.

Yes.

Which—

I can put it on your calendar.

Random question then about events like that. Do we need to like RSVP to them, or do we just show up to things like the Business Alliance?

Unlike Business Alliance, we provide a lunch. So it's a roundtable lunch and have people— we'll have a speaker. So on that, it would be great if we knew. We typically have extras in case somebody—

Gary, and I apologize, I don't have that on the new— the mayor's and the 2 new council members' calendars, but I will make sure it gets on your calendar.

Oh, okay, great, thank you.

So another thing that was at least a theme I kind of revealed there is just improving communication and interaction with the business.

Yeah.

With those that have business licenses.

Right.

And maybe there's ways that we can encourage them better to come to the Oregon Business Alliance and make sure we're showing the value that that provides. And I mean, we've had internal conversations about essentially taking the OBA to the next level.

So, and let's get a mover and shaker for our economic development.

Exactly.

Biggest bang for the buck.

And this month's speakers, he's spoken a couple of times before. It's very, very interesting.

It's on AI.

It's on AI. It's fascinating.

Yeah, a couple times.

And you know what, if you don't RSVP for it, There's always a few left over, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Great. Compatible infrastructure.

Yeah, preserving corridors in use for public benefit, the name.

Oh, just, I see that as an opportunity that maybe we could capitalize on, and it's there right now, but You know, maybe part of our general plan. I'm not sure how that works.

So, um, yeah, I think some of them—

I'm specifically speaking railroad lines and canals. You know, the canals, I know we're working on that and have been, and that may not ever happen, but on some of them.

But anyway, maybe for those portions.

Yeah, we have been Identifying what the low-hanging fruit is along the canals, for example. And to some extent, if there is any hurdles on that moving forward, it would be because one of the next steps is to engage with the adjacent property owners to see— to make sure that they they're on board with it and, you know, that they understand the facts around it and that sort of thing.

Railroads.

We've been in conversations with Vineyard for many, many years on that. We want to be a part of turning that rail spur that goes from 1600 North and Geneva Road all the way down to 400 South. No, it's further than that. It's like 600 South, 800 South.

Yeah.

Um, that— the latest we heard from Dan Hemmert is that that becoming a trail or being turned over to Vineyard and Orem is not anytime soon.

There's a business that still wanted to use it, right?

Yes. And I forget exactly which— Ryan, do you remember which business is still using that house for?

Building supply.

Building supply, yes. That being said, from a planning perspective, Gary, is there something we can put into our general plan to essentially state that this would be the next best intent for it? And if If it does become available, that we're sort of ready?

Yeah, with the general plan, and we're planning on coming into a work session and updating you on the general plan. One of the things along those lines is, you know, for instance, that corridor, not just the rail line, but that whole corridor needs some extra attention and work. And so the general plan is going to Identify some of those areas and say, okay, now we really need to dive in and look at those. And that we should pay particular attention to, like, trails and corridors and things like that. So as the general plan comes to you, it's not just that we want to get— we don't view the general plan as, oh yay, we did the general plan, we're done. We view it more as this is actually a work document for the next level up of intensive planning.

Yeah, and if we do it now, we're not downzoning, we're providing buffers which then can be used for public space if, you know, perhaps agreements can be made with landowners to— for public.

Yeah, we wouldn't take that whole Geneva corridor You know, 2000 south all the way up to 2000 north and just really plan that whole area.

Because especially the development at the mouth of the canyon where Provo required that they preserve a certain amount of space by the river. You're running Smith's Kind of that same idea, he's living—

That pathway.

You'll also be— we'll also bring back to you the first half of this calendar year, essentially next steps in partnership with the Utah Lake Authority and Waikara Way and trying to preserve some of that property down there for trailhead and All right, how much more have we got?

I'm looking here, we've got— That's the end. How many of you are skilled in translation? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Okay, we've got a half hour, friends. I'm willing to stay even though I said no. I'm willing to stay Is to get through this. This is really important. So, all right, we'll plow onward. Traffic congestion, peak hour traffic solutions.

Chris? That was just an opportunity for us to have— we may have already done studies, but is there something that would help the general public know during certain hours these are the areas to avoid if you're trying to get through town? I don't know if you've ever done anything that kind of alerts or even a clarification map, or I have no idea, but there's just—

Yeah, you know, because leaving the city center, I live just south of Bam Bam's, just barely extreme south, uh, Orem, which is extreme north, Provo, actually. Um, I don't take State Street, I go over to 8th and take the back back way down to 16th and go. And State Street, I can sit at a light 3 or 4 cycles sometimes. There I zip through. And it's just those types of tips or things like that. That's something that we could kick around with our engineers about.

I don't want other people to know about the secret ways. Well, that's the problem, right?

Not on my street.

If you're a resident of Orem, here's the secret code.

If you're traveling through to go to Provo or up to Midway, you will not get this.

They spend so much money in Orem, and we'll give you the secret code.

They'd be cheat codes for residents.

Exactly.

We could charge a subscription. Well, charge a toll for anybody that doesn't live in the city.

But we can do—

one of our podcasts soon could be, you know, Mayor interviews our traffic ops and our traffic tiger team, and we can talk about the benefits of, you know, the grid system and what improvements we have done to help mitigate against, you know, our biggest traffic congestion issues.

So I know it's a public issue. People always bring it up. So just if we Say that we're working on it, but also give some tips. That's just what I'm trying to get to.

Another thing I would just add on this one, and I know it's tricky, Chris, I think there are still opportunities to understand who's coming through the city, where they're going, because I could imagine a world in which we learn that we have a significant number of people coming through to particular employers and having conversations with those employers about shift times and things like that.

Yeah.

To see if they can stagger them in a way that will make everybody's life easier.

Right.

But if we don't have the data to know who's coming from where and to where, it becomes harder. And there are some privacy issues there. I think there's some data collection issues, but I think that there are some creative ways of learning more than we know.

We used to use the little rubber traffic counters and we'd just do traffic studies, stuff like that.

Anyway. We have a lot of information on the PLACER AI stuff that we use. And also, I think an important educational component of this is we have changed Changing how we look at things. More increased traffic on the parkway means more tax revenue dollars for us too. It really does. And so, yes, it's a burden, but it can also be a blessing.

And I'm not talking about the corridor parkway.

I'm thinking more of the, you know, the 8th North or the Center Street.

They get backed up to like— we wait for 5 lights. to get through the State Street Cemetery, right?

Yeah, where it's clearly more commuter-based.

That is correct.

Then Quinn's subject would really be helpful.

What were you going to say?

Just, I do like the idea though too of getting the message out about it.