City Council · 2026-04-28

it over to, uh, Carlo in our IT department.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Um, pleasure to be here today. I guess I'm first, so I'll dive right in. Um, so a lot of you— it's not all of you, some of you new to, uh, Orem, so I just thought it'd be good to go over the ecosystem of IT and, and pertains to Orem. Um, People don't understand, like, why I'm IT, and yet McKay and Sarah are also IT, and Steve are IT. It's because aggregate, we are IT, but I'm part of the operations, and Steve's part of policy and compliance end of it, and then McKay and Sarah are software development. So I wanted to give you a visualization of how all those fit together. This last year was a, was a I wouldn't say an uneventful year, but it was, you know, more of a let the dust settle after the major stuff we did last year with the new city center. Focused mostly on optimizing some tools we had. So SentinelOne and ActionOne were tools provided to us by the state, part of the cybersecurity budget that's started with a federal grant to the state that gets allocated to from the state out to municipalities as they need it. But the bulk of that stayed at the state, and so they chose to buy a lot of packages for municipalities and let them bundle those programs with them. So SentinelOne is our endpoint management response that's provided to them, which allowed us to retire Sophos, which is what we were paying for at the time. And ActionOne is patch management, and that allowed us to retire our Avanti product. So some cost savings to the city there.

Um, sorry.

Another big, uh, thing we did this last year was we upgraded our backup systems, uh, and backup being our disaster recovery data storage systems. We were using some very old software and some very old repurposed hardware for that purpose. We've moved that now to brand new hardware and brand new software, and then as part of that, we've Upgraded the hardware that's down in the St. George data center. So we have redundancy of that data both here at City Center and down at our disaster recovery site in St. George. And then part of the St. George upgrades included having to change the rack out to a larger rack to accommodate that new hardware. And then we did some firewall upgrades, repurposing the hardware we had at the City Center previous into that. So I gotta go over all these points, just kind of want to give you the highlights. Um, this slide is just kind of to give you guys a little bit of a taste for what, what the environment looks like here as far as the threats that the city faces. Um, if you look at the, the top, um, left-hand corner, the Ad Lumen events over the last year— Ad Lumen's a product we, we pay for that's a managed detection and response system. monitors logs that we feed it from various systems here, mostly our firewalls and systems. They feed into this and they get aggregated as events into that system. So almost 1.5 billion events got dumped into that system. Out of that, 776 were triggered as alerts, as something that's kind of suspicious, at least leads to more investigation needing to be done to see if it's— malicious thing happening in the city or, or not. And, um, part of that service we do with them is they, they take care of the busy work. They're 24/7, uh, 7 days a week, um, monitoring those so that we can have somebody take, take action on the, the nastiest of the nasty right as it's happening. Because if you wait, sometimes it's too late. So, so they take action on most of those events, but left— still left us with 306 that we had to take action on ourselves. So it leaves our teams pretty busy still just investigating those events to see if they're malicious or just look like they might have been. That bottom part of the slide talks about vulnerabilities. This is vulnerabilities as detected by SentinelOne product. So these are software running on each endpoint, so your PCs, the servers, that kind of thing. And what it means by a vulnerability in this case is a bug that's been released by a manufacturer to a central database that says our product has a problem when this particular thing happens. And, and that, that event is usually tied to a bug in their software, and that bug, that software might have several bugs that pertain to the same, same problem. So 120,000 vulnerabilities might mean 10 or 20 per bug. potentially, but it's just things that it's, it's keeping an eye on our system that, that are happening potentially in our environment that need further investigation and scrutiny. And of the ones that it's seeing, you know, there were still 538 that were exploitable. So it means there's a bug that has released information on how to exploit that bug and actually turn it malicious. So So even with the tools we have, we're still— we still have some of these things in our environment that need attention that we just don't have the resources to get to right away. So we're focusing on those and trying to get those numbers down. As you can see from the percentages there, they are decreasing. So we're getting to those, just not getting to them as fast as we need. But we're not in harm's way or not in a bad way yet, but we're— those are numbers we want to keep an eye on. ActionOne is another package that's tracking those, and those vulnerabilities that it's talking about are Vulnerabilities that have a patch. So if you have Adobe or something on your system and there's a patch that Adobe's released, the vulnerability in the old version's there until the new version's installed. And so it's talking about vulnerabilities that we could patch. And then, as you can see, we have 5,000— over 5,000 installed pieces of software that we're having to track and manage in the city. So as if we were doing this manually, that's, that's an overwhelming thing to do, you know. So even with some of the automation, we still have 1,820 patches that have to be installed. The patch could be as simple as like a printer driver, so it's not like whole software packages, but, um, but still a lot out there. So we— it's— this is— these are things we're watching closely, and we're helpful— grateful for the tools we have to kind of put the spotlight on those weaknesses and, and let us focus on getting those resolved. Um, this upcoming budget year, we have a couple items that we, we need to have attention. So with the new building Uh, we have a new UPS system, uh, and, uh, and the CRAC units, which is a computer room air conditioning unit. Um, those were bigger units for this building than we had previous, and so our budget was— needs to be adjusted accordingly to match— to manage maintenance on those products so they don't fall into disrepair. So we need an increased budget to keep those in, in, uh, good working order. And then, uh, the software request there is we have, we have software that helps us track all of our, our tickets, both in the, in the software development side for project management as well as in the help desk for, uh, items that we need to address. And so we've been paying for a product right now that's, um, gotten more expensive because we're using it more. It's good and bad, costing us more, but we're using it more. So we need a little, little bit of money to maintain that product. Um, and then the IBM system we have We typically do on a 3 to 4 year lease, and it's coming time for the new lease to be set up for the new PowerSeries to replace the core database to run all of our systems on. And that lease does include keeping the system redundant in St. George. Um, and then, uh, the final one is there is our, our Google licensing costs. Uh, we are a Google Workspace shop, so Our license agreement for the previous 5 years expired. Now it's time for a new agreement, and the price went up a little bit, so we needed $23,000 extra for the new price adjustments. And then CJIS requirements have indicated that we need to move from a commercial product to more of a government product, and so we need to add some extra licensing to maintain CJIS compliance with our criminal justice agencies.

So—

So that's our budget request for this year. Some of our focus for the coming year is mostly looking back to that, that slide I referenced a minute ago with the vulnerabilities and the security events. That's our next window of focus. Now we have the visibility in those tools, but those tools, we want to make sure that we're focusing on dwindling those lists down to minimal amount as possible. So big focus will be spent on that. Um, we're also working on expanding the help desk hours for this coming year to better accommodate police and fire since they work 24/7, and, and then the library and fitness center since they have a lot later hours than the rest of the city does. So want to focus on helping them out a little bit better in those hours. And then, uh, again, just kind of focusing on the, the resilience and the Readiness that we have for disasters. And talk to anybody in the security world, it's, it's most more so now, not if you get attacked by something, it's when. And so we want to be ready for when it happens so that it's as minimal impact, impactful as possible. And that's our focus. So, any questions?

Good.

Okay, well, I want you guys to think about most of the things that Carlo presented, like your immune system, right? These are things that happen inside of your body. This is what happens if you get sick, right? What systems are mobilized to make sure that you don't die from whatever it was? I want you to think about what I'm about to present as like the social relationships that our organization, the City of Orem, has with other software or service providers that could make us sick. And this has actually been the focus from this last year. It was to take a closer look at the relationships that we have with software and service providers that we leverage as a city to make sure that we can offer the service to our customers. And we evaluated, so we started making a long list of all of these. That list is not completed at this point, but this journey has begun. And as we onboard new relationships, as we onboard new software or new services that are provided by the outside market, we are asking these services cybersecurity questions. We are asking them data privacy questions. We're asking them about data retention and making sure that the legal frameworks and the operational requirements that we've decided as a team is good hygiene that these third parties are engaged in as well. And when they're not, right, we go back to the business unit within the city, whether that's parks or fire or finance, and we say, hey, here are the potential risks associated with doing our business through this service provider. And so we've got full disclosure about how we're doing business, where it's risky, where it's good. And then we're fully— we are accepting those risks or we're rejecting those risks if they're too much. And that's just been a blind spot. our operation in the past. We, we have not terribly focused on, but it's important, right? Just as in the pandemic, you did like contract or contact tracing because the people who you are closest with would be the ones most likely to get you sick, right? So this is, we are doing our third-party cybersecurity and data privacy assessments before we onboard vendors. We're doing annual auditing of the risks that are identified with third-party vendors and doing the best we can to inoculate ourselves. From risky business behaviors. And then we formalized a policy exception path. And this means, you know, there's, there's always the rule, right? And for every rule, there's always an exception. But just because there's an exception, it doesn't mean that we negate the rule, right? So we track the rule— or sorry, we track the exception. We audit against that exception annually to see if it's still valid, or we close the door. And then we've created and adopted a citywide cybersecurity incident response plan this last year. So the previous year was we adopted a cybersecurity framework, right? A way in which we build. This year we formalized our response to bad events.

Questions?

Seeing none, I shall move on. This coming year, what we're going to be focusing on is a lot of actually compliance. items here. We've got mobile device management that Carlo touched on that is a requirement for our criminal justice agencies that we're going to be rolling out.

We are—

this is a big one. The second item has everything to do with the MyOrem initiative, right, where we've got a centralized portal for our citizens, where as we build new now and as we offer services to citizens, we're trying to push as many of those services into a central portal for citizens so they don't have to have 7, 10, 12 different usernames and passwords with the city based upon how many services they consume from us. And this line item, moving to a single user sign-on for citizens, this is the backend that makes that work. Continued automation of employee account lifecycle. So it's great, people onboard with the city, people offboard with the city, and they receive permissions and access based upon their roles as they onboard with us. But what happens to somebody who onboards with the city as a part-time fitness center employee and is able to move up the ranks, right? There's— there are components within the lifecycle, we call it backpacking. They usually backpack access and privileges, and they may bounce around to 3 or 4 different departments in the city, right? So by the time they're done, they have so many more privileges than they ever needed. A focal point of this coming year will be to tailor rights and privileges to users even through the lifecycle as they move throughout different employment opportunities in the city. Excuse me. Again, compliance requirements. This is going to be encrypted communication, again, focusing heavily on our criminal justice agencies. And then the last 2 is just a continuation of maturing the city's privacy program as well as maturing the city's cybersecurity program. I know that seems like a shotgun blast, but these things are all interconnected. And as we raise the quality of the experience, all the boats are going to rise. And that was everything I had. Any questions? How many of those were state mandated? Oh, that is a really good question. 1, 2, 3, 3.5. Just over half. Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

All right, software development. So, uh, like Steve and Carlo have presented to this point, we're kind of the 3rd pillar of the IT group that helps support city services. What we do for the city is support the infrastructure that allows most of the city employees to do their jobs. As well as provide convenient ways for citizens and customers of the city to interact with us in day-to-day operations. So, to that end, one of the biggest things that we've been working on this past year is the launch of MyOrem. I presented this to people at various points throughout the year, and I am pleased to announce that as of yesterday, that is live to our citizens. So that's been one of the biggest undertakings that we've had to make sure that Steve mentioned earlier with unifying Accounts across the city, and we're providing a service that is adequate, beyond adequate to our citizens in a way that actually helps them get what they need from the city rather than being lost in the minutiae of having various accounts. Along with that comes upgrades of existing software. This has provided us an opportunity to see what we currently have offering and make it better, make it more secure, make it better to fix and change in the future. Utility billing website is the first thing that has entered MyORM as an available service to the citizens, and we have made significant improvements to make sure that it is a secure experience and it is very clear what somebody is getting when they are interacting with that service. We've also been looking at updating our accessibility guidelines, and this is rooted in things that have come down from the federal level with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Specifically Title II regulations that were set to go into effect last Friday and have been pushed back 1 further year. But this is work that we engage in to make sure that all of the services that we offer are legally compliant and are able to serve our citizens. Our software architecture is another thing because there's so much of city infrastructure that relies on the software that we've written. And we want to make sure that that software, when it comes time for it to be updated or to be life cycled out, that it is a smooth transition. Make sure that developers, we can easily access that and change it as the needs of the city evolve. But also when security events come forward, you're able to swiftly and accurately address those issues as they come up. And then finally, we've been engaging in steering committee conversations where, as a software development team, Make sure that any decisions that we do to progress the software needs of the city are being directly led by the executive level of the city, and not just at the needs of various departments in isolation. So all efforts by our software teams, and this includes our security and IT operations teams, are led by the executive level of the city.

Okay, so looking forward, going into our next fiscal year, We are—

main priorities.

First, we're building new still, right? We're extending the MyORM portal that just launched. We're looking at business licensing, putting business licensing into our centralized portal. We're also looking at fitness center. Fitness center is a project that has already started, has been underway for a long time. It's going to take a long time and we're going to keep working on it. Our other big one, McKay talked about the need to lifecycle software to keep it up to date, right? Maintenance, keep it all, the whole system healthy. We've reached time to lifecycle some of our really big systems. So our legacy programs, we're looking at payroll that pays all of our employees. We're looking at the general ledger system. We're looking at the court system. So starting this year, we are going to start looking at reevaluating them, redoing them, stabilizing them, all of those kinds of maintenance things. that are needed to keep it supporting the city's infrastructure. And as part of that, we are intending to, in this next budget year, onboard 3 more people to help us with this multi-year project of life cycling our most core systems. We're looking at 2 software engineers and also a database administrator who's going to specialize in the hygiene, I guess, of our— data and all the information we collect for the citizens so that we can make sure that we are legally compliant as legislation changes and also organized, right? And clean, and we can help our citizens in the most secure way possible. So, yeah, I think that's our— that's the end of it. Any questions? I don't have a question, but I just want to say congratulations on getting the MyORM up and running. That's— yes.

Good job. Now, that's a lot of work on that.

So thank you. Any questions at this point, Council? I do not speak developer and all of those languages that you do. So thank you for what you do, because I don't speak that language. Thank you.

We love doing it. Love doing it for the city. See things progress.

We have great people like you guys working on the end of it, man. So anyone who has an email now will need to set up an access— having accessed things in the past, will need to set up a new login.

That is correct.

Just to clarify that, because that's come up, right? So this is a whole new system, and this is fabulous, and you want to access it, just login. And they'll be able to link their existing accounts to it, uh, and our 311 agents are trained on how to make sure that is a good So if people have questions about how to do it, 311 would be where they need to contact who could help them work through getting set up with the new MyOrem.

And then as things escalate from there, if, if it needs to, uh, as software developers.

Oh, thank you.

And Pete, we have a whole PR campaign to get the word out about MyOrem. Sure, the awareness is given out to everyone. We've got a whole big plan that we're going to start rolling out here.

Is Quinn online, or Councilmember?

Yeah, it looks like he is online.

Um, Councilmember Minkham, do you have any questions? I just— I don't want you to feel ignored.

Uh, thank you, Mayor.

No, I'm—

um, fantastic update. Sounds like you've got a lot of things Going on. It's, it's just very informative, and I'm particularly excited as well about MyOrem. And thank you for the guidance on how to advise our residents as they make that transition.

All right, thank you.

First thing, can anybody guess where this hole is located? Sweet Ridge.

Oh, yes.

So here in Oregon, that's where we should all be today, even though it's kind of cold. Which one is it? Which hole is that?

9.

Um, that is number 9.

I spent some quality time at that hole during the police. A little longer than you wanted to.

Uh, so first off, uh, part of, uh, why we had IT— we have IT come and discuss things every year. Uh, Councilwoman, uh, Member, uh, Bielstein, uh, uh, many of us are in the same boat as you, to be honest with you. Uh, even, you know, we work with our IT folks every day, but Obviously, lots of the things they talk about are just like, uh-huh, okay, sure, if you say so.

It works, right? That's the question at hand.

Despite our best efforts to try to understand what they're talking about and how that impacts us, right? But part of the reason why we had them go first this time before is because, as you will come to see here when we start talking about the operations, a large portion of the operational items that are what we refer to maybe as expansions, are related to our IT area this year. Just to give you an idea of the process that we go through, so at the beginning of the year in late January, February, we open our budget product to all of the departments, and they are able to then start submitting what we refer to as these expansion requests. And that's those requests you see on that far left side. They have a time period in which they're able to submit those and for us to be able to consolidate those and review them and then be able to evaluate, do some evaluation on that so that by the time we meet with each one of the departments, we kind of have an idea of what things that they are looking at doing, trying to do in the next year that they feel like they need help with. We then meet, as it mentions, as a budget subcommittee, which is primarily Wren and Carrie and Ryan and Trevor and myself and, and Jenica, and along with each of the departments individually, so that we can discuss each of those operational expansions and, and what each of those expansions— what does it mean? Is there ways that we can have it some of that covered by a revenue source of some, some specific thing that wasn't there before? Or is there something else that, you know, we can look at that as far as a way to potentially even— we can accommodate that in the current fiscal year that we're in? So like this year would have been— can we accommodate that here in fiscal '26 potentially? So all of that discussion occurs in that budget subcommittee meeting. As you can see, if the little swish going down, if we find that there's some things that can— we can do immediately, then we do that. We go and we take those out of the mix and we take care of those, and then we go forward all of the other ideas. And I say go forward, we put them on a list to determine, is there going to be enough money to do any of these things? Some of those are Maybe, yeah, we're, we're going to find a way to do that. That's a given. Some of the others are, well, let's kind of see where we're at, and then we'll come revisit that and then give some approval in that regard. And then all of that is leading towards, obviously, basically where we're at right now, which is our tentative budget being completed, and which will be presented to you on May 12th. There's still time, obviously, between now and then that adjustments could be made and can be made and potentially even will be made by the time we present on May 12th. But for the most part, right now, Trevor and I are begging for everybody's help in not changing anything from this point forward.

Okay.

So anyway, the first thing, talking about expansions, we always want to touch on personnel expansions. first. They tend to have sometimes the greater impact. As you may or may not know, our legal department is awesome, and coming— being with awesome, they have to look at a lot of things. And even as IT kind of mentioned, we use more and more outside third-party things and do more and more things that require Agreements. So as those things are reviewed, we have this continued greater need to be able to have attorneys in place to gain a better understanding. And so Steve can actually take a vacation. So— Who needs a vacation? Yeah, we need to be here. So It's one of the first items that we needed to address with personnel. Now, I guess before I go too much further on, you'll notice on many of these, the last bullet points in many of these talk about where does the funding come from in those cases. Now, many of these, while they exist, this exists, these 2 positions in particular exist within the general fund. That's where they're paid from. Many of those costs of those individuals are paid— actually end up being paid for by other funds, whether that be our road funds, whether that be any of our enterprise funds. When we do work, particularly our attorneys, those agreements may come from any one of those particular areas. And so, obviously, finance is another great example. We do work for all of the funds within the city. So our costs are spread throughout the city. So, so while we're talking about them in a very small box, realize there is potential— we'll refer to it as a revenue component that is spread across several other funds, not 100%. So that's why we talk about them here in this setting. But I thought I'd at least make you aware that it is not 100% borne by general fund. We also— our urban forestry group, we have more and more trees that continue to age, and we have more and more of a need to continue to monitor those trees. And, you know, we've had recent discussions about canopies and different things like that. That group is really in need of some, some help and some assistance, especially as we continue to try to plant new trees. Or take care of those aging trees that we have.

Okay.

Our next one are beyond— those are the 2 personnel ones that we have within the general fund. Other expansions that we have are the— for civic engagement. So underneath that, we use a product, software product called Podium. That helps our, primarily our 311 agents, but is used by other groups as well. That was formally paid for through our ARPA grant money that we received from the federal government. That money has now been exhausted, and we still want to keep that product. And so we now need to, if you will, figure out a way to help pay for that product. Um, Wren wanted me to include the city council element for the Youth Council of 2000, just to make you aware that we do something for that group, um, so that we can really get that group moving. Um, normally that would not be something we might include it, but, um, it's not a terribly large dollar amount. But I thought it was important for you to know that we do care about the little, the little things that we do as well, and that we try to take care of those things as well.

Careful.

Our police department, um, you know, I can't thank the police department enough because every year they come and tell us, yeah, we just made— we just found a place to pay for those things. So unfortunately, the time I think has come where those things, the things you see up here that We expand our budget to make sure that they're not having to take from Peter to pay Paul, that they can do those things that they need. And usually when they're taking from Peter to pay Paul, that means they're delaying doing something. So we don't want that to be an ongoing continuing, if you will, problem or issue. We want them to be able to get those things done that they need to get done. And so That particular top item is related to that. Our animal services agreement with NuVos, that takes care of all of our animal control animals that we find within the city and deal with that contract. And that's not just us, obviously, it's Orem and everybody northward. The costs for that have increased, and our share of that has also increased. Now, that's not just a 1 year. This is also another one of those where we've been finding the funds to try to pay for those increases over the past years, and it has just now come to time where realistically we just need to raise that to the level that it's currently at. And our fire folks within each of the stations, they have various things that wear out and/or we need, which might include fridges and ovens or beds. various things of that nature. And in the past, we've just kind of found a way to get those. You'll recall the CIP money that we transfer into our capital projects fund. A lot of the times it's, you know, the things have finally come to the point where we need to do something, can we use some of that money? Well, these things don't go away, right? They're regularly needing to be addressed. So those replacement dollars are intended to make sure that that money is always available for when those things are occurring, and they occur regularly. They don't occur at the same time all the time. So it's, it would be, it's good to have some funds available to be able to address those. We also, an EMPG grant, for you don't know, is emergency management. In the past, we've received a grant that helped pay for our salaries of Heath and the things that he does within his division. Um, the grant award didn't pay the whole thing, but that grant has gradually been dwindling as to the amount that is involved with it. So, as part of being able to help support Heath and his continued efforts in the emergency management realm, we would like to put some funds aside to, in essence, replace some of those, those grant funds so that he has those funds available to do the things which he needs to do to make sure that we are prepared. Are there any questions about any of those expansion items at this point?

Great.

Now I'm going to be throwing a lot of tables and numbers at you, but I, I just want to try to focus in on a few different things. So number 1, the personnel costs. You might look at that first top line. This is— so I guess first I should say As we talked about separating the public safety into its own special revenue fund, that makes a very unique comparison issue for me. So what I've done is I've done the best that I feel like I can as far as putting those 2 things back together again in relation to comparing to where we're at this year. In future years, those 2 things will be separated and you'll have a, if you will, an apples to totally apples to apples comparison. This would be more like oranges and mandarins, right? Something like that. But yeah, so, um, the first item though, you know, might draw your attention to that, uh, percentage increase, but I need to, um, address some of the elements that go into that. Number one, obviously all of our STEP people who are in the STEP program, those are part of that. All of the people who are in our merit program, those increases are part of that. And those are all, generally speaking, at about a 3% increase. There are health insurance increases, as you are probably well aware, and many things. All of those things are in there. The 2 individuals that we just referred to that are new, they're part of that increase in percentage as well. We also moved an individual out of our self-insurance fund and into our general fund for various reasons. But that does cause, when you're looking at our fiscal '26 budget, that does cause a variance. That change is also included in there. We have a whole slew of new firefighters that we added in the end of fiscal '25. would not have made it into our fiscal '26 budget, as well as some new firefighters this year that we have added. All of those are related to our contracts with Vineyard and Linden. Again, those have an associated revenue increase, which we discussed in the last work session, associated with them. But from a comparison standpoint, it makes that percentage rise, right? And then, you know, there's— along with, we've talked about our focus on personnel above expansion or above doing other things, and this budget, as we're preparing it, has that focus in it and is trying to make sure that personnel are taken care of first. One, and then if there were been any If you want promotions that have occurred during the year, those elements have also been incorporated into that comparison as well. As part of all of these tables that we're discussing, I want to try to clarify that we're trying to provide you with more transparency than we have in the past. Not by necessarily— it wasn't designed in the past to hide things necessarily, but as Part of, to be honest with you, our new software is providing us with greater and greater opportunities to be able to gather and provide us so we can provide you the better detail in regards to those without burying you hopefully in too much detail that we just, we get lost, right? So that's what I'm trying to focus on here in these following elements. And one more thing that's in that percent change too is when we do a set-aside for market increases above and beyond merit and step increases, that doesn't start out in the personnel line item. It's a set-aside, and then we wait in the middle of the year to do that analysis to see what the market is. Then once we know what that information is, then it gets Put into the personnel. Correct.

Right.

And, and so, and as we use our new software, we'll continue to fine-tune those capabilities as to, well, this is the way we used to do it, this is the way we need to do it now, so that more and more of these comparisons, um, take into account those kind of things where, okay, that money really— that even though we put it in this particular account, That's really related to personnel. And I've tried to make some adjustments for that, but I can't necessarily get them all. So anyway, so thank you, Fran, for bringing that up. The other item on there I just wanted to point out, you know, not everything is always an increase down in capital outlay. Sometimes we are either because the needs just aren't there in that particular year, or as we talked about that CIP reserve money that—

Whoop.

We're able to take care of some of those capital items as part of using those funds to take care of them. And you can see that impact in the current fiscal year in relation to that as well.

Brandon, I don't mean to be that person, but you got about 15 to 20 minutes left.

We're good.

I just want to make sure.

Yep. Just a couple, a few more items in relation to our enterprise funds. Particularly wanted to note, uh, if you look right in the very center, you'll see a negative 9.9. And anytime you see negative numbers, sometimes you might go, yeah, that's good, because that means went down when we're talking expenditures, right? I just want to point out that negative is really all related to 2 bonds that were paid off, a 2005 series.

Series.

If you go up just 2, what, 4 lines above and you see the 3.4%, you might wonder, well, how come water didn't go down? And that's because we had a water-only bond that had a big payment waiting for those other 2 bonds to pay off. So, and it's a water-only related bond, so that's why you see a big decrease in relation to stormwater, but not much of a decrease. In this case, it would have been a decrease had that water bond not been there, but because it made up for those, it's still an increase. Um, some other items, uh, talking about solid waste, you, you might see that that 14.4% that you see down there. However, we're in contract and finalizing our contract with them in fiscal '26. Budget did not necessarily contemplate an audit, a can-count audit that we recently had kind of right at the end when we were finishing that budget. So you actually will see some budget amendment changes to try to accommodate for fiscal '26. But fiscal '20, what was eventually agreed upon in fiscal '26, will actually carry forward into '27, so there won't necessarily be an increase in relation to the cost element for that. So, so that's somewhat, again, one of these timing issues in relation to when we're looking at a past budget that was prepared, you know, over a year plus ago, as opposed to where we're going to be looking forward to moving forward. And then, are there any questions on that particular Page. Obviously, there's a lot to digest, and you'll be receiving the presentation. And if there are future questions about any of the particular items, you're welcome to contact me about those. Our internal service funds, of which our IT department is part of, and you can see the impacts there, the second to near the bottom, in relation to the things that our IT folks just talked to you and what those mean in relation to their budget. And various— and I mentioned the self-insurance fund and the moving of that individual. That's why you see a negative over in the personnel column for that particular place. Outside of those 2 elements, most of the other items are— we'll call it just a run-of-the-mill. That's the normal expected increases that we would have. So, and then the other funds of the city that we have, so road and transportation, related to those taxes. You can see a large focus in relation to those in the capital area. So we've been focusing on getting more dollars into that capital arena so that we can obviously have— continue to have the best roads in, particularly in maybe in the state, right, Chris?

Absolutely.

That's what I thought. You know, we've already had a discussion about CARE taxes. Part of that 6.7% increase is related to a use of appropriating some reserves that we've had in the past to this particular budget. And then redevelopment agency, it's primarily just related to the, the mall, the University Place CDA that we have there. That property tax valuation has been kind of up and down. So This year, we always tend to budget a little bit conservatively. So based on our prior year receipt, I'm budgeting conservatively again. Our development fees, you can see the personnel change there. Primarily that has relation to Mr. Yeoman and when he retired, some reconfiguring in relation to the staff that is still there and the changing of their duties and whatnot. So we don't anticipate that that will continue. That was kind of just a 1-year blip. Um, and the remaining funds that we have, uh, we— just to make you aware, we do have a telecommunications fund that is related to Utopia. And you may or may not be aware of, we once upon a time had people, they bought— just like you have a sewer lateral, they would buy the fiber line between the main line in the street and their house. It was called a Q, and they would finance that Q. That queue is financed through the city. They pay the city, and then we forward those funds to Utopia, and that's continuing with until those exhaust, and those are getting near the end of those, as you can tell by the amount of money that is related to them. Our impact fee accounts and capital projects, you might be going, wow, that seems really small for capital projects. Keep in mind, there's not a lot of revenue in the capital projects fund, so Most of— when you're thinking the big dollars, those are saved monies from all of those CIP transfers that have been coming from year to year. That's not new money, so that does not get accounted for as part of our budget. So the primary thing you see here are related to our cell tower leases. That is almost all of the money that is the new revenue that is in the capital projects fund is related to cell tower leases.

that we have.

And then I've combined just for space's sake, Foundation, our Orem Foundation and Community and Neighborhood Services. We had some changes in relation to Gary and what he, his pay and what he does for the city in relation to being, and that's covered through our HUD or award, grant award. Um, but I wanted you to note, as you can see on the far right, that HUD money, that grant is continuing to decrease year after year after year. Um, and so this year is no exception. It is continuing to decline. Um, and then you say Gary, you mean Gary Ledoux? Yes, not Gary McGinn, Code Enforcement/Neighborhood Improvement, correct? Little Gary, we call him. 7-foot little Gary. That's correct. And then our Senior Citizens Fund, which to be honest, as you can tell, exactly the same as the year before. Um, they, they don't vary a whole lot, so tend to— their budget tends to not vary very much. And to get through the kind of the end items here, uh, some personal expansions which, um, Sarah alluded to, uh, in here, and one of the items she, she didn't have in there is in relation to our privacy area. We're intending to hire an intern to help us get through those privacy elements for— I believe it's with Steve, if I remember correctly. And so those pieces are very important for our IT. And I can't stress enough from a finance perspective how important our IT folks are, particularly our programmers, in relation to how our finance functions throughout the city, because it would be very, very difficult without them, almost impossible to be able to do that. So, and some of the expansions which Carlo already has kind of outlined, so I'm not going to necessarily repeat those, but you can see the dollar impact in relation to the items that we have there. And what that means as far as those individual elements are concerned. And last but not least, within our transportation fund, those transportation funds, we have set aside dollars in relation to the trailhead that's at the lower cemetery, that would be at the lower cemetery. We've also added some funds in relation to our solid waste fund in relation to tree pruning replacement. and planting in support of the My Hometown initiatives. And then the last item in our self-insurance fund, we've set aside dollars in relation to event fencing. It's— we refer to a sinking fund. Sinking funds are— we save some dollars each year, similar to how we built this building, and eventually we have enough money to be able to get enough of the thing that we're looking at to be able to get it. And that it can be something meaning, you know, actually meaningful instead of just buying one barricade at a time, which may or may not do us any good. So anyway, that's what I have. Are there any questions?

Let me go back just one slide. Is that the only money that the city is providing partnering with My Hometown, or are there other?

No, there are other funds. These are in addition to the expansion. Yes, well, we have all what we normally set aside. I can just also emphasize IT fund. Just keep in mind that we say IT fund, but it benefits every department, every fund throughout the whole city. Yeah, and I should have, I should have mentioned that obviously all of our internal service funds are all allocated out to other funds, some of the general fund, some enterprise funds, some in other areas. So there was just a way to accumulate those costs so we know what does IT, for instance, what does facilities maintenance, what does it cost us in total before it's actually sent out and charged to all of these other funds. Okay, right.

And just to make sure, so next week we're having another work session, work session only on budget, and the week after that is a regular council meeting and you'll Presenting the tentative budget.

Yeah, next week will be our fleet.

Okay.

And our capital improvement project items. So big— we're talking big dollars.

Okay. Is the tentative budget— if you can remind me, is that a public hearing?

Um, it's been a public hearing in the past. Well, I have— we have to have a— I have to have a discussion based upon these new law changes. Whether you still need it to be or not.

Okay, I just was wondering if it had to be an official public hearing.

Yeah, and right now, to be honest, I'm gonna try to convince Steve that it does not need to be any longer.

Okay. Anyway. All right, thank you. Yeah, and all the work, all everyone, all the departments have done. And Brandon, you're the— say the cat wrangler. I'll say there's no cats, but Friend, like friend with a Scott. All right, thank you. Where's Jake? Here you are.

He's snuck in, looking to the front.

All right, our, uh, my next item is a presentation on short-term rentals. And before we get started, I visit— just want to let the rest of the council know that I visited with Jake And then we discussed kind of the process of this meeting and what our hopes are for when we conclude this work session. That Jake has a timeline. He'd like to get certain pieces of information from us. And I would— I want to encourage you, if you do have questions, of course, to ask them. But he has certain things that he would like to cover. And Jake, I'm going to speak for you too, because we've talked about what our hopes and dreams are for this meeting. And when this meeting ends, our hopes are that we will have an ordinance, or Jake will have enough direction to be able to present an ordinance to us for formal consideration at our May 12th meeting. So that, that's the hope that we have. No, like we would have that. I think the discussion that we're having today would Feed into that, and I think maybe we can make some decisions— not decisions, we can't make formal decisions here, but give direction and have the discussion today. I would like to see it on the agenda to be adopted on the 12th, but if the council feels— if we don't, depending on how far we get or whatever, we can discuss that. And if we need to move it to the 26th, we can do that as well. But that's, that's what I hope. But let's just see what Jake hopes. As we've talked, but let's just speak. I kind of like to let things settle for a little bit, so I was hoping that we'd have one more meeting. Let's see how this goes. Yeah, let's see how it goes. Okay.

Yeah, so, turn it over to you. Thank you. Yeah, uh, you, you said exactly the purpose here is to basically see where we have directional consensus as a council and, and where, where the council feels comfortable moving forward. This isn't about committing anybody to any one particular sentence that will then become code, or taking any formal opinions or votes or anything like that, but rather, where is the consensus? Where can we build upon? And then what direction do we have so we can have a working draft to present to the council in coming meetings? So, kind of the framework for the discussion is I view this as 3 separate many discussions. And discussion 1, I think there's going to be a lot of consensus already. What are the guiding principles? What are our values? I anticipate that that discussion can be accomplished in an area about 5 to 10 minutes. Discussion 2 is, is really based on those values and principles. I've prepared 3 potential different paths forward, and I will go over each of those different paths. And I think that that will be a foundational discussion Really on how the council moves forward with this. I anticipate that that discussion may take much more time, 30 to 40 minutes. And then discussion 3, we get a little bit more into the weeds. What are the actual implementations? What are the things we want to do if you were to choose option 2 or option 3? What are the concerns that are out there? What are the tools we can use to mitigate some of those concerns and balance the needs of neighborhoods and STR operators?

Before you go on, I just want to just— so those who are online listening, just so you have information that Jake and I, since we've last discussed this, have met with each council member individually. And we've discussed this to get ideas. And so this isn't the first time that we've discussed this, or I have, or Jake and I have been working on this and we discussed. I appreciate council members taking the time to meet. and to discuss in just one-on-one meetings or one-on-two meet— ones and twos to just get some ideas of what direction. So anyway, sorry, here I tell everyone to, you know, I digress. Bring me back. I apologize.

No problem. Um, I added this quote in the bottom of this, and I, and I like it. I would hope that it helps kind of guide— is, um, part of the word question is the word quest. And really, that's kind of what the last Maybe 3 years of my life has been with this project. Sometimes felt like tilting at windmills, but nonetheless, we are on a quest. We're all on the same team. I think we're all trying to make Orem a better place, a better place for everybody to live, to work, recreate, et cetera. So, again, please, please chime in. The only way I know where there is consensus is if I'm hearing opinions and seeing where people are aligned. So, as we did these mini meetings, and as we've talked about it, things I've heard, I've kind of categorized into 4 different guiding principles and priorities. Number 1 is really, how do we maintain neighborhood character, and how do we make sure our neighborhoods are stable? How do we ensure for neighborhood stability? Second is, how do you promote an ordinance that balances fairness between You know, property rights owners, as well as neighbors. And also, how do you make sure that we're following what the, you know, the consent of the public is, even though some of that might be a silent majority that really isn't voicing their opinions at personal appearances? They may be doing it through emails. They may not even really be engaged much on this topic. One of the things I've seen over the last 3 years is, regardless of the work sessions, regardless of the number of people that come out, it seems like every now and then we'll get the person that says, I didn't even know this was something that's been on the city council's agenda. And so really, how do you know the public consent when you don't really know what the silent majority really is wanting out there? Next is the legal and operational viability of any ordinance. It has to be defensible, actually has to be enforceable. It can't be overly complex because it needs to be implemented in some way that's meaningful. And then 4 is just Holistically, how do we ensure the public health, welfare, and safety of our community? Um, before I move on, because this is kind of that guiding principle. So, if I were to ask each of the council members, if you were to look back 5 years from now, after you've adopted an ordinance, and that ordinance was a success, what would the neighborhoods of Orem look like to you? I'm gonna pose that question, and then it'll be awkward silence like I'm teaching Sunday school.

I think they would look a lot like they look now, and maybe a little stronger. Okay, stronger. And I picture neighborhoods where people have the opportunity to, to live there permanently.

Okay.

And just based on emails that we've received and things like that, place neighborhoods where, um, to the mayor's point, people are here long-term because they're able to own a home and they're out. They also feel comfortable enough with the neighborhood, their neighbors, and having those connections that the children are playing in the street together. There's a, that sense of Safety and peace. Definitely that community connection, I think, is important. Okay.

As, as you've each vocalized kind of your, your vision, if, if there was an ordinance in 5 years from now, do these principles and priorities align with that vision, or is there something that's missing from this slide?

I would push back on the word fairness just a little bit because We're in this position of having to make an ordinance because it's already not fair. We don't— we're not in the business of making ordinances just to make ordinances. Because something's not going right already that you're in the position of having to address it. And so there's already this level of unfairness around short-term rentals that exists. And so I guess balanced fairness maybe makes sense a little bit, but It's already inherently unfair.

And, Crystal, I think we could also frame that also maybe a little bit differently and say, you know, how do you explain maybe a prohibition in a way that shows the equity between maintaining neighborhood character and what our standards have been in the past in our land use code? So, I mean, fairness can be framed and defined different ways.

Also under that one, I— those things that you've listed, democratic, equitable, reflect a shared vision. So for me, one of mine is principled. I try to make a principled decision that doesn't— that takes into account the future of one, not just the many voices I'm hearing now. You know, something that is possibly not popular, but is right. Or what the vision— vision of the future. So, of course, that's going to maybe be a little different based on who you're talking to. But I think principled is just a word I really like. Would you mind asking the question for Councilor Kilpatrick? He had to step out for a moment.

Sorry.

Yeah.

So the question I asked to the group was, if you were to look back 5 years from now, um, at having passed an ordinance that deals with short-term rentals, whether it's a prohibition or regulation of some type, Um, and that ordinance was a success. What do Orem neighborhoods look like to you to show that that was a success? You want me to answer?

Yeah.

Um, more, uh, family-friendly, more, um, uh, considering the single-family home rather than putting basically hotels in the middle of city residential areas.

Yeah.

So that's kind of, um, the general thought of looking back. We wouldn't want to be thinking that our neighborhoods are now geographical hotel, uh, coming-to-stay locations, but they're family neighborhoods that kids can grow up and go out on the street and play and have fun. And, and, and, uh, yet be aware of those that have successfully managed this thing called short-term, and their neighbors have been supportive because they've always been quiet and successful and friendly and all those other things. So, you deal with very fine balance. And as you look—

oh, Jeff.

I agree with everything that's been said. Um, if I could just add one thing, it would be neighborliness. I feel like that's something we lost, uh, during COVID We all kind of turned inward, and it feels like neighborhoods aren't quite as neighborly as they have been in the past. And, you know, so, you know, as we're looking at wishes, I, I would love to go back to a time where a little more, you know, we're out in the street talking more, we're So, when they said kids are playing in the street, riding their bikes, I don't know what else to say. So, I think that's a valuable part of any community is that togetherness.

And I would like to add, I think I agree with everything that's been said as well. And I think I would also like to add that I think it would be great if we could help families find ways to use their properties in ways that suit them and their goals, whatever that may be, whether that's staying in their home or whether that's, you know, being neighborly, whatever it is, let's help families use their assets in a way So now that I—

again, everybody's here, let me ask this.

Quinn, does Quinn have anything to say?

Yeah, thank you, Mayor, and thanks, Jake. I'll just add that, you know, the things you put on the slide, I think, all make good sense to me as well. We want to make sure that residents feel like they're comfortable in their neighborhoods, that short-term rentals, right, would be low density in those neighborhoods if we have them. I also— it's really important to me that those that have a high stake in this decision have a seat at the table and are able to meaningfully resolve any concerns that people might have. And that, you know, housing affordability is important to me, and the ability of those who own homes or are paying mortgages to supplement their income. In ways that don't detract from the quality of the neighborhood is important to me. And then to the group, based off those visions, is there anything that is missing as a guiding principle or a priority as a class that should be mentioned here? Okay, if there's no objections, I'm going to move forward to the next slide. So, as I indicated, based on our, our many meetings and based on one-on-one conversations with council members and based on also meeting with STR operators and neighborhoods, trying to see what possible paths there are. Really, I'm presenting 3 different potential Options forward. Option 1, and we can talk about these individually, or we can talk about them collectively as a group. But option 1, high level, is that we just clarify the prohibition that's already in our land use code. That transient lodging is not allowed in any residential zone. I'll just flip over to that slide real quick as well. Basically, what we would be doing is we would be adding language that makes it a lot clearer to all of those that would have a stake as to what Warren's stance is with short-term rentals. And that would be that short-term rentals clearly fall under the definition of transient lodging, and that transient lodging is not allowed in any residential zone. As I, as I looked at comparable cities, there had been previously 3 cities that had this type of language: West Jordan, Mapleton, and Alpine. However, West Jordan recently passed an ordinance that does allow short-term rental licensing, and they did so within the last year. So that's a relatively new development. And then, as you can see on the side, the other cities that I list there, find themselves in the same situation that Orem is currently. They, for all intents and purposes, have a ban or a prohibition, but it is buried in their land use code. It's not clear and definitive.

Can I ask a question?

Yes.

In those cities, I mean, I look at Vineyard and I think if I wanted to go on, you know, VRBO or one of those sites today, there's no way that I would find an STR. I mean, you're looking right now, so I'm sure they exist. So maybe the code It's unclear, but do you have any sense of, like, how many they're doing or how often they exist?

Well, I haven't looked specifically to see how many are listed in Vineyard. One thing I do know is because, again, in their land use code, it is prohibited. One of the reasons that our numbers seem somewhat inflated when we scrape data to find out how many is the STR operators in Vineyard are using OREM addresses to list their VRBOs.

I have a question and a comment. Just first, a comment. I just want to clarify that when I talked to how Jake and I met, Councilmember Kilpatrick was, was out of town, and I didn't have a chance. He's the only one I haven't— we didn't have a chance to meet 1-on-1 with. I just want to clarify that. 2nd, I want to have a question on this. Is this— is 22— is that our zoning ordinance? Is that— is this— or would this be in the license? Where would this reside?

So, if we were to take the path forward, then we clarify the ban. It would be in our zoning code.

Okay, so it'd be in the zoning ordinance. Okay, thank you.

All right.

Which is not currently.

Um, it is currently in the back. What it says is under 2219, it says any— and, you know, Steve, if you want to help me out, but basically says to have a permitted land use, you have to refer to our Appendix A, which is our land use table, to see if that use is permitted. And then it breaks down every zone and it says by SLU code or land use code what is permitted in that zone. And transient lodging is a non-permitted use in any residential zone. So it's several steps to find that answer. But yes, it's currently in our code. What I'd be looking to do is to move it forward and make it clear.

Can I make a comment?

Yes.

So a couple of those cities— this last week we were at our League of Cities and Towns convention with other cities. A couple of those cities I asked There, that question, you know, I've got you down on the list that you don't allow them, what are your thoughts? And, um, one in particular, Saratoga, was, um, you know, right now we're interested in housing people and not being hotels in our city, so we're comfortable where we are. So I would kind of, um, I mean— And there was another one, very similar statement. So I just say that to clarify, because it— because I understand that Airbnb, VRBO, there's a lot of pressure right now on cities to allow them. There is a political movement to do that. So it was interesting to hear that particular mayor say, no, we're not, we're not, you know, we're not interested in that.

Okay, going back now to option 2, just to kind of give the high level. Option 2 is kind of the first entry into short-term rental regulation, and that is that you only allow owner-occupied short-term rentals to operate within the city. Basically, we would have— and we can, again, I'll move forward to that slide so you can Kind of see the overview of this is, if that was the option, we'd want to have a more in-depth conversation of how do we define owner occupied. Currently, as I've played around with the language and draft, and is there would be anybody with a 50% ownership interest in the property itself. We would have limitations about corporate entities being able to qualify as owner occupied. Um, to be owner occupied, you'd have to reside at that residence. It would have to be your primary residence, which means you reside there at least 183 days a year. Um, and this is one of the areas that we could have a further discussion is under really basic understanding of owner occupied is that the owner resides in the primary residence portion of the home. So, if you wanted to adjust that where they could live in perhaps maybe the ADU portion and rent out the primary, we would just need to make some corrections or changes to our code. The 2nd part is that owner-occupied STRs would go through a licensing process where they'd have to— they'd have to provide proof of ownership. They'd have to provide proof of occupancy. They'd have to show that the property doesn't conflict with any sort of deed restrictions or any other sort of covenant protections. We want them to go through an STR management course to identify that currently. Maybe it's a hospitality course through UVU. They have to submit a parking plan. They'd have to show that they're insured for that type of operation. They would be subject to inspections from our building department and our fire department to ensure that that dwelling portion that's going to be rented is safe and And habitable, and that they pay all respective fees to the city.

So, if it's a separate, like a separate apartment or whatever unit, would they need— does this require them to get an accessory dwelling unit license and bring that, bring that accessory dwelling up to code?

So, that could be an option, and that's really where I have that in discussion 3, is this, as we Is where I can see where there's consensus. If, if the desire was to move forward with an owner occupied only, we could get a little bit farther into the weeds with, do we require them to have an accessory apartment permit prior to obtaining short-term rental license? Um, these licenses would be annual licenses. Uh, there would be no vested rights. It would not be a land use. This would be found under our business licensing code.

Just back up. So, parking plan, just do we have a standard?

Yes, and again, that will be in discussion 3 is what is that standard? Where does this council feel comfortable with that?

So, just so I understand your presentation, you're going to go through these points. Yes.

There would be no vested rights. In the license, because it is a discretionary license, that license would be good for a year through the— through that year, or until the home is sold. These licenses are not transferable. And if the council at any future date decided they wanted to amend or discontinue the program, because there is no vested right, the council would be free to act and make those changes. And then we get into the regulation portion of that, and regulation enforcement is Can we be focusing on— these would be for overnight accommodation only. There would be requirements for maintenance standards of the property to comply with our already existing residential maintenance requirements. A 24/7 hour response, even if the owner is gone on vacation, they would need to have somebody available to respond in case there is a nuisance at the home. There'd be quiet hours, lighting requirements as far as screening and shielding. to make sure there is no light trespass onto neighboring properties. Noticing requirements, meaning that they would have to provide notice to the neighbors by putting a placard as to who that 24-hour, 7-days-a-week response person is, as well as if law enforcement get called, they know who to contact. And that the tenants know of what the expectations are as well. There would be some limitations on advertising. They'd have to list their short-term rental license number. They'd have to only be able to advertise for what they actually can, you know, use that property for. So again, accommodations only. You can't advertise it as, this is a great place to hold a corporate event. This is a great wedding venue. That's not for overnight accommodations, so they couldn't advertise for that. And then again, payment of any transient room tax, all fees. And then if there's issues with enforcement, they obtain 3 violations in any 12-month period, the city could revoke or suspend that short-term rental license and then prohibit them from obtaining one in the future. If the city so chose. So that's again the 5,000-foot view of option 2. Option 3 is basically the next step. And that would be, you keep all the same terms of option, of option 2, the owner occupied, but then you introduce a 2nd tier. And that 2nd tier would be the non-owner occupied STR. And these would have all of the same regulations imposed upon them, except for they would have 3 potentially additional regulations. And one would be a density requirement. And I've provided here 2 different density mitigations. One is you do it 1,000 feet, or whatever the distance the council feels is the appropriate distance, and you do it as the crow flies between property line to property line. That way you don't end up with 3 or 4 STRs clustered right in the same, same street, same cul-de-sac. And so a neighbor doesn't have a whole bunch of vacant STRs around them.

So are we talking radius or just linear?

It would be a radius. You'd go from property line to property line in a radial.

From the corner of the property line?

From any property line to any property line. The other option is that you look at it through our neighborhoods. We already have divided Orem into several neighborhoods. You would start with a base of— each neighborhood would have The ability to have 2 non-owner-occupied SDR licenses issued for that neighborhood, and then you would add 1 non-owner-occupied SDR per 100 single-family detached dwellings. So that could increase. As you notice in there, though, there is no spacing requirement, so you could end up with clustering. The 2nd would be a safe pedestrian restriction. And that is, as you look at— what has Orem School District decided its name is? I don't know.

Timpanogos.

So, as Timpanogos is required to do a safe walking plan for each elementary and junior high, we'd want to ensure that if there's a non-owner-occupied STR, Um, they're not in that safe pedestrian zone. And so we would restrict them 1,000 feet, or when again, whenever the council feels comfortable based on that pedestrian travel from the elementary or the junior.

So would that be from like crosswalks for—

Yeah.

So you would go from the nearest entrance of the school, you would do it as a pedestrian travel, and if it's within 1,000 feet of that pedestrian travel, Prohibiting it. The 3rd would be potentially a numerical cap. And that numerical cap is, again, would be set on based on a number that the council feels comfortable with. As a placeholder, I've put 100. 100 non-occupied STR licenses would be eligible throughout the city. These would be The over and above requirements on non-owner-occupied STRs. With those 5,000-foot view of each of these options, um, kind of want to open it up to a discussion amongst the council and see where there's alignment or comfort with a different approach. Um, so I have a question back on the previous slide, number of non-owner occupied. I know I've asked this before, so please forgive my— um, do we know how many non-owner occupied STRs there are in Orem? I do not have any reliable number that I can give you. I can tell you And then the reason I don't have reliable numbers, OREM has never tracked this. We've never had an STR license program, so we've never asked for owner-occupied versus non-owner-occupied. If you go out to the internet and look at different websites, there are different numbers that you can find.

Air—

what does it say? It's AirROI is a website that gives a whole bunch of different market market analytics for STRs. They anticipate that 80% of OREM's STR market is non-owner occupied.

80%?

80% is what AirROI says. Is that a valid number?

I don't know.

And that's based on income records?

That's based— I don't know how They are derived to that number. They're looking at ads and they're saying, if it's for a whole home or whole townhome or whole apartment, we believe 80% of those are non-owner-occupied commercials.

They're commercial.

All commercial.

And again, if you take the number, which we believe is to be somewhat accurate, in the area of 230 to 250 STRs operating in the city. That puts the number around 160 to 180. Again, I can't say that that's reliable. I'm just letting you know what I've seen on the internet.

Well, and I'd like to put that in context too. I think, I mean, the numbers we're talking about here, STRs generally is less than 1% of our entire housing market. And then the number of owner-occupied is less than that even, or, you know, non-owner-occupied, it's about 6%.

Right.

But 1% How many houses do we have?

I believe we have 33,000 dwelling units in the city.

So, if you're going to do half of those, I was just doing some math, even half of them. Let's say we did half of our single family. I don't know what that number is. How many single family homes we have? Is that 33,000? That's including apartments?

That's including apartments, multifamily.

Around 24,000.

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have that number off the top of my head.

I don't know everything.

I wish I did.

It's close.

It's just not on this right there.

I'll go ahead, and if you can go back to the 3 options, I'll just throw it out there to start the conversation, or people like, whatever, is just to tell you where I stand. And I'm not expecting all of you to take a position unless you would like to and just talk about it, because we're not doing— we're not I'm not voting or anything, but I just want to tell you where I'm at right now. I, I am not— option 1, I, I don't want to have a complete ban on them. Option 2, I'm comfortable with only owner-occupied. I'm okay with that. That's kind of where I'm sitting. I'm still really struggling with option 3. I think the numbers that would make me feel comfortable for— with option 3, the number of total units is probably going to be much, much lower than what's been presented, because I really— I do have my— some— I have concerns, but I'm, I'm most interested in Option 2 at this point. But I'm still open to ideas. I haven't, I haven't shut the door completely on Option 3. I just want to hear what your, what your thoughts are. And there, I just— so that's where I stand right now.

Mayor, I'm happy to share a couple of ideas if that's helpful.

Okay.

I just am so grateful to our residents who have been, you know, really active in helping us think through this. I, you know, I think I've heard more from people on this topic than any other topic since I've been a council member. So many of those resident comments are just really thoughtful.

We're not laughing at you, Quinn. We're just laughing because we're with you.

I feel your pain.

I feel it. Yeah, same.

Well, you know, I mean, obviously people have strong feelings about it, but I really genuinely feel like I'm better educated on this topic because of the range of insight that people have provided. And so I just, I just want to acknowledge how important this is to people, how thoughtful they are in helping us think through it. I feel like I've learned a lot from a lot of people. You know, the way I think about this is, is I'm trying to figure out at the, at the base, you know, in agreement with the principles we've discussed previously, what are the problems we're trying to solve? And I think there are problems that we need to solve. So You know, we want any of these properties to not be a nuisance with parking or lighting or safety. We want that, you know, an ordinance to be easily enforceable. We don't want to put the enforcement on neighbors. That's really important. We— I think we all really want to preserve the character of our neighborhoods, and that's really important to me. As I look at the the options that Jake presented. Again, you know, I— if I had to choose today, I really think that some version of the 2-tier system makes sense for me. And the reason for that is that I think all of those problems that we've heard about can be resolved within the context of that. The numbers that we're looking at there that Jake's presented in any of those iterations is really just a fraction of 1% of our residences. So, so the, the chance that any individual resident will be surrounded by Airbnbs is just, you know, minutely low with an ordinance like this. And so I feel like there are really good ways of resolving all of those, those challenges that people have raised. And I think we do need to be conservative about the way in which we you know, we allow people to operate these within our community to meet, you know, the challenges that have been raised over and over again. But I do want to keep that in perspective in terms of this, just the tiny scale of numbers there. And so—

Sure.

I just want to thank Jake in particular for thinking through all of the ways in which We can enforce these in a meaningful way that make it just easy to control nuisance. Now, it doesn't mean that we'll never have a problem, but I have heard from dozens and dozens of residents that they value having the opportunity to rent their home in this context, or that they value the opportunity to bring family in to visit for a family reunion, and that, that having some opportunity to bring those benefits to our residents is important to me.

Thanks.

Thank you, Councilmember Meekin. I appreciate your thoughts, and I just want to echo what you said. I appreciate those who've engaged with us as a council and staff to share their thoughts and their opinions. I have this binder with information, and I've read every email, and I appreciate the input on all sides of the issues. of the, of the issue. So any other council members want to comment?

I'll, I'll weigh in. Um, thanks, Quinn. Um, I, I feel comfortable with option 2. Um, I go back and forth with option 3 with extreme guardrails. Um, Well, you, you had a number of 100. Um, and I go back to something that Councilman Kilpatrick said. We don't want hotels in the middle of our neighborhoods. So I, at this point, I would say I'm comfortable with option 2. Um, could be persuaded, uh, with very limited, depending on circumstances and situations. Option 3. But I feel very comfortable with Option 2.

I would—

and I don't know, it seems like somewhere along the way in some of the correspondence, this may have been years ago or months ago, and maybe I'm making it up, but it seemed like there was a question. Someone that came and talked to us talked about Having a property next door to— so, and my concern about the non-owner occupied is that every concern that we've had has come from a non-owner occupied property. I don't think it's ever come, or that I'm aware of, that we've had concerns raised from a property where the owner is on site. So my other question is, if there were a situation where somebody had— I guess it wouldn't really be owner occupied if they didn't live there, but if they had a property next door, they could respond to an immediate concern. I would be interested in exploring that as well, but maybe that just— maybe that makes it more complicated in weighing those 2. Uh, situations makes it a little bit more complicated as far as what we can and can't do.

And did I make—

does anyone remember someone talking to— it was in an email about that. Comment meeting, during the meeting, somebody said that I live next door to my, for example, my father's home or something in the past. And now we keep the home and we use it for STRs, except when our family comes and we use it for them to be housed in.

But it was someone who owns a whole house STR. Not their previous— they bought the house next door to them. And they live in it, and they live next door. So it wasn't their family home or anything. It's an investment. They rented out long-term, but then found it more profitable to rent out.

Yeah, so the way we would approach that is, one, I wouldn't want to expand the definition of what owner-occupied means beyond the traditional understanding of owner-occupied. What that then does is it creates where we would say, if you are a resident of— or if you live X far away from a home, we will treat you differently than we would treat anybody else. And what that does is it opens us up to litigation for violating the Commerce Clause and where we would be treating instaters very differently than outstaters. So that's where it becomes very complicated. Thank you for letting me think through that.

First of all, I also echo what Karen and Quinn and I guess Jeff said as well about resident input. We've gotten tons of input about this, and I feel like the residents have really been thoughtful in the way we handle it. Having lived here in Airbnb, you know, I don't want to see 25 cars out there, and we saw that regularly. So I understand that there are valid concerns, and I understand that people that have Have these Airbnbs, you know, where they're trying to stay in their home, and this allows them to do that. So I think there's really good arguments on both sides of this question. My question really is, though, are we trying to regulate ownership, or are we trying to regulate impact? And I think how you answer that question maybe speaks to this a little bit. I don't know that it matters. I don't think the residents really care who owns the house as long as the impact is being managed. And I think that Option 3, with a specific set of guardrails, allows us to manage the impact in a way that is You know, maybe fair to everyone involved. I think the other thing too is when we talk about these Airbnbs that have been problems, and there have been some significant problems, our hands were kind of tied in a lot of ways because we didn't have regulations on the books. So I think that the regulations act as guardrails that protect the neighbors and protect the property owner. And with, you know, a reasonable set of regulations, we can say, look, you have the opportunity to try it.

No.

3 strikes you're out. If it doesn't work, then you lose the opportunity and we're done. We close the books, we move on from that. So I think you've done an excellent job. With option 3, I read through your proposed legislation, and I think you did a really good job balancing all the different viewpoints in a way that feels really fair to everyone and allows people latitude to live and protect the neighborhoods. It's like the number 1 priority. So, thank you. I support option 3.

Thank you.

And Jen, I just want to echo— you actually asked the question that I've had here as a way to help facilitate the discussion is, are we trying to regulate behavior? Or are we trying to regulate identity? And I think people are coming at this with different perspectives, and some do want to regulate identity, and some are trying to regulate behavior. Does that—

yeah, go ahead and finish your sentence.

I was going to say, does that, does that help you move the conversation forward?

To answer your question, ownership versus impact, I think from my feeling that I do— answer to me is yes. Because I think owners, if the owner is living in the neighborhood, that there's more sensitivity to what's happening. And it kind of, it affects the impact. But also, the owner is part of the neighborhood and is integrated and being part of that connection that's there and can help regulate that impact. So it's kind of, for me, it's kind of both. Yeah, and I can see that side of it. And I think also, you know, if you have a strict set of guidelines and regulations, these owners are gonna be motivated to be nice neighbors, because if they don't, they lose their license. So I think that maybe is a natural guardrail that sort of speaks to that and helps, you know, everybody. Now, on the guardrail, with it is 3 strikes. Is that a legally, for lack of a legally magic number?

No, not a magic number.

Okay.

Plus, I think there's the requirement that you have to have somebody within 10 minutes or 20 minutes to address whatever issue there is. So I'm not sure that it—

3 is not any sort of a magic number.

It could be 2.

Yeah, it could be 2. We could do 1. But again, we threw 3 to give a little bit more due process.

Okay.

You only get 1 red card in soccer.

In a swim meet, you only get one— you get zero faults.

You get a false start, you're out. There you go. Anybody else going to want to share where they're at?

I am in favor of option 1, and I could be persuaded to option 2. The thing that I'm caught up on here is one of Quinn's things that he said was easily enforceable, is I don't feel like any of this is easily enforceable. The, the onus is put on the neighbors to regulate this. If there's a problem, it is on them to complain about the problems that they are experiencing. And that's the piece that still has not been answered for me. And in talking with people all over the city through their emails and after, you know, public comments and things like that, and asking them, hey, well, what about an owner-occupied thing? They said, okay, but if there's a problem, it's still I have to complain.

I have to be the bad guy.

I have to—

I have to— I have to be the one who's on it all the time and providing pictures, and the onus is still on the neighbors when there is a problem. And so that's the piece that I still— I don't like putting that onus on our residents, that when there is a problem, they have to complain and complain and complain and complain to see any change. I think you could make that same argument, though, for anything, whether that's a long-term rental next door or whether that's somebody's shed out back. I think any of those situations you could rely on the neighbors to enforce. So to me, I feel like I'm not sure that's— The difference between a long-term rental and a short-term rental is that long-term rental, it's the same people who are there time after time after time. And the short-term rental, it's I don't know what I'm getting every day of the week. I don't know if it's going to be a quiet night or if it's going to be a loud party night. And that's a hard uncertainty to live with, I think, in a neighborhood. I think the owner-occupied reduces that stress level a bit. And so I could, I could be persuaded to the owner occupied. But until we can answer that piece of the equation, I don't like putting the hotel in a neighborhood that means now the neighbors have to regulate that over and over and over and over again. They signed up to live in a single-family home neighborhood. They didn't sign up to live in a commercial area where hotels are, are allowed. So, and I mean, oh, well, I just want to add to that too, because I'm here, because I'm on the same page. I, uh, our neighborhood commission said they wanted total prohibition. They asked the— they surveyed their residents, and it was really interesting to see one member of the commission come back and say You know, I didn't realize that I had 2 down the street from me and that the neighbors next door were frustrated with those. But they didn't want to talk about their neighbors. They didn't want to complain because a couple of them have these 3, another in another area. They knew the owners because they had previously lived in the home and they were now renting it out as a short-term rental. So there's that. I don't want to be the rat. Non-owner occupied.

Yeah, I don't want to be the one ratting people out here.

So that onus on the neighbor, I think there— it's just boiling behind the— below the surface so many times. That's not fair. That's not equitable. That's not meeting what we've decided our values were there, in my opinion. How is it different than a long-term, you know, a renter next door that's long-term, where that's problematic, or any of those things? And especially if it's report— the reporting is anonymous, which it is in either case. How is it different? It's not. We have a serious problem with long-term rentals right now. And that's our next thing to tackle. So why would we pass something based on a failing model? Well, I think the model is that residents, all of us, have a civic responsibility, or I guess opportunity to mention things that are frustrating to us. So whether that's reporting an STR, or whether that's reporting that somebody's grass isn't the right size, or, you know, whatever it is. So I'm not sure that that's maybe our best option. And I think the other option, the other concern I have is we start talking about— Oh, wait, no, before you move on, I don't agree with that. I don't think our residents, when they move into a home, are signing up to being the police of their neighborhood and talk complaining about— I mean, we don't want that, right? That doesn't create connectivity and community. We don't want them to feel like we are, um, delegating that to them because that's just the way it's going to turn out. You know, I, I just don't—

Well, maybe let me just throw something different. Along those same lines, though, that's true with any neighborhood. None of us want to move into a neighborhood where we have problem neighbors, but we all probably may have a neighbor that owns their property, that's living there, that's not an STR. So that's— I mean, that's just part of living in a community is you don't pick your neighbors. But you try to be the best neighbors that you can. Um, so I mean, that's—

I don't know that we—

that any of us sign up for or get additional responsibility to rat on our neighbors. That's just part of living in a community, right?

But passing this ordinance, we are creating that. So right now, the total prohibition where our law now stands, um, we have a tight clamp on that. Well, we will. This has been— we all know the history here. We introduced more legislation that creates this opportunity for a change in the neighborhood from what Chris said, from a purely residential to now an investment commercial venture, a business, if you will. We are then putting that on Neighbors who have lived there under the expectation that they live in a residential area. So while that does exist with long-term rentals, it doesn't justify adding another—

Or owners.

Yeah, but that was her example, was the long-term rentals. It doesn't necessarily justify adding another expectation. On our residents. Well, maybe too, I'd see it a little bit differently. I see it as an opportunity to provide them a toolkit. So when there are issues, oh, here's the rules.

Now we can—

we all know what the rules are, and we can go sort of enforce those rather than just a vague complaint we don't have answers for. Now there's a specific action item that happens. But we're creating that. Well, that could be debated. I think the other question I would have is, okay, well, we're gonna say, you know, short-term rentals are a nuisance to the neighborhood. Well, What about daycares? What about the guy making tamales out of his house? What about all these cottage industry sort of gig economy things that one doesn't justify another? So, because someone else is disobeying the law doesn't mean we allow this. Well, let's just give in and let's make it legal.

However, I will just speak to maybe a little bit of that is we do allow for some home occupation businesses. So we do allow for some commercial operation within residential. I think the question is, what is the tipping point? And I think everybody may be coming at this with maybe a little bit different, you know, where are you okay with having commercial venture in a residential zone? And so, where is that tipping point for you that moves a residential neighborhood into more of a commercial use? Is that— You can, you can run a daycare as long as it doesn't create any impact under the home occupation, or You can make food out of your home and sell it at a farmer's market. But is it now that we go to an STR operation, is that too far? That's— I think that's the conversation, right?

And I apologize, I want Crystal to be able to finish her— I did have one other reason for preferring option 1. I am worried about Societally, that we are turning our housing stock into investments for people, and that, that will continue to inflate the price of housing and then make it less affordable for people. Again, that's why I could kind of see option 2, where it allows people to more afford their home and have that opportunity for homeownership. You have an ADU, you can rent that out either as a long-term or short-term rental that covers part of your mortgage payment. So I'm still wrapping my brain around that part. But especially as a mom of young kids that are going to be going out into the world and trying to afford homes soon, the more we, we move towards incentivizing people to turn housing stock into an investment product, especially as we allow the property tax exemption for primary residences and things like that statewide. I really worry about the ownership or the affordability. Orem is already having that affordability problem, and by allowing whole-home short-term rentals, are we contributing to that affordability problem that we have? And then if I can speak now, I am the same way. Option 1, you know, I want to support our Neighborhood Commission, what they— the survey, informal survey that they did. I don't see a need. I am very— every, you know, I've— I'm into my 5th year on the council. From day 1, housing supply affordability has been just every single time at the tip of the governor's tongue, at all of our, you know, every time a development is brought, that issue comes up. So why would we take out 240 homes? You know, 1%. Why would we take those off the market? That's a lot of homes. When you start looking at families that have children that can come to our schools that we're now closing because we don't have enough families in our, in our, you know, communities, that's another topic that we need to consider. So that's why I, I think Option 1— why, why do we have to prevent— present— why do we have to provide An income-related opportunity for people who want to buy homes and sell and rent them as short-term rentals. Now, to that point, to what Crystal said, and we've obviously been talking because I'm like, yep, those are conversations we've both had, these ideas. I'm possibly able to be persuaded for option 2. Um, but I will say, when I hear them say, you know, it's helping me afford my house, I get that. It's also a long-term rental of your ADU also helps you afford your house.

And you—

those—

I've seen those financial models. Housing is not that— you can afford the house with the ADU payments in there. I mean, that's a— that's a— that's a— Good enough, or not good enough, but that's an additional income as a homeowner, an owner-occupied home through the long-term rental market. And just as a personal note, you know, my child's in Springville because they couldn't even find an ADU to rent in Orem. Going to BYU, right? So once again, our supply issue, are we clamping down on supply? And just as an example, To the inflationary impact. And I've seen Airbnb, they've marked their marketing this. They are marketing whole homes. If you buy this house, this $600,000 house is a steal because it really, at a short-term rental income rate, you are creating a home that's really worth $750,000. $800,000. What in the heck is that doing? That, that is inflating the cost of our housing because it's making my comparables, um, be seen as comparables to the price of housing, the real estate appraisals. So I— those are my issues. It's a— it's from an affordability issue, from a housing supply issue, from an inflationary issue. I don't see it as necessarily something that we have to provide besides the additional— in addition to— You say it's only 1 house, 1%. But if we look at these ones that have been affected, the man who woke up and had someone swimming in his pool, you know, in his backyard pool, it does— it's not just that house. It affects all the neighbors on the street. So that's my thoughts that I share.

Before I steer the conversation into our 3rd discussion, and I haven't spoken yet, am I the only one left?

Yes.

So I'll be very brief. You ready? Same as Mayor Jeff, I, I'm persuaded that 2 is probably where I'd go because I think that's the option of either ADU or short-term could work. I'm persuaded at a limited tiered with heavy guardrails and a much lower number than what you projected. So that's, that's again, the— she's close to it. I think we're close. It's just the thought process. I know of a couple that aren't owner occupied that could qualify, and there's reasons for it. So that's why I'm not saying no.

Again, I don't mean to be that person. We need to break for dinner at some— briefly break for dinner at some point. I don't know when the best point in your presentation— I want to keep the conversation and the momentum going, but just, just as you're doing everything, say this might be a good point.

This is a natural flow. It is natural break at this point. So, okay, and then we can move on to where I think we'll actually have a lot more consensus on different things.

I totally forgot to invite a council member to close the food. Would you— oh, you already stood up.

Thank you.

Father in heaven, we're grateful for this day, for the opportunities we've had to conduct city business and deliberate on important issues that will affect the citizens of our community. We're mindful of thy influence and pray that it will continue. We're grateful for the food that's been prepared and ask that it might nourish and bless our bodies to be nourished and strengthened in our daily lives. Watch over the remainder of the events and activities. we participate in this evening, conducting important civic duties that we're responsible to make sure occur in our fiduciary responsibilities as well. Grateful for all the input and all those who've provided it. We continue to feel that, uh, collaborative unity that will strengthen the decisions going forward. We ask in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Council members, thank you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it. All right, we've got dinner here. I don't know.

Continue?

Sure.

All right, we'll continue now.

Thank you.

Okay, so as we move on to the next section, these would be very specific measures in which we could implement to help mitigate some of the concerns that we've heard over time. About STR operations and their impact in neighborhoods, both owner-occupied as well as the non-owner-occupied. Specifically, um, regulation 1, I think there would be a general consensus, and if any of these seem out of line with your policies or principles or how you envision a regulation, please speak up. Um, what is— first one is, you want to limit short-term rentals to ensure that they're only for overnight accommodations. These do not become open event center, wedding reception venue, um, host the whole rent party. Um, so these are really meant for visitors looking for accommodations overnight. And even their family, um, they wanted to have access to a kitchen. They want to have a place they can put the kid down for bed. They can then play games with their older kids, or if they maintain the amenities on the property, but do so in a way that is in line with residential use would be, and not just one that would be some sort of an impulse.

Right.

So I think we might need to clarify too, because Maybe it's a party, but like the worrying events that happen at the goat house, right? So somehow clarifying— I'm hearing you say the family thing. Are you going to talk about that?

So what I've done is I've taken what— in each of—

I have—

I've done a shared folder. In there, there is prospective legislative language. Um, I've taken that and I tried to sort of put it as a summary So in our overnight accommodation language, there's a much lengthier list of foreboding activities, as they were. Basically what we're trying to do is this is meant for overnight accommodation. The next would be lighting. Really, the only complaint is, as I've met with residents, the only complaint that we've heard really about Owner-occupied short-term rentals is about those that have security lighting and somebody who's checking in late at night, or they're coming in the early morning, and you've got security lighting that goes off. And that light then trespasses in through their bedroom. Or there's some sort of security camera that's positioned, and so they feel that there's a privacy thing, uh, privacy, you know, limitation on their privacy. So what we want to do is that any security measures, any lighting, they're shielded in such a way that it doesn't create a light trespass or have a negative impact on the neighbor. Next would be noise and nuisance control. Really, this is going to be maintained through quiet hours requirement is that during the weekends, 10:00 PM to 10:00 AM, be identified as the quiet hour, which means if you have a sports court amenity, uh, pool, spa, sauna, um, the— any of those amenities that would likely to attract, you know, noise and into the evening party, something like that, those are to cease operation at 10 PM on the property and not to begin at 10 AM. Yeah, on weekdays 10 PM to 7 AM. Again, these hours could be adjusted if the council so desires. But again, the thinking of the weekdays is usually people up and going with school and work. So that would be— And as they adopt a noise management plan, and really that is, they could either use, you know, some sort of sensible monitoring device to help ensure there's any sort of noise disturbance on the property. If so, the PR operator is alerted to it, mitigate that on their own rather than having a complaint drawn against them. But the other big portion of the noise management plan is that they're informing their tenants of what the expectations are. So the tenant goes into, or the renter goes into knowing, I can't meet that hot time. I'm not to be doing— I'm not to be doing—

We require that on their advertising materials.

Um, we've got some language we could look at that. I'm really hesitant to do too much on the requirements on the advertisement language because it is a First Amendment area, as well as there's some state legislation that does put us a little bit, um, put limitations on us. Um, what I'm looking at, what I'm looking at as far as our advertisement language is that they're notifying the prospective renter that they are licensed in the City of Orem. This is their STR license number. If an advertisement does not have an STR license number, then they are not licensed with the city. So, renter beware. They're putting a notice to renters, their option to notice. then wherever you're renting from is probably not licensed. And then they can't, they can't advertise for a use that they're not allowed. That's kind of the limitation of what I've been looking at as far as advertising.

It's really just a protection for them so they don't get a strike.

I mean, we can suggest it, definitely.

Back it, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

Could we encourage them to?

We absolutely could encourage the best practice or or something like that.

Okay.

Um, the other main qualitative regulation is noticing and posting. One is we want a nameplate to be installed on every STR of who the responsible party is. So if a neighborhood is like, hey, there's a party going on, they go over to knock on the door, they can see the nameplate, and the neighborhood— the neighbor can choose So, be neighborly, try to resolve this, or do I feel like this is a situation where I need to get the neighborhood improvement team involved? Or if it's after hours, do I need to get a patrol officer to respond? With that nameplate, the patrol officer that's responding or the NIT officer that responds, they have a contact person. And again, if it's after hours, then our business licensing center may not be responsive. Because nobody's there. But with that nameplate requirement, we always have access to whoever should be responding to that property. The second portion of this is that there's the 24/7 individual. So again, that they have somebody And they can respond to the home. And again, right now we set it at 40 minutes. That time can be adjusted to an hour if you want to give them a little bit longer to respond. If you want it to be a shorter time, 20 minutes, we could adjust that. So the requirement is that somebody responds to the property, or the owner group, or the owner, and can help resolve, mitigate whatever the nuisance call is. If it's noise, parking, if it's potential drug use, something that we could get responsive and direct actions rather than always just giving a citation or waiting to give a citation. There can be some sort of remedy that evening. Also, parking requirements, and we'll get into detail more on, on the parking requirements and the maximum. And then they also have to give a package to the tenant that has all of this information in it, as well as other miscellaneous contact information, like how do you get a hold of the police if it's a non-response, uh, non-emergency? So having the non-emergency line, 911, how do you get a hold of the fire department, or what's the garbage pickup, where do you place the garbage cans, etc.? All the things that we could do to help minimize Any questions about any of the things that I've talked about, minus occupancy requirements and parking, because those are separate slides?

Are family reunions considered events, or what?

How about a good solid meal? Together as a family. and you're there and have a property where you can play some games, but it's not necessarily, you know, everybody come, good solid.

Okay, I think I know for some families, family reunions are not cool, really, but there's some people. Yeah, hold on, I don't understand why that's a maybe. That's an event. If it's at a house that they own Like that one family, she said, we want to keep this house so we can have a family reunion there. Then they're using the residential because they own it.

If they're coming together as a group of a family and they're staying there for overnight accommodations and going to, let's say, a BYU football game, that I don't think is going to draw any attention. I don't know that that would be necessarily anything other than overnight accommodations. But if you were to say, everybody, this family reunion, bring everybody, bring your friends, come on over, we're having a barbecue, and you bring 100 people there, and it's, it's an event style. Like, when my family reunion happens up in Bountiful, there's probably 500 of my kin. We are loud and proud and—

We're family.

And I don't think anybody wants to— as we rent out the pavilion there at Bountiful Park, it's an event. That's why I think it really depends on what that event, what that is, what that use actually was.

Well, and the limiting factor would be the number of cars. That's where they would be in violation if they've raised many cars.

Or the occupancy of the home itself, right? If the limiting occupancy get into this in a different— if the home can accommodate a single family of 16 people and they have the bedrooms and the parking available for it, and it's a single family, that's going to be a valid reason. But if it's— they're bringing 40 people to a home that can really truly only accommodate 16, I would say that's a violation.

And when you say parking, are you including off-street parking, correct? Yes, parking that doesn't impact the neighbors.

Yeah, uh, Councilmember brought up potential future consistency to withdraw everything that you're talking about here, either has been or could be applied to regulating Absolutely. And we can look at also adopting a 3-strikes policy on our rental dwelling license as well. There are things that we can look at strengthening that program after we cross the finish line here. Okay, um, as, as we talk about enforcement, and I, uh, to Council Member Mulestein's point, I get it. People don't want to come in and have to testify. They don't want to have to— However, at the same time, it is a multifaceted issue, right? Even if there was a crime, I mean, we don't have Minority Report. We don't have any precogs that can tell us who's going to do what, and we can pre—

Pre-prosecuted crime.

Um, on a retail theft, we're going to respond to Walmart, the officer's going to meet with loss prevention, they're going to get the video, and we're still— if we end up at trial, we're still going to need that loss prevention individual who saw the event happen and reported it. They're still going to need to come in and testify. Um, there's always going to be some component between Us needing physical evidence of what happened, witnesses, to then show a violation. However, the benefit we have, we are going to allow this to initiate programs, and that is not the same evidentiary standard as the criminal side.

The criminal side, we have to show beyond, beyond a reasonable doubt.

We use the highest standard of proof Without. In our administrative process, we're using a preponderance standard, which is more likely than not. We also aren't in a formal evidentiary setting, so we have access to use evidence that wouldn't necessarily be admissible at a trial. But oftentimes we still need to have somebody be willing to come in and testify, somebody willing to take that phone, somebody willing to make that statement. So the neighbors are a key player in this process to help ensure that there is, I don't know, compliance with our ordinance. Then also at the same time, team, you have officers that can respond, do an initial investigation. They can do a knock and talk and see who's in the home, what's going on. They can make the, you know, yeah, I arrived on scene and there was a loud party. And then they can hand that off to the MIT team to do the following. And then we also use our business licensing department, and then we end up in the ALJ. So it's a multifaceted team. Then also at the center of all of this is we're going to also rely on the STR operator to be in compliance with our ordinance.

So we do expect they will be doing half of the work.

Um, if I've met with many of our ST operators, you know, they all have been open, they have been reasonable, they've all been really good to work with. Only a handful have been very disgruntled and very angry at me, and in some cases I can understand their perspectives as well. But at the same time, I do believe that by and large, people in Orem are good people and want to do the right thing.

Thank you.

And so I do think STR operators fall into that same group, but I do think by and large they will try to obey the expectations that are set. One of the problems is we just haven't had any clear expectations for how those operations should occur. However, when, when an STR operator does fall short, we would be looking at issuing a notice of intent to take. If they get 3 violations in a rolling 12-month period, we would be looking at revoking a suspending that, that STR license. Um, again, the proposed fines right now are just proposed. Again, we also understand this is a commercial venture, so we may be wanting to see an increase in those fines. But again, coming from a more conservative approach, $500 on the first, $750 on the second, $1,000 on the third.

That's how much they make in one day, so that's like nothing. That, that's not Anything that occurs. I have 2 issues with this. The amount of those fines is too low. This is what I'm hearing from residents too. And 12-month period should be a 24. If we're truly putting up guardrails and rolling this out slowly, let's experiment and see how many complaints certain homes get. If they can go for 24 months without 3 complaints, you know, most of it's going to be over the summer. I think then that then they've proved themselves as, as a sleepy, low-impact. 24 months is— I, I think that that would accomplish less because they can't have 3 or more in a 12-month period in order to get their license revoked.

But by going to 24, you're doubling that, that probationary period. So if I get one next month Then I have to be on for 2 years. Does that make sense? Rather than just, just 1 year.

Okay, you see what I mean? So if you don't deliver more in a 24-month period, then they get 3, they're shut down, but that resets after 24 months instead of after 12. Is it in there that it would reset to 2?

So it resets because it's a little—

so yes, but That means after 12 months of not having a complaint because they've been shut down. No, that's a whole different—

that's if their license is suspended, they would not be eligible to reapply for an STR for 3 years.

That makes sense what I'm trying to say. What I'm saying is if they have July, you know, the 4th of July is on Friday, and the next year the 4th of July is on Wednesday, the next year if it's like Thursday, Friday, Oh, we have 3 in that year before, 3 complaints. 2, we just made it because we just had another complaint this summer. So now they could get 6 complaints in 2 years. This is 3.

So, uh, Council Member Miller, what I'm hearing is you would be in favor of increasing the fines and increasing the probationary period. Is— does anyone else have any thoughts about that?

I think I would even increase the length from 3 years to 5 years if they couldn't operate.

I'd like to— what other items? We have parking yet?

Yeah, so let's finish up.

I'll fly through.

Okay.

Um, the next one—

are we going to be able to have the council member's voice? I don't want silence here as a yes or no. I think we all need to say where we are on these topics. We're going to put it on the next city council meeting. We need to be on the record with what ordinance you're writing right now.

Yeah, again, that's, that's again why I ask if there's anything that you're in disagreement with in these, please voice your opinion. I am going to take silence as, as that you are in accordance with this unless you speak up.

I go to 18 months for the period, and I can see increasing the fines but not by much.

Yeah, uh, the next one, and this is— this one is, is a little bit more nuanced.

Wait, can I just clarify? That means we're 3 to 4, so what you presented will stand in your ordinance?

I will prepare an ord— I'll get there at the end.

Okay, I'm just trying to determine what the purpose of this meeting is and what the outcome is going to be determined. Because sometimes when I haven't said anything in a council meeting on something that I did— on a work meeting on something that I didn't necessarily agree with— it was construed as a, as a positive. So I think this is such an important— if, if this is it, this is the only discussion we're having, I think we need to be on the record as council members with our thoughts. It's kind of a lot to process for one meeting. I kind of wonder if we're going to do a work session again and then present it. Yeah, I don't want to drag it out either, but like, it's a lot. Okay, let me weigh in on that.

Uh, the next area that I want to touch on is occupancy limits for short-term rentals. And by occupancy, I mean how many people can stay in an STR on any given night. As we first rolled out this STR draft, the conversation was the easiest way to enforce this would be by putting a cap at 8 unrelated. Or 8 related, regardless. Just saying we're going to cap it at 8 individuals for short-term rental. Now, we heard a lot from, from the short-term rental community, um, that that would not be a practicable, um, regulation. But again, from an enforcement perspective, probably the very easiest of the enforcement. An IT or an officer rolls up to a home, they can do simple math, and they could see that there's more than So, from a, from an enforcement standpoint, easiest way to enforce occupancy. Option 2 is that we go to a single family or 8 unrelated, which is really what we're doing is we're mirroring what we already allow for long-term rentals and single-family dwellings. Is we allow currently single families or 3 unrelated. So by giving short-term rentals option 2, we're actually increasing the occupancy over that of the long-term.

Um, one more thing. Yes, clarification. This— these things that we're talking about are things that relate to whole house, non-owner occupied rentals in general, and owner occupied. So, for example, if somebody rents rooms, like if I've I've seen those online where there's like the husband, the wife, and the sister, their 3-bed— whatever, 2 bedrooms, and then they rent, they do Airbnb on 2 of their other bedrooms. How would that fit in there?

So what we are— the way we address that scenario more is we are indicating that you can have 1 short-term rental area dwelling. You identify that as 1 bedroom or 2 bedrooms or your basement. Or the apartment that's above the garage. Whatever you are identifying as your short-term rental, you can have one of those.

Like in this case, it was like the house, you just kind of absorbed into the, into the family. You use the kitchen with the family, you do, but they just rent out these bedrooms on short-term.

We would not allow multiple bedroom rentals as a short-term rental. Under this ordinance. Yeah, because basically what it does, it does turns it into a boarding house. Yeah, what we would be doing though is saying you are identifying a basement, that basement has 2 bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, its entryway, etc. Right now it doesn't need to have its own separate entrance, um, unless we go the ADU route. Okay, that's what I was going to ask because I like the mayor's idea of the Okay, um, but what you would do is then you would look and say, okay, the general standard for that owner-occupied basement rental or the whole home non-owner occupied, the general standard is a single family or 8 unrelated. Then you would go to the 2nd level, which is the occupancy-based on-bedroom standard. So, if you've got 2 bedrooms and they are— one is 100 square feet or more, the other one is between 70 and 99, that sets what your occupancy is. Does that make sense? What we don't want to do is you don't want to end up with 8 unrelated in a 2-bedroom basement apartment that doesn't really accommodate 8.

So both of those apply?

Yes, both of those apply. So you're setting a standard, a general standard, and then you're doing a more specific look at the actual viability of that space. Okay, the 3rd option that we—

Do you have a question?

No, just you're getting to it. I was saying, what about the 3rd? The 3rd option is we're aware of You know, use that might be very different and distinct from all of the other STR uses, and based by its very nature, size, location, et cetera. So how do we, how do we work some standard for that type of a parcel? And so we, what we did is we provided language in that packet That would again indicate 1 single family or 8 unrelated, unless the property meets specific requirements. And that would be like, it's on 1.5 acres. The dwelling unit is over 20,000 square feet. It's completely enclosed by fencing, gated. It has parking to accommodate. Um, I believe it was 1 parking space per I want to say 1,000 square feet of the dwelling, but very specific, very rigorous levels to allow for an increased capacity for that type of parcel. Our recommendation is the council not— that language, according to our office, in our opinion, is that opens us up to litigation. And while it was requested that we review that and consider it, Our recommendation is the council not adopt that. Are there any questions about occupancy at this point? Jake, why 8 unrelated individuals as opposed to watching the law enforcement? Is the 8 based off of our view of other cities' STR ordinances, or? The, the aid comes from requests from STR operators that there will be occupants that are unrelated. There might be 2 couples, so that's 4 that are going in together because they're coming into town, or you've got a group of friends. So 4, 4 coworkers that are coming in for a basketball game, they're coming for a hunting trip, 4 to 5 to 6 people. And they wouldn't be permitted to use that parcel or that STR if we left it at 3. So we wanted to give some sort of increased occupancy. And so what we did is we looked at our ordinances across the board and say, where could we— where we could be uniform? And 8 would get us where we'd be uniform with other unrelated other areas of our ordinance. So that's how we got to 8.

But if we were interested in finding places for families, because I think that's how this started, the pro STR was it's, it's family, you know, centered. It's cheaper than going to get 2 or 3 hotel rooms. This isn't achieving that. This is actually opening it up even wider to now allow the hunting trips, which happened at the Aspen House. We're up at 5 AM because the hunters were up at 5 AM. Um, the sorority sisters of 8, you know, to me, I see this as problematic. I would much rather match our long-term rental stipulations because they pull in some unrelated, but still it's family-centered.

Any other comments on that? I would actually— I would rather forego some of the other slides To have a conversation on this.

I would agree with that.

Is there any—

does opening it up to 8, does that open us up to litigation on the long-term rental side?

I don't believe so.

Not that we have to provide the same, or if you're providing it there, why can't we do it here?

I, I don't see that there's any real litigation there.

Okay.

And I'm Again, hate to be that person for the 3rd time in this meeting, but we got to be in there in 5 minutes. And I see that we— I know we probably haven't covered everything in council question. I— we were hoping to get to address— I think you have some direction.

I have some direction.

Give you a couple options, and if there's other options you want to do, council, we can do something different. But we do have a work session next Tuesday. That's talking about fleet. How long would that—

Fleet and CIP budget, uh, which— an hour.

So would you— how would you feel about continuing this work session discussion?

Hour and a half.

At our— at the work session next week.

So, hour, hour and a half.

Or—

so we don't— what we don't have next week is we don't have a regular meeting nor some sort of city event. We have to be done by, so we could have an extended work session next week.

Or we can do it the 12th. I, I don't know. Or do you feel that we're at a point where we don't need to have another work session? I think so too. Okay. And just so we are being respectful of our residents, I feel like we need to have our work sessions. We're giving the direction. And then there needs to be some time for the— we need to have a city council meeting where the residents can come and see it.

Yes.

And then we need to have a city council meeting where if we've made any changes because of that resident feedback, we have one more meeting that we can take it to, to make those changes and, and pass it. Because otherwise, I've been in that resident seat where you go and you speak the day of the meeting and it— the decision's made. It feels like a waste of your time as a resident to go and speak, because truly the council's pretty much already decided what they're going to do. That's what it feels like. So if you— I feel like that extra time, especially in a topic like this, it gives our residents some time to reach out for some additional feelings based on what we are actually presenting. I have heard from so many residents, well, what are you guys going to do? Yeah, I've had experiences on the council where residents have given input as we contemplated the ordinance. And we discuss those changes and taking in that citizen input and making those changes, then directing staff to put those into the ordinance and put it on the consent calendar for the next time. So there's several different ways that we can do it where I think we can respect the citizens and their input, but also move it along as well. I'm so interested in moving this along. I've been doing this for But I really want to do it. I don't want— yeah, yeah. But there, there are a variety of ways we can do it. So, Council, what do you want to do?

I would say let's add it on to our work session next week and have further discussion and see where we're at.

See where we're at there.

Okay.

Is that okay, Council? All right. Thank you. I don't know how much more you— does it say? That sounds rude. I don't mean it.

How much more have we got?

A 3rd of the way.

We only have 5 more slides. Okay, we can get that.

Okay, so, council, we ended up here with occupancy limits, STRs. I encourage you in this week to go think about this, do your dishes. Like, I do dishes when I— as I think. But also, Jake— But also, I know in the packet you've sent, it had some good information about why you as the legal staff feel it's based— as I recall, it's based on a federal circuit court decision. Out of California.

That is correct.

You have these slides?

Um, I can share these. I can put those in that same shared folder.

Okay. I also have them. They'll be posted on— Councilmember Millett and Councilmember Meekum, I apologize that we didn't get to you and your, uh, city council reports. And entire council, I apologize we didn't get to the agenda review, but here we are.

Here we go.

Oh, thank you. Second.

Hi.

Hi.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think—

yeah, a long day.

Yes, that was a very long day. I'm glad that we didn't have to finish those amendments.

Yeah, wow, did we lose quorum?

I think we—

I think we lost quorum.

And why we're allowing those on the agenda, you know.

Because that took 3 just to go through. Isn't there? That wound up being 6. Anyway, it's jury duty.

Back and forth.

I know, I agree.

Further training.

And that's Teresa, the reporter, who just walks in. Please be helpful.

There's Chad.

Hello, Chad.

Chad, long time no see. Oh my gosh, it's been forever.

3 nights in a row.

It's too bad. Chad taught me better. Yes. Thank you. You're not happy to do it?

We got them in the correct order, so we'll be good.

Yes, we switched it. Oh, she's holding the knife. I've always done that. He thinks he's got us next week. He thinks interesting. Do I go? Oh, you've got Chad.

Always taking advantage of Mom.

What do you do?

Thank you for having him.

Thank you.

Okay.

I guess I'm just gonna write in. No, I don't have to answer that. You have to go on that question. I'm just gonna say both of them are different.

Yeah.

Manchester, ready to write me on this?

Yes.

Hey, there you are.

Hi.

So fun. It's just so fun. That is so fun. Like, if anyone wins this arm, I want to turn into that. Oh, he's so— Because the one that wins, she will share. Oh, and we'll have those first responders against the cuties, and then they can let the first responders against themselves. And all of the money for like, like, to like the domestic violence center and also the lunchbox. I love it. It was so fun. Like extra training for our office. We're going to be able to get my— my wife's here. We're going to get all the money to buy something. Oh, it was so fun. Okay, um, Councilmember Meekum, can you hear us?

Uh, yes, loud and clear.

Thank you.

All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to all of you. Apologize, we're starting a couple minutes late. We've just spent the last hour and a half talking about short-term rentals, and it looks like a lot of you want to talk about short-term rentals as well. So I would encourage you to, after the meeting, uh, Pete, when is this going to be— or Teresa, when is this going to be posted on our website, the work session? Later tonight, I would start about an hour-ish in unless you would like to be part or listen to the discussion we had on budget as well. But we did. We've just spent a considerable amount of time talking about short-term rentals. And just so you know, we are continuing our work session to next Tuesday, which is a Tuesday that we typically don't meet. We have a work session already scheduled. Scheduled to talk about the budget, but we are also going to include and continue our discussion on short-term rentals. And so that's next Tuesday, May 5th. And that meeting— what time is that meeting? The 3? At 3 o'clock. So we're going to spend the first little while talking about budget, and then we're going to continue our discussion on short-term rentals at that point. So appreciate the discussion we've as a council. It was a robust discussion, and I think that we're, we're getting a better understanding of what, what direction we're, we're wanting to go as a council. And looking at— I just appreciate you all sharing your, your thoughts with that. So with that, I'll call the meeting to order. And Council Member Meekum is participating remotely, and we have an invocation inspirational thought by Ryan Oh, current Miss Orem. Yes, welcome.

I'm sorry.

Apologize.

Sorry. Dear Heavenly Father, we're thankful for this day. Please bless us as we meet today that we will be able to have effective and efficient conversation. And please bless those who aren't here tonight that they will be able to be included in the conversation.

And we thank thee for all of our many blessings, and we thank thee for the ability to meet here today.

And we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Thank you. And then we have the Pledge of Allegiance by Haley Johnson, who's a member of the Miss Orem Royalty. Please repeat the pledge with me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. All right, we're at item 7.1, is Is— oh, there he is. Okay, welcome. We have Senator Kevin Stratton here from our state legislature who's here to do a legislative report. Welcome.

Thank you.

Yep, go ahead and have a seat right there and turn the time over to you.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council and wonderful staff. I'm very grateful and honored to be here. Today, and certainly honored to represent this wonderful city. It's fun for me to have good stories to tell, and there's so much good that's taking place here in this city under the direction of this wonderful council and the leadership here and the wonderful staff. Great story to tell. I do represent Senate District 24, which is— takes in— we come down The north borders of Orem to State Street, all the way down to Desert Industries where the river comes. And then we follow the river to I-15 and then down to Center Street in Provo and then around past the cemetery. And then we take Wasatch back as well. So I represent both Utah and Wasatch County as well, but this is my home. Here, and I am so grateful. I was reflecting in preparation for this. I was born here in Orem, and the population back in 1962 was about 30,000. And there's been remarkable change, and it's been wonderful. I am fond of peaches and peach trees, but we're growing other wonderful wonderful things rather than peaches, especially freezes like it has this year. It's been— that's been tough. But let me, if I may, Mayor— As you wish. I have a few things I'll share, and then I'd like to just open up to questions if you'd like, or would that be okay? Let me just share, if I may, talk a little bit about Utah. And it's fun because I think you'll understand as you look Look at the 254 cities and towns we have in the state of Utah, and Orem really stands out in a lot of ways. Well, Utah does the same thing as we look at other states, and you might be interested in all that. There's several things and key indicators. Utah is ranked number 1 for increase in housing household income growth, number one for protecting children's mental well-being, number one state overall for the 3 years running. And that's really remarkable. U.S. News and World Report, that takes several key indicators and looks across the board that, that indicate the health and vitality and strength in many different ways. And that U.S. News and World Report has ranked the state of Utah number one for 3 years running. Number one economic outlook for 19 years running. That, that's, uh, that's remarkable. That, that deals with tax policy and, and budget process and, and those related to that economic strength. Number one in GDP growth. Number one in upward mobility. Number 2 state for teachers. That's remarkable what we've been able to do in education over the last several years has been, I think, a real compliment to our citizens and their, their focus and desire to see good education.

Remarkable.

Number 2 education across in, in the state. Highest volunteer rate. Most independent state. Lowest electricity rates in the U.S. So wonderful, wonderful, and, and opportunity to recognize that we stand all— we all stand on shoulders and principles that help us guide and direct the decisions we make. And so there's a lot of good news. Now, there's of course there's challenges, and we need to deal with those, and, and we'll talk about that in, in a moment. But let me start. Constitutionally, the state legislature is charged— first of all, one, one key point is the fiscal health of the state. So let me talk a little about the budget. Our budget this year was $31.6 billion as a state as a whole. We did do something quite unique, uh, that we about every 5 years, 5 to 8 years, we'll go through and we'll look for a 5% cut across the board and what that would look like. That helps identify things that perhaps may be, uh, redundant. And we, we go through that exercise.

I—

one of my assignments in the legislature is to chair the Social Service Appropriations Committee. That has the largest budget in the state. It's $8 to $9 billion each year. I'm the Senate chair there and have a good House chair. But if we have both House and Senate members— in fact, the legislature, one unique thing about Utah across the nation is probably why some of the things we are able to do is that every legislator does sit on an appropriations committee. Senators sit on 2. So I sit on transportation, and then I chair the natural— the social services in the appropriations area. We found $60 million in our social services, for example, in that budget that we that we could redirect and make available. We had for 6 years in a row another tax cut for Utah families. There was the— from House Bill 1 in July, federal House Bill 1, there was close to a $300 million tax cut that went into place as well. But we were able to do some additional tax cutting and lower those taxes focused on policy to help our families and citizens. Let's see. So that's a little bit of the fiscal health.

And I—

and again, first priority for the legislature always is come up with a good balanced budget.

We're able to do that.

And we compliment you, by the way. One of the great stories I was able to tell to our state is look at Orem City and what they're doing. They're building, you know, they've had this wonderful Wonderful city center, but it needed repair and we're able to build this without any debt. What a remarkable thing that is, a great story to tell, and I compliment all of you for that. And one of those things I'm excited to share with my colleagues as we look at different issues. Second issue is oversight. Legislature is charged with oversight and working to make sure that the branches are working properly. We have several audits ongoing that take place, and then several— we have an oversight committee that we work with, and that's a good point. Then the third is the policy and setting the policy. I will share that I also chair— there's 3 other areas I chair. I chair the The Interim Committee for Natural Resources, Agriculture, Environmental Quality. I also chair our Federalism Commission. That's a remarkable thing that we're doing. If you ever think that there's contention in politics, you ever think that, come to our Federalism Commission. We have completely opposite points of view across the board, yet we work together in a very synergistic way. There's a great comment made— By one of our my good, I am of I affiliate with the Republican Party. I have wonderful Democrat colleagues, and we were presenting a legislative summary to the Utah Bar, and one of the the you can you imagine being legislature? You know, on an attorney, you have two strikes against you before even to get your first pitch, right? I'm an attorney. I'm a politician. Anyway, we were reporting back to our the Utah State Bar, and they asked about that. And one of our good colleagues said, "He says, 'You know, the things that the news media plays out just aren't accurate.' There is because he was asked for his first year in legislature.

How's it been?

That asked specifically. He says, 'There is a Utah way that we work together in a cooperative way.' We listen to each other, and we seek to come up with the best solution.

And that's—

the Federalism Commission is really on that. And generally, traditionally, those in the Democratic Party haven't really liked the notion of federalism, but they're more receptive right now because of the aggressiveness, from their perspective, at the national level from our executive. executive branch. And so there's— it's a ripe opportunity for us to work together in some wonderful ways. The final one is the Legislative Water Development Commission, is I chair that. So those are my assignments. So I can hopefully answer any questions in that space or any others you would have. I would maybe like to highlight just a couple of policies legislatively. There were 1,506 bills initiated. We actually end up passing 541. I often say it's really important that, uh, to recognize— I'm asked, well, what did you do?

And I think some of the most important things is what we don't do.

As we look at sound principles, limited government, sound policy, federalism, Those free— trying to protect the free market, the things that we value are very important. But maybe a couple of pieces of legislation that may be of interest. I did work— we've been working for 2 years on a water-wise landscaping bill. And I just have to say, we set up that— what does water-wise landscaping mean? And given our water and the challenges we have, and we've been so blessed with our ecosystem that we have in the state, remarkable ecosystem and pioneers that thought. And we have, even with this very challenging water cycle we're in, we do still have reservoirs that have water in them. There's so— there's a lot of positive. But I was pleased to note as I came in, I think the city's done a great job in this new landscaping being very wise with your water and the water usage. And, and that we're trying to set an example that would then be worth emulating across the state. So that would be one, one piece. Uh, probably some of the most, uh, near to my heart pieces of legislation through the years is a couple of years ago, we worked on creating a pattern cadence in September, Constitutional Month, where we would teach principles, constitutional principles that highlight them. And I'm pleased at what the city's done in that regard as well, but invite all and study the founders. That's one. So we have those issues certainly that deal with our policy, but then also what makes us who we are and how can we make sure we're Forgetting those wonderful shoulders that we stand on. With that, Mayor, I'll be glad to answer— try to answer any questions.

Right. Thank you. I, I appreciate your update, and thank you, thank you for your service, and grateful for the relationship that the city has with our state legislators. We've, we've been in contact this year a lot, just, and we have a good open communication. I do have a question. What do you see? As you know, the legislative session has ended, but the work still continues as we go, as we have interim meetings. What are the focuses of the priorities that you're seeing as we are going into the interim meetings between the sessions?

Thank you for that question. We do go through a process of establishing priorities and study items, what we're going to do, very similar to what you spent the last 3 3 hours looking at to try and create the best policy. There, there are issues that are hot, hot item issues. Immigration, for example. Voting integrity would be another one. But there's several important management issues that, that we're dealing with. Several water issues. For example, one of the things we're going to talk about in our natural Resource Agricultural Environment Committee is what do we do currently with our water situation that we're in right now? Do we need to do an emergency declaration, or what, what steps are we taking to deal with that and, and protect our environment? What are we doing with the Great Salt Lake, and how, how can we help and, and encourage that? There's a lot of reporting that takes place. There's, uh, you know, I, I— tax policy is one I'm interested.

I might—

I I don't mean to editorialize, but one of the things that, you know, we hear a lot about affordable housing, and we also hear about property tax. You know, one of the things— I'll just throw this out, I don't want to have— but if we didn't offer the residential exemption to non-occupied residences, that would do remarkable. We're going to need some help if that's something That, that, uh, you are— that's, that, that's—

Councilmember Miller, you, you're, you're speaking her language.

That, that, that would, that would help. I think our affordable housing would help a lot of the challenges. I know you're wrestling with this. I'm, I'm really excited to see what you come up with. I'm glad it's your, your decision, not mine right now. We've dealt with a lot already, but I'd be very supportive. I don't appreciate— but I do appreciate the intentionality. And the carefulness. I've talked to some of the council members. I know you're very listening and trying to be very intentional on this, so just don't mess up and we'll be good.

Well, we're trying our very, very best.

I know you are. Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Council members, do you have any questions? Do you, do you still— Well, I just want to make a comment because that was a question I was going to ask, because there was a bill that was run this last legislative session that first started to to talk about that 45%, basically tax discount that is given to high-density apartment owners. Um, so truly affects our ability to tax because it takes away tax from our school district, who then our school district has to make up that deficit. And then we have to hold off because we don't want to overtax, so we don't put on a tax because our residents are feeling the burdens from providing for schools. You know, you know all about that. We talked about that during the legislative session. So truly appreciate that you made that comment because I have been beating that drum for 4 years and I truly appreciate that that is a conversation now at the legislature.

I think we're going to need some help from our local, you know, League of Cities and Towns. And if that's a type, I would say, Mayor and council members, that I do defend your right to have local control. And good data leads to good information. For example, Uh, Chair Dahl of the League of Cities and Towns. He and I work very closely on Tier 3 issues. Uh, one, one great key indicator is, uh, if we're trying to get 40,000 units, we've already approved 109,000 in just a few, few jurisdictions, and that number will increase. But, but with that in mind, do we really need— should we really need to let that be a local control, is my perspective.

Yeah.

The key though is we need some, potentially some help with infrastructure, but that needs to be a local issue. That should not be spread throughout the state. For example, Orem has done what— if you've paid and paid the cost, put it in, you need to be able to do that. But we need to be wise and try and avoid the growth of government and some of the— I guess, uh, interesting isms, I'll say, ideologies of the day to not, you know, remove ourselves from the roots and the grounding that we have.

And that was my second point. I truly appreciate it because you do lead out on honoring municipal property, municipal rights, municipal government rights, I guess is the best way to say that. Um, thank you. Thank you for supporting us in that way.

Thank you. Great.

Thank you, Councilmember Muelstein. So you talked a little bit about water rights or water being a big issue that's going to come up in the interim session. How is the state planning on balancing that growth that you just talked about, this push for growth and the need for water for the Great Salt Lake? I'm very interested in knowing what that plan looks like or the legislature's point of view on that.

How long can I have? Can I have a few minutes? Maybe answer that.

Was that just—

I don't want to be—

Let me share something. Let me just share. My grandfather ran for— he was on the city council around 1950, ran for mayor in that timeframe. And he says, we need to create a good water system for Orem. And he was beaten. His opponent says, you're going to bankrupt the city. Well, Orem has one of the most remarkable water sources of any municipality because what we did for 75 years ago in buying up the water rights of the agricultural users and then addressing and making that available. It's—

we—

Orem will never run out of water. Orem will be the last place in Utah to run out of water. I'll just— but the same is true. 80 of the 100% of rainfall that comes, 90% of it goes in the ground and refreshes Freshes our groundwater and then evaporates. That 10%— I'm just using rough numbers— 80% of that 10% left is in agriculture right now. And so we need to do all we can to utilize best practices in there. We will have, as we take care of agriculture— and the nice thing is, as we improve the systems in agriculture, the water, the value of the water that's saved can pay for the improvements. And help that. So that— there's, there's a real good model there. A million acre-feet—

I don't—

a million acre-feet would, would raise this Great Salt Lake 1 foot. We feel that we need about 400 additional— 400 additional— 400,000 additional acre-feet. We've already identified to keep Utah Lake stabilized. We've already identified 160,000 acre-feet. One of the things One of the things that I have asked, I'm requiring our water development at the Great Salt Lake and several to come, we'll have several reports. We're going to dial this in. That's the question exactly. Let's agree what we need and how we're going to get there. For example, if we change the grading on the west side of the Great Salt Lake so that water runs into the lake instead of out in the desert, that is projected to provide another 60,000 acre-feet.

Thank you.

If we do away with the non-native plants around Great Salt Lake in Jordan, when we had two years ago when we had that great water year, we had to take water from Utah Lake through our canal system because the Jordan River was so choked with non-native growth. We take care of that non-native growth, and that adds another 80,000 acre feet. So we're doing. We purchased the magnesium plant there that had tremendous— about 100,000 acre-feet of water. We are really focusing, and as we just lift together and not use fear, I would say not use fear and some of the narratives we see, if we're wise stewards, we're going to— we will weather this and do it well. So those are— how's that? That's—

I could go on.

That was like a little skip along. I could go into lots of— take The whole meeting, if you'd like.

It's an issue I could talk about for hours as well. But thank you for representing Orem well. We really appreciate you.

Well, you have— we have a great story. We just need to get the rest of the state to do what Orem does. We'll be in good shape. So that's something to say to that.

Right.

Thank you. Anybody, any other council? Okay. Councilmember Lamson.

Well, we have a kind of a special opportunity here, Kevin. You have your sweetheart here with you this evening. And we just want to say thank you to both of you for your service and for your example and the way that you've led. Not only you, I know that your sweetheart is right there with you all the way, and she sacrifices a lot of things so that you can do what you do. So thank you to both of you. That is very kind. And I, you know, maybe I could ask Ruby. Ruby, would you stand up? She, bless her heart, we have been blessed At this point in life with 23 grandchildren.

Imagine that.

And Ruby's one of them, and it's Grandpa and Grandpa's birthday date with Ruby. So thank you for that. But we need— she's here.

She'll say— So Ruby, you need to talk to your grandparents about what constitutes a fun birthday. Okay, but we're fun, but, but there's something more fun for you. Trust me.

We want to be balanced, old mayor. Remember, balance is a good civic.

Yes.

So we're gonna— if you'll excuse us, we're gonna go continue our date.

But I am—

I'm so grateful. I do want to thank your families and your support group. And, uh, I, I remember— I remember Jerry Washburn, Mayor Washburn. I happened to be at his house. I was visiting, and, uh, he came home and he said, a terrible thing has happened. Jim Reams had left council meeting and had a heart attack just over here, and he passed away. And, uh, Jerry's, uh, he's— I call him my brother because we have a sweet familial relationship. But, but I recognized the work and effort of the wonderful staff and went to play basketball with some of them and other things, and no others. But we've got a wonderful city But really, compliment to who you are and what you're doing. But we do need to take time to thank those that support us. And I know, Jeff, for you and your sweet wife have been through during your time of service, and that, that's true with so many others. So thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And happy birthday, Ruby. Go have some fun. Thank you, Senator. Appreciate you taking the time to come this evening.

Honored to be with you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Senator. Mayor and council, if I can also just add from staff's perspective, in non-public meetings, Senator Stratton is super great to work with, always responsive, always listens, is always helpful, and is great at promoting the Orem way, uh, with the— along with the Utah way.

So, thank you. The Orem way. All right, thank you. Okay, the next item on our agenda is item 7.2, is a presentation The Green Grant Award. Blake is—

Blake.

Oh, there's Blake. Blake Linelli from— he's the Public Sector Solutions Manager for Waste Management of Utah. Welcome.

Hi, Council, Mayor. First and foremost, thank you for having me out. I always say I've got the best job. I get to give out checks and do all that fun stuff. So over the years, Orem has done a great job around recycle education, and we're happy to announce that you're the recipient of the Green Grant Award this year. And kudos to you, as you know, over the years you've been able to maximize the funds given by Waste Management to continue the recycle education. And items like the Top 10 in the Bin, our film plastic pilots, all of those have been pioneered by Orem. So Greatly appreciative, appreciative of that, and would like to give you a check for $5,000.

Oh, I don't think we'll turn that down. Okay, so how do we— do I go down? Okay. Okay, council, just know that we have a lot of these require pictures, so make sure there's no cilantro in your teeth because we've got to take some pictures.

Together.

Thank you.

I'm gonna have you go this way just a little bit. Perfect. And then, Linnea and Jeff, can you actually switch spots? Is that okay? Okay, we got it.

Thank you.

Thanks, Blake.

Thank you.

Thanks, Blake.

Thank you.

All right, our next item is 7.3. It's a presentation, Arbor Day proclamation and video. So we'll invite Bradley Day, our Community and Sustainability Officer, to do the presentation. Thank you.

Thanks much.

Mayor and Council, it has to be said, Orem really loves its trees.

Just this past weekend, the My Hometown Days of Service happened, and during that, the My Hometown communities, both Sharon Park and Geneva Park, we were able in Geneva Heights, we were able to plant some trees in their respective parks. It was a lovely experience. You all just participated at the start of work session with helping plant the new Freedom Tree.

And we have so many other trees just going up on this campus alone.

It's fantastic. For Arbor Day and as part of a Tree City USA, the city has this presentation, and we will share it for you now. It's famous for being Family City USA. But did you know that Orem is also Tree City USA? In fact, I have here in my hand a letter from the National Arbor Day Foundation designating Orem a Tree City USA for the 33rd year in a row.

The role of the urban forester is to maintain all of the trees on city property.

There's roughly 7,000 that we maintain in parks, parkways, buildings, medians.

But Orem's commitment to planting Planting, caring for, and celebrating trees goes back way farther than that. In fact, in the very first City Council meeting of May of 1919, one of the first official acts of the new city was to hire someone to care for the trees. And here we are, 107 years later, more committed to trees than ever.

Our long-term goal is we need to do 1,000 trees in 5 years. Trees are important for the urban environment. They lower Air temperatures, they sequester carbon, they filter stormwater to help reduce how much runoff we get. They also beautify the city and give people a place to interact out in the public setting.

The 4 standards set forth by the Arbor Day Foundation to qualify as a Tree City USA are: maintain a tree board or department, check.

Ours is the Natural Resources Advisory Commission.

Have a community tree ordinance, check.

At least $2 per capita on urban forestry.

Check. Celebrate Arbor Day. I'm signing the official city Arbor Day proclamation right now, so check and check. We're excited to celebrate Arbor Day this year with a few extra special events. We're planting trees in city parks as part of My Hometown Days of Service. We're planting a new Freedom Tree right here in the new Freedom Plaza to honor our veterans. We're planting hundreds of trees on the City Center campus to make sure the heart of our city is green and clean. Stay tuned for more ways that you can help bring more trees to Orem. Happy Arbor Day, Orem! Thank you very much. Happy Arbor Day. All right, so we've got a— I don't have the proclamation here, but you saw me holding a letter in that video. Yeah, so Arbor Day, we do have the tree initiative coming up from the Natural Resources Advisory Commission that we have. And, and, and like Bradley said, we did plant a new freedom tree out in the, out in the Freedom Plaza. And so you can see that out there if you go out there this, this evening. It's brand new, just hanging out. And so, Council, anything, anything you want to say about Arbor Day?

Go trees!

Okay. All right, thank you. Our next presentation is Fire Appreciation Day. And so I just— this title made me think about when I grew up camping, and when I would— with the campfire, I really appreciated fire, probably enough to really scare my mom and dad. But anyway, I don't think that's what you mean here by appreciating fire.

That's not what we mean.

But no, I did appreciate it. But turn I'm going to turn the time over to our Fire Chief Mark Sanderson.

Thank you, Mayor and Council.

I just want to—

following that presentation, I just want to assure you that we have the sharpest chainsaws and we have the best firefighters in the event that a tree catches on fire, that they can fall that tree wherever it needs to be safely. That's how good they are.

That's great.

Yeah, this is an opportunity for me, and I appreciate any time that I can get in front of you or Our citizens to brag about our fire department or show the personal appreciation that I have, as well as the support you have for them, it's an opportunity that I'll take every day. And so I actually, first of all, want to start off with just thanking our command staff for joining me tonight and supporting this presentation, along with Chief Dave Chase and our C Platoon crew. And we're very fortunate. I haven't heard the pages go off and I haven't seen anybody leave in an emergency. So I'm going to try to talk Fast so that we can keep them all here. But I appreciate them taking the time out of their busy day that allows us to do this. This actually is falling on the heels of our quarterly awards that we did yesterday, today, and then we'll finish up on Thursday. And it leads right into Fire Appreciation Day, which is May 4th. And I'm going to give you some background that initially we've turned Fire Appreciation Day into what was previously called International Firefighters Day. Which is a day of remembrance, recognition, support, and celebration where current and past firefighters are recognized, especially those who have fallen in the line of duty. This day began in 1999 after 5 Australian firefighters were killed during their attempt to battle a wildfire on the outskirts of Melbourne, Victoria area. After their deaths, J.J. Edmondson was a volunteer lieutenant firefighter in Victoria, Australia, rallied to coordinate this day as a national and international day of recognition and remembrance of those firefighters. The day of May 4th was also chosen as it's linked to the feast day of Saint Florian, which is the patron saint of all firefighters. Saint Florian was first known— was the first known commander of one firefighter squad in the Roman Empire. He ultimately lost his life while in the protection of others. St. Florian is widely recognized as a symbol of the fire service. International Firefighter Day is observed in many ways. It is represented by a red and blue ribbon, like I'm wearing now, which symbolically links the main elements of firefighters' work with red to fire and blue to water. And these colors are also known internationally and recognized as representing emergency services. So with that, Mayor, the Orem Fire Department would like to publicly thank you and the members of the council and Brandon and his exec staff and our leadership team for their continued support, because without that, the men and women of our fire department wouldn't be able to deliver the amazing firefighter skills, levels of service, along with our critical care paramedic program.

Thank you.

What I have— staff has prepared a ribbon with our logo that I would like to present to each one of you that I hope that you can place on yourselves tonight and then wear over the next week when appropriate, just in appreciation for the men and women of our fire department.

All right, thank you. Well, we appreciate the work you and, and your teams do, so I do want to We, I, uh, we 3 attended the, uh, Platoon— Platoon A, was it— award yesterday, recognition. And we were in B shift, B shift, and we missed the one today because we were in City Council meeting. But I do want to congratulate those of you who received service awards and, and other— were there any new fire— brand new, new firefighters that have met their probation that were actually—

Talented Peterson, Amy's son, was recognized.

And Amy, even in her condition, not feeling well today, came in and was able to pin Talon's badge on his chest.

Is Talon here tonight?

Talon is here.

Talon, I'm going to put you on the spot. Can you stand up?

Well, at this point, Mayor, what I would like to do is I would just ask everybody within—

I was gonna make him feel embarrassed.

I'd like them all to stand up.

Well, I'll stand up.

And that gives us the opportunity to just show our appreciation to each one of them for the service they provide this community.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

And Talon's actually on a call, Mayor.

Okay, I was gonna say Talon was spared embarrassment that you can— yes. Yes, thank you.

Would it be appropriate, Mayor, if, if the guys that were here, that— could we have a picture with them?

Sure, yes, come on up.

Yeah, and members of command staff, if you'll join, and we'll just have a picture and then we can close. Thank you for your time.

Oh.

Thank you. Okay. Which we're probably gonna have to do 2 rows. Yeah. Yeah. You guys come in the front, maybe even— Okay, let's see. Can I have my glove?

Yeah.

Yes.

All right, squeeze in.

Sorry, one more.

It's a big group. We got it. All right, thank you.

Mayor, I would just like to ask that the C Platoon be excused just so they can get back to business.

Okay, thank you. All right, the next item on the agenda is a presentation on National Drinking Water Week, which I think goes well with fire appreciation. We just have this kind of element thing and fire going on stuff. And so we have Chris Shirkey. He is going to be presenting on National Drinking Water Week, which is May 3rd through 9th. And also Reed Price will be presenting And Quinn Fenton.

And Quinn Fenton, he's our water manager.

Oh, again, I'm sorry, those of you who are here, you get to see another video with me in it. And so, but it's, it's very short. Well, my part's short.

This one's even better though.

The next city council meeting.

Bye-bye.

Pierre?

Pierre?

Today we're starting our fine collection of autumn leafy bits spring collection. Thank you.

How does Orem produce such delicious drinking water?

Mayor, I'm glad you asked.

With an Orem water manager, what is the secret here?

Mayor, that's the work of— starts by having good source water. We're very fortunate, 40% of our water comes from groundwater sources that include Spring water. About 15% of our water annually runs right on the side of Timpanogos, and we're fortunate to have that pristine source that close to our town. On years like this where it's dry, we have a good portfolio where we can choose more well water if there's not as much snowpack in town, thanks to decision makers and leadership and councils in the past that have set us up in a good spot. And our team consists of nearly 25 people. That are committed to providing quality water, from backflow control to pulling over 1,400 bacteriological samples in a year. People that just take pride in their job and are willing to work around the clock. We follow guidelines from federal, state, and local codes that help us provide safe quality drinking water. 3 years ago, the state came and did a survey on our water system.

We have a perfect score with no deficiencies.

They'll have another survey this year, expect to be in the same position. In order to keep that water safe and clean in the future, we will need to rely on our team and our public works leadership to ensure that we follow master plans and complete capital improvement projects that will put future residents In the same position that we are today, to where they can buy a safe glass of water.

Thanks for that great information. I hereby proclaim May 3rd through 9th as National Drinking Water Week. Here's the H2Oram. Thank you for showing— you surprised me by appearing on— suddenly appearing on my couch in my office. All right.

So, Mayor, we just wanted to say thank you for your support for our human resources and our capital resources that are necessary to continue to provide water, safe water, drinking water sources for us today and well into the future. We have Great plans, and we support— and we appreciate your support of those plans and moving forward into the future. There are times in years like these when we have drought conditions where we are especially appreciative of that support and of the, the blessed area that we live in with these amazing water resources. So, so thank you.

Thank you. Would you mind taking 30 seconds and telling those who are here this evening about Can you tell us about the new water reuse facility that even gives us more drinking water?

Sure, because we're not using it to water parks and golf courses. Yeah, the city recently completed a project that's been—

was envisioned over 20 years ago when, when city officials approached the state and sought permission to reuse the wastewater that comes down to the waste wastewater treatment plant. Over the years, we've made plans to do that, and about 5 years ago started to pursue that, that goal in earnest. We completed the facility, which will—

which has the capacity of treating 15 million gallons per day.

We don't need that much right now, but we built it to be able to provide that at some point in the future. Um, so, uh, by reusing water, that leaves water up in our storage facilities in the mountains or underground in our deep wells. So we're—

we get to use the water twice.

Right now we're using it to irrigate at Sleepy Ridge Golf Course as well as Lakeside Sports Park and, and soon Springwater Park as well. So that's a— Um, Great investment that we've made, one that, uh, 20, 30, 50 years down the road, uh, we believe that, that the, that the, that our residents will, like we are grateful for the, uh, investments that have been made in the past, will, will be grateful for that facility as well.

Right. Thank you, Quinn. Thank you for you and your team for For working to have such wonderful drinking water for us. Appreciate it. Council, do you have any? Okay, Councilmember Gail. Crystal and I were just talking that we didn't even know that National Drinking Water Week was a thing, but we're really glad it is. And I think since I've been on council now going on, this is my 3rd year, I think, um, I have been just constantly marveling at the work that the public works team does. And I just, I turn on the faucet and there's water, and I just am so grateful. So thank you.

Thank you for what you do.

In the words of Bobby Boucher, we have some high-quality H2O.

Can I ask one question? Just since we're coming into the spring, and Chris, you addressed this last year, in my area we had bubbles in our water and people were concerned that that was a negative. But my understanding was we addressed that and said, no, that's kind of what happens when we have water from our springs, the early mountain, the early runoff. Would you just kind of explain that a little bit, or, um, yeah, Quinn, yeah, just so our residents understand?

So sometimes we get air in the spring water. There's a couple different causes. Number one, the water is so cold where it runs out of the mountain that that temperature change will make little oxygen bubbles in the water, and then on certain years in real high-flow conditions, sometimes We've seen as much as 5,000 gallons a minute running out of the side of Timpanogos, and we're putting that right down into the tank.

And then with minimal treatment, just a little bit of chlorine, it goes right to the residents and they're drinking pure spring water.

But with that, you might get micro bubbles in the water when the flows are so high and the water's so cold.

That's your Rocky Mountain High fresh water, right?

Okay.

Mayor and council, with your permission, I think that, uh, next— this time next year, we should have Pierre and Quinn bring some H2Orem water bottles as gifts for everyone at the council meeting. What do you say?

I agree. Just like warm water right out of the mountain. Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

The next item on our agenda is item 7.6, Utah City Managers Association Awards for the Traffic Tiger Team and Jenica Jones, Strategy and Innovation— Innovations Manager. So we'll turn the time over to Carrie Rugg, our Deputy City Manager. Thank you, Mayor. I'd like to invite the Tiger Traffic Team members that are here as Well, as Jennica to come up, and I want to share a little bit about these awards. They're pretty cool. So once a year, the Utah City Managers Association meets the same week as the ULCT conference, so right before you guys came down. And once a year, they choose 3 awards to be given, and 2 of the 3 awards this year came to the City of Orem out of all of the cities and towns in Utah. So we're very proud of these accomplishments. So the first one goes to the Orem Tiger Traffic Team. This was the brainchild of City Manager Bren Bybee, Public Works Director Chris Shirkey, and Transportation Engineer John Doherty. This team was created to alleviate traffic issues and patterns in Orem that were frustrating residents. This cross-departmental team is made up of the following employees: Taylor Forbush, Traffic Operations Manager; John Dorney, Transportation Engineer; Bill Peterson, Streets Manager; Tyler Pay, former Assistant Public Works Director; Chris Shirkey, Public Works Director; Taggart Bowen, City Engineer; and a representative from the Police Department, Fire Department, and City Manager's Department.

This team meets biweekly to review traffic issues and comes up with solutions.

Congratulations to the Tiger Traffic Team. So their award was Program Excellence in a City. Then Jenica Jones received the Emerging Leader of the Year Award. In 2023, Jenica Jones was named as the division manager of the newly created Strategy and Innovation Division for the City of Orem. Prior to this role in a split especially in this role, Jenica has proven herself to be an emerging leader of the highest caliber in local government. Under her leadership, the division has become a central hub of problem-solving and solution-focused research and innovation for every department and division for the city. Her division oversees grant writing for the city, securing millions of dollars in just 2 years. Furthermore, she provides compensation studies for all full-time city employees, data dashboards, and heads steering committees. On any given day, Jenica's team is directly contacted by a division or department within the city for assistance of a problem. These problems cover anything from organizational to financial to HR. The greatest testament to Jenica's worth— work ethic and acumen is the fact that every member of the executive staff trusts her and comes to her for assistance with perplexing problems they face. She leads her team with humility, kindness, empathy, kindness, kindness, empathy, hard work, and especially by example. Orem City is incredibly fortunate to have Jenica in their ranks. Watching her emerge as a local government leader is not only inevitable, it's a joy. Congratulations to you all. And we'd like to get a picture of you guys with your awards with the council.

Okay, perfect.

You got it. Congratulations. I do have to say, at the Utah League of Cities and Towns conference, which was held right after this— it began pretty much the same day or within a day of the conference where these awards were given— I had the mayor of a community in the Salt Lake Valley text me and say, we need to talk about your traffic Tiger Team. And we need— so they want to come down and watch you deliberate. Not to put pressure on you, but the mayor and their staff want to come and learn because it's something that's been so successful for us here in Orem that other communities are interested in it as well. As this item is the mayor's report and items referred by council, I'm just going to take a moment and just share a couple of other pieces of information not on the agenda for you here in the public. You know, we— one of the priorities we have at the city is economic development, and right, we've been without an economic development director, and we've just hired a new Economic Development Director, and he'll be starting on May— May the 4th. That's it, May 4th. And we look forward to him coming and, and sharing his expertise. He has a lot of experience outside of the state of Utah, and— but has, has roots here in Utah as well. And so we look forward to having— his name's Garrett— look forward to Garrett joining our team. We also, as a city, a part of— Jenica, I'm going to put Jenica on the spot here. One of the things that we do get emails about and have people come for public comment about the future of the North Union Canal. And the city did receive a grant of over $100,000 for a study to, to look at the North Union Canal. And so I want to I want to extend my appreciation to Jenica and her team and others who participated in, in getting that grant for us so we can look at what some of those options are. All right, we'll move on to number 8, our consent items. We have 2 items on the consent calendar this evening. First one is approval of the meeting minutes for March 10th, 2026, April 14th, 2026, and April 15th, 2026. And And that was our very first joint Tippanogos School District meeting, which was very— I thought was very good and very productive. And item 8.2, an appointment to the Recreation Advisory Commission. I see Chrissa here, Chrissa Robertson. Is Stephanie here? Oh, there's Stephanie. Okay. Would you mind, guys, would you mind standing up for just a moment? We, on our consent calendar, we are going to vote on appointing these 2 fine community members to our Recreation Advisory Commission. So I would entertain a motion for consent items. Mayor, I move that we approve the consent items as outlined. Right, we have a motion. Is there a second?

Second.

Right, thank you. A motion and a second. We'll go ahead and start with Councilmember Gale.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Quinn, it's your turn.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Right.

Thank you. Passes unanimously. Welcome. Appreciate your service for— to the Recreation Committee and to the city. Thank you. All right, the next item on our agenda are public appearances. So, looking at the list, we've got quite an extensive list. This evening. And I noticed we have, we have 2 people who would like to talk about water drainage, and everybody else would like to— oh, we've got somebody who wants to talk about street safety, and, and then everybody else would like to speak about short-term rentals and Airbnbs. So I ask, we will give you— we'll invite you to take up to 3 minutes. One of the One of the things I just— I politely ask is that I noticed that some of you have spoken numerous times before the City Council. Of course, you're always welcome to speak again, but just to remind you that your comments are already on the public record. And so if you don't want to take all 3 minutes, that's fine. But we'll go ahead, and I'm going to start with Nicole Smith, and then Elsie's after Nicole. Thank you.

Hello.

So as you know, I'm not here to talk about Airbnbs. Um, my house is one of 2 houses that sits on a cul-de-sac that's currently being developed by Patterson Homes into the Belmont West property.

And I want to preface by saying we actually really like the development.

The houses are beautiful, um, and my husband and I are excited to have a cul-de-sac for our kids to play in. Um, but we are a bit concerned about the water drainage. And the houses have been built up about 3 or 4 feet above the 2 existing houses on the cul-de-sac. And even with the rain yesterday, we saw some of it drain into— it's currently an empty lot, but they're planning on building a house next to it.

And so we're worried that with the drainage, it'll come onto our property, and our property could potentially flood, given that we are so far below.

And like many of you, I assume we have a basement that we're worried about the floodwater running into. And so we're hoping that the developer can be required to put in some kind of drainage system. system so that we do not have the water runoff issues that we foresee happening. All right, thank you. Um, Mr. McGinn, is that who— would you mind following up with, with them, with, with Ms. Smith? And I think, um, Ms. Calls, probably you will have the same— we'll be discussing the same thing. I'll give you their contact information. Good, welcome. Thank you, Mayor and Council. My home is on the north side of the west side of the Belmont West development, and as Nicole said, the homes are built quite a lot higher than our homes are. And, um, I went out yesterday and looked, and from From the activity pad that they have beside the garages, there's about a 45-degree angle—

excuse me—

down to my fence. And then my fence is— on the other side of the fence is flat, and I have 2 bedroom windows on that side. And I I am likewise concerned about the drainage and hope that we'll be able to have something done about that. As Nicole said, they're beautiful homes, and we're excited to see who gets to live in them. And, uh, we hope that we'll be able to work something out on that line.

Thank you.

All right, thank you. Mayor, can I make a comment about that too?

Sure.

So there's a number of subdivisions where that issue, the one on 1600 North, the other Belmont East, I think, done by Patterson's. Those are more like 8 feet out of the ground, higher than the— 6 to 8 feet higher than the homes that they back up against. The Canyon Park development, the 2 buildings they took down there, I've received, um, you know, calls from residents. The west side, uh, Crystal, what are those, 6 feet higher again, 8 feet? Um, this is a— an issue that I, I concur with. Those storms, yes, that we had yesterday, um, there's an obvious problem. So just to kind of add that to the list of something that we need to address as a council. Okay, thank you. Uh, Mr. McGinn, I just took a picture of the sheet and, and texted it over to you so you have, you have their contact information. Thank you. All right, Madeline. Is it Madeline Dorton? Is that correct? All right, Madeline, welcome.

Thank you.

Dear Madam Mayor and honorable members of the Orem City Council, I am Madeline Dorton, a student in 5th grade at Orchard Elementary. I am here to bring a safety concern to your attention and offer a solution. I walk along the road 950 North between 600 East and 700 East, right in front of Canyon View Junior High, to get to school, and my parents often drive along that road. Problem: I have noticed that cars cannot park on the north side because of the fire lane, so they must park their cars on the south side. This is a problem because there is not enough space to park cars on the south side and have cars driving east in that south lane.

This is because the south side lane is only 16 feet wide and the north side is 23.5 feet wide.

Solution: to solve this problem, I'm proposing that this street centerlines be repainted so that the lanes are equal at 19.75 feet, which should be in the middle. This act will help cars driving on the south side of the street drive safely and not need to drive over the centerline.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you.

Thank you for bringing that to our attention. Mr. Shirkey, I will text you the copy of, of Ms. Dorton's information so you can follow up with her on that. So thank you. All right, next we have Jenny— is it Hannabom? Oh, I'm glad I said that right.

You did.

Oh, good. Welcome. Oh, I apologize.

Um, you did get that right.

Thank you.

Not many people do. My name is Jenny Hanbaum, and I am Grandma Jenny to very important people in my life.

Um, this morning I was driving my grandson to his school And he turned to me and he said, Grandma, did you know that an art teacher in my, um, uh, in the school that I'm going to go to next year, the junior high, was arrested for sexual abuse of some of the children? And I looked at him and I said, no, I did not know that. And I was kind of upset. So I dropped him off and I went home. And pulled in my little grandma house, which is very small house, and I have an Airbnb right next door to me, and it is 24 feet and a couple of inches. Their wall is 24 feet and a couple of inches away from my back door. My husband, or Papa Mike to some important people. Um, and I, we live there, and people come in and they're there for a night or 2 and then they're gone. We don't know who these people are. We don't know where they come from. All over the world, who knows? We make jokes about it. And after today, I kind of felt like, after what my son said, Orm City is Family City, USA. Um, And I was upset and worried about who was coming in because I don't know, when that house went up for sale, we were in the neighborhood real excited and happy to hear about it, about, you know, these people. And we thought we will be getting a really cute family, which will be a little family to add to our neighborhood. Instead, we got an Airbnb.

And, um, Um, I've under—

I've learned a lot in just the past little while, and let me tell you some of the stuff that I've heard. That, um, outside investors increase and increase local rental costs because Airbnbs and VRBO get vacation rental rates. Increase in home prices, home purchase prices by reducing owner-occupied house stock. It degrades our neighborhoods, sometimes with partying noise and stranger danger, including uncontrolled access of— for uncontrolled access of pedophiles, sex offenders, and even possibly felons, drug dealers, and terrorists of various sorts. Overflow of our street parking, and it reduces public school student body in our new district by occupying housing stock for purposes that do not include full school year occupancy of families with children. There are 527, I believe, houses, Airbnbs, and vacation homes in Orem. Those homes could be full of a family. We are having family housing shortages. Here's a start.

And That I'm sorry, this is very nerve-wracking.

And so of those 527 homes, I've heard some stories that they one one lady said that an Airbnb person, a man, she found him in her. Yard talking to her 5-year-old daughter. Not acceptable.

And another one of a home up on—

up that has a swimming pool, they woke up one night with a bunch of people in their swimming pool. And I don't know if you've already heard about that.

I listened a little bit to your, um, to your previous, um, meeting, and it was, it was a little bit—

it was very interesting.

But I would like to share Those thoughts with you.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Appreciate you coming this evening. I'll see if I can make it back to my seat. Oh, you're gonna be fine. Thank you. Um, next we have David Buseith. Welcome.

Thank you, Mayor, and Council.

I'm grateful to be here and grateful for all you do.

My name is David Buseith, and I have been thinking about Rentals in residential zones in Orem for the past 8 years, wondering how we can discourage investor ownership of single-family homes, tamp down on illegal rental usage of owner-occupied single-family homes, enforce current accessory dwelling unit laws, and avoid zone changes that Increase population density in our city. All of these things are important to me as a resident of Oron because of creeping urbanization. It degrades our family-friendly neighborhoods, in my opinion. From my experience living 25 years in Southwest Oron and 6 years in Northeast Oron, the decay, to my eye, has It's been horrible and accelerating, as evidenced by school closures, traffic, and to my eye, yard upkeep. For the past year, maybe 2, you have been debating whether and how to allow short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO in the city, considering that transient lodging is not permitted land use in residential zones, but it It is increasingly common. It's incomprehensible to me that there would be any tendency toward further urbanization. STRs would add to that pressure. Yes, landlords would like to get high rental incomes, but the high rental incomes would attract even more investors. We need single-family homes for young families, in my opinion, with children to fill our schools, not vacationers. So I fully oppose STRs, and I recommend instead of doing— that instead of doing away with the longstanding ordinance against transient lodging in residential zones, that the city focus on discouragement of investor-owned houses and illegal rentals, including short-term rentals, through all legal means possible.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, we— next we have Nico Romney.

Hello.

Thank you so much for hearing us out here.

Um, I Uh, have 37 short-term rentals all throughout the state of Utah.

We have rentals from Ogden all the way down to St. George.

We actually operate in 15 different cities, so we just appreciate that the city is even willing to have a conversation and discuss this with us.

Just a little bit about us, we are very family-centered. Our homes are very much set up, encouraging families to stay in our homes, and encouraging people who are traveling for work, who are bringing economic development into our cities, and, and setting up our homes in that way.

We are very neighbor-conscious in anything that we set up. We encourage setting up quiet experiences for the renters.

We lean towards movie theater rooms and ping pong tables in basements versus hot tubs and other outdoor activities so that if there is any noise, the noise is contained within the home. We have, um, we have decibel meters in our homes so that we can catch it before neighbors catch it if there is an issue.

We We do encourage longer stays, um, as far as we push for at least a 2-day minimum. But most of our stays, we're seeing anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks is what we're pushing for.

The people staying for those times are people who are between real estate transactions. With such an interesting real estate market right now, many people are deciding to sell their home.

Mm-hmm.

and get it completely closed, renting an Airbnb, and then going out shopping for a home so that they don't have those contingencies and so that they can get into the home that they would like.

We push for these renters, we send reminders, and as far as I know, there's a lot of concern about who is in the home.

One thing that we What we do to help us just understand who is in the home is we do collect IDs. So we have photo identification for whoever is staying within the home. So if there were to be a problem that maybe the city gets involved or someone else is getting involved, we know exactly who was in the home and we can work with the city, we can work with the police department, and just encourage people to let us know who they are.

For the most part, we have families, we have people coming and staying, going to BYU graduations, BYU activities, UVU activities.

And so we just ask for fair regulation on it where you let us have it.

In my experience working with so many different cities, knowing where they are is one of the biggest things that helps a city to enforce the rules. If they know where it is and they have a license and they have the means to revoke those licenses if there are continued issues, then most of those issues are solved.

We have Park City, we have St. George, we have everywhere from Ogden to St. George.

So we just appreciate you guys.

Thank you.

Considering it. Thank you so much.

Nika, where do you live?

I live in Bluffdale.

We have cleaners in Orem. We have several team members all over Utah County.

How many homes do you own in Orem?

Uh, we have one in Orem.

Thank you.

All right, thank you. I see that your name's on here twice. Looks like different people wrote, uh, maybe someone signed up for you before, before you got here, so I'll just— okay, just want to make sure. Okay, um, thank you. Okay, Jordan Coway.

Hi, my name is Jordan. I've been here before and spoken, so I'm not going to speak too long, but, um, I'm from Orem, live in Orem, raising my kids in Orem, and, um, We had an Airbnb in our neighborhood. It's since been shut down, but I'm just still really passionate about the issue. But we're not here tonight to debate whether you enjoy short-term rentals or whether you use them or whether these hosts are 5-star hosts. We are here to decide whether or not short-term rentals are conducive to the building up of our city, and the answer is they're not. As I look back on what you as a city council have stated you represent and your desires for this city. Short-term rentals do not align with those remarks. Mr. Lamson, you've mentioned that you miss the quaint small town feel and want your kids and grandkids to be able to live here and appreciate neighbors. Short-term rentals take all those away. The STR home in our neighborhood outbid 2 families because when it's a business and making several thousand dollars a year, it's no problem. Mayor, you stated that you're not interested in building thousands more apartments or hundreds more apartments because we are already built out. What you're interested in is how can we make our neighborhood stronger and how we can bring more people into our neighborhoods that are going to be living here. Short-term rentals are not the answer. Jen, you stated hands down Orem's biggest strength are the people in the city, the citizens of Orem. Short-term rentals do not bring citizens to Orem. I'm not here tonight because I have money on the line. I'm here tonight because I genuinely am concerned I'm concerned about what allowing short-term rentals would do to our neighborhoods, what they're already doing to our neighborhoods. I'm concerned what they're going to do to our schools. With 522 operating already, that's about an average of 37.7 short-term rentals per elementary school boundary. That is devastating to our schools and the already declining enrollment. I know you all love the city or you wouldn't be up there on that stand. Please stand behind your words and keep Orem's neighborhood strong, full of families safe and make them a place where our children and grandchildren can live. No amount of profit justifies destroying our neighborhoods and city.

Thank you. Okay, next we have Stephanie Hathaway. Welcome.

Hi, my name is Stephanie Hathaway. I grew up in Orem and went to Timpanogos. I always dreamed of staying in Orem and raising my family here. I'm married to a state trooper, and I care deeply about our neighborhoods and community. I can't even begin to tell you what a nightmare the last year and a half has been spending all this time fighting these Airbnbs. I live next door to the second goat house, if you will, that the city shut down after about a year of running it as a whole home Airbnb. The main owner, David, who by the way does not live in Orem either, Got up here a few weeks ago trying to make it sound like he was an Orem resident when he isn't. He also got up here and lied and said we've sent in 750 complaints and tried making my husband and me feel very small for being renters in a house my parents helped us out to buy to raise our family in long term, and tried to compare it to his illegally rented out short-term rental, and that is not the same thing at all. The owners have been nothing but horrible and nasty once they knew we were going to fight them on it. And I have it on video proof that they lied to a police officer that came by and told him they'd been given a variance by the city, which again would be illegal, both lying to a cop and if they were given the variance by the city. They've lied to their guests. They've lied to our faces, which has made The guests be even more enemies to everybody on our street. We've dealt with them coming on people's property, arguing with us, flipping us off, calling us names, leaving trash everywhere, parking in front of our house, calling our neighbor's work to try to get him in trouble, ringing our doorbell because they throw their balls in our backyard, smelling marijuana smoke, swearing nonstop, and being so loud after hours it wakes my family upstairs in our bedrooms. They didn't take care of their lawn well, despite lying to me that they've— they spent $700 a month on it. Their trees are encroaching on our property. Their sprinkler system has flooded into our backyard because, again, the owners don't live there to monitor everything. Their lawn person mowed into our grass super short and scalped it, and they never made it right. Their guests would park school buses outside Where people can't see around corners driving by. And I'm not kidding, almost every other day they had a car blocking the sidewalk, which when I texted them, they didn't care at all about. One of their groups even left out open alcohol that was half full outside on a truck bed, and children could have easily grabbed it and drank it. Statistically, more homicides and drug deals and prostitution happens at Airbnbs And we've dealt with absolute hell from them. Unfortunately, if the city hadn't done the right thing and shut the home down after all the proof was sent in, we were definitely planning on teaming up and suing. Um, I might not be super rich, but my parents are, who own the house, and they sued their own city of Lyndon a few years ago for a similar neighbor house situation. They won the lawsuit, and I would hate to see that happen to the great city of Orem. Um, at any time in the future by angry residents, because I can guarantee you'll be seeing many of these same complaints I've listed happening again if you allow whole home Airbnbs. Uh, please allow for long-term families versus short-term profits. Thank you for listening, and I appreciate your time and service to the community.

Thank you. Um, Val Juarez. Um, thank you, Mayor and City Council. I want to read just a couple of things about the short-term rentals. I'm speaking as a resident who cares deeply about the city. I've been here for more than 65 years, so, uh, I think I'm a long-term resident. Not long ago Uh, the city council adopted a simple standard for major decisions, is to make Warren more Family City USA, not less. That filter brought clarity then, and it can bring clarity now. The econ— the, um, because let's be honest about what's actually on the table. This isn't just regulating short-term rentals. It's whether we open the door for our family neighborhoods to be commercialized. The economics aren't ambiguous. When short-term rentals expand, especially through platforms like Airbnb, housing supply contracts and prices rise. Homes stop being homes, they become income-producing assets. That attracts investors, drives valuations higher, and pushes young families out of the market. Um, now connect that to a promise that was made. Mayor McAnlis told this community that she would make housing more affordable for our kids and grandkids. Reducing supply and increasing investor demand, um, does the opposite. That's— that isn't opinion, it's the housing market, period. There's also a second consequence, one that cuts into the heart of who we are. Fewer families in our neighborhoods means fewer kids in the streets, fewer kids in our schools, fewer young families putting down roots here. That's the opposite of Family City USA. That, that's a different city than the one we built. And the one we want to live in. I speak plainly about something else. Once a policy like this passes, it's extremely difficult to walk back. People invest based on your vote, properties get converted, and the moment you try to reverse course, you're told it would be unfair to the people who relied on your decision. So yes, technically we can revisit this later, but in practice, you know, We set the direction for Orem for years. There's organized financial interest pushing hard for this outcome. They have lobbyists, lawyers, and platforms behind them. The residents of Orem do not. Your responsibility is not to those interests, but to the families that live here and raise their kids here and want to stay here. Orem's not— Orem's not a resort town. We don't need to turn family neighborhoods into vacation rentals. and inventory. What we need to do is protect the thing that makes the city different from every other place on the Wasatch Front. We all hope— we make a promise to keep Orem Family USA City, that we keep that promise. And when the vote comes, whether it's tonight or in the weeks ahead, that your decision will make that a slogan or a commitment. I have one more comment. This is from Actually, from personal, from my previous neighborhood I lived in, which I still have a lot of friends there. And I can— Lenee's been to her house, Crystal's been to her house, Mayor Young had been to her house, um, almost the whole council has been there. And it's a freaking disaster. This is a 2— it's a 2 roads in, one way out, um, like a cul-de-sac but 2 blocks.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, we have the BYU fan house in that neighborhood. I can tell you right now, it's the biggest disaster this side of Texas, and that's a heck of a long ways away. The neighborhood impact with short-term rentals is very significant. They take up all the parking on the street, they block driveways, they block garbage pickup, they put their own garbage in other people's garbage and make messes. They also impact the area where children can't ride their bikes on the street because there are too many cars. It's like a cul-de-sac, for crying out loud. There's not a lot of cars that go through there. This is ridiculous. And they bring, they bring in busloads of people to fill that house up. We're talking 60 kids in a house.

Why?

It's not a hotel. We're making, we're making community, community personal homes Into hotel rentals. Um, short-term rentals should not be in neighborhoods. They should be in areas where there are other, um, there are other long-term whatever rentals that can accommodate those things, not, not our areas. We have laws for long-term rentals. Um, no more than 3 unrelated people in a home. That's what our warm city long-term rental is. You can't have. So why do we get 60 people in a home for short-term rentals? Why do they get to have a family memorial service for grandma with 50, 60 people there? It's not a funeral home, crying out loud. And they spend a weekend smoking pigs and doing all kinds of stuff next door. So short-term rentals need to have rules. We need to not have them in our, in our communities, in our homes, in our neighborhoods.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, I just— okay, um, just want to just clarify something, that we're not going to be making a decision on short-term rentals this evening. The work session next week is discussion only. We're not going to be making decision next Tuesday when we continue our discussion from today, but we will hopefully have some more clarity and direction as to the timeline after, after next Tuesday. So just, just to clarify that. All right, Marcy Lynn Gibby. Hi, my name is Marceline.

I'm sorry.

No, it's okay.

I'm a stay-at-home mom and my husband is a doctor in the area. We have 2 boys, age 4 and 6. I'm against legalizing short-term rentals in Orem neighborhoods and would like to share my experience with you as a resident of Orem living next door to an STR.

We live in a great neighborhood and chose the neighborhood because it was family-friendly.

2 years ago, the family living next to us moved to Oregon and changed their roughly 5,000-square-foot home into an STR.

At the time, I tried to complain to the City of Orem, but when I called, they told me that STRs were allowed by Orem City, and I felt there was nothing I could do.

When we were—

we were then made to live in what is essentially— live by what is essentially a commercial hotel. Since the home has changed over to an STR, we've had multiple concerns.

The main issue is that we feel less safe in our home and in our yard.

We have 2 young children and we don't know who is going or coming. This happens just feet from our house. We've had people staying in our rental talk to our children over the fence, telling them things that disturbed and confused them. Our kids see people in the yard next to us and can't understand that they're not safe people and not our neighbors.

In addition to safety concerns in relation to our— into our children, we're also disturbed by the following: the property erodes neighborhood and community.

Instead of a neighbor living there, we have unknown and sometimes unfriendly occupants that come and go. The owner of the property does not live there and doesn't know what is happening on their property. At times, people stay in there, hold events, and fill the street with cars. While I appreciate regulations have been proposed by the council that would help with some of these concerns, none of these regulations would address my safety concerns in regard to my children.

If people are coming and going next door and talking to my children, this will not stop unless the STR is shut down.

At the very least, we must make sure that the STRs are owner-occupied. I have yet to hear a really good reason for jeopardizing the well-being and safety of families in Orem just to help a handful of STR owners.

The owners of these large STRs are lining their pockets, devaluing, devaluing, devaluing our neighborhoods and moving their own families to locations where they aren't affected by the changes in the neighborhood. I think we can do better for the families of Warm.

Thank you.

Thank you. Scott Johnson.

Mayor and City Council, thank you for this time.

Uh, as a 40-plus-year citizen of Orem, I rise to fully oppose STRs in the city of Orem, largely to maintain a safe and stable community for citizens.

STRs make it very difficult for law enforcement and local citizens to detect suspicious activity because of the transient nature.

You don't know who's there and whether they should be there or not be there. I personally have experienced or seen party houses, aggressive driving, a school bus dropping off untold numbers of people in our, in our neighborhood, and very noisy late night parties from an illegal STR in my community that's only 3 houses away.

And this is not uncommon according to statistics that are easily searchable. Um, when you look at it, party houses, nuisance calls, and noise complaints tend to cluster around STRs. So it's degrading the community's safety and also occupying our law enforcement's time to respond to these nuisance calls. Enforcement is very difficult even in owner-occupied settings because of limited resources to respond and the burden of the neighbors to enforce by complaint.

These are complaint-driven. Despite being meticulous, like the gentleman said, they do all these things to make sure that they have the right people in there.

You cannot— investors cannot guarantee renters are safe or reasonable and friendly people because there is far less care given by these individuals occupying a space for a short term compared to somebody who lives in that area full-time. In my opinion, I I really see this as normal little guys, normal families against wealthy investors. And so do we want to kowtow to wealthy investors, or do we want to be Family City USA and really maintain our families here and invite families who are going to make this their permanent residence in here into Orem City?

Um, lastly, enforcement becomes really difficult.

What kind of strict penalties will be enforced for those who have an STR that is problematic. I mean, we've, we've heard from several people how there's been multiple, multiple complaints, but there's no consequences. It's very difficult to get somebody out of there and get the home occupied by somebody else.

So thank you.

Thank you. Debbie Lamb.

Good evening.

I have, um, letters being passed out to you from other members, other residents in Orem. Some come from grandparents, teachers, single mothers, all opposing short So, um, as a dedicated resident of 44 years and a voter in Orem, I'm here to express my strong support for our current prohibition of short-term rentals. While the purpose to monetize neighborhoods is high, the cost of our community safety and long-term viability is far too steep. Our neighbors are meant to be homes. Our neighbors are Neighborhoods meant to be a place to live. are meant to be homes, not unlicensed hotels.

Allowing STRs fundamentally alters our city in several critical ways. First, it erodes the long-term homeownership.

When homes become STRs, we lose housing stock for people who volunteer for PTAs, look out for neighbors, or invest in Orem's future. Replacing permanent residents with a rotating door to transient turns our streets into ghost towns during the week and party hubs on weekends.

Thank you.

Second, it is about generational continuity. A city thrives when children can afford to buy homes near their parents. By maintaining the prohibition, you are protecting the ability for families to remain deeply rooted, ensuring our community remains a place where legacies are built and residents are invested for the next 50 years, not just for the weekend. Third, we cannot ignore public safety and quality of life. Quality of life. Data shows a correlation between STRs and increased noise, parking congestion, and strain on police resources.

Unlike permanent neighbors who respect communal boundaries, short-term guests lack the initiative to follow local norms.

Mayor McCandless, you asked how can we make neighborhoods stronger and bring in people who are actually going to live here. Keeping STRs out is the answer. Quinn, you said every neighborhood deserves a committee that provides input.

I'm on that committee. We asked our neighbors how they felt, and we are telling you we are against them.

Jeff, you spoke about preserving tight-knit community and the small-town feel. You can't have a tight-knit community with the house next door is a revolving door of strangers.

Chris, you mentioned in a Zoom call with Tammy and I That the financial situation of STR owners is not the council's responsibility. They can sell their homes or rent them out legally. Jen, you say that it is a hard—

this is a hard decision. With all due respect, it's not a hard decision at all.

There are over 90,000 residents in Orem.

Listen to those residents. We are tired of the housing shortage and the declining enrollment in our schools.

It's time the council listens to those of us who voted for You. We don't want short-term rentals.

Orem is a community, not a resort.

Stand firm.

Prioritize the people who call the city home over the interests of investors.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right, Tawny Merrill. Thanks for your time again. I know this is my 3rd time, but I really appreciate the time and effort the City Council has put into organizing the options that I saw at your planning meeting today.

I think they're great options, and I, I think they're very workable.

I have a few concerns, um, about the generalization of STRs in the City of Orem. That they make all communities bad and that most of the citizens in Orem are against them. And nobody's polled my community, my neighborhood. So I think if you did, then you would have different answers from my neighborhood.

And I'm wondering how many people have actually been polled to ask that question.

Would you or would you not like an STR in Orem if that's allowed?

Another generalization that I'm hearing over and over again, that this is a very profitable thing for people to do. It is not. In my case, we rent out my mother's home so that it's still available for family when they come to town.

And my rent for an SDR is very, very low.

I have a negative income at the end of the year for taxes because we don't make a profit, but we make enough to help with the expenses of keeping that home in our family so that when family does come to town, they have a place to stay and they don't have to go to a hotel.

Another thing that I'm wondering about is that if, if you had a family of 8 And they didn't have the option of an STR to come to Orem and stay in for a week. What would it cost them to stay in a hotel?

It would be prohibitive for a family of 8 to be in a hotel 7 nights, eat out every meal.

Can you imagine how much that would cost?

I had a family come last week for BYU graduation. They were there all week.

They had a family dinner Saturday night outside and had a barbecue, and I didn't even hear him, and I live right next door. And that's another thing I was wondering about, is in your proposal, um, you mentioned having the SDR be owner-occupied, and I'm just wondering what the definition of owner-occupied would be, because I live right next door.

I have a view overlooking The entire property. I can see everything that goes on there.

So I know, and I can, you know, if there were a problem, which there has never been, I've never had a complaint from any of my neighbors, and I have had good families stay. So I'm just saying that there are— I understand there are some that need to be shut down.

I totally agree.

They shouldn't be allowed in a family neighborhood.

But those of us that do it right, we should have the right to do that and to provide someplace for families to come to Orem to visit their family that lives here. Thanks for your time.

All right, thank you. All right, Casey, I'm— and I know your last name starts with a T, but I, I— if you—

true.

Oh, okay, I see it now.

Thank you.

It's a German spelling. You can blame my husband's family.

Okay.

My name is Casey True.

Thank you, council members, mayor, and neighbors and friends. I'm here to bring another perspective to the discussion.

I appreciate everything that's been shared.

I think there's a lot of valid concerns on both sides.

I'm not here to create further division of sides, but maybe create a little bit of additional context on a subcategory that I think has been missed. missing. My husband and I are both Orem natives. He was born here, raised here.

I was born here.

We've been living now together here for about 8 years. We've been married for 12. We're world champion ballroom dancers. And so our career is quite niche. And our goal was to become lifelong Orem citizens. This is where we have a lot of family. We have a lot of community, and we just love the family focus here and everything that the community offers. In order to be able to purchase a home here, we needed to have something That would allow us to supplement with rental income. When we were looking in the market 4 years ago, that's what everyone else wanted as well. And so home costs, obviously, as we know, are substantially high for people of my age. I'm 33, my husband's 34, and the generational gap of being able to purchase a home is just getting wider and wider. For us, there was no opportunity to have a legal long-term rental home that we could afford.

However, we have a property.

Mm-hmm. that has a basement suite, and we've been doing Airbnb ourselves in our international travels since 2014. That's allowed us to compete world over, contributed to our affordability to be able to get these national titles, and to now be involved in this community, both with both collegiate programs, a number of high school programs, and studios throughout the area and indeed the entire Mountain West. This opportunity to have an owner-occupied short-term rental space also allows us to host my family, I'm the oldest of 7 kids, and when we get together, it's quite a group. As you can imagine, we're all having more kids now, and to be able to gather, we need a place where we can at least sit us down for dinner. Therefore, if I had someone living permanently in my basement, I would have less space to be able to host my family. We do have an Airbnb guest who stays 2 nights every week. He lives up in Brigham City and shared the following thought with me to share With you. He says, I live in Logan but work in, uh, down in Utah County.

Instead of moving down, I stay in an Airbnb for 2 nights a week.

If I had to get an apartment or hotel, I'd be paying much more, and I can't afford to relocate my family, much less find another job. Um, it'd be a shame to lose this option. So I'm just asking that we continue to explore the opportunities of what owner-occupied means. Um, and we only host 2 guests. Guests in our home. Since it is our home and we have young children, I'm very scrupulous about who we invite into that space. And my neighbors have all been not only supportive but actually encouraging in our endeavors. We have plenty of parking and have had nothing but positive experiences both as Airbnb renters ourselves internationally and also here locally.

One other benefit about people coming into our home is that they bring business to the Orem community.

So by being able to come here and stay, whether to support BYU or UVU sporting events, coming for family weddings, graduations, etc., they're contributing to the economy of our area. And it'd be a shame to have, obviously, the many negative effects coming in from outside investors and properties that are dangerous to the locals. But it also likewise be a shame to have local residents buying in good faith with support of the city when we called to purchase this home. We checked if it was possible, and, and we want to raise our family here, but we won't be able to if we don't have that opportunity to supplement our income. So, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Right, Theresa Horn.

Hello.

So, I have lived in my home since 1998. I have rented it, you know, to little families and everything. And then probably about, oh, 3 years ago, I decided I'd go ahead and try the VRBO. I have loved the VRBO. I can tell you the families that I had— yes, you interviewed the families, you're excited for them to move in, but you have those arguments.

I've had the police called just having a full-time person living there.

I haven't had any problems at all with VRBO.

My home, it is owner-occupied, and, you know, that's something that I love.

I love chatting with the people that are coming to our city. Again, they are, you know, going out dining, giving Orem, you know, that income too.

But I also pay the taxes through VRBO.

Um, I feel, you know, it's both sides. I could always raise my rent and rent it full-time, But I feel with VRBO, I'm losing a little less money, but it's less wear and tear on my house. And so as you do the work sessions, and I listened to the one that you were doing today, I think you have some pretty good options in there. So I agree with the party homes. Most of my neighbors didn't even know I had VRBO. There's homes in our neighborhood too that I didn't know they had VRBO. Those are the ones that are doing it right. We are also starred by VRBO, and I can say I have the, you know, 10 stars. I've not had complaints. And so I feel that's important for you guys to understand too. Like, I feel there should be a happy medium where we could all come together. And, you know, I liked the fines that you guys were discussing in your work meeting. I think that's a good option. I appreciate it. Thank you. And our last person is Chris Hammond.

Thank you, Mayor and City Council.

I know you've heard from me before, so I'll be as brief as possible. Uh, once again, I have a legacy Airbnb.

I have cameras, so anything that happens on the property, I'm notified immediately. I wanted to bring a couple of data points to you tonight. Number one, occupancy rates for short-term rentals is about 50%. So 50% of the time, a short-term rental has no one there. So we are saving money on utilities water usage by using a short-term rental.

Second, I have an associate—

I know it's come up on several things— who is over sober living in Utah County.

And, um, on a whim, I thought I'm going to talk to you about this.

And I asked her if she felt like there would ever be a reason for sober living to sue a city based upon occupancy, and she said no. Number one, One, it's government money, and number 2, increasing the number in a sober living home would be not recommended because of the people that are there and the fact that they need to be supervised. Plus, sober living is either a 60 to 90-day stay, and when you ask AI about the comparison, short-term rentals and sober living, there's no comparison. Thank you. Comparison. It's apples to oranges. Um, another thing that has been brought up, the 527 number is over-exaggerated because homes are listed more than once on Airbnb, so it's much less than that. There was the Senate Bill 108 that was just passed that says that short-term rentals are legal and So I would suggest that as you do your information, you look into that. Um, it provides— it protects short-term rental platforms like Airbnb as, um, patchwork of local regulations threatens the ability to take them away.

I'm sorry, what was the bill number again?

It's bill number 108. Now, part of the reason why that was sent to me, my doctorate is in special needs. And one of the things that was brought up in that bill as someone was reporting it is that short-term rentals provide an opportunity for people with disability members of their family to have a place where they can have things that are protected so their children are protected and they can go forward in providing the meals and the things that they need versus being in a hotel. Um, also, as far as declining from the access to homes, we have over 150 homes that are sitting on the market. We have over 150 rentals that are sitting on the market. So short-term rentals are not detracting from the availability of housing in Orem. Um, and I thank you for your time and your energy.

Thank you.

In doing this and providing something that is—

we can all work together and all live happily forever. Ever.

Thank you. All right, that concludes our public— our personal appearances. I've received a request to take a 5-minute bio break. So we'll convene here in— what is it? 54 after? So, 8 o'clock. We'll be back here at 8. Microphone— oh, there it is. Okay, the microphone is now on. We're going to continue with item number 10.1. It's a public hearing for the ORM Community Development Block Grant CDBG annual action plan and proposed budget. Taylor, welcome, and appreciate your patience as we went through this.

And thank you guys.

All right.

Mayor, just by way of—

or Mayor and Council, by way of introduction, Taylor Draney works for the Mountainland Association of Governments. For community development block grant funding, we are able to partner with an entity to do that, and thus we do partner with MAG in order to help manage that funding.

It's a great resource to have.

And as she does this presentation, then, for what the upcoming fiscal year's budget will be when it relates to community development block grants, uh, we want—

I want to just make it clear also that these grants were presented then to the CDBG Commission, and they reviewed them and approved the amounts as well as the contingency.

Are there any commission members here? There are not any commission members. Would you express our appreciation to them? Absolutely. Oh, okay. And Councilmember Kilpatrick says you're amazing. He said he is on that. Um, by the way, so we'll have a presentation on what the budget is and then open up time for a public hearing. No vote at this time to meet the 30-day posting period. All right, so there is the CDBG Advisory Commission along with Councilmember Kilpatrick, who's in charge of that. So this is just a short presentation to talk about the funding that we have for next year. Like Bradley said, that's out for public comment right now. We have a public hearing today, but these are the preliminary numbers that we're looking at approving. So to break it down between rollover funding from previous years that was unused and current year, that's there at the top. We have $77,000 of prior year funds that are going to be in addition to that $563,721, and that is our actual allocation from HUD this year. So those numbers are set in stone. Then every year we have 15% of the allocation that we set aside for public service funding. So that's that breakdown in the middle. And then historically, and this year as well, ORMA has always set aside a percentage of its public service funding to go toward a regional effort with Provo City, and 2 of the members of the CDBG Advisory Commission had an interview process along with some members of a similar commission from Provo, and they voted on those regional funds. And those are just for nonprofit organizations in the community that serve more than just Orem residents in order to reach, reach everyone regionally so they don't have to do multiple applications. But for all those projects, we only reimburse members for Orem residents served. So, and here's just an overview of those regional recommendations. So this year the commission decided to fund The Refuge, which provides emergency shelter for victims of domestic violence, Big Brothers Big Sisters, which provides youth mentoring services, Tabitha's Way, the food pantry, Family Haven, which provides therapy for abused and neglected children, and then the Fuller Center for Housing, which provides single-family rehab. So those yellow highlighted numbers are the amount that Orem will be covering. And then for the non-public service funds, these are those— the Fuller Center counts as non-public service. And then we have administration costs for MAG and for Orem City staff. We We have tree removal, which is a new program that we're going to try out this year. It's using single-family rehabilitation funds to get rid of trees that are a threat to health and safety. And the arborist here, Josh Story, is going to be handling that. We do code enforcement every year. That just provides some funding for code enforcement activities through the police department. Critical home repair is also a year-over-year thing that we've done. Mag has been administering that. Um, and then a lot of $170,000 this year to replace some flooring in the senior center. Can I ask you a question about, um, is the tree removal money equipment? Is it personnel? What, what is that? Um, I believe it's just the cost to cover the contractor who's going to— So we are hiring a subcontractor?

Yes.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

These are those public service numbers. The ones in gray are the regional ones I already discussed, and then those 2 in blue at the bottom are year-over-year projects that we've always done, some for victim advocates' salary, and then just a little bit of funding there for homeless services, which is just small resources for homeless residents that's given out through the police. And that's pretty much it. Our next steps, we'll be back on May 26th to get a final vote on that budget, and then the program year starts on July 1st. So do you know what did— can you go to that last slide? Yeah, the previous slide. Um, Victim Services, um, help me, bring me up to speed, would you please? Um, I know what was our last year's. Are we increasing that? Are we maintaining that? It's been $30,000 for several years. Okay, thank you. Yes, yeah, I know we always want to give more to that one. Uh, the public service amount is really, really small, so it's, it's tough to— Yeah, I thought we were going to add an additional, um, some additional resources there, but, um, yeah, I'll just follow up with you on that.

Okay.

All right. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you— I don't want to—

No.

Yeah, that's everything. Do you have anything? Okay, thank you. Council, any more questions? All right, this is a public hearing. We're not going to be voting on it this evening. We're going to be voting— it appears we will be voting on May 26th. So this is a public hearing to start the 30-day clock on, on public whatever, like the comment. Isn't there like A public notice in a comment period or notice period or something. I can't remember what it is. That's correct, and it has begun.

This is just a time when we—

Oh, okay, because I would say we're kind of short. Yeah, okay. So the public hearing is open. Is there anyone who would like to speak to the CDBG funding recommendations? All right, since there isn't anybody, I'll go ahead and close the public hearing. All right, so we'll go ahead And look forward to seeing you again on May 26th. Thank you. Perfect.

Thank you.

Okay, item 10.2 is a public hearing resolution declaring certain parcels of real property located in the vicinity of 1020 South 2300 West as surplus and authorizing the execution of an agreement with the State of Utah to convey surplus parcels to the state in exchange for a lease of a portion of the properties to the city for a period of 99 years. And I think that's one of the longest sentences I've read in a long time. All right.

That's because an attorney wrote it.

Okay.

All right.

Welcome.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'm joined today by Sam Brager. He's the Deputy Director of the Utah Lake Authority. We also hope to have Luke Peterson here, who is the executive director, but he unfortunately wasn't able to join us due to some health issues he's dealing with. So today we're here to present to you kind of a history lesson here in Orem, a little bit of going back in time, and we're going to talk about some properties down around Utah Lake. And so looking at this map right here, we have 4 parcels that are identified that 3 of them are owned by Orem City. The large— I'm going to use my little mouse here— this large parcel right here, there's a skinny little parcel right here with a little dog leg, and then there's a parcel that runs through here and runs up into this with a little narrow piece. That narrow piece will remain in Orem ownership. So, and then this parcel is actually owned by the state of Utah, but if you do a title search, it shows that Orem has an interest in it. There's an Orem deed recorded on that parcel, even though it's in the state's name. So how did Orem end up owning these properties? Well, back in 2003, when the city was building the golf course, they acquired these properties from Charles Garner. And up before that point, these properties were essentially quitclaimed to Charlie Garner by Charlie Garner. So he then operated these properties as if he owned them. Research has come to show that those properties were likely not owned by him, and therefore the city does not own them as well. There is a meander line from 1856, from an 1856 survey, that runs approximately along the city boundary through here. City boundary shown in the pink. But it runs a little bit through here, and you'll see it on a different slide in a moment. What's going on is we're working on a project called the Wakara Way Trail, and Sam will give you an update on that in a minute before we do some Q&A. And in order for that project to happen, all of these properties that are in question down in this area need to be cleaned up, and title needs to be cleaned up, and that title needs to be transferred. To the state of Utah. And then the federal government, which actually owns the underlying title, which is lakeward of this meander line, will then transfer ownership to the state. They have a verbal agreement to do so. Once that happens, then the state can move forward with the Waugh-Karaway project. And that's a trail that will run north-south along the shoreline of the lake, somewhere in the high water or high What would you call it?

High.

There's a sandbar down there. It's a kind of a higher elevation where it wouldn't be underwater ever, and it would connect to a trail in Vineyard and a trail in Provo. So the feds have said we'd love to transfer this, but we're not going to do it until it's all cleaned up because we don't want to mess with it. So that's why we're here today is to help clean that up. We're here to ask you as a council to surplus these properties that Orem owns. But we don't own, and then to execute an agreement with the state of Utah. So the state of Utah, in exchange for us transferring ownership of these properties, is willing to give us a 99-year lease that allows us to continue to maintain and run our golf course where it's located. Some of it is located on this property. It'll allow us to install future trails, trail connections, open space, utilities, and it'll allow us to continue to operate our stormwater facilities and sewer facilities that are located in this area, which happens to be where our outfall is for our sewer treatment plant and our spring water sewer lift station. So this is a drawing or an exhibit showing the 99-year lease of the property that they would allow Orem to use. And if we zoom in, you'll notice Up here on this north end, you can see golf cart paths. You can see this is the collect pond, and right here is our lift station. Right here is our sewer outfall, and then down in here, in that area, we will eventually have a parking lot for the trail project. So this exhibit here will show you kind of a comparison between the deeds that we are transferring in yellow or orange. And then the 99-year lease area in blue. Um, of particular note, you'll notice these 3 properties are in that blue area, a chunk of this bigger property, and then these other blue areas almost equal the rest of this in size. Oddly enough, this deed went out into the lake, and so a lot of this is underwater. It's not even land we could use. So the reality is the land that's down there now Is being used in its current state for what purposes the city's using it, and going forward, nothing would really change with the 99-year lease. So I'll turn the time over to Sam. Sam will give you a quick update, and then we'll open it up for questions. Thanks, Ryan. So, as some of you may be aware, actually, I should say at least 3 of you have served on the Utah Lake Commission, Utah Lake Authority board, and so probably well aware that there's a goal to have a trail Go all the way around Utah Lake eventually. This has been on the county's general plan, I believe it is, for 15 or 20 years now. We're actually working with the county to try and update that alignment to current where it's at. There's also several planning projects going on right now. One will soon be kicking off on Provo Bay all the way down to West Mountain. We hope to start another one, I believe, in 2027 for the remaining portions of the Southern and western side of the lake. There are currently over a little over 25 miles of existing trail completed as a part of the Utah Lake Shoreline Trail. You can actually find out which sections are completed if you go to our website, utahlake.gov, and under recreation, there's a trail plan page. Most of those sections are all between— or I should say all of them are between Provo and Saratoga Springs, but there are a few gaps in between. Currently, there's a gap between Between Linden and Lehi, and there's also this gap here from Vineyard down to Provo. And then once you get to the intersection of Lakeview Parkway and I-15 in Provo, all the way around the lake clockwise back to Saratoga, there's no trail. So those will be coming hopefully in future years. In regards to this section in particular, there's been more concerted efforts over the last— I would say 9 years, if I recollect correctly. I've been at the lake for So most of my time, there's been discussion around this section and trying to clear up things and be able to bring a trail through, including the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands and the Utah Lake Authority hired a mediator to help in some of these discussions back in 2024, and that mediation wrapped up in 2025. And as Ryan stated, this is the next step that's been identified, is that FFSL State Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands is working to secure clarifying agreements in order to facilitate that handoff from the Bureau of Reclamation so that we can conserve, protect this section of shoreline, and hopefully bring a trail through as well. As Ryan illustrated, the area he highlighted on the map is right at the end of University Parkway. It's a very logical location for a trailhead. He didn't mention, but we also plan to connect the trail up through into the Orem City connection. So there, anybody within the Orem City trail network can also get down to Utah Lake, similarly to how Lyndon completed their historic trail section recently. We like to try and have the Lakeshore Trail connect into every city network if possible, so there's easy access for both recreational and transportation use. Where it stands right now, currently, as I mentioned, is still in resolving some of these Uh, land ownership discrepancies. Um, the county has already secured through MAG, I think it's either $12 or $16 million a few years ago for this section of trail to connect Provo to Vineyard. So there is already some funding in place. Um, Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands also has some remaining appropriation dollars assigned to this. So I think we're in a good place with continuing to move forward on resolving The land ownership clarity, um, with funding already ready and available to begin planning, engineering, design, and construction of, uh, this section of Trail at the Lake. And, ma'am, do you mind, uh, mentioning on the public record how the trailhead that'll be built here will be the best trailhead possibly? Should I also mention on the record just how amazing the Orem City staff is?

Yes.

In all sincerity, though, Brynn, Ryan, Steve, and Chris, and I'm sure there's probably somebody else who's been in the meetings I'm forgetting, have all been wonderful to work with. They've been very informative, very patient, willing to discuss and find amicable solutions and shared objectives, which is something that's really important at Utah Lake. Without partners like Orem City and the other cities, we can't manage the lake appropriately. It requires that collaborative effort. So, Yes, it's going to be my personal favorite. I'll say that trailhead at the lake. It'll be a great spot, I believe, for everybody accessing, especially off of University Parkway with a lot of college students in the area. I think it's a great recreation option for them too. Does that satisfy Brent? We good?

Thank you.

You're welcome. Okay, any questions?

I have a question for Gail. First of all, thank you for your work on this. I can't even imagine what an undertaking it is to try and get all these records sorted out.

So, Thank you for that.

And the second, this is kind of a silly question, but what happens after 99 years? Are we like, you know, our stuff is there, we need to use it. I assume they just let us keep using it if we renew.

That would be the goal, that this trail is so successful and the amenities are so great that no one will ever want to touch it. I mean, the thing we have going for us is a lot of it is wetlands already and it's open space, and the hope is the state will want to protect it in perpetuity. If I remember correctly too, FFSL can't extend a perpetual lease on it, otherwise they would. 99 is the longest term they can offer, but the understanding is always— it's usually with government partners, and it's intended to be renewed.

I won't be mayor then, but I'll make sure I come to the public personal appearances and stick up for it. Okay. Yes, yes, yeah, I'll be— yes, I want— Can I just say one more thing? Oh, go ahead, Quinn.

Okay, Mayor, I just had a comment. You know, this is a really interesting, creative solution that just seems like a win-win for the city and for the state and for Utah Lake. And I'm just really grateful that we were able to be flexible and creative on this. I think it's a wonderful solution for all of us. Thank you.

I, I just want to say, um, just one thing, kind of. Maybe, um, would you talk about the science center?

Sure.

Just kind of, kind of bring this full circle. Tell them what else we have behind besides a path here.

Sure.

This is bigger and brighter and better than anything.

I appreciate the softball there, Councilman Millett. Um, she's served for quite a while on the board, so I appreciate that. Um, Utah Lake It has a lot going for it. I hope you've seen some of our, our ads last year, or they've started up again recently. That's one example of so many things that are going on at Utah Lake, whether it's trail planning and projects or vegetation restoration efforts, carp removal, community outreach and education, special events. Little tip, come to the Utah Lake Festival, May 30th. It's got the Provo Farmers Market in partnership with it. We've got paddleboard jousting. Oh, that's awesome. All kinds of fun stuff. The nature center is a part of this as well. So, Utah Lake has needed a nature center for longer than I've worked at Utah Lake. The current plan is a discussion with Lindon City and UVU to host that on some land owned by Lindon City directly behind the Lindon Marina. It's— we've received $4 million in federal funding for this, and we're working with partners to try and secure the remaining amount through the state and through some other funding sources. But the goal is to have an actual science research and nature center at Utah Lake. So this would be both a university resource for not just UVU, but the other universities to come and use lab space and classroom space and such for their students to learn. It's a site for us to be able to educate the community. Currently, we do field trips for 4th graders twice a year, for example, at the lake, but this would provide an ongoing home where we could expand that program to other grades and year-round. It'll also provide community space. We want to have probably not something quite as beautiful and spacious as this room here. I hope to have something maybe half this size of a multipurpose space that can be used for events and public meetings and other things about the lake. And there will also be educational dioramas and such. And we wanted to think something similar to what you see at Thanksgiving Point, being able to educate the public about the flora and fauna at Utah Lake and the work that's being done to manage it and protect it and preserve it for the future. And I guess to maybe tie these together, once we connect this trail, someone could walk from Orem along the trail up to the Nature Center because the trail goes right past it.

Oh, nice. All right, Council, any other questions? All right, we're going to go ahead and open the public hearing, and I'm going to be a A little facetious in the public. We're going to declare property as surplus and execute an agreement to convey property we do not own, that we thought we owned, right? Okay, that's— I'm not— that's not the official one. I'm going to open the public hearing for anyone who would like to come speak to the city declaring certain parcels of real property to be surplus and to authorize the execution Execution of agreement to convey the parcels in exchange for a lease for 99 years. Is there anyone who would like to speak to that? Okay, go ahead and close the public hearing, bring it back to the council. Council, it looks like there are a couple of different options on the agenda if, if you would like to move forward on this. There's a motion. And if you would like to not move forward on this, there's a motion that you can refer to. I move that the City Council by resolution declare certain parcels of real property located in the vicinity of 1020 South 2300 West as surplus and authorize the execution of an agreement with the State of Utah to convey such properties to the State of Utah in exchange for a lease of portion of the properties to the city for a period of 99 years. All right, thank you. We have a motion. Is there a second?

Second.

Hey, we've got several seconds. Councilmember Lamson. Okay, any more discussion? Okay, Councilmember Muelstein, how do you vote?

Aye.

Councilmember—

aye. Um, Councilmember Meekum?

Aye.

Aye.

All right, motion passes. Thank you. We've just— I know I can still— never mind.

Thank you.

We have made it. Best thing that we could do, considering the circumstances. I think it's kind of cool. We can all say we just made a 99-year law. How about that? Yes, that's right. And I've conveyed property that I haven't owned. Never done that before. No, but it's just the situation. It was the best we could do. All right, um, item 10.3, public hearing ordinance request to amend portions of Article 22-6-8 of the Orem City Code relating to allowable height of primary buildings in single-family residential zones. I welcome Jared, of great fortitude, to sit through this. Okay.

No, absolutely, it's my Pleasure to sit through it. So, I saw one of those Utah Lake spots at a movie last summer, and it was far and away the best part of that movie. It's what we talked about all night, but my family's obnoxious, so don't go by me. Uh, this is, um, uh, the, the proposed changes for residential allowable height. Um, we, we talked about some of these in work sessions, and then we've, we've made these into one, um, potential change that might, that might do some good. Um, just a couple of quick things. What does this proposed amendment do? Uh, 3 things, basically. It differentiates between flat roofs and pitched roofs, as we talked about, in order to allow things differently for those different types of roofs and the effects that they have. It lowers the base height that we allow, creates a base height rather than just a straight allowed height, and then allows additional height with setback back up to what it used to be. So for example, 35 is what we currently allow. Spoiler alert for what we're going to talk about in the next slide, but 35 is what we allow. This would reduce that to 30 and then let you get to 35 as you increase setbacks to kind of offset the effects of those taller walls at property lines. And then it also implements that graduated building height envelope that we can talk about again tonight and make sure we all are on the same page with that. A couple of things that it doesn't do: it doesn't change the way that we measure height by our code. It doesn't take away any of the exceptions that already exist for things like chimneys and cupolas, uninhabitable domes, and that kind Uh, it also doesn't remove this very sort of niche, um, height allowance. It's only in the R-12 and R-20 zones where you meet really great setbacks. It's a very— it's not used. It's an outlier, and we didn't eliminate that by this either. Um, just to start out, let's talk about how we measure height. Height is actually— the measurement of height in our zoning code currently is controlled by 2 definitions: our definition for height and our definition for grade. So height is just the highest point of the structure. Structure above grade, and grade is determined as the average elevation of the finished ground level at the center of all the walls of the building. So you have to do a little, a little work to determine that, but that basically, in short, it accounts for grades at property. So if the property's on a slope, et cetera, we still, we establish an average grade for all of that, and then we measure up from there. Uh, we wouldn't propose changing that. What we are proposing is that we, we measure things differently for different types of roof structures. We talked about this in the work sessions as well, but as a reminder, Um, what we're proposing currently is that pitched roof would be anything that's a 3/12 pitch or greater. And as a reminder, that's this kind of look. Anything less than 3/12, so all the way up to 2.912, is going to be flat roof as far as the code is concerned, if that's acceptable. Um, the rub of that becomes this. This text amendment would apply the way we've written it to all of our single-family residential zones. There's an R5, R-6, R-6.5, R-7.5, and, and I almost said R-6.7. I'm sorry. And R-8, that's tricky to avoid. Um, we, we would apply this to all of these. The difference in these zones is not the height that's allowed. You get 35 feet in all of these, but, uh, current in our current zoning, but the setbacks are different. And really, the, the issues that we have maybe been seeing and are trying to respond to are not so much just height, but height in, in relativity to the surrounding area, right? Um, you have to look at those things. So what we're proposing is that pitched roofs at minimum setbacks would get 30 feet of height. And then as you go 1 setback, 1 foot of setback greater, you get an additional foot of height up to that maximum of 35. So if you're set back, um, we— I have an example we can go through in a minute, but that's what we're proposing for flat roofs. Again, that's anything less than 3/12 pitch. You just get 20 feet at the minimum setback. So if you're just meeting the bare minimum setbacks, you get 20 feet of allowable height. And then 1 additional foot of height for setback foot up to 24 feet. And, uh, we explained to the Planning Commission when we presented there why 24 feet. That was the most common number I could find in all the other codes that we looked at doing this. Um, there's no nothing magic about it. It just works for builders more often than not. Um, in the R-12 and R-20 zones.

So, hold on just a sec.

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, so we're taking our 20 foot from the rear boundary line. Yeah, okay, that's your setback.

That's your standard.

And then you're saying you get a 1 to 1.

You get 1 to 1 beyond that initial 20 up to 24.

Up to 20. Okay.

So, if you're 40 feet for your rear yard, doesn't matter. 24 is the—

You're 23 feet, you get 23-foot height, 22, 22.

Okay.

Right up to the 24, and then no more beyond that. Maximum still applies. You just get 1 additional to get to the maximum to create a little extra buffer there. Um, for the R-12 and R-20 pitched roofs, minimum setbacks 35 feet, and then they have that exception that's already written in. So I just labeled that out for you. 20% of the total roof area can be up to 45 feet if you're at least 50 feet from property lines. You still only get the 20%. Those don't come up very often, but when they do, it hasn't ever been a problem that we can find. Uh, in flat roofs, we applied because we're defining roofs now. So we did have to make one small change to that. We just added this section for them. 24 feet in height minimums, and then you get that additional foot of setback up to 28 feet. And that exception still applies to 20%, but only up to 32 feet if you're 50 feet from property lines.

Does that make sense?

Okay.

Um, couple of things about the graduated building height. So what this would do is, I'm just going to read a little part of it. The height of all principal dwellings in single-family residential zones is subject to limitation by the graduated height envelope. Created by starting at a point on the property line, 8 feet above ground, and then sloping a line at a 45-degree angle towards the center of the lot. The entire building must fit under that envelope with, with the following exceptions. So, regardless of all those other rules we just read through, if you don't— if the building you're proposing does not fit under that envelope that's created, it doesn't matter if you're less than 35 feet. It still has to fit. And we've got an illustration we can go through that'll show that. Um, the exceptions are gables and dormers. Dormers not allowed above the maximum height in any case, and not above the ridgeline of the roof that they're on. And then for gables, not above maximum height in any case, and not more than 1.75 times higher than the point of intersection with the envelope. All this sounds way more complicated than it really is. So we'll get to that in a second. If it's math that planners can do, this is all based on math that planners are able to do. So it is pretty basic, really, when you get into it, and the gables shouldn't be more than 25%. of a facade's length. So not too flat of a gable, for example. Let me just show you in this, in this picture.

So, yep, there's—

this is the part that starts to make sense. So, um, to, um, let's start with the side yard, for example. So this is the 8 feet that we draw and say if we want to make that envelope, we go to the property line and we go up 8 feet, and that's where we start our 45-degree plane. And so what that means is And you get to go 1.75 times higher if you're a gabled end like this. So, I'll make more sense in a second. You can go 1.75 times the height that's allowed. Uh, when you, when you measure it, um, from this 8 feet. So, for example, in an R-8 zone, that's our most common single-family zone. R-8 zones, the smallest setback you can have from a side is 8 feet. So, let's take that as an example. If this is an 8-foot side yard, We measure up 8 feet and we start our 45-degree plane. With 8 feet of distance to cover at 45 degrees, you're going to go up 8, you're going to get 8 feet of rise. So you're going to intersect that wall at 16 feet in height. And where you intersect that wall at 16 feet in height, then you can, if you're a gabled end, you either have to fit everything under. So maybe you're this, maybe this slope works and you're, you're changed around, everything fits under it. Or if you're going to project above it, You can project 1.75 times that 18 feet, that 18 feet, that's 20. I wrote it down because I knew I wouldn't remember. That's 28 feet in height. So this gable could go up to 28 feet in height measured from the ground the way we measure height. So it doesn't get to that 35 feet, but it, it also doesn't do one other thing. You could measure that gable up to 32 feet, or sorry, 28 feet. But that is, and that is under the, um, 30-foot allowance, the base allowance at the minimum setback, just barely. So this would be possible. And what that does is keep you from having a situation where this massive wall is way above you like that. If we go back to this, you can imagine that while this is still tall, it's not the same effect as if this whole square were filled up with that projection. So you either fit under that envelope and are less obtrusive, or you protrude, but only the way that we allow that 1.75. So it pulls it down a little bit. Enforces the architecture from the front end. You can, if you do the math in your head again and say, say we have a 25-foot front yard setback that's required, that plane, you're going to be all under that because of that distance that's required. You're just not going to be above it. Okay, does that make sense? So the envelope is not as complicated as it seems.

Um, so instead of having the building envelope be like a rectangle, it's this— it's this shaded area rather than having it All go up and be right straight.

So you just fit underneath that. So if you're really close to another home, for example, let's just use this one. If you're really close to another home, in this case, I don't have a way to do the math, but you can kind of imagine if we come 8 feet up here, and this is probably right on its 8-foot required side yard, it would intersect and get to go up if it were a gable, then to maybe this area. But right, this wouldn't be possible, that massing like that. And that's kind of the point of, of what we've proposed here is really to deal with the fact that Orem has a lot of, um, single lots that are going to be developed and 4 or 5 lot subdivisions, and there's no way to deal with those adjacencies except to introduce more complicated code. Um, we feel like this would help. We have a couple of examples of, um, newer homes that have come through where we would have done a better job if we had this kind of code.

We feel like Like it would be usable.

So, um, with that, uh, this is just a horrible example of what can happen. This is an addition to a home. So this is to point out that we, we would propose this for not just new construction, but for any new construction. So additions to existing homes, especially where older homes are selling, and they're going to want— people are going to want to make additions to them. Let's make sure those aren't too obtrusive to the adjacent homeowners. Um, let's see, that's, that's all I have really, unless you have some questions for me. The full text was attached to your reports. Um, it, it takes it out of this table form that it's in because it's too complicated to—

Right, counsel, thank you. Do you have any questions? So, um, yeah, so this does not take into account the grade issue. That was spoken about earlier today.

That's right.

And do you recommend then that is a separate ordinance?

That would— I do. I would recommend a separate. We need to approach that one carefully and make sure that we don't, um, cause unintended problems with that. I think we're less likely to do that. This is probably not a perfect ordinance, but it can't— with what we've got, the information we have so far, we can't really address the grade differences other than to, to keep measuring from grade, and these will help in some regards. Uh, but not as much as a grade differential ordinance, and it probably belongs— that probably belongs in the subdivision ordinance instead of in the zoning ordinance where this height is contained.

Okay, thank you. All right, anyone else have a comment or question?

Mayor, can I make a comment?

Okay, go ahead.

Um, I, I was with Planning Commission when they were considering this, and I think, you know, on the surface it does seem fairly complex. It took me a while to get my mind around it. I think it does make progress for us and some of our concerns about the effect of our current building regulations on neighborhoods. And so the Planning Commission was universally supportive of it. They felt like it was a good step in the right direction, and I agree with that.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you for reporting on the Planning Commission. Anyone else comment? All right, we have a public—

If I could just express gratitude and appreciation for Jared Hall and Gary McGinnon, our staff, for the tremendous work they've put into this. This took a lot of research and analysis and even some creativity and thinking outside the box. Pun intended.

I just—

oh, hey, I appreciate their how as well. You know, they, uh, approach this in a friendly, approachable, accessible way.

So, great.

Appreciate it.

Yes, thank you. Well, it is a public hearing, so I'm going to go ahead and open the public hearing. Anyone who would like to make a comment on the proposed ordinance to make these changes to the allowable height of primary buildings in single-family residential zones. Is there anyone who would like to speak to that? I'm seeing heads like, no, nope, I have nothing to say.

Okay.

With that, we'll go ahead and close the public hearing and bring it back to the council. All right. Councilmember Kilpack.

Mayor, I move that we approve by ordinance the proposed amendments to Article 2-6-8 of Warm City Code relating To allowable height for primary buildings in a single-family residential zone.

Thank you. We have a motion. Is there a second? I'll second that. All right, thank you, Councilmember Mellett. Is there any further discussion? Hearing none, we'll go ahead. And Councilmember Kilpatrick?

Aye.

Vote aye. Councilmember Meekum?

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All right, motion passes unanimously. Thank you.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you. All right, item number 11.1 is a financial summary from February and March of 2026, and you'll find that in your city council meeting packet. And our fate now lies with item 12, city manager information items. What you got?

Uh, pay attention to some calendar, calendar invites that are— that have come to you from Lori Kreiman. So Tuesday is officially the city's 107th birthday. We are going to throw a little party on Wednesday at opening night at the farmers market at the stage in the City Center Park, and the Neighborhood Commission is serving 1,070 pieces of cake, and there will be live music and And then the Orem Farmers Market, which as you know has been just more and more successful every year, it's also kicking off that night. And it'll be its 6th year, and there'll be, you know, just lots of excitement and participation all around.

Will you remind me what time the birthday party— birthday's part of the event is? Is it 6?

Pete, do you— Yeah, 6 o'clock.

6 o'clock.

Um, and then also to celebrate our birthday and our annual Kindness Week, we are doing a community service project at Nelson's Grove next Saturday at 9 AM. And as per usual, we feel like the best way to celebrate is to serve, you know, provide additional opportunities to serve the, the community. So that's all I've got.

All right, that is all he has. All right, we have made To item number 13, a motion to adjourn.

I'll make a motion to adjourn, but before I do that, I just want to give a shout out to Council Member Meekum, who is awake at 3:45 AM where he's at. Quinn, I don't, I don't know how you did that, but you're amazing. So with that, I'd like to make a motion to Close the meeting.

I have a motion. Do we need to do the second? I can't remember. Second. Got a second. Do we have to vote?

Aye.

We're not doing a roll call, Mr. Earl. All right, see you next week at