The Draper City Council met on June 9, 2026, in a session that included presentations, public hearings, and multiple votes. The meeting began with a presentation from Salt Lake County Council members on county services, followed by the swearing-in of fire department promotions, public comment, and consideration of several land-use ordinances, the city budget, and other administrative items.
I love the address. Thank you. That's how they're also. Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started and um the mayor showing. So I don't have to. So we're gonna start with a presentation from uh members of the Salt Lake County Council on County Budget Services in Key Protey. So thank you for coming and we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much for having us. Do you want to start here? Is that good? Yeah, good. So my name is Suzanne Hierston. I'm one of the at large members of the Salt Lake County Council. And I'm also a very proud Draper resident, so thank you so much for having us. Thank you, Councilmember Johnson, for introducing us. I'm here with Councilmember Theodore. Yes, I'm D. Theater. I represent this area from the county. I actually live in Fancy, a district neighboring city, but River. So and then we have Kara Travino, she's one of our council staff and our government uh government relations liaison. So we just wanted to take how much time do we have? Like we were thinking of 10 to 15. Okay, great. Okay, that works. So last year we had were meeting with some of our legislators, and it became really clear that there's a lot of confusion about what the county does, and so we were hoping to just reach out to our shared municipal elected officials and staff just to let you know what our our core priorities are and where we can collaborate and overlap and um serve our shared constituents better. So the history of Zelda County, the first incorporation was in 1850 with Salt Lake City. There's been a wave of incorporations since Draper was one of the earlier waves in 1978. There were more incorporations in the 90s, and then we've had quite a few recently with several townships becoming towns, and then with the passage of HV 330, any island, um, most of them are in Sandy, must either annex or incorporate by July of 2027. So that raises the question of well, in a valley that's walled of all cities, does the county play a role? And if so, what? And we would argue a very much yes. We have we've been focusing on our regional role, especially as there's been more municipal incorporations over the years. And the statutory duties that the legislature lays out are different for cities and counties, and like you, we are also um political subdivisions of the state. And these are some of the things that we do for our regional services in our role. Our number one priority, and it's bipartisan, is public safety. We are responsible for the sheriff's uh operations, law enforcement, operations of the jail, uh our district attorney and prosecutions, and then also indigenous defense with our legal defense attorneys that we contract with to provide that constitutional right to an attorney and defending yourself. We also are responsible by statute for general elections. Um our uh county clerk Lenny Chapman also contracts with every city in the county to do local elections as well, and she sets the bar high. She is the gold standard in my opinion of free and fair elections and is so great to answer questions if any of your constituents have questions. She's phenomenal at answering them. We also have a statutory duty for the health department. I serve as a council representative on the board of health. We are responsible for general public health. We do things like restaurant inspections to make sure people aren't getting sick when they go out. You know, if there's an issue with you know a nursing home water issue, they they handle that. Um vaccine clinics and so forth. And uh we also have statutory duties, both federal and state for adult and aging services. There's a federal requirement that counties provide meals on wheels, aging nutrition, and this is a huge problem in our country, but we actually have the highest per capita according to the CBC uh rate of deaths by food insecurity for seniors in our county, and it's not something we want to be number one on, but our meals on wheels is so important. We provide over 2,000 meals a day in our senior centers and also delivering to um folks that are at risk of hunger in our county.