Check one two, one, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

Okay.

Nobody's happy as the year.

Are you gonna hear that?

She isn't going ahead and call to order the um regular town council meeting for October fourteenth, twenty twenty-five.

Thank you all for being here.

I know many of you this may be your first and it may be your only time you'll attend a council meeting, so welcome.

Uh, tonight.

We'll begin with our invocation and pledge of allegiance.

The invocation will be offered by Reverend Dr.

Kristen D.

Hansen, the senior pastor of First United Methodist.

I and to share in a prayer as we begin tonight.

Um, I just wanted to say from First United Methodist Church, we've been in pretty ten years, and this is our anniversary year, and we are so excited to celebrate that uh with our town, uh, and have this long history with you all.

So let's pray together.

God, we thank you so much for this evening and for this time that we have to share and to speak our minds and to be the people who are gathered here in this little town of Gilbert, almost three hundred thousand people.

We're incredibly thankful for the growth and the development and the kind and gentle hands that have nurtured this community for all of these years.

We pray that we might be able to share our minds and our hearts together and work together towards the good of our community for all people.

In Jesus Christ, we pray.

Amen.

Thank you.

Well, I suppose I'm supposed to lead us in the pledge, but first I'd like to introduce these young people from MIAC and let them well let them lead the pledge, and these two young people will speak about why they became part of Mike and what they've learned.

Sure.

Uh hi, my name is Baron Vaughn, and I go to Perry High School, and this is my first year in MIAC.

And I think something that is amazing about MIAC is it gives us the opportunity to learn about local government.

And last meeting we got to dive deep into uh the different operations that run here at Gilbert.

Hello, I'm McKenzie Redford, and I'm a junior at Gilbert Classical Academy.

I joined MIAC because I wanted to be more integrated into our community.

And what I learned today is that recently we have adopted AI to use in the fire department and police department.

Would you please leave the pledge?

I pledge allegiance to the United 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.

For those of you who don't know, my ac stands for the Mayor's Youth Advisory Committee.

We meet with this group quite often and throughout the school year, and they learn all about uh the town and their responsibilities in the town, and we're we're thankful to have them.

Roll call.

Mayor Scott Anderson.

Here.

Vice Mayor Bobby Buckley.

Here.

Councilmember Chuck Bongiolani.

I'm here.

Councilmember Kenny Bucklin.

Here.

Councilmember Young Kaprowski.

Here.

Councilmember Monty Lyons.

I'm here.

And Councilmember Jim Torgeson.

Here.

A quorum is present.

Thank you.

We have several proclamations.

We'll start with the one declaring the month of October 2025 as Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Councilmember Bongiovanie.

Keith, you want to come up here for your presentation?

Okay.

Right.

Good evening.

Good evening.

On behalf of the Gilbert's Domestic Violence Awareness Month Committee, it's a pleasure for me to be here tonight and to highlight October as the National Domestic Violence Awareness Month and promote it in the town of Gilbert.

My name is Keith Bradshaw.

I'm the counseling manager for Gilbert Youth and Adult Resources, which is a licensed outpatient counseling facility that operates as a section within the Gilbert Police Department.

It is my privilege to serve as the committee chairman and work alongside these dedicated committee members to raise awareness for domestic violence and speak out about abuse in all of its forms.

As you can see from the slide, our committee is comprised of professionals from several different departments within the town of Gilbert, each person playing a unique role in our objective to foster greater awareness and to prepare and host our annual awareness event for our community.

Our endeavors to successfully reduce domestic violence requires a collaborative effort between the town and its community stakeholders who provide substantial support, education, and resources to those who are victimized and need assistance.

As we work collaboratively, we have developed professional partnerships that have maximized the way we execute our interventions and services together in order to decrease lethality risk to survivors so they are safe and prosecute offenders so they are held accountable.

Each of these 13 community agencies help us achieve positive outcomes in the lives of those directly affected by domestic violence and strengthen our resolve as a community to be more proactive and recognizing and intervening when we suspect domestic violence is taking place.

The domestic violence movement has come a long way since 1989 when Congress designated October as for federal observance as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

However, domestic violence continues to be the antithesis of social equality and establishing healthy family relationships despite the fact that it is preventable.

One reason is that many people do not know the dynamics of domestic violence and how it shifts power and control in an intimate partner relationship exclusively to one person.

Listed on this slide, you can see the various tactics used by the offender to submit the sub survivor into resignation, usually because fear and anxiety are constantly exploited to keep them in check.

Notice that of all the different ways DV is perpetrated, very few of them actually involve physical abuse.

However, physical violence is often implied to result if compliance is not met.

What makes domestic violence so challenging is how much of the maladaptive behavior is shrouded in secrecy and often behind closed doors, making detection very difficult.

Then once the cycle of domestic violence gains momentum and the power and control is surrendered to the other person, it makes getting away from this traumatizing relationship very difficult.

In fact, on average, about seven attempts are needed before the survivor successfully breaks free.

This is why we all need to be more socially assertive and courageously asking questions and speaking up when something seems to be amiss.

For example, in Gilbert last year, we had 1,942 DV calls for service, which resulted in 1,700 victims.

Even so, we still live in one of the safest cities in the nation, but how ironic it is that some people who go home in Gilbert are therefore in the most dangerous place.

Domestic violence, the domestic violence awareness month theme for this year is partnering with survivors towards safety, support, and solidarity.

It emphasizes three components the dangerous reality of domestic violence and how we can work to make survivors more safe.

Number two, how we should reduce stigma and hold non-judgmental views of victims so they feel supported.

And three, how we can engender unity and solidarity, building bridges of trust and understanding between survivors and the community.

Above all, this theme is a very good reminder to all of us of what we should do when anyone who is disenfranchised or marginalized in any way from any form of oppression or social injustice.

It really becomes our initiative to take a stand.

The highlight of our DV awareness campaign will be on October 23rd at 5 30, right outside Town Hall, as we host our third annual Domestic Violence Awareness Month event.

We are pleased to have Mayor Anderson, Chief Solberg, Assistant Chief Garza, and others address us, including a DV survivor who will be courageously sharing her story publicly as a reminder to us all that domestic violence does not discriminate against anyone.

We hope that everyone will join us for this special event where we have over a dozen nonprofit community agencies hosting resource tables and talking about their services as well as free servings of Jeremiah Italian ICE.

As I conclude, I want to acknowledge the support from our past and current town council members, vice mayors and mayors for their support to Gilbert's commitment to combating domestic violence.

Their vision and leadership is evident in our forthcoming Gilbert Advocacy Center that broke ground in January and is about 50% build out currently.

This innovative new building, which combines trauma-informed care with trauma-informed design, will stand as a beacon in the future and be emblematic of Gilbert's intolerance for domestic violence.

Please go to our website shown on the screen to learn more about our DV awareness campaign and more information about our upcoming event.

Thank you.

Keith you could come up here.

Whereas domestic violence affects over 12 million Americans each year across all demographics, including age, race, gender, sexuality, religion, education level, and economic status.

Domestic violence does not discriminate and can happen to anyone, and it looks different in every relationship.

No one experiences it uh in in the same way.

Although the underlying objective of all domestic violence is to assert power and control over another.

Whereas Arizona ranks as the fifth highest state in America for domestic violence.

And between September first, twenty twenty four and September first, twenty twenty five, Gilbert's police department has responded to over nineteen hundred calls for service related to domestic violence and made thirteen hundred and forty-eight arrests.

Whereas the dedication of Gilbert's family, violence detectives, police counselors, prosecutors, and victim advocates, and interns working harmoniously on multidisciplinary teams to reduce the lethality risk for the survivors while promoting justice through Gilbert's domestic violence specialty court court that that empowers survivors with a voice and holds offenders accountable and offers rehabilitation through court mandated counseling.

And whereas Gilbert actively serves on the Maricopa Association of Government's domestic violence subcommittee to ensure regional discussions, efforts, and policies support domestic virus survivor.

I'm actually the liaison for that.

And whereas Gilbert is committed to increasing domestic violence awareness and providing the resources necessary to reduce its per perpetrations in our community and support survivors through all forthcoming family advocacy center that will open in the fall of twenty twenty six to provide trauma informed care through advocacy therapy and forensic services to domestic violence survivors.

And now therefore I Chuck Bonjovanie on behalf for Scott Anderson, mayor of the town of Gilbert, to hereby proclaim the month of October 2025 as domestic violence awareness month in Gilbert, Arizona, and invite all members of our community to attend Gilbert's third annual domestic violence awareness event at five PM on Thursday, October twenty-third, twenty twenty-five, held just outside Town Hall to learn more about how we can eliminate domestic violence in our community.

Thank you all.

And then yeah.

Okay.

That'll work.

Can you fold that up, please?

Yeah.

Hi, ladies.

Okay.

Would one of you like to speak?

Which one of you are uh do you want to speak before I read the proclamation?

Are you okay?

Do you want me to take the mic?

Yeah, you can hear me.

Hi guys.

Okay, I'm Angela Newson.

I am a mom of four, and I am currently fighting breast cancer, not done with it in the middle of the battle.

Um also it's really close to my heart because my mom recently lost the battle with breast cancer too.

So it's just popping up in so many places now, and younger and younger.

Like I was in my 30s when I got diagnosed, and so it's just really important to have the awareness that's really changed my life in so many ways.

It's changed my identity, it's changed how my strength looks now.

And so I just love that Gilbert can recognize this and um do an awareness month.

So hi, um, I'm Dr.

Angela Savary Mutu.

I'm a medical oncologist at Dignity Health Cancer Institute.

Um, it's an honor to be here with you all to promote breast cancer awareness month.

Um, at our facility, we have uh interdisciplinary services of medical oncology, radiation oncology, uh, genetic testing and um surgical services as well.

And um if there's anything important I can say today, it's that you know, breast cancer affects one in eight women, and early detection is so key to survival, and so if I can help promote uh, you know, women definitely starting at the age of 40 earlier, if there's uh history of breast cancer, um, to get your annual mammogram so that we can catch breast cancer early and help save lives.

Thank you.

I was just gonna pass it to you.

Okay.

Thank you, ladies, very much.

And uh, you know, our heart goes out to you.

So breast cancer awareness month, whereas breast breast cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in women and also affects men, with one in eight women being diagnosed in their lifetime.

And whereas, while breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women, w when detected early and treated effectively, the five year survival rate is very high.

Whereas October is annually recognized as breast cancer awareness month to increase public awareness about the disease and to emphasize the importance of early detection, education, and access to quality care.

And whereas breast cancer screenings, including mammograms, are critical tools for early detection and are vital for saving lives.

And whereas we honor and celebrate the resilience of breast cancer survivors and stand in solidarity with those currently undergoing treatment while also remembering those who have lost their lives to this disease.

And whereas the generous support and timeless effort of volunteers, caregivers, researchers, and healthcare professionals are essential to finding a cure and providing support to those affective and affected.

And whereas by raising awareness and promoting proactive health measures, our community can work together to reduce the incidence of mortality rates of breast cancer.

Now, therefore, I, Bobby Buckley, Vice Mayor of the Town of Gilbert, Arizona, do hereby proclaim October 2020 as breast cancer awareness month.

Thank you.

Thank you, ladies, very much.

We appreciate you being here.

Thank you so much.

Councilman Lyons.

Hey Kyle, can you and the team come up, please?

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Ready?

Yeah, you'll get the same.

I just want to introduce our planning team here.

One of the things that uh you know, we're going to recognize them for the efforts that they have put in in creating uh this beautiful town that we live in.

And I wanted to tell you guys this.

I brought my father-in-law here for the first time a couple months back.

And when he looked at Gilbert, he was blown away at the beauty and the symmetry and the just the pleasantness of the community.

He's 87 years old, and he comes from the old world, but he was really really impressed.

And all of you, you know, contribute to that.

And I think it's a great testament to this community, and it's why so many of us live here.

So I want to thank you all for that.

So you think already on?

Yeah.

All right.

Um, well, I guess I will just say um it's an honor to be here with uh the my colleagues, the rest of the planning team for this recognition.

It's our our pleasure to help implement some of the plans that are adopted by our voters and bring bring that vision to fruition.

Anybody else like to say that all right?

With that, I'd like to read this proclamation.

And I am blind, so bear with me.

All right, whereas change is constant and affects all cities, towns, suburbs, counties, boroughs, townships, rural areas, and other places, and we're as planners can help navigate this change with data-driven insight and expertise that provides better choices for how people work and live.

And whereas community planning provides an opportunity for all residents to be meaningfully involved in making choices that determine the future of their community, and whereas equitable and inclusive planning ensures that all voices are heard and considered in shaping the future.

And whereas the full benefits of planning require publicly elected and appointed officials to understand support and demand excellence in planning and in plan implementation, and whereas the month of October is designated as the national community planning month throughout these United States of America and its territories, and whereas the American Planning Association endorses National Community Planning Month as an opportunity to highlight how planning is essential to every community and how planners are uniquely positioned to identify solutions to communities' most difficult housing, transportation, and land use questions.

And whereas the celebration of National Community Planning Month gives us the opportunity to publicly recognize the participation and dedication of appointed planning commission members who have contributed their time and expertise to the improvement of the town of Gilbert.

And whereas we recognize that many valuable contributions made by the professional community and the planners of the town of Gilbert, and extend our heart well heartfelt thanks for the continuous commitment to public service by these professionals.

Whereas the town of Gilbert has demonstrated a commitment to thoughtful planning through adoption of the 2020 general plan.

I now therefore, on behalf of Scott Anderson, our mayor, uh, do hereby proclaim October of 2025 as community planning month.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you.

Our next presentation will be something a little bit different tonight.

We want to set the stage for those of you here to uh talk about water in Gilbert.

We want to uh give a brief presentation that uh may help to provide some information for you.

We want to uh make sure you have all information you need, and uh we want you to have the opportunity to also let us know what your thoughts are.

And you have several opportunities.

I know there are some out in the lobby also that we and we will be going into this presentation here shortly, so if they can come in, please come in.

But you'll have the opportunity tonight to in uh communications portion of the the agenda to express your thoughts, your feelings, and and uh give us some good input.

Uh we want you to know that there are also across the the uh lobby in the tower room.

If you have further questions that you'd like to actually talk to a staff member about, we have some staff that's uh in that room able to answer questions and help you with uh any uh information you're looking for.

Uh we want you to have as much good information as possible, and and we want to hear from you also.

So we'll start first with the presentation.

I think our public works director, Jessica Marlowe is gonna be making the presentation.

Yes, thank you, Mayor, members of council um for the opportunity to come here and speak to you tonight regarding recent frustration that's been expressed around high utility bills, water rates, and our utility billing portal rollout.

Um I'm gonna spend some time here kind of sharing with you what the town is doing to address those concerns.

First, I want to take a minute to help kind of walk through what may contribute to a high utility bill, especially in the summer.

There are a lot of different factors that can cause utility bills to increase.

First, we did have rate increases that went into effect in April.

Um we've had several increases over the last few years, including a 50% increase in 2024, a 25% increase in April of 2025, and then our sewer rates also increased in April of 2025 by $30 a month.

So in April, um, with all other things being equal, no change in consumption on a utility bill, the average customer would see their bill increase by about 40 dollars a month.

Okay.

The second uh the second thing I want to talk a little bit about is um more accurate meter readings.

So we have a meter change out program that's been in existence since prior to my tenure with the town 11 years ago, where we change out several thousand meters every single year.

And they get changed out based on reaching the end of their useful life, um, which is typically 15 to 20 years.

Um, or if they fail early and they stop reading altogether, then we um get a report on that and we'll change those out.

Every new meter that we install in the town now comes with a report from the manufacturer that was tested per AWWA standards that shows that it meets those um accuracy requirements for three different flow rates, low, medium, and high.

Um old meters often underreport when they start to fail, they slow down and they stop reading as accurately.

So even on the door hanger that we share when we change out a meter, there's a statement at the bottom that says your usage may go up as a result of having a new meter.

The new meters are also more sensitive.

The technology is different, and so they can detect much lower flow rates.

So small leaks or very, very small usage is now detected with these meters that maybe previously wasn't detected with the older style meter that has a lot of moving parts inside that can wear down over time.

That being said, with we this year we've changed out 3,400 meters in the system, and 14 of them have been sent back for warranty-related issues.

That's point four percent.

Um, and those are typically actually communication errors where the meter just won't connect to our system, so it won't send a read, so we send it back and put a meter in that we we can get the data out of.

We have over 90,000 utility customers.

Um people are not perfect, technology is not perfect.

We expect that there will be errors and there will be anomalies.

We have an entire customer service team that that's their job is to answer resident questions, partner with them to investigate and help solve any problems they may have or any questions they may have with their utility bill.

The third thing that we have seen in recent months that is contributing to some higher bills is unpaid balances that are carrying over.

Now, with the utility billing portal system um transition, residents that were on auto pay had to sign up for auto pay again in the new system.

And that resulted in um maybe a gap in not having a bill paid for a month or two.

That happened to me.

I got my August bill and it was for both June and July because I didn't register in the portal right when it went live.

So I got a bill for two months.

Um we've seen several that that have a compounding issue of carrying over bills that are causing higher higher bills than they would expect.

Yeah, so but you do not have to be registered in the portal to pay your bill.

You can use your paper bill and send a check-in.

You can come to town hall and pay your bill.

We actually have almost double the amount of people in the new portal than we had in the old portal, and double the amount of people register for auto pay now than we did previously.

So the new portal is great, it's gonna have a lot of really great functionality and information once it's fully once all of its functionalities are active.

So the last thing they talk about that contributes to high water bills is just increased summer water usage and undetected leaks.

June through September are the hottest months in in Arizona, obviously.

July and August are historically our highest water production months, and that's it's double when it is in January, February, and March, literally double as much.

So we know from that trend alone in how much water we have to produce that many residents have the same type of usage pattern where their summer months will double what their winter months are.

Additionally, you know, irrigation leaks happen, particularly in the summer when you're running your irrigation more.

Those can often go undetected because of just irrigation patterns and how hot it is and how quickly water can disappear.

So that being said, we hear the residents' concerns, we understand that they are frustrated with all of these different compounding factors that have happened kind of coalesced all at once.

And so what the town is doing in order to mitigate those concerns is hiring a third party independent contractor to come in and do an audit of our AMI radio and meter system.

They will verify the accuracy of the meters, verify the accuracy of the AMR AMI radio system, and then those results will be made public for complete transparency.

Anything that is found as a result of that audit will absolutely be corrected.

We are committed to making sure that the bills are accurate and that the residents are getting accurately charged for the water that they're using.

In addition to that, we're gonna be expanding our customer support services.

So we're looking to contract additional resources for our both our water conservation team as well as our customer service team in order to provide additional capacity for water efficiency checkups and to help reduce wait times for calls when people are calling customer service or responding to emails that our team is getting as a result of the just questions that they have regarding portal registration or their billing, their billing challenges.

There are also things residents can do to help start that process, including checking checking their usage and checking their usage history.

They can log into the billing portal or check your paper bill.

There's a graph that shows you know year over year consumption there.

Um but they can look at the water dashboard, they can see you know, maybe April to May to June to July, you're seeing it go up and it's a lot higher.

But what does it look like compared to last year at the same time?

Um the patterns are typically typically similar.

So if you see a high bill in August this year, check to see if you had a high bill in August last year because it could just be a pattern of your consumption.

Um the second thing they can do is um do a simple leak check at their home.

We have a QR code here.

Um we have a lot of really great videos and tutorials online for how residents can start that process themselves just by turning off all the water in the home.

Check your meter if it's still moving, water is going somewhere.

Um, and that would indicate that you have a leak.

Um, I will say, even if the meter's not moving when you turn everything off, you could have an irrigation leak.

Those are not gonna show up unless your irrigation system is on, um, and then you just it gets a little more complicated, and that's where we can come in and help with the water efficiency, uh water efficiency checkups.

So we have those available again.

We'll have expanded capacity coming soon, we'll have some additional resources in there to be able to complete more of those and get to more residents on that side.

We have water conservation workshops that are free that are coming up.

Um, we have water conservation rebates, um I'll talk a little bit more about.

Um, and then we also have a utility billing assistance program for those that may qualify based on income.

And then the last thing they can do is contact the town directly.

If you still have a question about your bill about your consumption, please reach out to us.

We are here to help investigate it.

We can't investigate it if we are not contacted by the residents themselves.

We can do additional, we can do additional meter testing, we can do the water efficiency checkups, we can help walk through and see and troubleshoot.

Um, we've got our team outside in the tower room, as Mayor Anderson mentioned.

Um, I did see a few people out there talking with them, so that's great.

We're grateful for them to be here tonight to be able to help people answer questions and start um start that process.

But then when you work with the town, we absolutely, if there is a meter error, we will adjust your bill.

If there is a leak found, we have resources to help.

If the bill is accurate, then at least maybe resident will have a better understanding of their usage and how it contributed to their bill and how we may be able to help in other ways with just not necessarily leak detection, but even just the efficiency checkup and modifying watering to use less water in general.

Posting on social media is social media is a great tool for the community to keep people informed and keep people connected.

We cannot help if it's not reported to us.

We have seen hundreds of complaints and concerns on social media.

That is not translating to people reaching out to us to help.

So we are just asking for residents that have questions, have concerns, need support in investigating an issue or answering a question about their bill to just please reach out to us because we really we really do want to help and we want to make sure that people are getting billed accurately.

So I want to talk a little bit about the rate increases now.

These rate increases are vital.

They are non-negotiable, they're absolutely critical for us to be able to fund our future water resiliency and water resource security.

They're funding our Northwater Treatment Plant reconstruction as well as drilling nine new wells for water resiliency to prepare for drought and shortage that is almost certainly coming on the Colorado River in 2027.

Now and for future generations.

So again, just to kind of recap things are available for residents right now and what's coming in the future, financial assistance, utility bill assistance program, water reduction assistance with irrigation control or rebates.

We've got Zeroscape conversion rebates, we've got free water conservation works workshops, the water efficiency checkups, online tutorials, the portal.

One of the great things that we have with the portal and with the new AMI system that's gonna be coming early next year, is the ability to detect what we call continuous consumption.

So if a meter runs for more than X number of hours continuously, it will be able to alert people that they may have a leak because their meter's been running nonstop for a shorter period of time versus waiting a month and then getting a bill and seeing suddenly you had this huge increase in consumption.

So that's actually something that the AMI program that we have.

We got several million dollars in grants from the Bureau of Reclamation specifically for that AMI conversion program because it is a proven technology for helping with water conservation and leak reduction.

So we have again, we have um we're doing additional meter testing as it's warranted, adjusting bills already if errors are found.

We're we're working on getting the audit together, we're working on a scope right now and getting the funding for that.

Hint it's likely going to be a contingency request.

Um just trying to increase customer support overall.

Um this is kind of a little bit of a recap as well, but the AMI radio program has been in place since 2020, and we've installed about 52,000 radios so far.

Those go on new meters as they're set, but they also are installed on old meters that are still in the ground that are still good, haven't reached the end of their useful life.

We'll be continuing to install meters on the rest or radios on the rest of the meters over the next couple of years so that the entire system is on that AMI network.

And the AMI network is really just the way that the meter read gets transmitted to our system automatically versus having to go to every single meter to upload that data.

We have the new billing portal that launched our rate rate implementation.

Um then, like I said, we're investigating everybody that calls, we are investigating.

Um daily I see emails back and forth from water conservation from utility billing from our meters teams, investigating and looking into the issues that are people people are bringing to us.

Um then, as I mentioned, we'll be doing the the third-party audit, increase customer support with full public report of all the outcome of those audits.

We also will be, when we first launched the utility billing portal, there was a 120-day grace period where we were not doing any late fees or any disconnects to allow people to transition to the new portal, get set up in auto pay, and get everything kind of established.

So we are going to extend that, and there will not be any late fees or disconnects until the audits complete and the results of that audit.

Um, you know, any if there's any findings of that, we're able to address those as well.

Um we do encourage people to stay current on their bills because they will be responsible for whatever portion of the bill they're responsible for once we finish this entire process.

Um and so we just don't want people to get too far behind.

And finally, we're going to be implementing several listening sessions.

We've had um council members that have expressed an interest in participating in listening sessions with the community.

These council meetings are very, I'm here presenting, you can ask me questions, but public comment, they can speak to you, you can't answer.

And for residents that want to have that two-way dialogue, um, we're going to be setting those up as well.

So sometime in the next 30 to 60 days, um, we're still working on a schedule and planning and coordinating all of that.

Um, and then we'll be able to notify the residents of when those sessions are happening with a town newsletter, which you can sign up for, you know, as well as other outreach um methods.

So we're just here to provide some contact information.

We've got really great resources online um regarding utility bill questions, frequently asked questions, um, the the utility portal, our customer service line, our utility bill assistance program, and again all of our water resources, um, water conservation resources as well.

So, just to kind of summarize, we here we are listening.

We are going to do an audit to verify the accuracy of the billing system of the meters of the AMI system.

We are absolutely committed to accuracy in our billing and making sure that we correct if there are any errors out there, making sure that they're mitigated, um, and just encouraging people to reach out to us with their questions so that we can address them directly.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jessica.

Council, we'd like to give you a questions or make comments.

Councilmember Torgeson.

Well, I think that a little out of order here, but I wanted to make a couple comments.

First, as a Gilbert Town Councilman, I find it deeply concerning that former mayor Bridget Peterson has chosen to publicly comment on Gilbert's water and sewer rates and induced in doing so misstated key facts.

Sadly, the reporter failed to check his facts, his youth and inexperience.

I thought I had a loud voice.

I guess I don't.

Sadly, the reporter failed to check his facts, and his youth and inexperience showed.

Let's start with a 515 million dollar transportation bond approved five years ago.

I oppose that bond because it was overly broad and lacked clarity.

During that time, my campaign science opposing it were taken down.

A clear violation of my First Amendment rights.

Mrs.

Peterson's disregard of First Amendment rights was not isolated.

Others experienced similar treatment, and the town ultimately paid settlements as a result of several disenfranchised residents.

There was no delay in using the transportation bond funds for transportation bonds or transportation projects.

Mrs.

Peterson's tenure as mayor was marked by extremely poor conduct.

Her behavior towards colleagues and staff became so unprofessional that the town hired a mediator in a futile attempt to curve her her boorish and divisive actions.

The fact that she is now attempting to drag me and others into a situation that she helped create only underscores while the entire council ultimately unified against her bid for re-election.

It was equally troubling that Mrs.

Peterson now residing in surprises, attempted to mislead Gilbert residents by suggesting that a transportation bond had anything to do with water and sewer rates or the North Water Treatment Plant.

It did not.

And she knows that.

For clarity, water and sewer operations are funded through enterprise funds, which are entirely separate from the town's general fund or transportation funds.

By law, every dollar collected from these funds must go directly to maintaining and operating water and sewer systems.

Nothing more and nothing less.

And it's not easy for this young woman to stand in front of a lot of people that are angry.

And the sooner we start treating each other as though we understand that somebody's doing their job and trying, the better off we are.

But before we get into this discussion this evening, I want to make a few more things perfectly clear.

I voted against the water increase in December 2023, along with Councilman Bon Giovanni.

My concern is that it would lead to year-after-year increases, reopening the same wound every time residents received their bill.

The council maturity chose a different path, municipal bonds that would attach to our rates for 20 years or more.

The approach lessened the immediate pain, but guaranteed higher long-term costs.

When the plan came up for final ratification in April 2024, both Councilman Bon Giovanni and I voted in favor, knowing that a divided council could damage the town's bond rating and drive interest rates even higher.

It was a difficult choice made to protect residents from unnecessary financial strain.

From the beginning, I was adamant that we conduct clear and extensive public outreach.

Anytime government reaches into someone's wallet, it owes them an explanation in detail.

Staff did make efforts, huge efforts to communicate.

But that message did not connect, and for that, we must all take responsibility.

When sewer rates increased, can the sewer rate increases came the following year, we were told they would be nominal until they weren't.

I again pushed for outreach and a clear explanation before asking ratepayers to shoulder more.

My no vote on the sewer increase early this year was not a statement against the need for the repairs, not whatsoever.

It was a statement for transparency.

I wanted a sunset clause to assure residents that there was an end in sight, and I wanted the average Gilbert household to understand why we were asking for more of them.

The system was built was focused on the average household using eight to ten thousand gallons per month.

But the unintended result has been crushing bills for some residents on larger lots.

Mine being one of them.

And it is the tone of our public discourse.

Every member of this and previous councils has served out of a genuine desire to contribute to this community.

To my knowledge, no one has ever used their seat for personal gain.

When people post day after day that everyone is corrupt, and those it doesn't just hurt those that serve, it divides neighbors, erodes the community we've built together.

Social media gives everyone a voice, but it's using it to spread baseless allegations, silence reasoned conversation.

I've seen memes suggesting that developers wrap their arms full of cash around the mayor.

That is false and beneath our community.

Mayor Anderson's a good man, acting in good faith.

Even when I disagree with former Mayor Peterson, I defended her against unfounded corruption claims.

False accusations help no one, and they drive good people away from public service.

If you attack and insult those who are trying to do the right thing, eventually no one will want to serve.

And that's not who Gilbert is.

I have always maintained an open door policy.

I welcome thoughtful ideas, differing opinions, and respectful debate.

That's how we get better results.

Not yelling, not rumors, and not hostility.

They make understanding impossible here.

The truth is Gilbert is facing decades of deferred maintenance and cumulative decisions.

This is not the fault of one council or one councilperson or one staff member.

No one ever intended to fail this community.

Not one person.

But one thing is certain we cannot fail in providing clean water and reliable sewer service.

Never, not once.

If you lose your water or sewer service, your home becomes uninhabitable.

These systems cannot fail.

And while we all may disagree on priorities, we must stand united on this fact.

We are working to get ahead of system failures and to build sustainable future where these crises don't repeat themselves.

I presented a clay pipe alternative, Council members Bon Giovanni and Lyons, and they immediately recognized the value in looking at that.

It will be on an agenda shortly.

These pipes have a 100-year warranty and may last centuries.

No one wanted the current situation, but we can learn from it and do better.

In the Ill Indian Gilbert's About community, respect, communication, and understanding will always get us farther than anger accusation.

Together we're going to fix this problem and preserve the town we all love.

And you've invested a lot of time here already, and you will during the next communications from citizens, and I implore you to stay till the end of the meeting so you can hear more comments from this council on ways to move forward.

Because if you leave, you won't hear some of the things that we decide that we need to move forward on or some of the questions we need to answer.

So please stay.

Thank you for putting up with my diatribe.

Thank you.

Councilmember Manjivani.

Thank you, Mayor.

I I've always believed in my life and my business that if you make a mistake, that's fine, but you have to own it.

And by owning it means you get better from it and you don't do it again.

Personally, the launch of our billing system, I can't call it a catastrophe, because that would be an insult to every real catastrophe.

It wasn't done appropriately.

And I wished we were able to do it differently.

And I hope in the future, when we roll out something, it's done differently.

Um when you spoke about reasons for bills spiking.

I have a personal story, which I'll talk first for in a minute.

But you mentioned broken, possible broken meter, leaks, overwatering, billing for two months, and there's a possibility of all four of those things happening.

So that's five different variables.

You have to trust my math on this one.

Four times three times two times one plus one.

There are 25 different combinations for having a high spiking bill.

It isn't just one thing.

If you see uh your bill spike, you know, 60,000 gallons, you can't automatically say my meter is broken, or this is broken, because it could be a combination.

For example, um, my bill prior to the raises were about was about 180 dollars a month.

I have an acre property.

Now, mind you, half an acre, I have fake lawn in it because I don't like mowing my lawn.

I have a 30,000 gallon pool, a 16,000 gallon pond, and 200 tropical bamboo trees that are 30 feet tall.

Um, when the changes came, my bill went to 260, it's an 80 increase.

Okay, I understood why we had to do all that.

You know, matter of fact, look at that pipe right there.

That's one of our pipes that exploded.

So I was okay with the $80 increase because I knew about it and understood it.

Um two months later, my bill went to $850.

I lost my mind.

I called the town.

Um now the guy who came out didn't even know I was a council member, so I don't want to hear any kind of special treatment thing going on.

But uh turns out I had a broken meter, but it was 20 years old.

At some point, these things are gonna break.

So I also found out I had 24 leaks in my yard.

I fixed the leaks, got the new meter, uh, gave the watering schedule that the town gave to me to my landscaper who fixed all my timing, and I'm back down to about 280 right now.

The town did an incredible job investigating the situation.

Recently, there's been, of course, a lot of complaints.

I've asked people to email me.

Um, I've gotten probably 10 different residents email me with the issues.

I've turned them over to the town, they've either been resolved or they're currently working on them now.

One thing that you didn't mention in the presentation was we had about 15 years of not raising our rates for whatever reason.

Maybe the seven people that were up here 15 years ago didn't want to raise rates for whatever reason.

When you don't raise rates for 15 years, bills don't just you know disappear.

You know, your water doesn't just appear when you turn on the faucet.

So we were tasked with making a responsible decision, not an easy one.

We could have easily said, we're not gonna raise rates, guys.

Let's kick the can down another two years.

At some point in time, we have to be responsible to make sure that we deliver the services that we promised the citizens.

Does it suck?

It sucks.

It it really does.

Um, another thing I want to clarify: if this council in the future agrees to a 25% raise or whatever race, that isn't a 25% raise on your whole bill.

It's 25% raise on the water part of it.

Okay.

And I want to address one more thing, and that's developers.

Because I I've heard many, many comments.

Why don't you charge the developers?

Why are you charging the citizens?

We have, if not the highest system development fees in this whole metropolitan area.

What that means is before a builder builds a house, he pays us money for water, sewer, and those kind of things.

Now I'm gonna isolate it just to water and sewer.

They pay us for police, parks, all those public work, I mean all that stuff.

Just water and sewer, and the bill that you're looking at right now.

When a developer builds a house, they pay the town approximately 21,000 to pay us for our infrastructure.

When they build an apartment, they pay us about 14,000 on average per apartment door.

When I hear people make accusations about developers, they are more than paying for the infrastructure.

If you look at a neighborhood with a thousand homes in it, you know, I'm not doing the math really quick in my head, but that's probably I don't know, 40, 40 million, 4 million, whatever.

They are paying for those system development fees.

And that's before the resident moves in and starts paying his or her own bill on top of it.

I would love to see.

Does our software that we have now that the meter software?

You mentioned that it alerts us if it's seeing a uh a spike, correct?

Mayor, council member Bongiovanni, it will be able to notify us of high consumption, which would be a spike or an increase in consumption and abnormal increase in consumption.

I'm not sure exactly what the criteria are for that.

Um, but it will also notify us of continuous consumption, which is constant running of the meter.

Okay, and now I know we can't do any motions tonight at all.

But what I would like to what I would like to see is at least for 90 days, we take some responsibility also.

If we see a spike in a neighbor's and one of our residents' homes, why wait two months for them to call us?

I would love to be able to say, hey, we call them on the phone.

We notice a high spike, we notice 40,000 more gallons than usual.

You know, can we send someone out?

Can we make an appointment to send someone out?

Again, I know we're not making any motions, but I would love for us to consider that in the future, maybe in a short period of time, 90 days, until we get our hands around all this.

Mayor, Councilmember Bongiovanny, that is uh I'll say a service or a function that our team did with the old system constantly.

Um anytime we saw those types of alerts, we would do that.

And we will start doing that again as soon as we have that available to us in the new system.

Um, in the meantime, we're looking at ways that we can manually do that.

Um to it's you know a much more time consuming process, so we may not be able to get all of them, but we're trying to figure out how we can do that in the interim.

But we absolutely that's not that's not like a a term-limited thing, that's something we do forever.

Oh, absolutely.

Because I have a feeling my my fellow colleagues up here would be okay somehow, contingency money, somehow finding the money to take care of that for a short period of time or you know, in the in the future.

I I'd rather have us be proactive than sit in a room with a bunch of people that are concerned that their bill has gone up immensely, and they took them two months for them to really put it all together.

I'd rather be proactive and call them right away and say, let's send someone over.

So again, we're I know we can't make any motions tonight, but I would like to see that uh in the future.

And I I want to thank, I know the um the town staff, the water department right now is under a lot of stress, and I want to thank them all for what they're doing.

And I'm glad we're we're going to be hiring some more temporary people to get on the phones and answer some of these questions and concerns.

Thank you.

Thank you, councilmember.

I just have one thing I I'd like you to explain one more time just for clarity, because we're talking about when we talk about failures with the meters or the AMI.

Would you explain the difference between the AMI and the meter itself and where the problem may be?

Sure.

The meter itself is what the water is flowing through and what is registering and recording the consumption that's happening.

Um AMI portion is the radio that's connect to the meter, it just sends the read from the meter to our um to our system.

Our old meter reading system was what we call touch read.

So we would have to go to every single meter and use a little wand and touch a puck in the top of the meter lid, and it would upload the same data to our system.

The AMI system just makes that automated.

So we have 90,000 meters in the system.

We have 52 plus thousand AMI radios.

A lot of those AMI radios are on older meters.

So we had one come up the other day where the AMI radio was installed in October of 2024.

The meter itself was from 2011.

It was one of the ones that we investigated that Councilmember Bongiovan had sent over to us.

So that answer?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Council, and thank you, Jessica, for the presentation and to your staff for all the preparation.

Thank you for that.

Thank you.

We're going to go ahead and move to communications from citizens, the first portion.

Vice Mayor.

Hello.

Whoops.

Hello, everyone.

We're happy, believe it or not, to see you here and hopefully hear your comments and uh as you can see.

We're doing lots of lots of hard work to try and get all of this worked out.

So the first um, well, for I'll start off with I reading the rules of decorum.

And if you guys would please, you know, listen and pay attention because it's very important information.

So the the Gilbert Town Council values citizen comments and input.

Anyone wishing to speak before the council must fill out a request sheet, a request to speak card for each item they wish to speak on and submit it to the town clerk or place it in the bin provided prior to the start of the meeting.

The communications from citizens portion of the agenda provides citizens an opportunity to identify for the town council matters of interest or concern related to town government.

Under the provisions of the Arizona Open Meeting Law, the town council is prohibited from responding to issues that have not been properly noticed.

Therefore, the town council may only listen to citizens who wish to address them.

And at the conclusion of the open call to public response is limited to individual members of the council responding to criticism made by those who have have addressed sorry, I'm sorry, so it's a new form.

So criticism made by those who have addressed the public body, asking staff to review a matter or asking that a matter be put on a future agenda.

In accordance with town code, each speaker is limited to three minutes.

Priority will be given to Gilbert residents, business owners, and property owners.

Public comment will be limited to 30 minutes at the beginning of the meeting.

So we'll be doing a 30-minute period, and we'll get through whatever we get through in 30 minutes and then the balance of the residents wanting to speak will speak at the end of the meeting.

Once the 30-minute limit has been reached.

If additional comments remain, they will be heard after the conclusion of the public hearing with the same three-minute limit per speaker.

While people cannot donate their time to others, they can designate a person to speak on behalf of a group of people.

Be sure and state your name and your place of residence and then begin speaking.

All speakers are expected to observe common standards of decorum and courtesy.

Personal attacks, political speech, or threats of political action are inappropriate in this forum and will be grounds at the discretion of the mayor for ending a speaker's time at the podium.

We truly value your engagement and public participation in our town council meetings.

For those here specifically related to water and utility rates and are looking to troubleshoot potential discrepancies, we currently have customer service sports staff on site in the tower room located directly outside the council chambers.

Thank you.

Vice Mayor, if I may.

The designation for a group member is part of our old code, so that's not in our current code, but council can suspend the rules if they want to do that.

It's just not part of our code as written.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay, our first speaker will be Eddie Cook.

If you could come down to the podium, you will have state your name and your city, and uh you'll have three minutes to speak.

Mayor Anderson, Council members, hi, my name is Eddie Cook.

I've been a resident here in Gilbert since 1986.

I just wanted to uh share real briefly here when I was on the council, there was a resolution 4026, which was something that I worked on from 2017 to 2018, which was called the policy of civility.

And back at that time, there was some contention with you know residents in the council, but through that I worked hard with uh stakeholders about how the interaction of council and with the public and the policy of civility where we respect everyone's um uh voice and everyone's voice was heard, and that we should be able to agree to disagree respectfully.

So I just share that with you as the beginning of this.

Um I wanted to share a little bit about um a comment uh just to clarify um Councilmember Bonajoli that you know 15 years ago, you know, why didn't we not raise any uh rates?

Well, we did have one rate increase, which I believe was sewer, but the the issue for us back then was to create an economic engine where the robustness of our businesses as they were successful, would eliminate the need to increase anything from taxes to rates or whatever, and that was really the focus of the town of Gilbert as we saw the the redevelopment of the downtown and council member um Torgeson was part of the RDC and understood that what it was you know 15 years ago is not like it's today.

It is an economic engine.

The Santan Mall, something that was very important for the council because we've seen many malls collapse during the time, Fiesta Mall, you know, Tri-City Mall, uh Metro Center, and then we didn't want that to happen.

So the focus was that we wanted to keep that mall alive and running because it was an economic engine.

Also bringing in wonderful businesses to uh the Rivillon project, Class A office spaces where commercial was an ongoing amount of revenue.

So that was some of the things that was important for us.

But I served eight years on AMWA, as you know, that are very, very important as it relates to water in the region.

And water is literally the most important resource for the town of Gilbert.

In fact, it's the most important resource in any community.

Without water, we can't live.

Without water, we can't have our businesses.

And in 2014, when I sat there in a day's and we were given a presentation about our infrastructure, it began a process where we were now data-driven, asking staff to provide all information that we needed to do to start that process of protecting our water.

And then in 2018, you began to see the first CIP projects focus on water.

And for you folks, COVID put a stop to a lot of that.

As you know, the price of goods and services, um, supply chains were detrimentally hurt.

So that was unseen for all of you here on the council, and you have to make decisions based upon today's economy, inflation rates, and so forth.

And the cost of water delivery from SRP and CAP and how we drill for groundwater, which are the three sources that Gilbert uses, again, that all cost money, and again, that's the most important resource in Gilbert, and we can't live without it, but we have to pay for that.

So I thank you all for um making the right decisions for a community.

I'm also uh a property owner that has suffered through the increases as well.

I'll be calling the town of Gilbert to have an explore my water meter as well.

But again, I just want to share and thank you for um having the courage to take on this uh very difficult um issue.

Every council has their moments in the past, but again, I thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

Uh Shivelli, uh I didn't see a timer there.

Or is it was it is it there?

Okay.

All right, I just wanted to double check that.

Yes, the timers for the individual.

I'm keeping the 30 minutes separately.

Oh, okay.

Okay, but they have three minutes to speak.

Yes.

I didn't see the we used to see the three minutes.

Yes.

Okay.

All right.

Just wanted to make sure we don't have any issues or anything.

Uh okay, so our next speaker is Barbara Colvin.

Hello, my name is Barbara Colvin and I live in Santana Ranch in Gilbert.

And I couldn't help be irritated with the comments about reach out to us, reach out to us.

And everybody keeps saying, reach out to us.

I called Town of Gilbert, General Administration to find out when this meeting was going to be.

I made three phone calls, and every single phone call, it ended with press this for that, press this for that, and then I do that.

I got disconnected all three times.

It was very frustrating.

I went on your website.

It was very frustrating.

It was not easy to find where this meeting was going to be held.

So I ended up calling somebody in the water department, and she had a difficult time getting a hold or finding where the meeting was going to be on the website.

So that being said, you need to improve a little bit more on the receiving of the reaching out.

I feel like the citizens of Gilbert have been victimized because of the poor decisions that were made.

Yes, you might not have had all of the information available to you, but to expect all the residents to take on this massive increase in their bills at one shot.

Yes, you say you spend it out.

By the time when I moved to Gilbert, my water bill was $89.

That included the whole thing.

Water, sewer, and refuse.

I checked my water bill this past month.

My water usage is $12.

The cost for my water usage is $12.

When the individual was showing her slides, you know, it my bill now is $152 a month.

I'm a single person household.

That shouldn't be.

I don't do laundry every day.

I don't wash dishes every day.

So I don't know how many increases you think the average residents can absorb because Gilbert is not the only one that is raising our rates.

And the rest of them are going to be following right behind them.

Guarantee the salaries are not going up.

I don't have a salary.

I have a retirement pension.

I am 73 years old, and I'm going to be forced to go back to work in order to pay the increases on every single one of my bills that are necessary to live on.

That's not frivolities, vacations, big properties, all of this.

That is not that.

So I guess I have to stop talking now.

I'm not done.

Please, please, please hold your applause.

Applause is not is not decorum, and please hold that.

Please do not applaud.

And I also did have, I also did have a check on my Gilbert came out, and then he checked mine because unbeknownst to keeping in contact when they see a spike in a uh customer's thing.

My bill went up to 182 dollars, and I about had a cow.

And I called and somebody did come out and we checked it.

We troubleshooted it.

It ended up being nothing in the system, but it was a float that was malfunctioning.

So my yard is desert landscape.

So I don't use a lot of this.

So that and your your time has expired.

I'm sorry.

I know.

Where can I continue to give this information?

Because a lot of the things that Hamill quoted.

I have to say this one thing.

Even though Gilbert Water meets the definition of affordability, we realize many customers in Gilbert are still struggling to keep up with rising costs.

Where is she determining that Gilbert's water rates are in the affordability column?

Okay, so now you can tell me where I can send the rest of my issues.

Okay.

If she would like to leave it with one of our clerks towards the back of the room, we'll make sure and give her information where she can send that to.

Well, I hope it was better than the one that I met on the way in this morning this evening.

They couldn't, they couldn't tell me what form to even fill out to speak.

Okay, if please if you continue to disrupt the speakers, then we're gonna the mayor will have to address you and do whatever he needs to do.

We need to keep decorum in here.

We're happy to have you here.

Steph, can we also have someone inform Barbara about our rebate program for people who called it?

Excuse me, Chuck.

Sorry.

I thought you were done, Bobby.

Is everybody reminded on?

Okay.

Um, if you please, please help us and we have respect for you, and please have respect for the decorum in the council.

So the next speaker, and you will have three minutes to speak.

And I hate to interrupt people when they're speaking, but when the when you see the buzzer go off at three minutes, there's lots of people that want to speak in here.

And when you over speak that, you're taking away some of you know the time and the ability.

So the next speaker is Amy, and Amy B, if you could come up.

Thank you.

Um thank you for having us here to listen.

Uh, my name's Amy Beharano.

I live in Lagos Assancia, right across the street in Gilbert, and I've lived here since 2023 from Chandler originally.

Um Philadelphia originally.

But I'm here tonight.

Um, and I'm sure some of you saw my posts.

I'm here because, like many residents, I am impacted by serious issues with the town's water meter system.

Um, I did actually call the town, and I did have somebody come out, and um is Tony.

He is fantastic.

He first identified the fact that my radio transmitter was not configured properly.

It was reading four digits instead of seven digits.

He said that that would cause incorrect multipliers.

Well, that radio meter was installed back in or the radio for the meter was installed in December of 2024.

Now, mind you, your rates in Gilbert for the water had not gone up that much, and there were other issues with my meter.

So I had no idea.

I just paid the bill, thought maybe it was like carryover in December or January, and continued to pay it, and I did not even realize how bad it got until I got a bill for 75,000 gallons of water.

And I want you guys to take a minute to think about this.

My home, I have about an eighth of an acre, and I have a little bit of grass on front of my eighth of an acre.

I do have a pole in the back, 15,000 gallons that I do keep very well maintained, but for an eighth of an acre, right, with two people, there is no possible way.

I am possibly using 75,000 gallons.

So when he told me that, you know what, your radio is misconfigured, probably on factory reset.

How many others have factory reset meters?

Right?

I call the town up and I'm excited.

I'm like, yay, they're gonna fix something.

The message I got from the town was we escalated to supervisors, and we are not going to do anything for you.

We are not going to adjust your bill.

This is your water.

He said that you water a lot, right?

Based on the rate.

He's not looking at how many gallons per minute.

He's just looking at like what the chart says.

And because you changed your billing system, and I work in software, so I am very, very well aware of the fact that it does not cost a lot to keep up an old EMR system or an old system to just give access to the bills.

I can't even go back to look at what my bills are.

I have no ability to do that because that was taken away, and we got four days' notice to take it away.

And I remember actually trying to pay.

So thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay, our next speaker will please our next speaker will be Frank.

Commander Frank.

Uh we're here about the American Legion and the proposed um project here that's going on.

So a little history on our post.

Our post was built in the 1950s by hand the American Legion.

Um you might notice there's two names because we had uh sheriff that didn't quite care for us.

Uh so we put his name on the post and he allowed us to build the post.

Um, with that being said, the Legion guys made that decision because the Korean war was going on, and we needed to get our vets in there because they knew coming home because they were War One vets, War War II vets, they know how important that Legion was.

Their sons and grandsons and daughters wouldn't uh face the suicide that uh could happen if they don't have that association.

Um the current plans that the town has of building the road 20 feet from my post and then also taking all the public parking from there will result in my post basically uh ceasing to exist.

Uh 10 spaces, thousand members is not possible for my post to exist.

Um, you guys might realize like just recently we're gonna have a hundred children in the town of Gilbert have a Christmas this year because of the money we raised uh from that post and using the little park next to us to help achieve that goal.

We've raised over six thousand nine hundred uh six thousand dollars for the fire department so kids could have uh clothes and book bags for schools, and we were the ones that put up the flags.

We maintained those flags and also at the museum.

Um all that will cease to exist because I will not have the ability to fund these projects and talk about redevelopment.

We talk about planning and economic engines.

I don't know I'm a nonprofit and we don't economically we provide tons of services to the community.

The ones helping raise money for that.

So I just like to leave it like this.

That the post um belongs to the veterans who built it, families who keep it alive in the community that it serves every day.

Redevelopment should be built on the legacy, not area.

The current plan, I'm asking for the next meeting a motion to stop this road.

It will stop it will put an end to my posts.

And we are the character of the American um of the we are the town of Gilbert.

We are the people in here.

Like I said, we have two thousand members in that little post, and we provide and do a lot for this town.

And you can see here the hats, the the vests, these are just a small portion that came out today to show our support and love for this place.

And I can't tell you how many veterans that we've saved just recently.

Sorry, thank thank you.

Mayor.

Councilmember Buckley.

May I interview?

I think you're out of order.

I think you're out of order for a second.

I'm asking if I could interrupt to say one thing quickly.

That Frank please at when you come take later come to me because I know that you lost a member in front of you, and I'd like to talk to you about that.

Okay.

So the next speaker is Maureen Hoppe.

You can come forward, state your name.

Please take your name.

The city you live in.

And you have three minutes to speak.

Are you here?

Okay.

All right.

My name is Maureen Hoppy, and I'm a resident of Gilbert.

I want to emphasize that anyone that may be identified in my statements tonight are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Two years ago, several ethics complaints were filed alleging misconduct by multiple council members.

The council neither accepted nor rejected the results of the subsequent investigations.

Some council members expressing concerns about the conduct and adequacy of those investigations, and believing that important information had been overlooked.

Current council members that were the subject of these complaints were council members Buckley, Giovanni, Ferguson, Mayor Anderson.

Since filing my initial complaint, myself and others have had our personal information released by council members and the town attorney.

They've been stalked, harassed, and have been repeatedly threatened with legal and criminal action by certain council members and their supporters.

Attempts to make reports to the Gilbert police or to obtain any form of protection has been met with significant resistance.

I recently obtained an email dated Friday, February.

I'm sorry, Friday, April 14, 2023 at 26 p.m.

Sent by Town Attorney Chris Payne to Andrew McGuire, outside counsel for the town of Gilbert.

The email references statements of fact and other information related to allegations of threats made against Gilbert landowner Jeff Cooley by members of council, specifically Councilmember Jim Torgeson.

It also includes a summary of conversations and statements provided to Chris Payne by Mayor Scott Anderson, former Mayor Bridget Peterson, Kyle Maris, Coutreau, Veronica Gonzalez, and others.

This email and many of the records and evidence that it references were deliberately withheld from the public.

Several media outlets, investigators, and other members of the council.

Additional evidence suggests a conspiracy by town officials, including the town attorney, to willfully and deliberately withhold records from the public, particularly those that contain defamatory information about the town and expose possible misconduct of town officials.

I am alleging widespread corruption and gross misconduct of Gilbert Town officials and members of the town council.

A conspiracy to cover up and conceal public records, and evidence of misconduct from investigators, the media, and the public, and a coordinated effort by town officials to use the full power of the town's taxpayer funded resources to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against outspoken residents.

I have filed additional complaints and provided these and other records to state agencies for investigation.

I am demanding an independent investigation into all facets of the town of Gilbert.

And I am asking the residents of this community to stand with me and demand transparency and accountability.

Town officials have violated our rights to free speech and to petition our government for redress.

And we have had enough of their antics.

There is much more to be revealed to both the public and investigators, and additional disclosures are forthcoming.

The tyrannical conduct of this council must end now.

It's time to stand up and hold these bullies accountable for the demise of our town.

Okay, our next speaker is Red Thomas.

The current plan strikes me as the death penal of our legion.

Uh post as an institution here in Gilbert.

Without adequate parking, and it and our service to Gilbert will just fade away, like General MacArthur's speech about old soldiers.

What I see here is a reasonable solution.

A tale of two buildings.

On one hand, our legion post is supported by 2,000 very active members and is operating 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

While the Chamber of Commerce building with 620 members only managed to schedule something like 15 days this month and only for a few hours at a time.

What if the city were to lease the current chamber building to the Legion for a dollar a year for as long as the Legion is viable?

The chamber might rent space for their meetings, like a party, or use a restaurant's overflow room like every other chamber does across the country.

The renovation that would allow the current building, the Legion building, to be purchased by our business entity that would provide additional tax revenue and jobs for the community.

That's all folks.

All right, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay, our next speaker is Timothy Roan.

Good evening.

My name is Timothy Rowan.

I've been a resident of Gilbert for 10 years.

Some of the questions I'm going to ask may seem rhetorical, but they are questions that not only myself but we need answers to.

Back in April, I was interviewed by Channel 3, Easter Sunday, actually, about the proposed rate increases.

And I expressed my concerns then.

I'll express them again now.

Well, I understand that the infrastructure, the damaged pipes, and so forth are probably one of the main reasons for the increase.

How long did we know about those issues?

I remember reading an article where there was a picture of a pipe in 2016 and a pipe in 2024.

How often are those inspections done?

Eight-year gap?

If this was known to be an issue sooner, then maybe we wouldn't be here tonight, or maybe in a different circumstance.

What's the expectancy of the pipes?

One of the councilmen mentioned something about a hundred-year warranty.

Has the vendor for those pipes taken responsibility for this issue now?

Are they going to be held as accountable as you will be?

I think that's the largest issue with this rate increase is usage.

And I know I speak for a number of people who've already spoken, and I'm sorry if I'm going to be repetitive.

It's noted that there have been meter calibration issues, which means the QA from the vendor is flawed, sort of been called out.

Why aren't we inspecting all meters?

Not just the ones in question.

Where there's one, there's many.

It's not an isolated issue.

You have to understand that.

I need to also understand how myself, my wife, and my two children are gone for three weeks out of a month, yet our usage is 9,000 gallons.

How?

I have no leak.

I followed the protocol that the young lady put up on the screen.

I have no leak.

I've called the town of Gilbert.

They're going to come and look at it.

No leak.

One time I was told I use 435 gallons of water in a day in the last billing cycle.

Billing cycles need to be more average.

There shouldn't be a big swing between 28 and 35 days.

All the meters need to be checked, as I said.

Lastly, does anyone on the council oversee the IT department?

If so, who?

Anyone?

Bueller?

No.

Whoever runs the IT department needs to be fired.

This rollout is an abomination.

Someone already mentioned that we cannot get copies of historical bills at all.

One more second.

Retention policy needs to be followed.

And whoever runs the IT department needs to understand the first process of any rollout or implementation or conversion is historical data data retention.

We can't get historical bills, and that's an issue.

So it's broken.

Fix it.

All right.

We have time for one more speaker.

And if the speaker would please abide by the time frame, that'll be the end of our 30-minute beginning.

And our next speaker is Nancy Stipp.

Hello, my name is Nancy Stipp.

I'm a resident of Gilbert, Arizona.

We've been here for 25 years.

Some of you up there already know who I am, and a lot of you don't.

Thank you for having me, and thank you for letting me speak.

My bill was one of the worst.

At 292,000 gallons of water for a 13,000 square foot lot.

I have a pool.

Okay.

I went to the town of Gilbert asking first for assistance as to what could be done.

I had had a new meter put in three weeks earlier.

So it couldn't be the meter because my how could one be put in brand new, and then the next one being put in.

And we don't even know if they're working really, because I don't have my bill yet for the end of for the full 30 days.

And I know that I think it's Councilmember sorry, Bon Giovanni.

Um I I know that there's interactions back and forth on our Go Gilbert Facebook page.

Um, but I think the interaction has not been good.

I think the interaction is more been rude, quite frankly, to the town of Gilbert and our people.

My bill has been taken care of.

I was one of the ones who they said you owe nothing.

Done with the that's it.

I have no explanations.

Nobody told me why.

I appreciate it, sure, but my people here are not getting the same care that I got.

I did email the town of Gilbert utilities the day I got the bill.

I am still waiting for them to respond to me.

I did have Channel 3 and 12 news at my house within 48 hours.

They did respond to me.

And and I know that some of you didn't like that.

I say I ran to the media.

I didn't run anywhere.

You forced somebody out of their house to go do something because you're not doing anything.

Over a hundred days.

Over 100 days, nothing has been done.

And Mr.

Mayor, I would like to address you properly when I say with all due respect, and also Vice Mayor.

This has been one of the most significant issues that has affected our town since the pandemic.

And this has been complete, and you have been completely silent for months, 100 days, and you came out and made a statement to us, but the same statement that everybody hears.

We have leaking water.

My 292,000 gallons of water was explained from the supervisor at the utility department.

We asked where did this water go?

Because she was sure I used it.

And she looked at my husband and she said, Oh, it went in the dirt underground in the dirt.

So underground in the dirt, I mean, A, my house would sink if it's just all below me, not to mention we have a basement home, so I would have noticed right away if my house was using 292,000 gallons of water.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Well, at this time, we will move into the consent agenda.

That that ends the beginning speakers, and we'll do the remaining speakers if you filled out a card uh in at the end of the meeting.

So I'm gonna begin to begin the consent agenda.

Um I am going to actually, I believe, Patrick, pass this time over to you.

We've had several items uh pulled off the agenda to discuss.

So Patrick, you're up.

Thank you, Vice Mayor.

I'm aware of the items that the request for additional clarification was placed on.

So I think I I should be able to explain everything without having to pull anything off.

But if you would like to pull something off for additional conversation, please let me know that.

Okay.

Again, we categorize our items into three or three main uh areas of focus under the strong economy, prosperous community, exceptional built environment.

Agenda item number four, uh Roosevelt Water Conservation District IGA for roadway improvements at the motion to adapt a resolution approving an IGA with RWCD for a project we've got at Hill Higley and Pacos intersection improvements.

It'll relocate the existing RWCD facility outside of the planned roadway, and it will be funded through the Maricopa Association of Government's revolving fund.

Agenda item number five is an IGA for vote for joint law enforcement training.

It's a motion to approve a resolution for an IGA between the City of Phoenix and the Town of Gilbert for joint law enforcement training or attending law enforcement training hosted by either party.

There's no financial impacts over the town may receive funding from the City of Phoenix for their use of our facilities, which will be determined by a future MOU.

It's a motion to approve a cooperative agreement with Kimball Midwest for maintenance repairs and operational supplies, parts, equipments, and facilities for a yearly amount of 100,000 in a four-year period not to exceed 400,000.

It's funded out of the general fund from multiple departments.

It's to maintain our facilities across the town.

These services are the backbone of the software solutions used by our police department to include computer-aided dispatch, records management, victim notification, professional standards, online reporting, and laboratory information management systems.

It's funded via the general fund and is included in the approved fiscal 26 police operating budget.

For the purchase of a Kaiser Premier Aquastar sewer cleaning vehicle and a motion to authorize a wastewater replacement fund contingency in the amount of 275,000 in the wastewater fund contingency in 218,000.

These items are rate supported through the wastewater operating fund and wastewater replacement fund contingency categories.

And so that would be the rates that people pay for their sewer bill, go to pay for the equipment that maintains our system.

Excuse me, to provide janitorial and sanitation supplies equipment and related services to the town of Gilbert.

Contract fee is to not exceed 220,000 annually.

Contracts funded from the corresponding facilities and parks contracted maintenance accounts for each facility that requires these services.

Contract fee is not to exceed 150,000 annually.

It will be funded by from the corresponding facilities contracted maintenance accounts for each facility that receives these services.

It's funded by the general fund and is included in the approved fiscal 26 parks and recreation operation budget.

This is for me uh replacement of various vehicles that reach the end of their life or the parts to maintain the vehicles that are currently in our fleet within the parks and recreation department.

Agenda item number 12, the light the world giving machine license agreement.

It's the annual agreement with the Church of Jesus Christ, Christ and Later Days Saints to use a portion of town road property for the placement of vending machines commencing on November 14th and terminating on January 2nd this year.

There is no financial impact to the town.

It's funded via the general fund, is included within the fiscal year 26 parks and recreation operation operating budget.

It's a contract with LDV custom specialty vehicles for the purchase of a police command van not to exceed $1 million over two fiscal years pending budget approval.

And a motion to approve the fiscal year 26 general fund contingency in the amount not to exceed $750,000 for the purchase of a police command van from LDV custom specialty vehicles.

The item was originally approved in fiscal 25.

However, it's not able to be completed.

The budgeted funds have been carried over into fiscal 26.

The remaining 250,000 has been approved in the fiscal 26 budget, and we'll use the opioid settlement fund.

And four-year information, our previous command van was uh a 2003 model that reached the end of its its useful life.

We uh sold that vehicle at option at auction, so we don't do not currently have a command van for a police vehicle.

And this is our mobile unit that's on the scene for any major incidents, catastrophes, um, or any needs we may have for having a presence on scene for major and significant events.

Gender item number 15, street striping contract.

It's a motion to approve the streets contingency request in the amount of 128,000 and change, a motion to approve contract with Franklin striping for pavement marking services in the amount of 754,000.

The current available budget for fiscal 26 is insufficient for the proposed contract.

Therefore, the streets fund contingency in the amount of 128 is requested.

The town previously did this work in-house, but now outsources it because we can save more money.

They can do it more cost effectively than we could do it in-house.

Agenda item number 16, AV equipment and services contract.

It's a motion to approve expenditures utilizing contract with Ford Audiovisual Systems, Level 3 Audiovisual LLC, and CCS presentation systems.

And uh with surveillance systems integration in the amount not to exceed $3 million for three fiscal years, pending budget approval.

It's covered under the information technology department and annual capital expense.

With this item, that does not mean we're going to spend $3 million.

That is just the amount of authorization based on what our needs should be for replacement of ASIS AV systems, maintenance of AV systems.

By also having four vendors to choose from, we also can select the vendor with the best technology at the best price for whatever our needs are.

Previously, last year we used the state contract for level three, and for a period of time level three was not on the state contract, which meant we didn't have access to an AV vendor for our needs.

So this provides us with adequate coverage across four vendors over three years for whatever needs we may have that would come.

Agenda item number 17, pre-construction services with Intelis for the CIP project, Summerton Boulevard, Williamsfield Road to Wrecker, and a not to exceed amount for 184,000.

And this is funded with the voter approved 2022 general obligation bonds.

It is being funded through the 2022 GO bonds in the amount of 1.16 million dollars.

And with Sunlit, a contract with Sunland asphalt and construction in the amount not to exceed 2.7, 2170 million dollars.

This items funded with those general obligation bonds.

And this is the wall that will create separation between the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and our heritage district along the southern boundary, as well as a walkway along that wall to create a safer traveling area for our general public.

Again, this is funded with the 2022 general obligation bonds.

With TALUS construction and amount not to exceed 1,049,000 in change for fiscal year 26.

This item is funded by the streets fog seal budget and roadway maintenance administration budget.

This is how we maintain our uh asphalt streets year in and year out to maintain their performance and extend the life of that asset.

Agenda item number 21, Freestone Rec Center flooring replacing contract.

It's a contract with advanced health styles fitness equipment inc doing business as advanced exercise.

In accordance with state contract through the statewide sporting goods for the replacement of the sports flooring in the upstairs track and fitness area Freestone Recreation Center.

It has reached the end of its useful life.

This item is funded out of the general fund, is included in the approved fiscal 26 parks and recreation operating budget.

It's a motion to approve a contract with landmark aquatics for accutab chlorine supplies for the following locations: Mesquite Aquatic Center, Greenfield Pool, Williamsfield Pool, Perry Pool, Water Tower Plaza, and Gilbert Regional Park in the Western Calumenity Canal amenities for water features.

Items funded out of the general fund is not does not require additional funds for renewal.

Gender item number 23.

It's a motion to approve a change order to construction services under a JOC contract with Nesbit contracting for CIB project number ST 2101 bus stop shelter replacements, an amount not to exceed of 201,000.

The funding for the Propage Change Order to will utilize public transportation funds from Valley Metro and Arizona lottery funds as a designated funding sources.

The increased cost to this came when we discovered there are uh four additional bus shelters we discovered with damage that need to be replaced in addition to the 33 other bus shelters that we are replacing because of damage.

Agenda item number 24 is a road improvement change order.

Uh change order to AE services contract for to sustainable engineering group LLC in the not to exceed amount of 11,000 and then change for the CIP project.

Cooper Road baseline to and SENUS and its uh funding source is the 2022 general obligation bonds.

Cactus Yards parking lot change order.

It's a change order for A services on the Cactus Yard parking lot improvements with HR Green, the amount not to exceed of 12,359 dollars.

That's to replace some additional ballards out there as well as a few lights, and this is funded through the general replacement fund.

Agenda item number 26, Freestone Recreation Center HVAC change order.

It's a motion to approve a change order to the train contract.

This change order increases the contract by $6,636 to cover preventative maintenance cost of a new HVAC unit, a Freestone Rec Center.

The compensation under the agreement, including this change order will be 180,259.

It's funded out of the general fund.

This is we add it, we adding an additional uh facility to this maintenance contract uh with this vendor.

Gender item number 27, time tracking system contract change order.

It's a motion uh to approve a general fund contingency in the amount of 112,617.

Approved change order number two, utilizing a contract with Tyler Technologies to support the implementation and licenses.

Tyler time and attendance and advanced scheduling and suite of Tyler projects in the amount of just under 2.3 million for two fiscal years pending annual budget approval.

Majority of the funding for these services has been allocated for in the fiscal 26 budget.

The 10 contingency requests will come out of the general fund.

This is to upgrade our system that uh handles the time and payroll uh services for the town of Gilbert.

Agenda item number 28, uh general liability IBNR contingency funding.

It's a contingency uh contract and a motion to approve a contingency request in the amount of 324,000 and change to approve provide sufficient capacity for the fiscal 25 general liability incurred but not reported.

The IBNR is an actual aerial estimate of funds the town must reserve for future claim payments serving as an accounting requirement to ensure sufficient reserves exist to cover all obligations if operations were to cease.

To cover the increased IBNR for fiscal 25, the existing balance in the general liability fund will be used, plus fiscal 26 contingency totaling $324,700 will be required from funds specific to the department.

Agenda item number 29 grant acceptance from the Gila River Indian Community.

It's a motion to authorize the acceptance of a 12% gaming contributions grant from the Gila River Indian Community in a total amount of 45,936 and approved grant fund contingency contingency in the amount of 45,936.

For the following three items, Town of Gilbert, Naomi contract in the amount of 15,936, Town of Gilbert Park Ranger contract in the amount of 5,000, and women's health innovations of Arizona contract in the amount of 25,000.

The grant fund contingency is required to authorize expenditures.

However, this amount will be fully offset by the revenue received from GRIC, resulting in no net fiscal impact to the town.

It's a motion to consider approval of the meeting minutes of the special joint meeting with the public works advisory board of September 3rd, 2025.

Special meeting of September 8th, 2025, study session of September 9th, 2025, and a regular meeting of September 9th, 2025.

A special meeting of September 22nd, 2025.

And with that, that concludes the consent agenda for this evening.

Okay.

Thank you, Patrick.

Does anyone have any questions or want anything pulled off?

Council Member Torgeson.

Uh first, I just wanted to make a comment on item 12, the uh the giving machines.

This is something that is very Gilbert.

It is uh something that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints puts out where you're buying a gift for someone you don't know.

It's a it's a charity and it's it's giving, as they call it a giving machine, but it is something unique, and it is something that is very community-oriented.

I implore everybody to at least look at that.

If you can't afford to give, you can't afford to give, but if you can, you do.

And my only question, and it is rhetorical, but I need to hear you say it.

I am always stunned at the cost of a command unit in number 14.

I find disbelief in it.

And I know that it is my cognitive dissonance.

But please just explain that for it quickly, because it's a very big pill to swallow.

Thank you, uh, Mayor Anderson and uh Councilmember Jorgerson.

It's more than more than a vehicle.

Um this command band vehicle as mentioned the prior one was twenty-three years old, twenty-two years old, and we it was out of service.

Uh continuously breaking down.

The priority for this command ban is utilizing um bringing it to an incident.

It could be a homicide scene, it could be a natural disaster.

It's to provide us with resources on scene, uh, beat out technology, the uh camera systems, a place where we can download evidence, interview individuals involved in those incidents, um, have a bathroom break rather than have an open drive away or borrow a uh residential bathroom if that's available.

So it's a um not a uh convenience, it's a necessity, and we made the best we could out of that last uh resource that we had, like I said, for over 20 years.

Uh this was budgeted in FY25.

We initially thought we could get it for seven fifty, but then um with cost increases over the last three years.

But once we finally got to where we were pricing it out, it was coming in over well over eight hundred dollars, eight hundred thousand dollars.

Um the current quote we received is just over eight sixty, but we have some contingency in there if there's something unforeseen as we actually build it, and it'll still take about twelve to eighteen months to build it, but this will lock us into that price.

So it is very expensive, like large apparatus type vehicles.

Um, but it's not just the vehicle that we're purchasing, it's the equipment that goes with it and the maintenance and the warranties that go with that equipment to make sure we can properly handle investigations.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chief.

Uh does anyone else have any questions or want anything pulled off?

Okay, with that, um I will move to approve the consent agenda items number four through thirty.

Can I have a second?

I'll second that.

Seconded by Councilmember Bongi Ovanny.

And um with that, we have, yeah, we need to vote.

Oops.

Okay, so we have a seven zero vote.

And that will end the consent agenda, and I will now turn this over to Mayor Anderson uh for the public hearing section of the meeting.

Thank you.

Before we start the public hearings, I've had a request to have a five-minute bio brain.

So you'd like to take the brain.

I'm good with that.

Okay.

So let's have a five minutes.

If everybody could uh have a seat and get settled, we'll start again.

We'll start back with our public hearings and we have a um block of items and uh normally we like to have one public hearing for all the items unless you want one taken off.

I know that item thirty-six will be taken off for separate consideration or there are any others.

We'd like to keep the others all in a block and vote all them at once if we can.

No.

Are you unless you have a presentation?

We will eventually.

I want to vote on the uh everything else first.

If uh discussion you want some discussion on thirty-five, okay.

Well, thirty-five and thirty-six.

So can I have a motion for the other items in public hearings?

I'll open the public hearing, close the public hearing and ask for a motion.

Motion to approve thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, and thirty-four.

Thank you.

It's been moved by Councilmember Bonjavani.

Seconded by Councilmember Koprowski.

All in favor, please indicate Vice Mayor, you're rolling.

We'll move to item thirty-five, general plan GP twenty-four oh eight.

Zoning Z twenty four-twenty aura at Santan.

Staff presentation.

Thank you, Mayor and Council.

Um this item is GP twenty-four oh eight and z twenty-four twenty aura santan.

Uh this was brought before council in um August of this year and then continued to to tonight to allow the applicants some additional time to revise their plans.

So I'll run through my presentation um fairly quickly, but feel free to interrupt me if you've got any questions as I go along.

Uh GP twenty-four oh eight is a general plan amendment request on 14.24 acres.

Uh it's located at the southeast, it's located southeast of the southeast corner of Alvista and Pecos Road.

Uh the request with the general plan amendment is to amend the general plan land use designation from regional commercial to residential 25 to 50 dwelling units per acre.

Uh the companion zoning case, uh Z 2420 is on that same 14.24 acres, which requests to rezone the site from regional commercial zoning district with a PAD to mixed use large, uh also with a PAD.

Uh so for context of the area.

This is the aerial photograph.

Again, this is off of Market Street, uh north of the Santan Freeway and then south and east of Pecos and Valvista Roads, uh, behind the novel multifamily development in the VA hospital.

Looking at the land use classification, the area is largely uh general commercial um designation on the land use plan, anticipating commercial type uses in the area.

The novel project um a few years back changed the portion here that you can see in orange just northwest of the site to residential.

And then looking at the zoning map, we see the same pattern of development.

The property is zoned regional commercial as is much of that purple area.

Multifamily High is located just northwest.

So the applicant is seeking to rezone this property and amend the general plan.

Just for some brief context of the area, this uh Valvista Square development plan, which is what they're looking to amend, was originally developed in 2012, showing kind of this mixed use project that did anticipate uh multifamily in the area, as well as a variety of commercial uses.

So this was that original plan.

Um and then in 2019 when novel came forward, um a revised development plan uh was provided on site to allow for that multifamily development and then changed uh what could potentially be developed on the subject site.

The applicant proposal um again seeks to rezone the property to mixed use large and change the general plan designation to allow a density, a residential density of 25 to 50 dwelling units per acre.

Uh at the August um council hearing, the proposal included 357 units.

Um there was 10,000 square feet of office within building one, 5,000 square feet of office within building three, and then it ranged from three to four stories in height.

So this shows the location of that office space that was proposed back in August.

At the direction of council, the applicant went back and took another look to see if they could add more uh non-residential use to the site.

So the updated proposal includes that same 357 units.

Uh there was no change in the in the unit count.

Um, but they were able to increase the building one office space, which is the the office at the southwest portion of the site, um, to 29,000 square feet roughly, which was an increase of 18,000 square feet.

The building three office space increased by 550 square feet.

Um so there was quite a bit of work that the applicant did to increase that, and how they accomplished that was by removing the residential garages on the ground floor of building one, which allowed them to expand that commercial space on the ground floor of um that specific building.

Um what that did, so I had mentioned um back in August that there were a couple of deviation requests that they were seeking.

This change did add an additional deviation request.

Our code does require that they provide um 25% of their covered spaces have to be enclosed, which requires 90 space, 90 enclosed garage parking spaces.

Um, so they've added a deviation to uh reduce that from 90 down to 54 in order to increase the commercial at the ground level of that building.

Uh, in terms of the deviation request for the non-commercial use that would be required as part of mixed use large, the code requires 20% uh by them increasing, uh they are now requesting a reduction from 20% to 7.5.

The previous request was um 3.49%.

So they have increased the amount of um office space or or uh non-residential space that they're providing, but it is still a deviation from our our land development code.

Um I had shared this previously, um, but just some other context for the area.

This is within our central 202 core growth area, which does anticipate residential multifamily within this area.

There is a high concentration of multifamily in this area.

So when the applicant first approached us to do a multifamily development here, we did encourage them to consider our mixed-use zoning district.

Um primarily because as we continue to grow, as we continue to reach build out, we know that retaining those non-residential uses are of importance.

We have 27.86% of our community is residential land uses, and so our goal is always to retain as much of that uh non-residential use as we can.

Um, and so staff doesn't feel that this is in compliance with the land development code, um, and we aren't supportive of the significant deviation that they're proposing.

Um, but I do also want to point out that the applicant has uh reached back out to the chamber, provided an updated presentation of what they're proposing to the chamber.

Uh previously the chamber was not in support, but given the increased office that they were able to provide, the chamber is now in support of the project as well.

Um so staff, if if council does wish to approve this project, we have provided uh conditions in your packet, A through X that would be included in the motion.

Staff's recommendation again is um not to support the project based on the significant deviation from the land development code, but I will also share with you that planning commission did recommend approval of the project.

So uh happy to answer any questions you have.

I know the applicant has a presentation as well.

Any questions?

No quite can I talk?

Vice Mayor.

Okay.

Uh no, no questions actually.

Did you just say that staff does not recommend this project, but planning commission did?

Correct.

Okay, I just wanted to clarify that.

Okay.

Thank you.

Is the applicant here?

Mayor and Council, Adam Baugh, 2525 East Arizona, a bit more circle.

You've seen this before, and I thought about just jumping right to the conclusion what we've done, but given the size of the audience, I think it's helpful to tell the story, especially what it takes to get to this point today.

Um, our property is the area in red, and it's surrounded by a retention basin, a winco, uh novel apartments, and a couple of hotels and a VA clinic.

Um, and when you look at this site, it's owned RC.

RC allows lofts above commercial.

Um, but what's interesting here is this got its original zoning in 1999.

And the question you got to ask yourself was why since 1999 has it still sat empty when everything else around it has been built out.

Um what's interesting is in 2004, the owners and developers of Kierlin Commons wanted to replicate that success of Scottsdale and do that down here in Gilbert, and they created a zoning plan that was approved by the city council, town council called Main Street Commons.

Main Street Commons was trying to do what Kierlin did up in Scottsdale, which was residential above commercial.

And to do that, they had to have a different street layout.

But unfortunately, what happened is and the reason why I have these red boxes on there is this shows you the staff report from 2004, which talks about future residentials uses proposed.

But unfortunately, the thing that they couldn't control was the Great Recession of 2007, 2013.

And the consequence of that was an unpredictable scenario where the ownership of this project and all the parcels around there were broken up into distressed parcels.

I will cut little past this slide for the sake of time.

The question you want to I want to sort of answer is if it's already zone RC today that allows residential above commercial, why am I changing it to mixed use?

There's a couple of impacts.

Um, and by the end of the, I hope you'll be able to see the wisdom of what we're proposing.

The first impact is the competition between Sandan Village and Main Street Commons.

This is the era of 2004, and both were competing for outdoor malls.

And really, it's harder to do that in such close proximity to each other and still have enough tenants to fill both projects.

And some tenants were jumping from one to the other, and the reality was Santana Village got a better and a quicker head start and a better tenant profile, and was able to anchor through and ride out the recession.

The unfortunate part for Main Street Commons is they put in the road work, but they were slower than the yellow box.

Because they were slower, they got hung up with the recession.

So even though they started putting the infrastructure in the roadway alignments, the recession occurred, the project stalled, it was broken up into individual pieces with a variety of different owners, and what was one plan replicating Scott's still Kieran Commons became really a series of about 12 or so different parcels owned by different people, all competing for whatever they could do with their um piece.

As a result, there was no more project that vision that was uniform, and it was really a failed project.

The problem though with that failed project is this next slide here.

This is the roadway network, and I don't think people would have designed the roadway this way, which is this red line, had they not planned for a larger congruous uniform project.

The unfortunate part is while they couldn't predict the recession, they did they got ahead start and putting that roadway in.

The difference is when you turn up Val Vista Road and make a right on Market Street right by the VA Clinic, very few cars travel that line in red.

It seems to be that the commercial shopping pattern is to go up Valvest Drive and turn right on Pecos.

As you turn right on Pecos, you have a very different experience.

And the reason why this matters, those two circles is circle number three is the city's traffic data.

This isn't from our own reports, this is just pulling the city's traffic counts.

And the difference at that red dot there is about 630 to 850% more trips during the peak time on Pecosh Road than that little dot on the bottom, which is on Market Street.

Just to give you some perspective, if I could break this down into minutes, there's 29 cars a minute on Pecosh Road, and there's barely three on Market Street, which tells you Market Street is not a road that's being traveled for retail uses.

And I think the outcome would have been very different if Main Street Commons could have beat the recession and been built.

That's not the circumstance that happened, but it was the roadway that was designed.

So recognizing that this isn't a roadway that's being used for commer for travel, it's very difficult to attract retail users who want to be on a road that no one's driving on.

In fact, your national tenants and your boutique tenants want to be in a place that's very visible with high traffic turnover.

So the third issue that comes up here, as you start to look at what happened, the ownership, as they kind of acquire these broken parcels from a what was a good plan, but a failed execution, they started to figure out well, who can buy me a piece and what can I do with it?

And the first one that kind of came in was the VA clinic.

I thought it was an error to call a hospital, it's a VA clinic, but I think it was a necessary component for the town.

But the unfortunate consequence of it, it did change the vision of what was supposed to be Main Street Commons, this walkable retail below, lofts above.

And as a result, the other parcels started to spin off to just whoever would buy them.

And so that's why you start to see the bank and then an Aldi's and then a bunch of apartments, and then you see uh the bikini beans uh come in off of Val Vista and another potential hotel coming down there, and the uniform vision that I think was well intended, failed execution, has resulted in this circumstance where I've got this weird piece along a bend of a road that no one's driving, across the street from a retention basin where no one's putting other businesses on there to track other uh traffic in the corridor.

So while this clinic was very important for our town, it sort of um changed the dynamic of what was supposed to be the plan in 2004.

There still is plenty of retail opportunities, but I think it's interesting that those retail opportunities occur on areas where the retail visibility is significant and where it still can succeed and likely occur.

Someone may ask someone asked me, well, what about office?

Could you do office here?

And frankly, we have been marking it for not we, I shouldn't take credit for that.

The ownership has been marking it for office and retail opportunities since their acquisition about 2010 or so.

Um, one of the challenges with that is there's a lot of empty office right by them.

If you look at the old mountainside fitness property, it has about 40,000 square feet of empty office already built.

So if somebody really needed to take down quick immediate office space, it's there and it's been on the market for a year and a half.

And then you can go just north of us on Rome Street, Rome, uh excuse me, Pecos Street, Rome Towers, where there's several offices that are about 4,000 to 10,000 square feet.

So if somebody just needed something small, um they could have something there quick and ready too.

And so trying to attract a large campus office, they would likely go over to where Rivillon is, where you've had a lot of built office, big floor plates that are still empty today.

And so just the nature of this project isn't it's really a victim of the timing that it started with and the infrastructure put in prior to recession coming, but now we're trying to figure out what we can do.

When I look at the office corridor in this submarket, there's eight and a half million square feet between Gilbert and Chandler, which is the identified submarket, and of that, there's 31% vacancy.

Even Price Row Corridor, which is I think the gem of a city not to be named, a little to the west of us, has 3.2 million empty square feet of office in that area.

So I say all this because we would love to have that, and we've been trying to get that, it just won't come, and I don't think it'll ever come post-COVID.

So I asked myself, why then am I doing mixed use?

Well, the simple answer is there's one building that I don't have retail on the bottom.

But the reality is by doing retail and office, I now have the Goldilocks zone, which is I can be flexible with spaces as small as 1,000 square feet to about four or six thousand square feet, which allows me to tailor a space to a small boutique local user that might not have the necessity of the significant trips that you would expect that a national user might expect along Pecos Road.

The interesting thing about this process is when I started it, I'm not, let me take a step back, I'm not introducing too much that I'm competing with the former Mountainside Fitness Building or the Rome Towers building.

I'm actually creating a new asset class that really doesn't exist.

And what's interesting about this is when you look at my plan before, the areas in blue was my commercial previously.

And when I filed this case, I had about 9,000 square feet of commercial.

And that's when I came to the chamber the first time.

They said that was cute, but it's really not enough.

And we made some changes, and by the time I came to council, we were about 16,000 square feet of commercial.

And I really appreciate the wisdom and feedback I got.

And I think sometimes my job is to help applicants get the process, and the other times it's to receive good coaching.

And the feedback I got then was to consider the three hotels on the south side of that building one.

Are there people who might be um visiting in that whole those hotels there that could maybe frequent and support potential commercial across MIT?

And so we went back and looked at it and we realized we can do more than just simply office.

We can even include um opportunities for retail, maybe small boutique, bakery, or coffee shop that could be beneficial for those uses over there.

But at the same time, being so close to the A clinic that you could see a medical office component being in here as an ancillary support service since council in August.

We've come back to the design team, and we've doubled the amount of commercial.

And so now we are 35,000 square feet of commercial on the ground floor.

Everything identified in blue.

Now, this deal almost didn't happen, and then the reason why it's taken me a while to get here is because it's hard to subsidize that with the project proposed.

But thankfully I have a willing partner in the ownership group who were able to step in and collaborate with the builder here, and together what was an impossible deal that broke down after August came back to life.

And it shows you a willingness of a cooperative seller who wants to make something happen after years and decades of trying here at this property.

So at the end of the day, um our open space didn't go down.

At the end of the day, our units didn't go down, but our commercial doubled, or if you look at the beginning, it was quadrupled from the beginning from the first case.

And I like this slide that staff showed in a different presentation, but it's helpful.

As staff did some analysis on a very different issue, but they they've they recognize the value per acre and how important it is in our in our town.

And some of the areas that have the greatest value per acre are mixed use areas, which allows us to capture the revenue both from sales tax, property tax, development tax, but also folks who live here can shop and support the businesses nearby.

And the blending of those two in one single parcel actually makes this a higher value breaker than many of the other parcels across the town.

And so as the chamber revisited this and looked at it a second time, recognizing that we have heard the concerns of council and from the chamber and come back and revise the plan.

They wrote a different letter of support.

I'm very grateful for what they've acknowledged that this property has some inherent challenges.

We can't change roadway alignment, we can't change the retention basin across the street.

We can't change that.

No one's driving this road.

But the fact that we have listened and added double what we were last time shows a willingness from both a seller and a developer that they want to try to create momentum, even in an area that could be challenged and difficult.

So at the end of the day, this in a funny cycle restores back the idea of mixed-use commercial that started this project in 2004, long before any of us were on the dais or here at this room.

And while the recession put some of these conditions in place, today is a really good chance to make a good correction out of a frustration that occurred in 2007.

At the end of the day, it's the right solution for a street that's rarely traveled.

It's a really good use with the 202 um uh growth plan as Mayor mentioned last time and Ashley pointed out here.

It's been unanimously supported by the planning commission.

I haven't heard any um public concerns about it.

And with the chamber letter support, which recognizes their voice as the um leader of the business community, clearly um seeing the value and the change coming forward is a good thing for the town.

I appreciate where staff's at and um but I think this is the right use, and hopefully um you'll recognize that we've heard and revised the plan based on the feedback we received.

Mary, you have a long agenda.

I'll try to be as brief as I could without um shortchanging any of the attention that you need, but I'm happy to answer any questions that this council may have.

Council members, any questions, member Bongiovanie?

Thank you, Mayor.

Um you know, my issue with this the first time was not having enough commercial, so I appreciate you guys more than doubling the commercial on it.

And I also have to recognize that not all the time.

I mean, I hate getting rid of commercial property, rezoning commercial property, but not all the time is the zoning I feel appropriate.

I agree with you as far as that road.

I used to have an office at Rome Towers.

Um I can't see more commercial happening there, but I do appreciate you doubling that.

Now, with my bad math skills, I just want to verify this with you.

Um 367 doors, average of 14,000 dollars going to our water and sewer.

That's about five million dollars and development fees, which is about one percent of our total project that we need for 750 million dollars.

Okay.

Thanks for verifying that for me.

Appreciate it.

It's a probably 110 million dollar project sales, which will be about five and a quarter million just in impact fees and development fees.

Thank you.

Other questions.

Thank you.

I have no request to speak.

I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the council for discussion and/or a motion.

Councilmember Koprowski.

Um thank you, staff and Mr.

Baugh.

With the additional office, as Council Bon Giovanni mentioned, and with the planning and zoning and chambers support, um, I move to approve general plan GP24-08 and zoning Z24-20 with conditions A threats.

I'll second that, Mayor.

Thank you.

It's been moved by Council Member Krowski, seconded by Councilmember Bon Giovanni.

Please vote.

Motion carries five two.

We'll go on to item 36.

General Plan 2501 and zoning Z 2502 willowbrook.

Staffordshire.

Good evening, Council.

Uh, I'm Kristen Devine.

I'm a senior planner with the town.

Uh, the project I'm bringing before you tonight is for a rezoning and a general plan amendment for the Willowbrook community.

Uh, you previously saw this in August, and it was continued at that time so that staff and the applicant but could better explore um some alternative traffic measures that uh the residents were concerned with.

So I'm gonna do a brief recap here of the project.

Uh it's located on 156th Street and Riggs Road.

This is just east of Val Vista.

It's currently zoned as SF 43, and what the applicant is requesting is to rezone this property to SF6 with the planned area development requesting some deviations on setbacks and lot coverage.

Uh and with a general plan amendment to also go along with it from zero to one dwelling units per acre to two to three point five pilling units per acre.

Uh just as a refresher, this is the development plan that they're proposing.

It's 91 lots uh with a minimum of 6,600 square feet per lot.

It covers approximately 26.4 acres.

There's 18% of open space proposed uh for a total density of 3.45 dwelling units per acre for the project.

I would like to point out also that the red dot lots on the bottom are all single story restricted lots.

And just a brief recap of those deviation requests that we went over uh back in August.

The applicant is requesting a deviation on the front side and rear setbacks as well as lot coverage.

Um, front setbacks, the only deviations that they're requesting aren't for the setback number, but they would like to eliminate the staggering requirement for the front setbacks.

Um side setbacks, we're requesting a deviation of five feet, so from a 10-foot requirement on one side to a five-foot requirement on the other.

Um rear setback also not eliminating the the actual setback number, but they are requesting the elimination of increased setbacks adjacent to our tirial and collector roadways.

Uh, to compromise, they are increasing the lot size from 6,000 square foot, which is standard for SF6 to 6,600 square feet.

They are increasing the lot depth from the required 100 feet to 120 feet.

They are implementing that single story restriction on the southern boundary.

And the open space is 18%, where 10% is required.

Um so back in August, the the concern was largely due to traffic.

We were asked at that time to look into alternative traffic measures to see um what we could do since the signal was not requested at that time.

Um so with that, I'd like to invite Susanna, our town engineer, up to discuss some of the traffic measures that we have to present for you.

Thank you, Kristen.

Okay, let's see if I can manage this technology.

Good evening, council members, vice mayor, and uh mayor.

The staff has been working really hard with the developer at this point in time to see what types of alternatives that we can do to provide that safe and efficient traffic flow, not only on Riggs Road, but also as the left turns and the outbound traffic happens on 156th Street.

Just as a quick reminder of where we were at back in August when we first looked at this, the traffic study was indicating that a signal was not warranted at this site.

There are nine criteria, they call them warrants that you're usually looked at to say if they meet those certain thresholds or meet their criteria that they would then.

And so, but but generally one of the criteria from a volume perspective is that for a four-hour volume, so you would have to have 64 vehicles per hour making that left hand turn.

Currently, so that would be four hours out of a 24 hour time frame that you would have to have 64 vehicles doing that.

Currently, we only have 13 vehicles in the in the existing peak, which means that's the most that's ever coming through in one hour out of that embedded off-bound, left bound left.

So it's coming from the north side southbound.

The other one is the northbound coming out of the subdivision.

So again, we're we are far from meeting those criteria.

Um we've done a little bit of in putt yeah.

Um we've done a little bit of input as well as looking into our system as well as looking into our system, or maybe I have looked into it.

I know our traffic engine system, or maybe I have looked into it.

I know our traffic engineers have known this for a while.

But we have about 44 signals right now that we are looking at on a regular basis where those left hand turns become more comfortable and feel as if they are a better and a safer you know environment for them, even though the numbers are showing that that it is probably performing as it should in an unsignalized situation.

So we've looked at opportunities that were arrange around site visibility.

There's the gaps in the traffic.

So traffic that's coming from left and right on the east and the west side, that you have enough time to get across that intersection and make it, and you feel comfortable that you're able to do that before that traffic would would close in on you.

We have also alternative routes that we've looked at to say what can what are some other alternatives that we can lessen the number of uh vehicles that would be coming into that intersection to make that left turn.

We also looked at some different configurations on the intersection itself, and then adding to that as some speed controls because I know that speed was also a question for several of the property owners out there.

So from a site distance concerned, we do know that there are a couple areas that we have some vegetation in the way that we want to basically get to a point of having some removals.

On the southwest corner of Riggs and 156th Street, there's a little tree that's sitting on the private property over there that is in the county right now.

We will need to work to probably pull that down so that they have a good visual to be able to see any traffic that is coming to them eastbound.

And then when you look to your right and you're coming for the traffic that is coming westbound, we have a canal that's out there a ways, and there is a little bit of a challenge with a rise in the roadway there.

We need to make sure that that visibility is there with any improvements that we might make.

But also there's some vegetation and some heavy vegetation of some trees.

So we're also suggesting that we look into that and clear that out so that we are able to really see the visibility of the cars that are traveling on Riggs Road here.

So as far as a gap goes, we've done some calculated analysis that basically says what kind of what time does it take to go from a stop condition on 156th Street to make that left turn across the three lanes of traffic and get up to the 45 mile per hour without having to stop in a unprotected kind of meet um open area there.

Um that that time frame we've calculated is about 13 seconds.

So about 400 feet out, we need to have cars that far away when we start our turn.

We're gonna take five seconds to get across that roadway, and then on as we're looking to the right-hand side, we need another eight seconds before cars will basically approach us from that from the from the westbound.

So what we know is with that 13-inch gap or that 13-second gap, we've looked at how the traffic is flowing through there and determined that maybe there's some signal timing we can do to allow the signals that are east and west of here to be able to be adjusted somewhat to open that that gap up.

We've made some initial changes to that right now, working with the developer.

And then over the last month we've had a few challenges.

We had a water line break, we had some paving going on in this area, and we had two fall breaks that were going on.

So we didn't feel 100% that we understood exactly where the traffic was.

So we're gonna continue to work with the developer, and they have agreed to work with us.

We always knew it was kind of be iterative to see what we can do to widen that gap and give that 13 second in there for the majority of the day.

So as an alternative route, I know there's been some discussion about what if we go south on 156 through that subdivision and then go out to Santan Boulevard to hit Valvista, and there's been a question on that one.

I don't have an example of that here.

So it's pretty tight between the two subdivisions out there.

We didn't look too deep into that, but we felt that that was probably a non-starter.

There is private access right now between those two subdivisions to be able to get through there on an emergency perspective so they can go through the additional subdivision that's there through through Valvest and then take a right turn and head out.

But that was one that I didn't show you here, but that is one that has been asked about, and we don't feel that it is probably a viable alternative for us at this point in time.

The next one from an alternative route, and this is really kind of a kind of a combination of several things here with this one, and that is to provide a U-turn that is closer than what we have down at Edora Trail.

So right now, if you do not, if you're coming eastbound and you do not take a left turn there at 156th Street, you have to go all the way down to Adora Trail so that light in order to make a flip around to get to head back westbound.

So we looked at that and said, what are some of our options?

And I know the property owners were a little bit concerned about some of that U-turning that is happening in 156th Street.

There are people that maybe miss the light at ALA or choose to get around that light, they come up and take a left turn so that they can take a right turn into some of those other access ways to the north, ALL or the schools to the north.

So we looked at this and said, okay, so how what could we do that maybe would allow that same type of thing to happen as a U-turn?

And from that, we know that there's two things that can help move traffic off of 156th Street and make that left-hand turn through what we're what we consider a two-stage U-turn.

You would take a right-hand turn, move over the three lanes, go into a storage bay, make the U-turn, and then head back westbound.

There will be two opportunities with this subdivision to do that, one at 156th Street because they have access onto 156th Street with this subdivision, and then we have their secondary, their other access that is actually on Riggs Road, which would have to do the same thing already, is go down all the way to Adora Troyers if they wanted to come back westbound.

So we have worked with them to say, would you be interested in putting that U-turn in?

And this is they've agreed to do that, so that is one that we have looked at.

And I think it it basically allows you to move over in a comfortable fashion.

You have some storage space in that median when you move over to before you do the U-turn and feel comfortable that you can pull back out to go to 45 miles an hour without the cars heading westbound, getting, you know, hitting you.

So the intersection reconfiguration that we looked at and we talked about was actually taking the median out on the east to remove the eastbound median nose.

That median nose right now allows traffic to head, uh take a left turn at that intersection with a raised median to go up into the subdivision that's on the north end side.

If we remove the the hard raised median there and we put in a two-way left turn lane, that would allow anybody to take that left turn and they actually would be able to sit into that two-way lane before they actually pulled out, giving them again a little bit of time to basically look at one lane coming at them one direction and then one the other.

Um out there a little bit more where we start improving those medians or changing those medians to where it's no longer a four-way intersection, but it becomes two three-way intersections in reality.

Um, and when it would basically create a median in the center of that road that allows the this the 156th street going northbound to take a left turn left to get to go westbourne.

Again, you have a storage lane to be able to get up to speed to that 45 miles an hour, or you can come into that area of the left bound.

What it does is it cuts completely off anybody going north or wanting to take a left bound north from that, and we would restrict anything coming southbound on that neighborhood to the north to only be right in and right out.

Um that one is the probably the most extensive one that we've looked at.

So from that perspective, um, we also looked at the speed control because we know that that's a challenge as well.

Um we've looked at speed speed feedback signs.

Um we would put in solar powered ones.

You've seen them out there.

We primarily use these these um speed zone or speed feedback signs on our collector systems around schools.

Um we use them also, you've seen them down in the heritage district as well.

So we are not using them in a frequent situation.

We do like to analyze that and make sure that we're doing it appropriately in the right spot spot and able to sign put that in the right spot.

And then the second one, which we've been talking to you guys about, some what are some of the other options that we have for safety that helps us with the reduction of speed, um, getting that feedback, but also potentially issuing tickets without having police officers out there to do that, and that's the speed enforcement cameras.

So that if if we were to work towards that direction on that one, we would have to put a policy in place that the council would approve in order to do that, and then it would be how do we basically set up the contracts to manage any tickets that were there, how do we recoup the money, etc.

etc.

So a little bit of work that we would have to do there, but that is one that we're continuing to research um at this point in time.

So we kind of looked at a decision making matrix, and it appears from our perspective that we want to do the least impactful, we don't want to necessarily change too much of some existing things that are happening.

So that property that's on the north of the development that's on the north side, cutting them off from being able to make a left hand turn would would probably um open up some challenges from that neighborhood as well.

Um so we're looking at trimming the vegetation, let's get that site distance a little bit more improved.

Let's put some signal timing adjustments in, and then also put that um downstream median U-turn and also restrict the U-turn right there at 156th Street is our is how we would look at that is to say those would be our best recommendations at this point in time to improve um the the feel for that safety and that efficiency of the work in that in that area.

We are going to continue to look at the speed back five uh the speed feedback signs, that two-way left um turn, continue to evaluate that as that may end up being another thing that we would promote maybe in the future, um, or then also continue to watch those new signal warrants.

We are not recommending at this point in time at all on the signal enforcement cameras because we're working with you on that, but this may be a location in some day that we would put that in, and then the T intersection, we're also not recommending that at this time.

So that's where we're at is to turn the vegetations, um, continue doing that iterative process on that signal timing, put that downstream median U-turn on, and then um put that no U-turn sign up right there at 156th Street, and then continue working through those mitigation efforts.

So I'm gonna turn this over back to Kristen at this time.

Thank you.

Or if you have questions, any questions?

Councilmember Bonjivani.

Thank you, Suzanne.

Thank you.

Um you go back to the recommendations again.

Sorry, one more before that.

When we're back, yeah.

Okay.

Um speed feedback signs.

How would that be a detriment?

Do it now, also with your other recommended things.

My only concern with that one is is just have other areas that they may be be needed as well.

And we'd like to spend a little bit of time saying what is the plan to address this across town in some of the other areas that we're looking into.

So it's much like the cameras themselves where we're you know, the the enforcement cameras, kind of maybe looking at it as a more comprehensive.

Um it is something that I think we could do.

I just would like to maybe take a bigger picture and and work through it as maybe this development is actually going in to put that in.

Okay, can I uh chief?

Can I put you on the spot?

I know that you guys have been doing some speed enforcement down there because I see it.

Right.

So I see the officer there every once in a while when I ride my bike.

I believe I don't go 60 miles an hour on my bike though, but yeah.

Thank you.

Councilmember Torgas.

Um I have a question.

I believe you looked at a a using the Roosevelt water easement, which I thought was mostly county there, but you've said that you don't feel that it's it's something worth pursuing.

But a feeling is one thing is can we take a better look at that?

Because that would solve all these problems for that community.

And it shouldn't, if it's got access now for emergencies to be able to make it a little bit more usable.

Overall costs are and what the capabilities are with that.

It's gonna take us some time to do that.

And so I think that that's really why we're saying at this point in time, we don't think it's going to be that immediate support that that would be needed in this area.

So it's not off the table, but it's not on the table for this conversation here.

Correct.

Okay.

Councilmember Lyons?

Susanna on the U-turn lanes, we're talking about.

Well, I'll back.

Yeah.

Um I'm gonna go to the U-turns.

Did you guys, when you did the traffic study, look at how many cars made a right out of there and then went down to the light and hung a U-turn there in your count for people going left?

So I don't know that I we have gotten it all the way down to Odoro Trails, is that what you're asking?

Yeah, because that's the same thing.

It's going right and then coming in.

What I do know is right there at 156th Street right now.

We have in the peak hour, we have 13 cars going left and 13 cars going right.

So they are basically going both directions right now at almost an equal rate based off of the information that we've we've looked at.

Does uh is anybody even taking a look at that to see how many right turns ended up actually truly being a left turn?

So you're asking how many of those 13 would be go back and then come back?

I don't know that we have that information, but we certainly can add that to some of the other work that we're doing as we're looking at the signalization timing.

When I look go back to your slide, well, let's stick with this one first, and then I want to look at a slide on this chief.

Uh and this may not, this is a question for you, and this slide may not be a really good picture of that.

But when I look at the U-turn coming out of the other drive that's proposed on both of these, really, how many feet by law do you have to be in a lane before you can make changes to go over three lanes of traffic?

I don't think the code specifies roughly speaking, it's about three seconds.

I'd have to look to see if there's an actual you need to be able to uh enter a lane and then signal to the next lane safely in that time frame.

So that's tight, but it's doable.

If as long as you to do obviously you've got you've got time.

Um so it is uh concern that that um so it is uh concern that that would be a tight time frame would be a tight time frame.

Now if there's no traffic or limited traffic and you can but you have to do a property, get into the first lane.

You can't just make what we would call a wide right.

You're making that right turn and then going all the way left.

You've got to go into the first lane, proceed to the middle, then the third, then into the uh left turn lane.

So from your opinion, it would be a tight it's legal, but it's tight.

Okay.

In my opinion.

All right, and given the speeds that we know that are going down there on that road, how feasible is it in your opinion?

Using my council member Bon Giovanni math.

45 miles per hour, your distance, it's your speed.

You're going 45 feet, um, plus half of that is another 22 feet.

So you're going 66, 68 feet per second.

So depending on your speed, that that's gonna either increase or decrease based on your speed.

If you're going 45 miles per hour, so I don't know what the distance is from that intersection to that U-turn.

Right.

If some math is the math for me, 35 miles per hour, you're going about 66 feet per second.

Okay.

All right.

And Susanna, could you go back to the slide that has the uh picture of what the proposed number of cars making a left turn would be when you were looking at the warrants?

Okay, yes.

Uh uh, let me add to what he just said there.

We've looked at this be extensively.

The distance between that second or that uh entrance onto rigs to that U-turn is about 450 feet, which is twice of what we would do when we basically do offsets on most of our signals, and we do believe that they could do that in about a five-second time frame.

So, and and we believe it's a doable type opportunity.

So that and again, those are calculated, so just letting you know that that's we we've looked into that and placed that.

We also have you know, we'll we'll be looking at that from a design perspective as it gets as it gets provided to us from the developer to assure that we're giving people enough time to make that the move that that the chief just basically gave us.

So I think you're looking for this one?

Yes.

So you're you're saying the proposed peak is going to be about 44, but the threshold is what, about 65 vehicles per hour?

The right now we've only got a peak of 44 as we calculate that um for the propo with the proposed development.

So it's another 30 on top of the 13 that was there initially.

Okay, so but that does not include the people that are making a ride going in down to a dura trails and hooking a Louis to go back left, right?

Yeah.

So again, I now we're we're getting way up into my traffic engineering, all the little things that they gave me to look at.

And I do believe that based off of what we've looked at there, is it that there was maybe only one or two in the records that we got that showed that there was actually a U-turn happening at that intersection?

Um what we're trying to do though is to prevent those U-turns happening at the intersection themselves.

I know setting of the light, watching it when it went down there a couple times.

There were several that were doing that.

I think it just depends on what day of the week it is as well.

So absolutely.

Okay.

With that said, I I would it be fair to say that if we added that to that, uh that 44 would increase.

If we added the people that are going down and hooking a U-turn at a duro, um I think that this was a very conservative number.

So I I think it's high for based off of what I've been told by our traffic engineers.

The calculation on this does appear to be a little bit straight than taking the exit could go right hand out of that development.

So there's a lot of you know, looking at how how the disbursement happens, et cetera, as it goes in there.

So I'm gonna assume that the 44, and I'm gonna feel pretty confident of that assumption that the 44 is addressing any of those U-turns that are happening there as well.

And I want to go on the record and say, and I think the development is a good idea.

I just have major concerns about traffic down there.

Councilmember Mondjivani.

Thank you, Mayor.

Suzanne, um cross the street.

My guess is when that future development is built, that this would create a warrant for that site.

Absolutely.

We really do believe that the development on the north side that's undeveloped, that area right there, will definitely push to put a warrant of or of a requirement of that signal in at that point in time.

There'll be enough traffic that I think is coming southbound in that area that will create that.

If not two of them, there might be another one that would be a little bit farther east of the one at 156th Street.

When you change the timing that you suggested, could you get two cars through there at a time, three?

What what's your estimate?

Okay, excuse okay.

Explain the ask the question again.

I don't think I quite understood it.

Sorry.

I saw the timing change that you were suggesting.

Could we get two cars through three cars with that extra with that extra lane to the turn there?

So what they're doing is trying to balance how many cars are coming during a certain time frame.

Right.

Um and they hold at a certain amount of time at that signal.

It depends on what the volume is at the time frame, and then it would come through on both of those.

So they're adjusting that timing so that there is an opening from when the light is is red, right?

Um, and allowing enough time for it to that opening.

Are we talking about?

I don't know if that's one or two or three cars.

Okay, it also depends on the time of day as well.

So thank you.

Thank you, Susanna.

Thank you.

Yeah, I have some questions.

Well, I'm not I had some questions for her stuff.

Pardon me.

Well, I wanted to have like I wanted three extra slides.

Um recommendations that she had there.

Kristen's Oh, okay.

Okay.

I sorry.

Um I just have like three extra closing slides.

Um, and if there's still questions, we'd be happy to answer those for you.

Um so the last couple of slides I just wanted to go over is should you choose to approve this project and should you choose to adopt uh the U-turn option that Susanna touched on earlier.

We would like to add these two conditions to the approval.

Um the first developer shall be responsible for Riggs Road improvements, east of 156th Street improvements.

Don't mind that typo, I apologize.

Uh, shall include the construction of an eastbound left turn bay and storage removal of median vegetation that obstructs site visibility for 156th Street, an installation of a no U-turn sign for eastbound traffic at 156th Street.

And then the second condition being developer shall conduct a before and after intersection gap analysis for signal timing adjustments.

Um and then I just wanted to reiterate that um staff does recommend approval of the general plan and the rezoning, it does meet the intent of the Santan character area.

Um those were those were the last two slides.

I was kind of anticlimactic, I'm sorry.

Uh so we are available for your remaining questions now.

Vice Mayor, did you have some questions you wanted to ask?

Okay.

I I did have a couple questions.

I think the first slide you just did, if you can go back to that, might have answered those.

Is this the first one you did that you put up?

In the very beginning.

I'm sorry, Vice Mayor, in the very beginning when I spoke, or just this time.

No, this time.

This one, yes.

Yeah.

Well, and some of this, that's my question was gonna be what does the developer want?

And I think this kind of states what he wants there.

And what the end result is exactly what your you know your the developers wanting.

Um yeah, so uh mayor, vice mayor.

Um our recommendation is to eliminate some of that vegetation to improve the site visibility.

Uh it is to install the uh downstream U-turn, a no U-turn sign for eastbound traffic.

Uh and the developer is in agreement with these.

Um they were sent the conditions, also the two added conditions, and they're agreeable to this option.

Does that answer your question?

Okay.

Yes, I I just want to know because it seems to me it's a little bit unfinished.

I've are we gonna have a presentation from the developer?

Okay.

I think I'll wait.

I'd like to to listen to what the developer has to say, and I think he will probably answer the rest of the questions that I have.

I just want to know what they actually want out of what you've recommended.

Yeah, absolutely very much.

Thank you.

Kristen.

I'll open the public hearing and invite the applicant to come up.

Thank you.

I'm okay, thank you.

Uh good evening, Mayor, members of council, Brennan Ray, 2325 East Campbell back here on behalf of Lenar Homes.

Um I have a full presentation that I can go through.

I don't know that it's particularly relevant at this particular time, but there are a few things that I would like to emphasize.

One, we have worked closely with town transportation staft in conducting uh the gap analysis.

Uh our team has been out there and we've worked closely with them, uh, town staff on that analysis on some additional questions, diving deep into what was conducted uh out there to understand whether or not there's gaps in it.

We have had discussions with them about the additional stipulations that you saw uh put on the screen tonight.

We are agreeable to those uh conditions in terms of additional improvements because this is a a good development uh in a in an area that uh we need some housing in.

The other thing that I will tell you is that as we look at this, and this is when you always start talking traffic, it it starts at a site and then you go and look bigger uh as you go throughout it.

As we've visited with staff, we know that there's some regional improvements that are gonna uh impact Riggs Road and the volume of traffic on that.

Uh in talking with uh the town engineer Susanna with the Oketo Road improvements that you guys are underway uh over the wash, um that by I think the town's estimation is gonna lead to a 10% reduction in traffic on Riggs Road.

Uh and so there are some other regional improvements that will uh improve the condition of Riggs Road further to the east of you and Queen Creek.

I know they're heavily looking at their transportation plan because again there's not a lot of north-south if you look further southeast as it heads to the west.

And so there are things that are kind of upstream from you guys that are gonna improve the downstream flow.

But as it pertains to what we're talking about tonight, we've we we believe and agree with um the recommendations that staff has proposed and we're agreeable to doing those to trimming the vegetation to putting the U-turn uh lane in the in the appropriate spot, um installing that no U-turn sign.

Uh we certainly uh to Council Member Lyons comments, we certainly uh want to make sure that people exiting our site uh through our entrance are able to safely make that transition across.

And while it was generally depicted on that um aerial that staff had put up, um, as we get into the engineering details, we're gonna fine-tune that to make sure that there is appropriate spacing for people to make safe lane travels as well.

Um as staff indicated, we have to models would be open in this community uh in the event you choose to approve it.

There were 18 to 24 months before models will open.

So that does afford us time.

Uh it does afford staff some additional time to look at some of these kind of bigger picture items that I know they presented to you guys tonight.

So there still is an opportunity for the additional analysis to continue before the subdivision goes live.

Again, I can go into a lot more detail if necessary, but we would request your recommendation for approval with the additional stipulations consistent with staff's recommendation and the planning commission's recommendation.

Happy to answer any questions.

I also do have Don Cartier with CivTech, our traffic engineer that should come up.

You have three minutes.

Thank you, Mayor.

Distinguished Council members.

So you missed unfortunately there was a miss in the in the data there.

I don't know how I'm going to be able to send any of my kids, my kids, or any any of you is absolutely needed.

Traffic control.

Case in point case in point just today, just to get out of my development to come to this meeting, it took me 11 minutes to turn left.

I was the third car in line, one car turning left at the beginning, one car turning right, and then myself.

11 minutes just to turn left at 5 40 in the afternoon.

I did make it here in time, thankfully.

But uh you know, I I I don't uh I don't think 11 minutes is appropriate.

That's my opinion personally.

Um the uh let's see here.

Um another anecdote uh for that, just real quick.

Um Sunday morning at 6 a.m.

There were two Gilbert police officers with two people pulled over at 6 a.m.

on my way to the airport.

That's got to tell you something that even at 6 a.m.

it's a highway.

Um the last thing that I that I wanted to bring up uh was the setbacks.

Um you know we've argued before about the setbacks uh with the uh the proposed setbacks um being uh not a non-staggered uh position.

Um we feel that even though the houses may have setbacks to themselves based upon the facade of the of the house, um, it doesn't meet the adequate uh uh requirements that the town of Gilbert has set forth um already.

So I thank you for your time and uh have a good night.

Thank you.

The second card is uh I'm assuming is your wife, Kayleen Marvin, but she does not want to speak.

She's opposed also.

Thank you.

I'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the council for discussion and or motion.

Councilmember Torgeson.

Umzanne, could I bring you up again?

My math still stands from our last meeting.

And I think we're missing something.

If we're missing that it was on a uh holiday week, somehow uh Councilman Ponti Giovanni, Councilman Lyons, they were down there, they had difficulty trying to navigate that.

Uh when I asked you and someone else the math that was irrefutable.

We're missing something, and we have to I'm not opposed to the building of the community, but I am concerned that even without that community, these people have an 11-minute wait.

Something is being missed, and what commitment can we make to Marathon Ranch that we're not gonna miss this and somehow solve that problem beyond a U-turn?

Because the U-turn is not acceptable to me.

I want to find a solution.

What commitment can we make as a town to solve this problem?

Because it's uh we're arguing over whether it was done during a fall break or what time of day it was, or if it was on a Tuesday or a Saturday.

There's a problem there.

These people aren't making this up.

They're not there.

I've been down there twice.

One time there was no issue, another time there was a huge issue.

How do we how can we commit to these people to solve the problem and not take it out on the back of if the developer has to pay something?

Not a not a halfway job.

Yes, Councilman uh Torgeson and and uh Mayor Anderson.

I think the answer to that question is it with our traffic team, we are constantly and always looking at safety and efficiency on our on our our roadways.

We are constantly going to be doing that.

So I think this recommendation that we brought before you really basically said we think this is an iterative process to deal with that, and we're going to continue to work down that list that we've talked about to say let's start with these items that we believe are ones that that can support um alternatives to get around the current left turn.

If the U-turn would have been in, the time got too long, and it's a safe turn, you know, we take the right turn, and then we take that U-turn, the 11 minutes probably would have gone away.

And so that those are the things that we're working through as we go through that.

If we continue to have issues and we continue to monitor and continue to see problems, as we do with every other intersection that that is on our lists or on the things that we watch, as our PD are looking at, we just continue to work and work and work and work until we can get that comfort of that efficiency, that ability to have that that safe uh movement within our high um within our roadways.

So I I think that's the commitment we make every day.

So I I know that's not the answer you want to hear, but I think I think that's that's where we're trying to go forward with this at this time.

And certainly, you know, once a signal goes in, that is still not a guarantee we're not going to have accidents and crashes there, and the delays are are going to be um also different than what they are today.

Um, just because you you've got your signal stopped and you don't get to go for a certain amount of time.

So there are those types of things that are going to affect it over time as well.

Councilmember Kaprowski.

Um thank you, Susanna, for bringing back the additional information and the evaluation and the recommendations.

I I I agree with those recommendations.

And I want to touch upon something you mentioned, which is that the town has a ranked list of unsignalized intersections for traffic signal warrant evaluation.

Um it's my understanding that that list is very important to have because it with limited resources, it protects the town from liability when we have crashes at those intersections, because we know that we cannot fund or build 44 intersections or more, even if they are warranted.

And so even if this intersection was warranted, you're saying that there are 43 other intersections in the community that actually rank higher that we would need to look at and address before we should do this one because of that prioritization.

That is correct.

Um thank you.

And thank you for also answering that last question regarding if someone doesn't want to wait to make the northbound left, they could make the right and go to the Adora trails currently or make the left at Higley, and that'd be a far less delay than the 11 minutes mentioned.

Um we do have a physical barrier here in this area with with a canal that is immovable.

Um it's it's simply I think the conditions that exist for this piece of land.

I think that this project of single family homes and with the evaluation and conditions set forth.

Um I move to approve general plan GP 2501 and zoning Z 2502 with staff conditions including K and L.

One more question, sorry.

Thank you, Mayor.

We have a motion on the I know, but I have one more question.

Okay, before that.

I'll be happy to be happy to second that after I get my question.

Okay.

Umzansa, you're you're saying that you and your staff is committed to continue to monitor that for the next 18 to 24 months and make any appropriate changes or recommendations during that time if we continue to hear the residents of marathon ranch having more concerns.

You're you're willing to say you're willing to be you're willing, so I can give my commitment to them in the next 18 to 24 months.

If they're coming here every meeting with it with an issue that we we're going to continue to solve this.

We are continuing to monitor all intersections within the town to assure that we're getting safety out of them.

This will be one that we continue to do that with.

Thank you.

With that, I'll second um motion by council member Kaprowski, seconded by Council Member Bon Giovanni, please vote.

Council member lines and council member buckman opposed.

Thank you.

Uh we'll continue on the communication.

Vice Mayor.

Okay, so we're going to continue communications from citizens, and I am going to read the rules of decorum once again.

So the town of Gilbert values citizens' comments and input.

Anyone wishing to speak before the council must fill out a request to speak card for each item they uh they wish to speak on and to submit to the town clerk or place it in the bin provided prior to the start of the meeting.

Once the meeting starts, there are no more you know, the ability is no longer there to sign to speak.

The communications from citizens portions of the agenda provide citizens an opportunity to identify for the town council matters of interest or concern related to the town government.

Under the provisions of the Arizona open meeting law, the town council is prohibited from responding to issues that have not been properly noticed.

Therefore, the town council may only listen to citizens who wish to address them, and at the conclusion of the open call to public response is limited to individual members of the council responding to criticism made by those who have addressed the public body, asking staff to review a matter or asking that a matter be put on a future agenda.

In accordance with the town code, each speaker is limited to three minutes.

Priority will be given to Gilbert residents, business owners, and property owners.

Public comments will be limited to 30 minutes total at the beginning of the meeting.

The town clerk will notify the council once 30 minutes limit has been reached.

In addition, comments remain uh they will they will be heard after the conclusion of the public hearing items, which is where we are now.

Um this is the same three-minute limit per speak all speaker.

While people can not donate their time to others, they can designate a person to speak on behalf of a group of people.

The town asks that when your name is called, you come forward to the podium, state your name and place of residence, and then begin speaking.

All speakers are expected to observe common standards of decorum and courtesy.

Personal attacks, political speeches, or threats of political action are inappropriate in this forum and will be grounds at the discretion of the mayor for the ending of a speaker's time at the podium.

We truly value your engagement and public participation in our town council meetings for those here specifically related to water and utility rates and are looking to troubleshoot potential discrepancies.

We currently have the customer service support staff on site in the tower room located directly outside the council chambers.

And with that, I will begin calling the remaining speakers, and the first speaker will be Melanie Winfield.

My name is Melanie Winfield.

Um good evening, Mayor.

Um council members.

I'm the owner of Happy Goat and Co.

Together with my husband.

We've spent the past 12 years here in Gilbert raising our four wonderful children and building a small family farm where I create sustainable, healthy products for our community.

Over the past two years, the town of Gilbert has implemented some of the highest water increases in the valley.

48% in 2024, 25% in 2025, with more planned next year.

Also, it was noted that there haven't been any rate increases in the last 15 years, but there was a rate increase in 2018 at 11.9%, and also a rate increase in 2022 at 29.6%.

So we have had rate increases in the last few years, but I want to speak specifically on the recent rate increases.

We were shocked, we were shocked when our once averaged 60 to 80 monthly water bill ballooned to 250 to 400 with no change in usage.

As a farmer, I understand how precious water is in the desert.

I fully support responsible infrastructure and clean water.

But these D price hikes are more than an inconvenience.

They are a financial crisis.

Properties over three quarters of an acre are automatically pushed into the higher price tiers simply because of the land we maintain and not because we're wasteful.

For small farms like ours, the system doesn't recognize responsible use.

It penalizes sustainability.

People on smaller lots or using minimal water aren't impacted the same way.

But those caring for livestock crops, livestock or crops, these bills make it difficult, even impossible to continue.

If this pattern continues, Gilbert risks losing a very small Gilbert risks losing the very small farms and open spaces that make this community unique.

Here are a few things to consider.

Pause any further rate increases until an independent financial and engineering audit is completed to provide immediate relief for households in crisis, offer temporary bill credits, or hardship assistance for seniors, low-income families, and small farm properties hit the hardest by the increases.

And I know that was talked a little bit this evening, and I appreciate that.

I hope that that happens.

Oh, I'm done.

Disconnections.

Anyway.

Thank you for your time.

Okay, thank you very much.

The next speaker is Steve Laval and Steve Lavelle.

Apologize for that.

And you will have three minutes to speak.

All right, good evening.

Nice to see you guys again.

Um I have to say.

I told you so.

Your problem sits right there.

And now he's leaving.

But that's your leadership problem here in the town.

You have a lot of upset uh citizens who are rightfully upset because you've lacked leadership in this organization for quite some time.

And I'm glad to see them all here so we can kind of get them up to speed on what's been going on here in the town.

But I wanted to address Mr.

Banger, who's leaving.

Um I was sent his uh email that he sent out to the employees today.

And in that email, he says, quote, we've built a culture where innovation is encouraged.

Different perspectives are valued, and every employee matters.

I wonder if you thought that when the digital media team spying on the employees here and silencing conservative employees.

Do you think that then?

All right.

I was wondering, did you think that when you were pushing for BLM to be supported and the Marxist organization that it is?

And I was wondering if you were doing that with the LGBTQ and the transgender community that you've bent over backwards with and you've actually cost taxpayer money with because now you're you're you're renovating stations, fire stations that were built to be 100-year fire stations.

But you're renovating, like I believe it's five or six of them at a cost of about 40 million dollars.

But that's okay because you can just tax these people for their water.

And me too, by the way, because I'm here too.

By the way, my water rates increase too from like 70 bucks to 180.

So thank you.

Appreciate that.

Um, uh did anybody ever ask the fire chief why he removed the electronic fire trucks from the budget.

Did you guys do any research on that?

So the problem that I I see here is that I'm trying to help you guys.

I'm telling you that they don't tell you the truth, that they give you bad information, that they're lying to you, that they hide information from you so that you can make good decisions.

And yet here we are, right?

You haven't been given good information to make sound decisions.

Eight years nobody's nobody stuck a camera down the sewers for eight years, and became a crisis in this community that these people have to pay for.

Okay.

That's lack of leadership.

That's a lack of management.

Okay, that's the problem in this organization.

And it starts at the top and it stays at the top.

I'm gonna leave you with this.

You guys have a big decision.

It'd be nice if he left a little earlier, but it you have a big decision as a council to pick your next next town manager.

And I hope you pick one that has Christian values and loves America and is conservative, and is going to be conservative for us so that we don't continue to have to pay these taxes.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you very much.

Okay, the next speaker is Josh Reynolds.

Uh mayor, members of the council, Josh Reynolds.

I'm a current uh citizen of the town, and I was a former employee.

Um tonight I want to talk to well, you guys obviously, but the folks that are in the crowd here, and also anyone that's watching online.

Um you guys have a tough job to make, or you know, obviously a tough job, and I think you guys get beat up a little bit.

Um I'm online just like anybody, and I see some of the comments, and I just want people to know that these folks have to make some tough decisions, and I I think what we need to start doing is looking at the information you guys are given.

I believe that the staff here um under Patrick Banger and his and his um leadership team is in my opinion not giving you maybe the most accurate information, and you guys are the scapegoats, unfortunately, because you'll make decisions and have to deal with the ramifications.

And I think we need to dig deep a little bit and look at our leadership team.

So, and I know Steve kind of said a little some of the stuff I was gonna say, but you know, today's a good day for the town of Gilbert.

I'm not trying to come across negative, but Patrick going to Glendale is a good thing for this town of Gilbert, and I'm I'm I'm very excited about it.

I know a lot of people are as well.

Um, but again, going back to the leadership.

Under Patrick's leadership here, his leadership team, your fire chief.

I know Steve mentioned he tried to buy 3.3 million dollars of electric fire trucks.

And I'll just say for those that don't know, those electric fire trucks were out of service.

The one they have was out of service more than it's in service.

It's not a good, not a good purchase.

And that was scrapped when Steve, along with a couple other gentlemen, uh, brought some information to you guys' um attention.

Your police chief took a knee with BLM in June of 2020.

That's not a leader.

I think that's a cowardly move, in my opinion.

And your HR director um in 2021, we provided the documents to you guys before.

Um, but in 2021, he tried to hire firefighters in the town of Gilbert based on race and gender.

And we can provide those documents for you again.

But again, I just wanted to kind of speak on the lack of leadership.

I am happy that Patrick is leaving.

I think this is a good day for Gilbert, and uh thanks for your time.

Thank you very much.

Um next speaker is Alan Taylor, Alan.

Are you here?

Okay, looks like he is not here.

So our next speaker is I believe that's Mitch Ellis.

So Mitch Ellis.

Okay, thank you.

Our next speaker is I believe it's Mr.

Clock.

Pardon me.

Are you saying Herman Clock?

Uh yes, yes.

I I couldn't, I couldn't quite make out your first name.

And please be sure and and give your name and city you live in, and um you have three minutes to speak.

Thank you.

Evening, Mayor Anderson, council members.

My name is Herman Clock, Herman Frederick Click III, native Arizona resident of Gilbert, currently.

I watched this community build.

My father, who's a World War II veteran, taught me about pride and patriotism, and the gifts and the privileges we have being Americans.

And I joined the American Legion to help support those.

Taking away the parking lot of the men and women that give us the privileges in this town in this country.

To walk several blocks when some of our veterans can barely walk here.

We raise money for this town, we support this town.

As past president of our homeowners association, as past president of the Gilbert Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association, and an American Legion, Sons of the Legion, and a writer.

We're here to support the community.

Don't take us away, please.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Okay, our next speaker is Robert Arnett.

Robert Arnett, are you here?

Okay, so we will move on.

Our next speaker is John Cauldron.

John Cauldron, are you here?

Okay.

Our next speaker is Kathy Hickey.

Hi, my name is Kathy Hickey, and I was born in Arizona also, and I have been living in Gilbert for a very long time.

My uh great grandfather was it okay.

My great-grandfather was um the he worked for the Gilbert Enterprise and owned that, and that was way back when it was barely 1900 before it was a state.

My grandfather graduated from Gilbert High.

I taught at in Gilbert for years and years, and now retired.

But I do have a concern about the water situation.

Um I brought a copy of my bill, and as you can see, it went, and there are just two of us in that live in this household.

It went from 4,000 to over 41,000.

We have not changed anything.

I called the city out to take a look at this, and um the first time they came out was in July, and they said that um that when they shut the water off, the water stopped, and when they turned it back on, it started again.

So there was nothing wrong with it.

So then I had them come out again last Monday, and I left a note trying to explain some things and asked them to please call me.

I put it inside the box.

Nobody ever called.

I went yesterday to pull it out, it was just drenched in water from the rain.

So I don't know if they came or if they didn't come, but I I don't know if anything's gonna get fixed, but I'm just in fear for what's gonna happen what when I get my next bill, because it just goes up and up and up every time.

So that's all I have to say, and I hope you do something.

So thank you.

All right, our next speaker is Steve Kaufman.

Steve is he is he not here?

Okay, all right, thank you.

Um we have a few more left here.

Uh, our next speaker is uh Austin Walker.

Austin, if you would please state your name and city you live in.

You will have three minutes to speak.

Thank you.

Good to go.

Hi there, my name is Austin Walker, and I'm a reporter for Arizona's family.

I just want to say one, thank you for having us uh all speak today.

I know this is a little bit unorthodox, so I'll keep it brief.

Can you state the city you live in?

Yes, I live in Scottsdale, but I'm here uh working on assignment.

Okay, thank you.

Great.

Other than that, um, for weeks I have been talking with dozens, hundreds of people um here in the town of Gilbert that have been reaching out to us asking for help, saying that their bills aren't adding up, their usage isn't working, something is wrong, and they're asking the town for help, and they're getting limited to no answers.

This all being said, we've uh uh asked to reach out to the town of Gilbert, specifically talk with Mayor Scott Anderson.

I know a lot a couple, you know, last week we tried to talk to him, that didn't work out.

This morning we also reached out, and that didn't also work out.

So we know that you are transparent or wanting to be transparent.

And at the end of the day, you want to be honest.

You wouldn't be here on the dais if you didn't love this town.

You didn't love the people that were here and serving them.

So, this being said, we're here to put these questions out that we've tried to ask and we haven't got those answers to just yet, and know that we are here to be a vehicle and a vessel to help with that transparency.

So, first is Mir's.

We've had people reach out to us about this.

The first thing is background.

We've learned, you've heard from Nancy Stipp today that Nancy had a faulty meter.

We learned from the town of Gilbert that there were um should have been polled, they were inaccurately calibrated.

But this all being said, um, I asked how many are left, and that answer was not given to us, so we don't know.

And there's been stuff today asking, well, why don't we look at every single meter that's been placed just to have a check and see if this is working?

Um how do we know what's left?

The second one is the water treatment facility for the north.

Uh the background, it was delayed quite a bit for a lot of things that you guys could not um have anticipated COVID-19 supply chain and so on and so forth.

But we asked um it got very expensive, about half a billion dollars more expensive, and the town telling us that the town saved money uh by doing this.

About 30 million dollars.

So I think the question here is how did the town save money when the project got exponentially more expensive?

And finally, are there other options?

Has the town looked at anything else that they can do to alleviate the financial burden on residents right now, seeing next year about a hundred percent increase on their water rate.

I know this facility is being used to have water rates uh as well, excuse me, as well as service fees, and I know uh town policy regards a uh enterprise funds and it discourages funds from one area being used for the other, but this is a policy, not a law.

So, has there been a conversation from the people um from you guys talking about amending this policy, seeing if we can dip into other funds and use that to cover this all being said, the reason I asked this is because recently uh the uh there was a project Greenlit that shows about 600 million dollars for parks when it comes to splash pads and something else uh that that could be used.

So, again, we want transparency, we want to help you.

I just these are the questions that I think a lot of people have asked us, and we're hoping that we can work with you and get those answers.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Vice Mayor Buckley.

Uh thank you.

Sorry for the F-bomb laden diatribe on you the other day.

Yeah.

I feel you still deserved it, but I'm sorry I gave it to you.

And I and if I can respond if I'm allowed to disagree.

I do want to say that I will try and get you as much information as I can because I do believe this has been rolled out in a way that people have problems, but I wanted to apologize for ripping your head off.

Thank you.

And just to be clear on that, I would like to if I have just 10 seconds.

The quote that former mayor Peterson said was quote, we had put on a trans, we had put a transportation bond on the ballot, said Peterson, who explained that bond was meant to free up other money that could be used.

So this was not related to the bond.

It just was the idea that this bond was put in place to free up other money.

So it was not coming from that bond.

We just want to make sure that's very much clear and transparent and crystal.

So there's no other confusion on that.

But I again want to say thank you so much, and we hope that we can work with you more to have some answers for people here.

Thank you.

Okay.

Please, no clapping.

Okay, I apologize.

It's just inappropriate, please.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, I'm sorry.

No, I'm talking to you.

Yeah, I'm trying to keep decorum going here.

Um, so um our next speaker is Dorraine Summons.

Or Simons.

Doreen, are you here?

Okay, okay.

Thank you.

You guys are helpful.

Um, all right.

Our next speaker is Daniel Um DeSantis.

Thank you.

All right, we are moving on.

Our next speaker is Carissa Arnold.

And Carissa, if you could state your name and your full name and your town.

You live in.

You have three minutes to speak.

My name is Carissa Arnold.

I conduct business in Gilbert, but I currently live in Mesa.

I made a request in July of 24 police records related to my daughter's sexual assault investigation in support of a civil case against her attacker.

On August 7th, 25, I received an email from Zach W.

Gilbert Police Records Supervisor informing me that the footage was no longer available due to a retention policy failure.

My daughter was raped, harassed, contemplated suicide, and this claim of a simple oversight just ripped away her chances for justice.

I began asking questions and obtained records that showed the following.

In December of 24, the town clerk directed a policy to begin the mass deletion and purging of records starting January 13th of 25.

State documents provided by the town clerk specifically state she is not authorized to set policy or procedure.

I believe there were others involved in creating the policy to permanently delete public records, possibly including the town attorney and assistant town attorney.

There seems to be a lot of question about what records to delete and how.

Sorry, about nearly everything regarding my daughter's records.

And I question if they made Zach W.

The police records supervisor take responsibility for deleting my daughter's records, which we had been waiting for a year at this point.

The town doesn't have a clear policy in effect for public records.

The most current town code is over 12 years old and is significantly inadequate, and Gilbert Police doesn't seem to have any policies in place.

The recent policy for deleting records was created under very questionable circumstances.

The purge was created after the last meeting for the outgoing council, but before the first meeting of the new council.

The policy appears to exist solely in email.

It was never signed or written down.

I fully believe that the timing of the deletion of these records was intended to hide evidence of corruption or cover up.

Tonight I wonder if you're deleting records regarding everybody's historical water records to hide truth about water rates and meters.

While I am submitting my own complaints to the Attorney General, I believe that I have provided enough information to compel the town council to request an immediate investigation by the attorney general.

I am also asking the town immediately to stop deleting all records until after an investigation is complete.

I am terrified by the thought that you might choose to protect the town's own reputation over protecting justice for all of our children.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Did you uh and I apologize for this?

Did you state the town you live in?

It's for the record.

I did.

Pardon me.

I did in the very beginning, yes.

I did.

I said I lived in I do conduct business in the town of Gilbert, but I live in Mesa.

Okay, all right, thank you.

Okay, our next and last speaker is um Richard Davis.

Richard Davis, are you here?

All right, I guess that is it.

So with that, that concludes the communications with citizens for this council meeting.

And I am gonna turn this back over to our mayor Anderson.

Thank you, Mayor.

Mayor.

Yes, I remember.

Now that it's over.

Are we I just want to make sure we can't respond during but if something is said as related to transparency that I feel needs to be put on record for transparency based on what the reporter said.

Am I allowed to respond to that?

Well, I think it was criticism, but it was criticism.

It was criticism of the mayor.

It was.

So may I speak?

Sure.

So I just the one thing I want record because transparency does matter is the day that they asked the mayor for that interview, he already had an appointment.

And asked me.

The reporter asked me to step in and do the interview, which I did.

It was not Austin.

And Austin, I appreciate you talking.

I was hoping you were coming back into the room.

I appreciate you wanting to partner with us because that's what it's supposed to be.

Media and government are supposed to be working together, so thank you.

I think her name was Susan.

You weren't there at the water treatment plant.

I offered when that was done, because I said I have a doctor's appointment at 10 o'clock.

But I'm happy to stay.

It was a couple minutes late for it.

What's important about that is I offered to sit down and discuss with her after that was done at a different time the multitude of reasons that led to where we are now.

It's multifaceted.

She acknowledged that.

I'm aware of that.

And I said I was more than happy to do that.

The bet correct me if I'm wrong, but the best that I can tell that interview never ran.

And then you took one piece of it that had to do with uh we use a send to help our um struggling residents, so thank you for showing that.

Uh but I wanted to get that on record.

There was an interview.

I never saw it aired, and I did make an offer to your channel to sit down and talk about all of those reasons because it is important.

You need to know, the citizens need to know.

Um it's an issue.

And and it's again multifaceted.

So I'll leave it at that, just for the record.

Thank you.

Um I called him, but he might not have been here.

We have one other speaker that would like to speak and before we get to the administrative item.

Okay, so I guess our last speaker is um Noah James Markham.

Aloha uh mayor and to the rest of the city council.

My name is Noah James Markham, and I live in the great city of Tempe.

I'm a proud Democrat, and I love it.

This water bill issue that's going on right now in Gilbert.

We might have a lot of conspiracy theories, people here in Gilbert that might think Arizona is not in a drought.

So I guess that could be the problem.

And maybe people should really look how Arizona does not have a lot of water.

But maybe Gilbert has more than other cities.

But if we think that God will save us from the drought, that ain't true.

That he will save it.

No, it won't happen.

But President Donald Trump said that he was going to make our economy cheaper.

That's just not true either.

I have requests that we have Section 8 here and Gilbert, and also I have requests that hopefully the city can fulfill here, that we have T-coil in the city council, movie theaters here and Gilbert for people with TNA's.

So the movies can connect to a line devices while we're watching the movie.

I know we have subtitled devices at the movie theaters, but that could be updated too.

I also have another request for the city that comes as are in your auditoriums in the city, and also in city police or even that we have that we always have a sign language interpreter, no matter if someone asks for it, or not the sign language interpreter should always be there.

I have one more thing about your police officers.

Why don't they do their job by trying to pull over the people that spent a hundred miles per hour in a 40 mile per hour line or 25-hour line?

Is it a bad thing with money?

But they have the audacity to distract a kid with a disability on a sidewalk.

Bob give us both people in the city with disabilities.

There's a huge problem with that.

Because of the speed, why is that?

Because I got a ticket for turning right on a right stop sign, but this police officer was going a hundred miles per hour and a 45 mile per hour line.

I also that I always ask that we support DEI in the town of Gilbert.

Maybe we should have a pipo in downtown Gilbert, or only even a gay club in the downtown Gilbert.

So we can't find more DEI in the community.

I give you a quote.

It's easier to be evil than to be good as a person.

Like you guys in the White House.

That's just like Hitler.

America is not welcome in Hitler.

Maha, and thank you for listening to me tonight.

Thank you very much.

And now I'll give up back to the mayor again.

Thank you.

First is item 38, which is consider the reappointment of Mary Delay and new appointment of Iraj Kodka to the self-insured trust board with terms beginning October 14, 2025 and ending September 30, 2028.

Do I have a motion and second?

I make a motion to approve item number 38.

Move by the Vice Mayor, seconded by Councilmember Torrison.

Please vote.

Motion carries 70.

Item 38A.

I think there's been a request to postpone that item.

Uh Councilmember Lyons.

Yes, I'd make a motion to postpone that to the October 28th council meeting.

I second that.

It's been moved by Councilmember Lyons, second, and by Vice Mayor Buckley to postpone item 38A until the October 28, 2025 regular meeting.

Please vote.

Motion carries unanimously.

Thank you.

Future meetings, you can see the items that uh been requested, and some will be scheduled for the fall retreat, and some we'll have on a future agenda.

We'll go to communications.

Communications from the town manager.

Thank you, Mayor.

Members of the council.

I want to start with uh last weekend, as we're all aware, we had some uh significant rainfall uh around the region, including Gilbert, Arizona, and we had a number of issues that our workforce responded to through all day Saturday and Sunday and into the evening.

A couple of uh statistics I'd like to highlight for you and show you the great work they did.

We provided over 50 tons of sand and 3,000 sandbags were distributed.

Our parks and engineering crews worked early into the morning uh hours managing road closures and flood conditions, and Gilbert Fire responded quickly to a structure fire that was caused by a lightning strike.

That was a significant event in our community.

We're very proud, proud of our workforce that responded and helped mitigate that uh damage to our community and impact to our residents.

Moving into department and division highlights, it's national community planning month in October.

So we're gonna highlight our development services team.

Their primary areas of service are planning and code compliance, transportation planning, development engineering, and plan review and inspections, as well as data content and strategy.

The impact they have in transportation planning.

We received 177 million dollars in regional funding, provided over 49,000 certified ADA rides.

They issued over 1,527 total commercial permits and 24 and 2349 residentials and 387 single family, 418 total planning cases, and almost 1.3,000, Gilbert 311 code compliance requests, completed almost 24,000 uh inspections, and 12, just over 12,000 backflow uh backflow device inspections as well.

They've got some great dashboards they have created so you can dive in and learn more information, gain more information and insight into our community and our development and where it's occurring and in which categories and one of the projects that is underway that we've highlighted is the Gilmore project.

Moving on to retirement recognitions and awards.

We want to recognize firefighter Wesley Roskowitz.

He is retiring with over 24 years of dedicated service to our community.

We've been an integral integral part of our team and done demonstrating unwavering commitment, bravery, and a true passion for service, and we wish him well and thank him for his service to Gilbert Arizona.

We want to recognize Ashley Deering and June Wilson in our clerks department.

They both received their certified municipal clerk designations.

Earning the CMC designation takes at least three years of training and clerk experience.

We're proud to share that both team members achieved that milestone in August.

So very proud and congratulations again, Ashley in June.

We also want to recognize the Parks and Right team who was recertified for their CAPRA accreditation.

It's a distinction earned by fewer than one percent of agencies nationwide, and it reflects excellence, innovation, and impact.

They were also 2025 gold medal finalist, um, one of four finalists nationally for setting a high standard in parks and recreation.

We also want to thank the Gilbert community for um 911 day of service.

We had 97 projects completed, almost 6,700 volunteers involved from 88 organizations and almost thirty almost 14,000 hours of time donated by those individuals, and they are certainly the lifeblood of our community.

With that, that's all I have for you this evening.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Patrick.

Uh report from the council.

Council.

Councilmember Lyons.

Just want to remind everybody we have a Veterans Day celebration coming up Tuesday, November the 11th.

Uh, there'll be a uh car show from 3 to 5 p.m.

and a ceremony from 5 p.m.

to 6 p.m.

at the Gilbert Water Tower Plaza.

Um, this is a good time to come out and honor our veterans, and I would encourage everyone to please come and participate and to uh enjoy that time that we have with him.

Thank you.

Councilmember Torgison.

Uh I want to remind people that this Saturday, October 18th, there'll be a live pumpkin carving event during harvest in the heritage district.

I probably won't be there because the water rates are high and their sharp knives, they're in year out here.

Sorry, but safety first, gentlemen.

Um that'll take place at the water tower from 9 to 1 uh to 1 p.m.

on Saturday and open house style, so stop by any time.

Also, the uh heritage district visits visitors and businesses are encouraged to learn about new developments coming soon to the downtown at digging the district.com.

Construction projects can significant significantly impact visitors and businesses.

So town stuff staff will update the website regularly with information on parking events, road closures, and other ongoing improvements in the heritage district.

In addition to sharing project renderings and interactive mapping tools, digging the district.com shares information about the heritage district wayfinding and place marketing project.

Uh I did feel that unfortunately we with everything that's gone on, we weren't able to address some of the comments from uh people as I think uh the criticism the of avoiding things uh so I hope that maybe our civil discourse can go further and understand that everybody was heard that spoke this evening because I didn't think we addressed some some of those things.

But one thing I wanted to point out is uh Frank, you lost a member, and he and another member tried to intervene, and they got there just moments too late.

Uh Jim Savini uh took his own life, and he was one of the Legion members.

And the suicide rate amongst uh veterans is absolutely abhorrent.

I have a friend that I worry about almost daily, and it's just something that we should recognize because it's it's not just the cost of doing business for him, it's something that we all can do better by.

And I just wanted to say that person shouldn't go unrecognized.

So thank you.

Councilmember Monty Romney.

Thank you, Mayor.

I have a quick comment before I give the parks and rec report.

So um I I try to be available on social media and answer questions.

Um at times it may come off as rude, and I apologize for that.

I I will no longer be on social media after a few expressos anymore.

With that said, we as a council have a handful of residents who go out of their way to be negative.

There is one such president who was going out of his way to find my post and respond to every one of them negatively.

I tried something different with him.

I found common ground.

That common ground was the Arizona Rattlers.

This gentleman and I over the past few months became friendly and plan on going to a game together in the spring.

This weekend he committed suicide.

Folks, people out there are hurting due to multiple reasons.

What I've learned is that we need to work together to be more civil.

We can work together more.

This isn't us versus them.

We all live here together.

We need to take a step back and listen and have a conversation.

Something I've learned is that when you have an ear of a decision maker, speak into it.

If you yell into it, we may go deaf and not be able to listen anymore.

Let's work together on these issues.

Excuse me.

Umbert Concerts in the park.

Enjoy some tasty takeout with from one of many Gilbert restaurants and enjoy the tunes.

Performances will run from 6 30 p.m.

to 8 30 p.m.

and include a variety of family-friendly local musicians.

October 23rd will feature Clark Cole and the High High Horse.

Pumpkin decorating and more.

We look forward to seeing you all there.

Get waterlogged in the pumpkin patch.

And that's it.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Vice Mayor.

Well, on a happier note, um, the council would like to wish Mayor Anderson a very happy birthday.

Today is Mayor Anderson's birthday.

And um so we have some cookies from Liberty Market back in the back room to celebrate.

So happy birthday, Mayor Anniversary.

Thank you very much.

Um thank you all.

Thank you for being here.

I did all the comments that you've heard tonight.

Uh I have no other specific reports for the mayor.

Uh I'll entertain a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

We are adjourned.