Good morning everyone.

We'll try that one more time.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning, good morning, team.

I was almost there.

Usually if I say hi everyone or before everyone, I expect a good morning, Matt, or a high.

Good morning, Matt!

Good morning, Mr.

Lerman.

Good morning, Matt!

There you are.

Thank you so much.

I will uh invite Candace up here in less than four minutes to uh get going on our agenda so we are exactly right on time.

Um as we begin the second day of the town's spring council retreat, let me take a moment to welcome anyone who may be observing here in the room or anyone watching online, thank you for taking an interest in the work of your town council.

For those who may be joining us for the first time, I'm Matt Larman with Social Prosperity Partners.

I serve as an independent facilitator for this retreat.

My role is to support the conversation, to help prompt discussion and clarify what's being said, but I do not play any role in leading the council anywhere.

No one's asked me to lead them to any particular conclusions.

Um I'm here to help them have the conversation and to uh enable staff as well.

Just a quick note again for anyone listening or observing uh about what you're gonna be seeing today.

This retreat is a working session for the council.

It's a place for questions and discussion and exploration.

Council members are hearing reports for staff, they're asking questions, they're comparing perspectives, and they're offering guidance about what policy options they would like to see develop further.

This is not a meeting where any final decisions will be made, those can only happen at a properly agendized council meeting.

This retreat reflects the partnership between council and staff.

It's a time for learning and guidance.

Council members have this space to better understand the town's current situation and the choices ahead.

So if you do have a side conversation, we ask please that you step outside the room so it doesn't interfere with the live stream or the recording.

Thank you all for helping us keep the discussion clear for everyone following along.

I am told that uh Vice Mayor Bangiovani is once again joining us by teams.

Hello, Chuck, I don't know if you can respond, but just want to know that we're we're here thinking of you and and we welcome your participation.

And Chuck, I can hear you guys fine.

I just FYI, I have um surgery scheduled sometime today.

We don't know when, so I might be I might be leaving at some point time if you see me disappear.

You're not gonna play this during the surgery for the probably would know you maybe, but um we're grateful to have you here and uh and we all wish you uh the best of health.

Um so with that uh context, I am oh and by the way, Chuck, I also sent you my uh a message by text, so if you want to text me anything directly, um and I can feed that into the conversation as well, I'm happy to do that.

So if you want to text me anything directly, um and I can feed that into the conversation as well.

I'm happy to do that.

Great, thanks.

So, with that context, let me just remind you how council answered one of the questions that we asked yesterday.

I asked counsel, what values do you want guiding Gilbert's financial future?

And among the responses, I won't read them all, but among the things that you said, counsel, you said trustworthy, responsible, courage, stewardship, innovation, realistic, and confident.

Confident comes especially by having candid conversations with each other, asking questions, talking together, and making sure that we understand what it is that we're doing with as much clarity as possible.

And I look forward to helping you uh achieve that clarity today.

Um with that, um Candace, it is time for you to kick us off on community engagement and talent attraction.

I attract your talent to the same.

Thank you.

Um we'll have Melissa Wallow.

I had to practice that several times.

Wait, if you're gonna stand up there, I'm gonna give you the microphone just for extra hours.

From the people team, and then Brenda and Commander Robert Kirk will also be joining us.

Yeah.

Okay.

So yesterday we had some really great discussion.

Uh, one of the topics, some really great sentiment was related around our people, our workforce, and how important it was to take care of them and support them.

And so, very timely, is we wanted to talk about how important it is to understand our workforce and why that matters.

Why it matters is because if we take care of our workforce and really understand those that we need to recruit, that's really gonna help us level up to our focus areas, maintaining that prosperous community, that strong economy, and of course, the exceptional build environment.

Because those people, our people, are the reasons why we have these focus areas and why they are um so strong.

So, what you're gonna see today is some really great national data insights that help us understand how we need to engage with our community, our people, um, and engage on a way that we can retain them and support them.

And then from there, once we go through that, we're gonna go and see some great strategic frameworks and how we continue to maintain that engagement, and then from an account standpoint, we just asked there's some great discussion, questions, feedback of any nature, but no clear direction, but just more so any comments.

All right, so my name's Melissa Bolo.

Thank you for practicing ahead of time.

Uh I lead the people solutions team.

So our team does all the recruitment for the town.

We also do employ relations and accommodations.

Um, but like Candace said, we want to talk to you a little bit about our workforce.

Um, from a demographic perspective, we're seeing some really big shifts nationally in the composition of the workforce.

As baby boomers and even Gen Xers start to exit the workforce.

We have Gen Z taking the fastest growing segment of the workforce.

And by 2035, Gen Z and Millennials will make up 65% of the workforce.

With that shift, we know that a lot of our boomers and Xers hold institutional knowledge, decision making, um, and a really great analytical ability.

And so those are skills we need to build into our younger workers.

What I want to, the biggest thing is this is happening before this.

And so that's why it's so important for us to really start to understand the motivations, fairies, which we'll get into, understand Gen Z innately, so that then we can bring them in right before this retirement clip.

Um, so that institutional knowledge is shared.

Absolutely.

And we see the data from the Pew Research Center and ICMA estimate about 50% of local government being eligible to retire by 2030.

We know that today in Gilbert, 21% of our sworn staff could retire today.

Um we know that by 2031, we will have 32% of our sworn folks eligible to retire.

So those are some pretty big numbers that we need to get prepared for.

So some interesting differences that we want to highlight.

This line is interesting because it actually shows you that there's more similarities between generations than there are differences, but there are some key differences.

So, in terms of preference, we see somewhat of a shift in historically very popular reasons.

Someone would join local government, like retirement security, the younger generation, maybe because of age, and perhaps that will change over time, isn't as focused there.

They are very focused on work-life balance, flexible schedules, and purposeful, meaning, meaningful work.

So here are some of the things that drive Gen Z and what they're really looking for.

And one note, just to think about this from a historical perspective, are some of the things that have shaped their lives.

So they were children going through the 2008 financial crisis.

They maybe saw their parents lose their jobs.

Perhaps they even move out of a childhood home.

Some of those things are extremely impactful in their belief of the relationship between an employer and an employee.

And that shifted that dynamic from being one where you'd have a 30-year career with one employer to where you may be more open to a lily pad career approach, which is the right position for me right now at this time.

And that's considering your life perspective.

Maybe what's more important to you in that moment isn't a linear career progression like we've historically seen, but it may be more of hey, this works better for my life, it's more flexible.

This schedule works for where I'm at today.

And what's really interesting about that is 32% of Gen Z would be willing to prioritize flexibility or work life balance over compensation.

And that's very different than what we've seen historically from other generations.

Some other notable things, this generation is really into pursuing their passion.

And you may have seen a social media trend lately of like your your five to nine and not just your nine to five.

Has anyone seen that kind of trend?

So we're seeing a lot of social media videos, LinkedIn, TikTok, where youth is saying, here's what I do, here are my passions outside of work.

And there's a couple trends with that.

Some are very entrepreneurial, and so we're seeing that you know, 57% of Gen Z has a side hustle or another job.

And those are often not they're not full-time jobs, they're things they can do outside of work to earn a little additional income.

And again, I think that's shaped by financial independence.

They they don't see that they're going to be with one employer for 30 years.

So it's important to have some means to provide for themselves.

But this generation is also very socially active and cares deeply about things like the community, um, social movements, and so um it's very interesting, those those passions.

Some might be wellness and meditating in the morning during their five to nine.

We see a lot of five to nine after work, wellness routines, fitness, preparing your own food and eating healthy, things like that.

So just interesting to uh perceive career minimalism means this isn't their whole life.

They don't want a job that is their whole life, they want a job that fits into it.

Anything else you can say?

Uh, just at that point, they want a job that fits into their life, but still gives them purpose or meaning, right, in their whole entire life.

All right, something interesting about this slide is preferences for communication.

So again, we're seeing um, you know, this isn't a dramatic shift in how we communicate with one generation over another, but from a recruitment perspective, what's interesting about this is we need to be dynamic and shift some of our approaches.

So this is the right approach at the right time.

Um, we may text more to get quicker responses or even to prompt folks to check their email.

Um, we also see all generations really want to see uh more streamlined, cohesive communication.

Um, so we're working on new channels to communicate with our audiences and ensuring that it's rich and graphic when possible.

We're using video content when possible, like short form video.

Um again, not too many differences, but we do want to be very concise and compelling in the short communications that we have.

Can you maybe tell us what those icons mean for those for those of us in the room that may not be used to I thought I was the only person?

Yeah, should we do a game?

What's the first one over here?

Text message short form video, email.

Chat is another is one short form uh text.

What's this one?

In person, yes, in person.

Does this surprise you at all?

What's the what's the black thing on the bottom?

Pick up the phone chat.

Yeah.

Is this surprise at all?

Or is it seem pretty make sense?

It does make sense.

And then it just says, please use this sparingly.

They'll they'll stop listening if you start to go drowning out and long emails and whatnot.

Candace the short form video, I'm sorry, I'm gonna ask the question.

Yes, the short form video mean TikTok.

Is that or is it something other than that?

No, it if it's a it's more personal, so if maybe you want to get their attention about something quite important, recording a video on your phone and sending it to them might will resonate more than sending an email or giving them a call.

So do more than what it is.

Yeah, this for what we still look up.

And I'm Gen X.

What the hell is uh five to nine?

So you can go ahead.

Yeah, so five to nine is just your hours outside of work.

So like 5 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

versus your 9 a.m.

to 5 p.m.

job, or reverse if you're more of a night owl, right?

What do you do after work?

What do you do before work?

And this is all about pursuing your passions and having like a full and complete life.

And I think that shifted where you know older generations really prioritize work.

And we might have seen, you know, uh a dad who didn't spend a lot of time at home and kids growing up in that environment, so that's not the kind of parent I'm gonna be.

And in this newest generation, we're really seeing a prioritization that it's important for me to have a rich, meaningful, fulfilling life, even if I make less money.

So for me to repeat that back to you, so I understand that they're prioritizing their off time is important to them.

Don't interfere with that.

So we're not necessarily seeing don't interfere, but I need this job to fit into my life, and I have other priorities.

So I maybe I'm a yoga instructor, and that's important to me.

So I would be willing to work before or after my classes, but I need to have this block of time off.

And I think that's where we have to get really creative and ensure that we meet people's needs and help them fit our positions into their life.

We still have high expectations, we still expect performance, but if we can do that in a way that allows an employee to have that flexibility, we should.

Can I interpret old guy to old guy?

My understanding knowing this organization and having worked here many 10, 12, 14, 16 hour days.

What I interpret that is I ain't working 12 hours.

You get eight, the rest of my time is mine.

Am I wrong?

There's boundaries.

I would say we're seeing a shift towards greater boundaries or more risk of burnout as well, right?

Because we can all sustain a fast pace or high intensity level work for a short period of time.

Um we are seeing a shift in what this generation demands from employers.

And again, this is that lily pad approach where right now, if I'm burned out, I'm willing to walk away from a career and go to something else that fits my life better, and maybe I'll come back to it later.

There's a much different um like level of commitment that if it doesn't work for me now, I may shift away, and maybe I'll come back, right?

And so I don't think they're leaving on bad terms necessarily, but I do think we're seeing a willingness to leave, whereas an older generation may have stepped that out.

Well, just one comment on that too.

For I'm a what we would call a tweener between ex and baby boomers, and we share some of the values between this that and I see with my kids, because I've got seven, so I have some millennials, some Z.

Don't assume that these are hard concrete, because you can pull from each one.

Absolutely.

Oh, sorry, I'm going to go.

One thing I think so interesting is we're painting with a really broad brush and making some um trend analysis, but there's going to be unique folks.

Um, I have a Gen Z employee in the room that's super committed.

Um, she works very, very hard.

And so I think often we make assumptions that this is about laziness or lack of commitment, and that's not the case.

This generation is dedicated, they're intelligent.

I think what they're demanding is is a different type of relationship from their employer, and that's somewhat based on the way that employers have treated employees, right?

Even right now in the workforce, we see layoffs happening, not because of profitability and necessary need from the organizations, but it's a reprioritization, maybe utilization of technology.

And as the workforce shifts and employers make different decisions, the ramifications is that employees have different expectations, right?

They don't see this as a lifelong relationship anymore, and so that's a two-way street.

And I and just for our our Gen Z's and millennials, I wasn't saying that as a any call them lazy.

I said it call them intelligent.

Absolutely.

And burn out, and you know, and I wasn't meaning I'm not doing it, period.

I'll do it.

This is what the job demands.

But we did it every single day.

Every day.

And we and we see that's not great for mental health or resiliency, so you know, there's ramifications to those expectations of us isn't clear.

Melissa, Kristen's had her hand up back here for one time.

Sorry, no, it's fine.

Um, can you go to the slide that had it might be the next slide, the different percentages of okay, this one.

We didn't talk about this a lot.

But 77% prioritize learning and development opportunities, and that's really important.

Gilbert does a good job of that, but as we were going through budget process, it's one of the first things that either gets cut or is not approved.

And while that obviously we have to do what we have to do, but when we cut learning and development, that has a really big impact, not just in how we can train uh for succession for preparing for the cliff, but in in employees feeling valued because they don't have that opportunity.

So we may lose some folks.

So there's a lot around that one that we didn't talk about.

I just wanted to point it out.

100% agree.

I was gonna make a comment yesterday while that conversation was happening.

Uh the trickle down effect is while we are looking inward, hopefully the community appreciated that we were looking at where to see any place that we could potentially cut.

But a lot of the things like you said, Kristen, this is the first thing that starts to cut, but has a severe trickle-down effect of affecting already a lean workforce that has purpose here, it feels purposeful and and and making an impact.

But if we don't support them in the way that they're expecting, where do they go elsewhere?

So it's it's waterfall effect that can happen.

I'll just say too, on the topic of the nine to five, five to nine.

I think one thing we're seeing a lot inside this organization, and Councilmember Bucklin, you're spot on.

We still have a lot of folks that work long hours, right?

That is that is that is par for the course here in Gilbert often.

Um I I don't think I think in many cases people are okay with that when the time calls for it, but but that brings with it an expectation, right?

As an example, um, you know, if you've got that kind of traditional, you're supposed to punch in a certain time of the day and you're supposed to punch out a certain time of the day, and then you walk away and you you you disconnect from work altogether.

That's not always conducive to somebody's mental state, their their kind of mental flow, the the psychosis behind how they effectively work.

Um, and so we I appreciate that we have tools here, right?

Like hybrid work, like obviously technology tool connectivity via teams and and outlook 365 and all these things that allow people the flexibility to kind of also work when they're most productive and effective.

Um and you have folks that work, you know, as as many of us do, right?

A council meeting day, many of us work a 15-hour day, and that might mean our brains are tired Wednesday morning, and there needs to be some variability and some flexibility offered in that.

And I I think that's kind of what we're getting at here is yes, there's the kind of separating or the kind of boundary setting piece, but there's also the allow me the flexibility, and then when I can be here, when I can work, I will work my best if you recognize the flexibility I need my life, which may be very different from Michael's flexibility or Lena's flexibility needs, right?

So there's just a lot of that I think we continue to study and kind of research and understand.

Um and you and somebody said it, I think Monty or Councilmember Lyon, you said it.

We also we we change the trends for others and the expectations, right?

I mean, sure, we say what a boomer wants, but boomer preferences change as Gen X preferences change, as Gen Z and Millennial Preferences change, and so we bring other generations and expectations and perspectives along with us as the workplace changes, and so I love what you're you're presenting to us here because I think being mindful of that and having that acknowledgement and flexibility built into how we operate is so important to Gilbert's future and what we need to do here.

So we can use my point.

Sorry.

Um, that's you said it's critical.

So our leaders here really lead from a heart of love in what I went through and what I still witness is we are so lean, probably more anorexic, but we are so lean when we do get bodies, the leaders push them to the front lines where you can have more flexibility because you get more people because it's all enough, but you get more people to carry the work because the the work because we want that touch point with our citizens to be done with excellence, and so the leaders take on more and more and more.

Um if you recall in June when I stepped off the dice and did the presentation on the staffing, what I didn't show you was um I had gone to the assistant manager's schedules and the town manager's schedule, picked a random week, literally just a random week, and was like, holy crap.

Every one of you was double and triple booked from 7 a.m.

to at least 7 p.m.

and sometimes up to 8, 9 p.m.

And I thought, okay, that's an anomaly.

We pick another random date.

Same, another same.

And farther out I got no, because those dates, those times hadn't been packed in yet, but within two months, it was unbelievable.

Um so I didn't show that, but it it demonstrates what I'm saying is that we are really lean at leadership, and I say this in this public meeting because I have a friend who, dear friend, who I really respect, but just this week said you guys never should you should not have funded that additional um assistant manager and deputy.

And I said, I respectfully disagree.

You've not seen their calendars, and you cannot leave these teams and more than a billion dollars in CIP in all of the important programs you're doing, sitting in meetings.

And when I talked to Patrick about it, you can't not be in those meetings.

So what you do, right?

And so that if I believe it, then we have a leadership problem in the future because people will forego that to have a work life balance.

And that's why it's important to prioritize that learning and development so we can create and foster future leaders in health and Legate and Anecdotally.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, sorry.

So what I'm getting from this is that employers are definitely beginning to cater to what the Gen Z generation wants versus the other way.

That's exactly right.

And we are seeing higher retention rates when we do.

So if an employer chooses not to, they're just seeing higher attrition rates at that level.

So 78% higher attrition rates, uh, or sorry, retention rates among Gen Z when there's flexible work arrangements offered for them.

That was gonna be my next question.

Yeah, well that you know, that it's very interesting, uh, especially growing up in my era where that's what you did.

You wanted a career, and and you wanted to please your employer, you wanted to do what they wanted and to adjust to that, and this is just like 180 degrees or 360 degrees the other way, which um you know, I think as long as the work is being put out and they're getting what they the employees are getting what they need when they need it, if they're having to put up projects because you know, like the Gen Z group wants to go to the football game today on their day off, or or get off early, or whatever their situation is, then I I think that could probably develop into a problem.

But my guess is uh what I love is that this generation talks, they they say what they want, they don't just accept what is being offered.

So I I personally think that's great.

So notice Jim over here, I I want to pull a couple things together from a personal personal perspective, because I'm watching my son do this as you've written it out, and it's it's helping me understand what he's doing because he's paid exceptionally well over the last year.

He saved the entire division of the company he works for in process getting the director fired because the director was out of his mind.

At the end of it, he got a what he considered a modest bump in pay, which was probably about 40,000 a year bump.

And he's like, You expect me to do this for another year for this?

I'm not, and he just said, I know what I'm worth, I know how much most people output in an hour compared to me.

I'm gonna limit it to these times.

I will work remote four days a week, I'll come in for a meeting once a week.

He started setting guidelines, and he's like, I dare them to fire me.

And that's what I'm watching here, is exactly what it is, and part of that, the 77%, is he watched them put somebody in, uh, they removed the director position, they watched he watched somebody come in that had absolutely no business being over that entire division.

And he's like, What?

What am I here for?

There's it's a glass ceiling, they want more than they pay for.

I'll ride it out until this comes forward, and that's probably with that.

He's willing to work 80 hours a week for a year, and then it was done.

Yeah, I just want to see if I can just get clarity about what I'm hearing from council, and I know this isn't the part where you want to stop it.

The resonance is really interesting.

What I think I'm hearing from council members is that recognizing this is not an option, right?

It is the reality, and that as an employer, the town has no choice but to um uh recognize this and and respect this reality as it affects our entire employment base.

Is that yeah, well, I I do think that the town would have a choice or an employer would have a choice, it's just do they want to accept maybe mediocre workers that are willing to just tell the line.

So I don't think we would, because we want the highest quality, right?

Yeah, and the recommendary highest value, right?

Lowest cost, highest value, right?

Monty.

I think you're right in what you're characterizing.

And the thing that I think that's important for us to recognize is that since the 90s, we've been in a transformational period as technology has been integrated into our lives, and that's going to continue and accelerate.

And if we're going to retain good people, and this speaks to the 77% talking about the prioritized learning development, we have to invest and recognize that it takes time to do that.

We need to invest in that, and that will allow us with the retention, but also having the most qualified people with the most leading edge skills that are necessary for us to do what we need to do.

That's what I think is done.

So let me let me let me feed that back to you because the comment that was made that yesterday when we were doing the exercise on the 3% expense cut, and the comment was made that um we talked about cutting out certain parts of learning and development, right?

It didn't this is my observation, that didn't engender the same kind of discomfort in our conversation here as when the police chief went through, you know.

Well, what would happen if we didn't use the system and we had to send patrol officers out to do this, and all of a sudden it was really obvious how inefficient or ineffective that would be if we had to go back to that way of thinking.

So, what I'm listening for here is is kind of an appreciation, a sensitivity that you all seem to be resonating with that says, oh, we're really understanding the significance of needing to prioritize uh learning and development opportunities.

I just it didn't come up yesterday.

No one no one said, well, if we don't have this, we're we're missing something important.

But I'm hearing that in your conversation right now, Jim.

No, I'm just saying what you said is correct.

We're we can't ideologically stomp our feet and make people show up nine to five and do as we will.

The world has changed around us, and we're gonna have to adapt.

And can I just add what Kristen was saying, and then what Chief was saying, those are very much complimentary.

This that you know, Chiefs uh example was a bit more concrete, right?

You take away said service, that gets placed back onto the office variants that create burnouts, and then ultimately it probably opens you know less uh less retention.

Same exact thing though, what Kristen is saying is if we don't support that, more burnouts gonna happen, they're they're unhappy, more open availability.

So it's very much interchangeable, just maybe not as comfortable.

Thanks for a moment of clarity.

We should let you get back to your presentation too.

And one interesting note is with learning and development, that is a top three deciding factor for folks when they're looking at multiple employers, and we've seen that anecdotally from feedback from our intern population.

Um, we've done some surveying with prospective um interns mostly from ASU and found that if they have two job offers concretely, they will accept the one where they have more growth opportunity for learning and development, even if the compensation is power.

Uh well, we we really have shifted to this conversation already, but um just having a conversation around the impact that we see when we are lean.

Uh we've discussed this at length.

So uh one point that I want to make here though is that every vacancy we have creates ripple effects through the organization, and this also impacts our ability to recruit quickly.

Um so we are looking for not only optimizing our recruitment strategy, but how do we help protect employees in that when when there is a loss on that scene?

Uh we know that the impact can be longer response time, deferred projects and burnout among high performers.

So this is this is a huge priority and why we've shifted some of our focuses in strategies of recruitment.

Exactly.

And so now that we have a good understanding of what's going on nationally within our industry and how it affects Gilbert specifically, the other point that we also have to take into consideration is not only generation, but the unique talent that we have to be looking for across all the various departments, whether it's IT, whether it's public works, police, fire, and these are in a way personas that we look at in understanding the unique barriers, motivations.

And if you go to the quick one, this is about 14 or so, but this is just an example, and I won't go through them of the things that need to be taken into consideration when you're not only speaking to demographic, but also the specific the unique um elements of someone that might be going into uh communications, community management, community impact admin.

So each of these, and we have various ones, and we won't go into limited time, but there would be a persona that talks about what you know fire is looking for, what police is looking for, public works.

Those are all very unique, and we need to be mindful of that when we're also speaking to the demographics as well.

Now, how do we put this in practice?

We've all talked about funnels, frameworks, flows, but what's most important is that we need to be agile.

Again, people communicate differently, they expect different things.

And so, what we need to make sure is when we go into any strategic framework, and this is much you know very common in terms of how we uh engage with um uh candidates.

We align with our positioning, our values, we hopefully attract those that that we want to add into our into our workforce into our culture, we engage with them, we convert, and then hopefully retain retain.

Now, what we're seeing in here is it needs to be dynamic, as Melissa said, the positioning needs to be consistent but dynamic and how we message it based off of who we're talking to.

We need to be mindful of the target audiences, what are their again motivations and barriers?

We also need to understand where they're um engaging with.

Are they talking in LinkedIn?

Are they more on a social standpoint?

That's why we're more heavily in social.

Are they mostly on email?

And then understand their ways of communicating, and of course, ongoing, maintain that that support and and guidance as they come into the workforce.

And so continuing to be aware of them.

Um now that we see this framework is how do we also see it in in practice?

And we have proven success.

We have Brenda and Commander first here to talk about a case study specifically with Gilbert Police Department.

So they're gonna take you through how this has come to life.

Good morning.

Uh we're excited to share how uh you know our study on how we fill the 50 seats and kind of walk you through a lot of what Melissa and Candace already presented on and how we put it into practice.

Um, I'm Brenda Croscoe, I'm a public information officer with the Office of Communication and Engagement assigned to the Gilbert Police Department.

Yeah, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Rob First, I'm a commander with the Gilbert Police Department.

Um standards and vision, two of the units that I oversee that we're gonna talk about are uh hiring, recruiting, and then the uh training is a little bit in here also.

So when we started, uh I stepped into this role in like August, um, and we were getting ready to do a new recruitment campaign.

Um we started looking at the needs of the department, and for those of you that we have on some of this already, 20 some percent of our workforce in the police departments able to retire pretty much at the drop of a head.

They were hired 20 to 25 years ago.

They can leave whenever the uh the competition for police officers is not just here in the valley, it's nationwide.

There's I don't know of an agency that's really not hiring.

So we're we're competing nationwide for good recruits.

So uh with the uh leadership of the town, the leadership of the department, they said, you know, how can we make a big impact on this?

And we said, hey, we need one big academy class of 50 people that can step in and be prepared to meet the needs of our citizens and the community and the expectations that they have of us.

So our goal when we started looking at this was we're gonna build 50 academy seats for class 10.

Um we're gonna take this on and we're gonna see how we can achieve it.

We knew what we needed to do is we needed to get 700 applications for us between September and December to build 50 seats.

Our failure rate for academy, I'm sorry, for applicants is uh pretty high.

Only 20% of our applicants get through the process.

So we lose 80% of our applicants essentially.

So we do right around 700 was our target.

Um so we started working with the talent we have within the police department, uh, the PIOs and social media and our teams, and uh we're starting to show you kind of what we're able to do.

And a lot of what we actually found echoes exactly what was presented on Gen Z.

We know that our workforce is changing.

We know that as more boomers and Gen X retire, we now have to shift our focus into Gen Z.

And so that's exactly what we did.

We took some time ahead of actually the campaign, and keep in mind this is happening very, very quickly.

I want to say we were within days of launching the actual hiring, the applications opening, but we were told like hey, you're a go for the 50, right?

And um, you know, recruiting campaigns aren't out of the normal for us, we do several a year, whether it's dispatch or actual for the academy recruitments.

Uh, but this one was so much more intense because of we that we needed get those 50.

I want to say we were within days of launching the actual hiring the applications opening what we were told like a year ago for the 50 right and um you know recruiting campaigns aren't out of the normal forest we do several a year whether it's dispatch um or actual for the academy recruitments uh but this one was so much more intense because of we that we needed in those 50 so what we did is that we identified a couple of the characteristics of Gen Z some that you have previously heard so we are definitely purpose driven we are technically they are our first generation who have fully grown up with modern day social media as is um even when I graduated high school I don't think Instagram had been around very long but now you know they actually grew up with it so we knew that they are used to that quick communication and streamlined processes on getting information and we also know that they value personalized engagement and that really these pre-informed how we were going to approach this campaign.

So when we sat down uh we wanted to come together to really find what is something that's going to resonate with this specific group right and so we created its own campaign uh branding for class 10 and wanted it to be set apart from previous campaigns to kind of show this one's different right and so our slogan that we created is 50 seats one calling your feature is something that we felt was aspirational urgent and personal and really called back to some of those characteristics that uh resonate with Jan C in order for us to be able to do that we needed to also have enough photography and video content to sustain us through the three months of recruitment so this is just one example of that imagery that we selected we looked at different brands um national brands that have you know a big following around that age group some of them for example I think Nike was one of them and so uh this is just one example it's a black and white image our recruit training officer looking into the distance of the actual recruits and then the slogan along with the brandy here at the bottom so this same look is what we were echoing through all of our marketing materials for this campaign we also needed to keep in mind uh short form video so this is a video that was created in-house by our videographer Oscar I am going to try to play it and hopefully it will second oops share so technically this is a different this is not it's definitely not us should be not nearly as cool as our might need some assistance this is the audio exactly that's funny issues for some select Rob is this is skewing up what were the structural challenges you had with 50 beyond that's a lot of group officers in the field that's what's coming up in your presentation but no it isn't um yeah we so obviously one thing is um one of the things is we'll talk about a little bit is uh we used to bring people on very late in classes um the idea of this one was to get them into as soon as we could so we did not lose them to other agencies or other jobs so we brought them in finding um meaningful things we're getting people to do was challenging uh our team did a really good job of actually working with them and getting them ready for the academy through the Bree Academy I think we're gonna talk about them I am Gilbert Pye and Gilbert P I am Gilbert P I'm Gilbert Pi am Gilbert Pete I am Gilbert Pete

I am Gilbert P.

I am Gilbert P.

I am Gilbert Pete.

I am Gilbert Pity.

I am Gilbert PD.

I am Gilbert P.

So that was uh the main video that we used for our recruitment efforts that our media Oscar was able to put together, really calling back not only is it emotional, but it's putting that back onto the individual who's pursuing this career in policing, right?

Uh, it also showcases all the opportunities that you have with Anclopper PE to uh not only you know have a fulfilling career but try new things.

So uh that was something that we thought great success with being able to um put together in-house.

She's really feeling that up.

I always, whenever I watch that video and I see the part where it says I'm Gilbert PD and the dog comes in.

I'm expecting to hear a part.

He's saying I am the same.

So you just look captioned on the right.

Just uh it's almost rhetorical.

But since we're a 410 culture here, not a nine to five.

How does that impact that Gen X?

How does that reflect?

Because police are not nine to five.

Fire's not nine to five, and none of the town is nine to five, really.

Yeah, I mean, I can speak from the police perspective.

I think it actually helps us a lot.

Um I came from Ohio lateral here, and one of the things that brought me here was the 410s, quite honestly.

I can't imagine.

Well, back to the work in five days a week.

Um, so I think that's one of our selling points.

And throughout this whole campaign, um, and again, we'll talk about a little bit more.

We really highlighted the good things that Gilbert has to offer.

Um, the relationship with our community is different than a lot of police officer relationships with their community, right?

We have a very supportive community.

Um, all the things that we give our officers when they come in, um, their gear, um, things that you get on day one.

We we highlighted all those things, so the things definitely set us apart and helped us in this campaign.

Um, and not trying to get too far ahead of it.

So, but I think we'll touch on a little bit more here in the book.

But also, we'll go back to the rest of staff too.

Yeah, for sure.

So, on what his comment, um, yes, it's definitely seller because you get an extra day off to refresh.

Here's where it's risky.

You remember a time when we were way short staffed, and um so on your days off, you came off shift, you had to go on standby.

Yeah, meaning you couldn't, you had to be within a 45-minute response to fill patrol shifts because we were starting with almost every patrol team one to two people short with just low staffing, injuries, sick, and so when you put people on standby like that, you restrict them to being a 45-minute response.

They can't go out of town, they can't go do stuff, they can't go get a glass of wine that night.

Um that prolongs, that's when that becomes an issue because you're not really getting that recharge time.

Yeah, for sure.

We had up till you know several years ago to the chief credit, I think you listen to a lot of the feedback and and the detriment to um making people be on standby and what it does to our workforce.

So um we don't we don't have that anymore.

Uh but obviously, yeah.

We did have a period where it was necessary just to cover our staffing needs up.

We were that short, yeah.

Yeah, I think it just calls to the urgency of making sure that our recruiting campaigns are um maximizing you know reaching the people that we need in order to avoid situations like that.

Um so we know obviously with what we identified with Gen Z is that they are primarily on social media, so our multi-channel execution strategy included a couple of factors.

First, digital outreach, which for that you know, it's our social media posts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.

We created um a mix of uh multimedia uh graphics, some of them were videos just to make sure that we were reaching different audiences.

It was also a combination of paid and organic.

So if we're just sharing something on our social media channel, typically we're not paying for that, it's just seeing to our followers, but we did invest a small amount of money to reach outside of Gilbert because we know again, like Commander Burst said, we're not just trying to recruit here in Arizona, we're also competing against the same agency, so we need to expand our reach.

So we need to expand our reach.

And so we did invest a small amount of funds in paid ads on social media to allow us to reach that audience.

We also had earned media, so we pitched our recruiting campaign, uh, put some urgency behind it to media, saying this is our largest campaign.

So we did have some outlets come out and do uh stories on that.

This is just one example of uh AC family who did a piece on our recruiting recruiting efforts, and so that is at no cost, which is something that we try to leverage as much as possible, knowing that if we were to have paid EU's outlet to do this, which you can through advertisements, it would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars.

So this was a great um feature for us at no cost.

Yeah, we were also very intentional on a couple things.

The uh, as you guys saw from the past presentation, the in-person engagement.

Um it doesn't have to be face to face, but staying in contact with those candidates.

Um back when I became a police officer not that long ago, 15, 20, 25 years ago, whatever it was, council member Buckland was uh people were chasing the job.

Now we're chasing candidates.

Um staying in that direct engagement with our candidates throughout the process.

We were super intentional with our background investigators of if they didn't hear from or they did not see that people were working on the packets, they would reach out to them in a text message and say, hey, do you need some help with something?

What's going on?

Like, are you still interested?

Uh before we probably let those people just drop off the face of you know, and we would go get somebody else, but uh that's not really the case because there's a there's a lot of competition out there for good recruits.

Um so the uh the direct candidate contact and the in-person engagement.

A couple other little things we did was we tried having open office hours.

Um, it was one or two days a week.

One day a week, yeah, one day a week for a couple hours, you could just walk in and talk to a recruiting detective, a background investigator, and myself, the lieutenant, the sergeant.

Um we had people walk in uh with needing help, maybe they didn't understand something in the packet or they needed something to notarized.

So we just we tried to break down all of those barriers that that in the past we probably wouldn't have worried about because we honestly had enough people chasing us down.

Um now we were very intentional about not losing our candidates and trying to get them through the process.

So our efforts are something that we want to make sure that one are actually we're doing the right thing and that we're reaching the people that we need.

So we did pull some insights for you.

Again, the timeline for this recruitment campaign was September 2025 through December of 25.

Um, and we did end up reaching that 800 applications, which Commander Kirst can expand on a little bit later.

But uh our joint Gilbert PD website saw about 17,000 visits in that time frame.

Here's a little bit more of a breakdown on what we paid for and what was actually at no cost for the organization.

We're very mindful also being um you know good financial stewards of the money that we do have.

Indeed, is one of the largest job uh platforms that a lot of uh people are using nowadays, and uh I know that that workflow is something that was important for us to identify how are they finding that we're hiring, right?

So uh knowing that they're Googling police jobs in Arizona, um, Arizona law enforcement jobs indeed is one platform that would have come up at the very top as saying that Gilbert PD was hiring.

So that was about $9,000.

Um, and the cost per application of someone actually beginning an application through Indeed was about $4.41.

And from that, we got about 690 viable applications.

At the end of the day, it was about at a cost of $14.92 per viable application that drove that directly to the recruiting team.

For Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, uh for the organic outreach, it was zero dollars.

Uh, we had about 635,000 impressions, which is how many people actually saw our content, and we had about 3,000 clicks that came from that.

Now we did, like I mentioned, invest a little bit of money, $825 on Facebook and Instagram ads that reached about 115,000.

But when you're actually paying for something, you're more so driving them to have an action, right?

And so we were wanting the money to allow people to actually be driven to the recruiting site.

So from the 115,000, we have about 8,000 click on our recruiting page.

And then lastly, Google ads, about 175 dollars uh worth invested in that during the time frame.

We had about 101,000 people who saw the content through Google ads, and about 1.2,000 uh actually click through to the application.

And then on the side, you see the cost for like 10 cents for meta ads and 15 cents for Google ads.

So I think uh when we're talking about being uh fiscally responsible, this is one of the most impressive things right here.

So when we started talking about this recruiting campaign, um I know we looked out at some agencies that will come in and help you do this.

So when we started talking about this recruiting campaign, um I know we looked out at some agencies that will come in and help you do this, and I know a lot of other valley agencies and agencies across the United States use recruiting and marketing firms to the tune of 200,000.

Um we did all of this in-house using the talent that we have with videographers, our PIO team or social media.

We're all in for about 10,000, and this is our largest uh class we've ever had.

This is the most applicants that I've seen since I've been here.

So it just shows like just being intentional and using things wisely working together as a team, what we've really accomplished is pretty impressive, I think.

Hey commander, can I ask a question?

Yeah.

I I know uh especially I think kind of coming out of COVID when we were seeing some real drops in applicant flow in police.

There was kind of a sentiment that sometimes we kind of had to to hire anyone that made it through the process to keep our our headcount rate needed to be.

I'm assuming, but but maybe could you elaborate on has this helped us also address the kind of quality of higher focus and ensuring that like we're hiring the kind of people who are the kind of people we want on our streets here in Gilbert.

Yeah, absolutely.

We have not lower our standards for what we expect for Gilbert police officers whatsoever.

Um they all meet the Arizona Post standards.

That's that's who we report to.

Um we're obviously looking for high qualified candidates, and again, if you're seeing 200 applicants, finding those candidates is probably a needle in a haystack.

If you're seeing 800 candidates, we have a much better chance of bringing a good talent pool, right?

And I think if you look at this group that we just hired um when you're in a room with them, it's a good mix of people from all different backgrounds and different walks of life and different coming from different areas, which uh I think will have a good impact, you know, just on what we put out there in the community and how they interact with people.

Very cool.

So we also did change how we also did our hiring, again, being very intentional.

Um what we found was a lot of agencies in the valley gave what we call a conditional officer offer to candidates um pretty early in the process.

Doesn't mean that the candidate's not gonna fail out at some point for like a bad psych or a medical or a polygraph or something, but they would get a good candidate, they would say this person's a good candidate, we're giving you a job offer right now.

Um what we were doing was we were going very late in the process.

Um, so we kind of reevaluated our process and said, well, if I'm applying a Chandler in Gilbert, and Chandler gives me an offer right away, and I have nothing from Gilbert, I'm probably gonna be more engaged with with Chandler, right?

So we uh made it when we did the early process, we had good candidates.

We gave them conditional offer early on, and we actually saw exactly what happened to us.

I think in the past, we had candidates drop out of other people's processes because they wanted to work at Gilbert.

This is where they wanted to be, and they dropped out of somebody else's process, and we were able to get them through very quickly.

Um, again, just those multiple touch points.

Um, our recruiting officer, our detective, our sergeant, um, the background investigators were constantly texting and emailing and staying in touch with these candidates.

Do you need something?

Can we help you?

Um, you know, just because maybe they weren't going as fast as we wanted, doesn't mean they were inter they weren't interested anymore.

Again, it's just different um thought processes from different generations, and they just needed needed some assistance, maybe.

And then um the other thing uh when I when I came into this position, I found is if somebody was in a process with another agency, say maybe Mesa or whoever, um, we would kind of back off.

We wouldn't really go after that candidate.

Um, I met with our people, and I know our assistant chief, and they support this also.

I work for Gilbert, I'm not worried about Chandler and Mesa.

So I want to go get those people if they're good candidates, let them decide where they want to go work.

Let's let's put on the table what we have the offer and let's follow through and say, here's our offer if you're a good candidate.

And we again had candidates that it shows us over other agencies.

So just some little updates to the hiring process that we saw that worked out.

So again, we were looking for 700 applications.

I actually shut it down in mid-December because we hit 800 applications, and I didn't want to get to the point where we weren't gonna be able to get to everybody.

Um, the good thing out of this is the 800 applications.

We still have about 25 good candidates, 23 somewhere in there left over when we start looking at class 11 here very soon in the next couple months.

So we'll be sending letters out of them saying, hey, we're still in the rest of you, are you interested in us?

Class 11 is gonna be starting, we have retirements, we're gonna lose people throughout the academy and FTO and things like that.

So we we had this backup built already, but um yeah, it was pretty impressive just to see what we were able to do, just uh pulling our resources together and changing a few things up.

So we stand in constant communication with the recruiting team.

We had um touch point meetings just to make sure that they were tracking correctly anything that we needed to adjust on our end in terms of content outreach, and we'll do it all over again for class 11.

But we're excited to follow class 10.

Um, we will be following them through their academy journey.

So we will be showing a lot of the cool videos of what it's like being recruited just because you know we're constantly thinking ahead of you know, class 11 class 12 having enough content to sustain us through that.

So it was still people to work with a great team on the PE side.

I know we're almost at time, but I think we're a little bit over.

You guys did such a great job.

Just a couple remarks next steps, and then if you guys have any other questions, we can kind of group them at that end.

Is that cool?

Yeah, um, but just as a reminder, this is a proven successful case study of just if we listen to uh what the generation is expecting in their employer, we're very agile and flexible, and and how we how we communicate with them, we get success and 800 applicants and more.

So um, great job to you guys.

Uh Steven that you next steps.

Absolutely.

I I would just say this a lot of work goes in behind the scenes.

Your team did a wonderful job.

There were also a lot of people on the people team helping facilitate onboarding background checks hiring process for 52 people.

So just kudos to you guys.

Um, in terms of next steps, like it's not just about getting them in the door, it's also about keeping them, right?

We've got to keep those 52 people, and so we are committed as a team to ensuring that we have not only the right employment brand, um, and or I'm sorry, not only the right recruitment brand, but employment brand as well.

And so a lot of what we talked about today is part of our strategy going forward.

Gilbert is in a really great place.

We've done so many things that are important to this workforce when it comes to flexible schedule offerings and four by tens and really developing great leadership programs.

Our organizational development team recently launched uh leadership expectations, which are a framework of how we talk about our leadership expectations internally.

We're committed to ensuring that our folks are tuned in and we are listening, right?

We are in the midst of an engagement survey right now with our employees.

It's critical that we listen to their feedback, that we truly hear it and we act on it.

And lastly, I will leave us with never stop improving, right?

We are committed to being bold, being innovative, ensuring that we are dynamic and we continue to shift our approaches to meet the needs of both our applicants and our workforce.

Um, so if you all have suggestions, please share them with us.

But we are continued to grow and help be the employer of choice to build our community into the future.

Can I say one thing really fast before we applaud the amazing work of all this team?

Uh no applause first.

I think we should uh and I will just say, you know, we we Gilbert sees a really great level of applicants and interest across our organization, and PD is a is an amazing testament to the the work because I think a lot of that had you had to do kind of targeted outreach.

Um a lot of our recruitments, we just don't have the bandwidth and capacity uh, you know, among our people team to really target and go after candidates, but we still see a really high volume of applicants.

Um, you know, it oftentimes to the tune of two to three times more applicants and interest than in some of our neighboring cities do on certain positions that they post tour.

And so even in these conversations where we talk about being lean, where we talk about our people working hard and wearing a lot of hats and all of these things, um, we are still a highly sought-after uh employer and a place that people want to come and work.

And I think that that goes to the the hard work of all these individuals up here and um and people across this organization and leadership and and at the example they set and the work they do every day.

So thank you.

And just to add um how we got here on the PD side, when we started class nine, we were happy we had 21 recruits and we felt good for about five minutes.

We realized we still had about 20 vacancies, plus I knew we had about 10 or so more coming.

And Dawn challenged us, she's asked initially, can we do uh two academies at once?

I said absolutely not.

There's no there is not capacity, we don't have enough people or space.

So that's when we evolved from okay, well, if we can't do two at once, let's just double the size of the academy.

And so that's we initially talked 40, and then we said, well, 40 might not be enough.

So we pushed it to 50, and the truth is we actually got to 53 because we had three recycled from class nine into class uh 10.

So that pushed us up to 53.

Um, but uh thank you, Don, for pushing us, and thank you for everyone who helped us budget, allowing us to be creative, and um so for helping us use indeed.

Um that was something that we had tinkered with, but with your guidance and with our uh carrying the burden of not only doing these 50 but doing about 50 more hires on the civilian side.

And it's not when we do something like that, it's not just PD.

It's hiring, it's NEO.

We you guys, I think we stressed out NEO having 15 to 20 in the last three sessions.

Most of them were PD employees.

So thank you.

And we'll do it again.

Mike, I think just going back to even before that step farther, I go back to Leah when we designed even the training facility.

She pressed us to really look at the end game and got us to think outside of our needs today.

That ends up with two academy classrooms that can seek 50.

There was some pressure actually to say, hey, hold on a minute.

Would you ever be more than 25?

And it pressed us.

Um and I think part of that is looking back that vision again, going back to design.

I know you've applied that to other projects as well, and much like we have the advocacy center.

So I think as the town thinks and the CIP team and everything they do and Jack Drag and budget, it ties everything together to know that we are truly building this place for what we need to get.

I know that budgets are challenging, but this is kind of the fruit of that labor to know that we couldn't have done this, even going back to the sign of that place.

And to add on to that, you know, we we've got a lot of CIP projects who are talking about consequences and how we're gonna get by in the meantime.

Had we not done the training facility, I would have well over 100 vacancies because I could only get five to six seats in an academy.

Phoenix showed us off, Mason showed us off right at the right time when we opened up, and we bluntly we'd be screwed if we had not done that.

These council members, that was difficult decisions by council.

So we appreciate the effort.

All council members says I know there's hard decisions coming up.

So I guess just thanks to the to the team that puts on it.

Yeah, well, hang on, I'm just gonna say, I know that we are over our time on this, and I'm not pushing you to wrap up prematurely, but I do want to leave time at the end of this before we do our applause and appreciation.

I would like to for all council members to have the opportunity to comment.

It can be plaudits, but it can also be observations that you're taking from this conversation as well.

Things that are impressing you, things that you're learning, things that you want to make sure other council members are aware of are going on in your mind as a result of seeing this.

So I'm gonna let this go just a few more minutes.

So go ahead, uh Kenny.

So yeah, I want to just tell all of you uh involved.

What you said, Aliyah, Chief, this team, you know, the manager.

Um I am so freaking proud of you guys.

I've spent a decade out of law enforcement running um sales teams, some large sales teams, lots of marketing, thinking we're creative, and you guys destroyed everybody.

And you didn't pay us on the dollar.

So you hear us talking a lot about being being the stewards of our um our uh residents' money.

And what you do is I have not seen a better display of being a good steward of their money than this.

This should be celebrated.

Um I would highly recommend that you uh submit this for proposal when they do the call to uh call for speakers at IAC at um IACP at um ICMA that you guys submit this.

That's brilliant.

I can't believe what you got at what little cost.

Um every community deserves to have the best in class police, right?

At the lowest cost possible without sacrificing that quality.

Um this is a perfect example.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kate.

Anyone else, Bobby?

I will I will be short and quick, but I'm extremely impressed by this.

I've also taken it all in so that uh I can look at what you said and what you've done.

And Candace, if you wouldn't mind sending me the especially the beginning part, I'd love the numbers, and uh I I think I can say I have a new appreciation for Gen Z.

All right, thank you all, and I love what Kenny said as well.

I um totally applauded you guys on all all you've done and and how you've turned around to save funds and save money.

Um I I think it's fantastic.

Thank you.

Bobby, thank you.

Monty, I saw your hand.

Um you guys were presenting.

You talked about the uh sworn officer retirement.

Do you have numbers for those that are not sworn officers?

What our retirement bill wave looks like there.

We do, and this is um we don't hold the data, uh ASRS holds the data, and so they don't give us full transparency, but we can make some assumptions based on age and also years of service with Gilbert, not other agencies.

We know that five percent of our workforce is eligible to retire today.

Um that would include Sworn, though.

It's all FTEs, and then in five years, we know 13% of our population is eligible.

So lower than the ICMA numbers that we see nationally.

Um, but that is also an estimate, and we know it's on the low side.

I would be curious in those numbers, what critical career fields that we have that could be at risk.

Uh I'm taking facilities, maintenance, uh, even IT folks.

So it would be nice to be able to have that in front of us.

Um as far as recruiting.

We talked about not being able to do training because of the staffing size and kind of throw people into the mix, and I think that that drives a decision to look for more experienced people.

Is that fair to say?

Um, which means it's gonna cost us more to get a recruit, but also at the same time, we have a we're behind the curve in adapting them to our culture because they're gonna bring the culture from their other places in.

I would like to see something around how we are helping to shape new hires to integrate into our culture because it's one of the strengths we have.

And when we're hiring more experienced people, they're bringing, I can't tell you how many times I heard somebody say to me over my career, well, we used to do it this way over here, and I wanted to show them.

So, you know, one of the things we do have here, and they brought good things, I mean Jesse, but um, you know, we have a really good culture here, so we need to make sure there's cultural alignment.

I would like to see something that Nathan, you know, or whoever whenever you know that that addresses that um and then a mentoring program.

I haven't seen anything on that.

I would like to see that.

The things that made the great strides in my career is when I had a mentor, when I didn't have a mentor, I was flying with some.

Okay.

And then finally on the learning thing, which I think is very very critical because we can target that to incentivize where they may learn to complement the holes we have in our own organization, and maybe allow a person to shift from one career to another, or maybe do a step up in their current career.

I think that would be something we need to look at and invest in.

Uh so that's my comments.

Thank you.

We can touch on two of those just real quick.

During this process, we also kept our lateral process open because it is important to bring laterals in.

We can get them on the street quicker.

Um, we're not spending the money on putting them through an academy.

They're already a trained officer.

We brought in about uh 10 maybe during this time, roughly.

Um so we do we do continue to mix in laterals.

Uh it's it's a good mix.

Again, they do bring things from outside.

I brought things from outside, but sometimes they bring good things in too, right?

Like right, it's a good mix.

Um, they do our recruits do get a lot of our our culture and our um what to expect here.

We were one of the good things of bringing them on early this time.

They had a lot of time with our um uh recruiting detective who kind of acts like as a mentor for them leading up to the academy.

So going into the academy, they're getting a lot of our culture.

We're bringing down detectives and officers and commanders and assistant chiefs to speak with them.

Uh we brought in Joe from Joe's Farm Girl from the community to give a perspective on the community members' perspective to them, and then the mentorship program, which in recent years seems we've gotten a little out of whack.

Uh that has been at the chief's direction reinvented, and uh these they will all have a mentor.

So yeah, we're on a lot of that already.

Thank you.

And Melissa, you've you touted leaderverse, but leaderverse is something that was recently launched by the people team, which includes agile mentoring, which is a very new component that hopefully empowers people in a more flexible way, again, understanding that the people communicate engage differently to connect with people that they think that they can learn from.

So we are very much leaning into some of those already.

I'm gonna suggest first off, let's thank everyone here.

Um I have Gilbert PD also sounds like a show that's gonna be on ABC.

I love that.

Let me ask you all a question, Council members, especially.

Um we're supposed to go into directly into our next agenda item, but I'm also a little behind on our agenda.

Would you like before we talk about infrastructure?

Would you like to check out the infrastructure before we do that?

Would you like the kidney break first?

We talked about wastewater yesterday.

Let's take a 10-minute kidney break right now, but a real 10 minutes, it's uh 10 09.

We'll start again at 1019.

Alright, we go right uh into infrastructure and we will go right from infrastructure to parks and recreation strategies directly.

So Jessica, you're just thank you.

All right, yeah, I'm here to kind of talk with you about um funding needs around our parts and transportation infrastructure.

Um, this is really just kind of a recap of some information that we also saw at the Fall Retreat.

Um, we talked about our transportation um funding needs and then parks share their parks and recreation-related funding needs.

Um, and then yesterday we referenced some um ideas around leveraging our citizen input for these kind of trying to solve some of these challenges that we have.

And so we're gonna talk through our plan for engaging our public works and parks advisory boards in this process.

Um, this is informational only today, although welcome discussion questions and things of kind of how some of what we're looking at here and some of the needs we're seeing tied to some of the conversations that we had yesterday.

So, just to kind of start off, our investment in our infrastructure is really important on the transportation side is the network that our town is built on.

It gets people safely for communication, it supports our economic development in making sure that businesses have quality infrastructure that can support their needs as well on the prosperous community side.

When we look at our parks, it's it's maintaining a clean, safe environment, and it's what brings residents to Gilbert and what keeps uh residents in Gilbert for the long term.

And it's also really tied to our city of the future initiative.

We know from the needs that we have identified, but our current infrastructure is not built for our future.

Um, maybe maybe 10 years from now as we continue to grow and as we continue to support this economic development that we're looking at to help generate revenue and solve some of these funding challenges.

Um, we know we have to also invest in this infrastructure in order to be able to support that economic growth and be able to continue to bring businesses into the community and bring people that are you know spending their money in no burden to the community as well, and so looking to the future and how we we also need to invest in this type of infrastructure in order to support all of the other needs of the community.

So, real quick an overview or recap of kind of some of the needs that were shared in the fall.

Um, parks had shared um a total of 17 different projects in um categories such as access and equity, interpretable rehabilitation, economic development, there you go, um, and environmental viewership.

Um, and there is some funding for parks available.

You know, there were some projects that were accounted for in the quality of life initiative.

We talked yesterday about how that funding is um uh not going to go as far as we hoped it would due to a variety of factors.

Um, and so there's a gap of about 660 million dollars on the parks infrastructure needs that are currently identified in our capital improvement plan that were um built from the parks and rec master plan that was completed in 2024.

Um transportation side, we identify 85 different projects in seven different categories safety intersection improvements, rehabilitation, redevelopment, um, widening non-motorized infrastructure, which is actually where there's a synergy between the parks infrastructure needs when you talk about um multimodal paths and how that part of our transportation is also part of our recreation network and the safety associated with that when you have uh multi-passen crossing our traffic paths and keeping our um commuters and our residents and our pedestrians and our cyclists safe.

And on the transportation funding side, there is no funding for transportation beyond our current 20 uh 2021 transportation bonds that were um passed by the voters.

Um, through March of 2025, we had spent about a hundred million dollars on these projects, and that's because it's slow roll to get these projects moving through design.

We didn't have funding available to even start design until we have those 2021 bonds approved, and this is 2022 because that's when we actually issued loans.

But so it's taken us four years almost to actually get projects from design into construction, and now that they're in construction, the money is getting spent much more quickly.

And the last nine months we've spent another 60 million dollars, and by 2028, fiscal 2028, we expect that all of those funds will either be spent or encumbered with contracts for construction of projects that are currently under design.

And so our goal is to try to figure out a solution for how do we get the next phase of funding available for these transportation related projects so we can start that design process and not have a large lag between projects getting completed under the current funding and not having any funding to move forward with the design of the new projects that are that we have identified in our in our plans.

And so we saw this graph as well in terms of the timing of different options we talked about in November.

The top line is a 2026 ballot question, which is the only option that really gives us the funding, new funding coming in before the old funding is gone.

The 2027 ballot question kind of aligns with that.

We have our money encumbered, and then we have new funds available starting that same year.

And the further out we go, the more of a gap there is.

Red dots are bad.

It means there is no design happening, and we're gonna end up with this big gap in being able to actually start and complete projects.

So, in order to help us walk through what solutions we have for funding these projects, we're gonna engage our transportation and reports.

Total need between these two infrastructure pieces is about 1.8 billion dollars.

Even if you gave us a 1.8 billion dollar blank check, it would probably take us 20 years to build everything in this plan.

We would never ask to do it all at once, and so part of that process with the boards is to help us prioritize and determine the best way to fund these projects going forward.

This is what we know we need right now.

Um on the park side, they redo their master plan every 10 years, so their needs are probably a little more finite or certain for the for the foreseeable future.

Um on the uh transportation infrastructure side, we have a lot of master planning efforts coming up, including the Northwest Redevelopment Plan, another heritage district update, and our transportation planning plan update.

Um, and we start talking about again, start talking about redevelopment and the economic development components you'll hear about later today, making sure that we have that infrastructure in place to be able to support that growth and redevelopment is going to be really important part of that process.

So our advisory board coordination.

Um, our goal with them is to engage the community, get their perspective, um, increase transparency in the pro in our process for planning this and how we're going to fund it with that with those teams, and really trying to align the community priorities.

We have our public works advisory board that's very public works focused, and they are subject matter experts in their field.

We have our parks board that are engaged in the parts process because that's their passion.

Um, and how can we get synergy and alignment with the overall priorities of the town and this type of infrastructure needs to be able to make a recommendation to council on how to try to solve this gap.

Um, so we're gonna start with just sharing with them the infrastructure needs that we've identified, um, work with our um our budget team to educate them on the different funding mechanisms we have available for these types of infrastructure, um, and then use their expertise and their um their engagement in the community to help us prioritize the the not necessarily the projects themselves.

We have 85 transportation projects, we wouldn't ask them to go through and prioritize every single one, but more the criteria that we use to prioritize those projects so that we can make sure that we are delivering not only what town staff believes we need from a safety and congestion and all the different pieces to what the community is actually looking for and where they see the pain points and interest, um, and then get some direction from the boards making recommendations to council on what these needs are, the prioritization and funding options we have available.

So we've kind of already started this process with our public works advisory board.

We met with them and we shared with them all of the transportation-related needs that we've shared with the council in the fall.

Um, and the parks uh parks and rec team has met with their parks board and also shared parks needs that were um that were shared with the council previously.

Um, and then the next step in that process is our team swap.

So we're gonna have our transportation staff go to the parks board and share all of the transportation related needs with them, and then the parks and rec team is gonna come to our public works advisory board meeting and share all of the parks related um needs.

And so then we're gonna have several joint meetings with them to discuss and kind of educate them on the funding and the financial options and mechanisms we have for funding these types of projects.

Um, our park um public works advisory board has had a lot of that in the past, but they've been making recommendations on utility rates for a while, so they have a little more familiarity with how the financing and funding of projects within the town work.

Um parks board has not generally been engaged in that type of process before, so there'll be definitely some education and outreach that needs to happen with that.

Um but then working with them on prioritizing the criteria that we use to evaluate the need and the overall prioritization of the projects within the banking plans, um, and really trying to get some alignment and synergy where and a consensus from them around where the priorities should be or where we should be using those funds, and then coming back to council or getting recommendation from them and coming back to council on a future date and to share those those findings and a plan um recommendations on how to proceed.

Jessica, you're amazing.

Yeah.

Questions, observations, comments.

The obvious one is on your last one on the timeline.

Just is there anything here?

Your recommendations don't come back to council until after the budget process is done.

Is there anything about this that needs to be advanced or adjusted in order to uh field council's decisions on next year's budget?

Not as part of the FY27 budget.

Um we originally had tried to condense this timeline with the idea that a 26 bond for funding this could potentially be an option, but we really wanted to make sure we were thorough in our engagement with the two boards, and so the timing of that does not appear to find out.

Um to that point, you know, we talked yesterday about uh public safety bond initiative in 2027, and so looking at how this may also kind of layer into that time.

Okay, to leave it as well.

Go ahead, you go first.

Okay.

To put a finer point on what Jessica just said, um it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the red dots that signal that basic grind to a halt in terms of transportation improvements being able to move forward, and we know that causes frustration for the community when there's a lot of construction work taking place on our roads all at the same time.

The team works hard to try to sequence it to minimize that disruption, but there's only so much disruption that you can mitigate if you need to build roads.

So that taking the 2026 bond election off the table makes the 2027 decision even more important, and that will definitely need to be balanced with the conversation yesterday and for a public safety bond and what the right balance of dollars is if the council were to decide to to put two items on the ballot.

Thank you, Leah.

Yeah.

A lot of this is assuming that the design and construction of future projects is funded through future bonds.

And I guess I would encourage the town to consider other funding sources for the design so that we can be more shovel ready for when those um and more flexible for those bond years to come.

I'm not sure whether that is gonna evolve conversations about using sales tax or other cash to do that design, but I think that all layers in with other funding sources as well, such as grants or regional monies, and as much as we can get that design started, so we don't have the same situation as last time.

I think we'll really help bridge that gap that we're seeing.

Thank you.

Yes, absolutely.

One of the things we are gonna continue to look at is there any capacity within the existing or funds to start the design of the future projects, um, which would then rely more heavily on having construction dollars uh coming into play.

But those are that and dedicated funding sources beyond bonds, sales tax, et cetera, will all be part of half financial evaluation we do.

Yeah, absolutely.

Jim, I felt that the half cent increase the quality of life property was supposed to offset asking for a bond.

That was a sub in.

And we're still asking for a bond.

So we're asking them to pay more tax here, pay more tax there.

I don't think it's gonna resound real well if we do that.

And I'm hoping that we can take some of the the parks and it's like the regional park and do more public private partnerships where we're not asking for money to receive every time we spend to own something, we're not recouping that money or spending their money every year to maintain it, though.

I think we need a rethink of how we're doing this because that everybody's been protective of that half cent not going somewhere else.

So now it's not going somewhere else.

We're asking for more again.

And it doesn't sit.

Jim, can I ask you for clarification on something?

Yesterday maybe our in yesterday's conversation.

In yesterday's conversation, didn't we identify that there were a number of things that would be paid for in the quality of the life sales tax, but we said council said that we would consider shifting those into the bond.

I didn't say that.

But that was a comment.

I mean, that was the whole point.

The clarity of that conversation yesterday seemed like that seemed to be a prudent thing to do, but for the 27 election season.

But as we do this, do we take on a half cent sales tax for quality of life in lieu of asking for a bond a year ago?

I thought that's what the point was.

Questions, comments.

I think if I could just kind of open a little bit.

So I mean, I know the half-cent on the quality of life is focused on the public safety, police fire, and some parts of projects, a lot of which have been prioritized out of that product money, but there's never there wasn't a discussion at that time around the funding for transportation, which is all we relied on bond funding.

So there is completely different.

Thank you.

Um I just have a quick question.

Are will we be meeting with you guys again before June?

I just need to dive into this a little bit deeper for myself for information to you know to to double check some things and uh to to just inform myself a little bit better.

We do not have any touch points plan of council um for this process and before June.

That's all engaged judges with the boards and kind of working through making recommendation council.

Um recommendation would probably happen after June.

But probably you're just saying so.

Do you need a decision in June?

Is that what you're gonna be?

Oh, okay.

So we have we have time to I have time to do this.

Okay, great.

Let me ask you also for some clarity here.

Yes.

So uh there will be touch points with council for sure.

We absolutely want to leverage that citizen engagement through the public works advisory board and the parts advisory board, so that we were getting that reflection of community priorities.

But Dawn is a part of yesterday.

She mentioned multiple touch points with council on that 10-point framework.

And one of those will be regular updates on how these efforts are going.

Because this is a part of that framework that was presented yesterday.

So council will be receiving updates on how those efforts are going.

But but to just confirm that was my my question earlier.

There's nothing in here that's going to get uh surprised, put in front of council that they're gonna have to make a decision before the budget has to get approved for next year.

Yeah, that's so that's what I was doing.

So and we will know about how all the other efforts are going.

Yes, okay.

So we have time.

Perfect.

Thank you.

One last look.

Anyone else?

Jessica, thank you very much.

We're now gonna go right into um ask the break to not economic development for doing parts and right.

Yeah, I probably do a terrible job talking about that.

Are there slides for you?

Uh there are slides.

All right, we will go find those slides to give us 30 seconds to figure that out.

Sorry.

We've said two minutes, we are actual two minutes.

We just make sure we have the council.

Three, four, five, six, seven, we're good.

All right.

We are uh we're gonna read Michael's gonna take us through Mark Recreation.

As soon as I have everyone's attention.

All right, Michael, floor towards.

Thank you.

Uh good morning, everyone.

Uh I'm gonna ask on the front end if I'm ass late between standing and sitting, I got a wood leg and a glass eye right now.

So if you see me just take a seat, I promise it's not because I'm disinterested.

I'm just going through it right now.

Uh so it's like I got the mind of a Disney with the body of a painful.

Just want to kind of have a conversation about our parts of recreation user fees.

Uh looking to get some direction from council as far as which approach uh would be the most prudent as we look to address some of those costs.

Uh before we get into that, I want to just quick overview of what we offer.

Uh we have twenty-nine parts, twelve lakes, four pools, ton of complexes, right?

I don't want to just read what you guys can read here.

But it just goes to show like the many different types of amenities that we have.

Uh, but more importantly, uh I want to kind of go into all the different services that we have.

Uh between adult sports, youth sports, uh, concerts, special events.

Uh, we even have stargazing, so you know, if you want to come out to the observatory, look at the telescopes, and um, you know, kind of look at the past the clouds and see all those things.

We have not losing opportunities for you to look at those types of things.

So the thing that's important to consider is that we have costs for this.

Uh, each of these have different levels of service, uh, different audiences that we reach, different opportunities, and those costs are something that we factor into our daily operation.

Um, it's no secret, we have challenges just like every other organization, every other department.

Uh, market pressure, such as inflation and construction costs of exacerbated our uh offering that we're able to do, increased cost for personnel, utilities, contracted maintenance operating supplies, it's nothing new.

Uh, but they have affected our ability to achieve a sustainable uh level of cost recovery.

Uh, before I dive a little bit further, I do just want to kind of give you guys a reminder of what cost recovery is, at least from the parts of recreation perspective.

So it's the balancing of public tax funding with the revenue that's generated from user fees, rental partnerships, and what I'd like to put in their sponsorships.

Uh, any revenue source that's used to offset offset those operational costs.

In short, cost recovery for us is revenue over expenses.

Right.

So if you have something uh we had a program that has a seventy percent cost recovery, the expectation is that seventy cents of that of each dollar should be paid for by the user, and the other thirty percent or thirty cents would be subsidized by the development.

Here's a brief snapshot of our department cost recovery since 2018.

2018 is noteworthy because that was the last time that our department went forward to town council to approve of the increase in our parts and recreation user fees.

And the weird thing for those years from 2018 to 25, we've actually increased slightly by 4%.

And so I'd encourage you to not look at the percentage points, but mainly the percentage.

I want you to kind of identify the change because I think if you see 25 to 26, you think that that's minuscule.

Or if you see that we're actually 34% down to 25%, you might think that that's minuscule.

But from 2022 to 2025, we've had a 19% decline in our cost recovery, which gets exacerbated, obviously, with the increase of expenditures.

So before we got to this point, our team worked to do some internal benchmarking.

I have to give a huge props to my parts of rent management team that's over there for emotional support.

I look to them for affirmation when I feel like I'm struggling.

And also our data support team.

They did some benchmarking of seven sister municipalities as well as three school districts.

The school districts were important because they offer some of the amenities and some of the facility rentals that we do.

So it's kind of really good to kind of get some of those comparison points.

And I just want to have one, for example, to kind of reference where we are, and then also highlight the ambiguity in our own internal strategies of how we do cost.

So this is an example of how much it costs to rent an extra large room in our inventory per hour.

And we average about 84 dollars an hour, and that is much lower than the other municipalities and school districts that we survey.

But a thing to note for uh for this, and which highlights the ambiguity that 84 dollars is actually the average of four different types of extra large rooms that we have.

So, in addition to us being lower than our sister or uh municipalities, there's that ambiguity even within ourselves to define well, what exactly does an extra large room cost?

And one instance is $89, another one is $79, and then another one I think it's uh in the hundreds.

And so the ask again is just to get council feedback and a recommendation on which approach that we should take in order to address these cost recovery.

So I'm gonna spend some time going over what we like to call a cost recovery model.

So it's a it's a pyramid.

Uh the if the best way to look at it is the higher up that you go on the pyramid, the greater the cost uh recovery should be.

Or the lower you go down on the pyramid, the greater the subsidy should be because there's a greater community benefit.

Uh a perfect way to look at it before I get into the tiers specifically is a playground at a neighborhood park offers the greatest community benefits, so it should be the most accessible to the public.

Uh so as I go into the tiers, I'll kind of explain and give you instances of uh different types of amenities or facilities or programming that falls into these individual tiers.

So as I alluded to uh tier ones, uh 0% cost recovery.

Those are things that have the greatest community benefit.

Our parks and trails should have the greatest access by design.

Um there's never an intent for anyone or any parks direct agency out there to charge for someone to use a playground, to use a trail, to use a park.

The next tier is tier two.

Oops, I'm sorry, it just hit me.

My sciatic is kicking in, so I'm gonna go ahead and take a seat.

I just didn't want you guys to think I was giving up.

Other times getting to me.

At the very least, you'll remember this presentation.

So uh tier two uh are things that have more of a community benefit, but they do have a level of individual benefit to it.

These are things like youth sports or town sponsored community events.

These have a cost recovery of anywhere between five and forty percent, and there's even flexibility within that tier.

A youth sport, for example, may be towards that higher end, while a town-sponsored community event uh would be towards that lower end.

The cost to go into Shacapalooza may be relatively small, so that we can offset some of the operational costs, but we don't want that to be to the detriment of the ability for a resident to attend.

The third tier is uh more balanced, uh, so there's essentially an equal benefit for the individual and the community.

These are things that like community fitness classes or after school programs.

These typically have a cost recovery percentage between 40 and 70 percent.

Uh tier four are activities or things that lean more towards the individual benefit, but they do have a secondary community benefit.

Uh, these have a 70 to 90% cost recovery, and these are things that facility rentals or uh competitive use sport leads, sports leads.

Tier 5 is very individualized or specialized events or programming.

These have a 90 to 100% plus cost recovery.

These are private lessons or any uh exclusive use facility that uh takes away from the ability of our users to use that amenity.

And then we actually have a tier six, and this is what we like to call exclusive.

These are market-based.

These are things like our third-party concerts, we have boots in the park coming up, is a perfect example, or for-profit tournaments that we have at our facilities.

Uh, a better way of saying this is if we have commercial entities that use our public assets, we uh we we uh price that outside of a cost recovery model.

This is something that is completely market-based, and the intent is to generate a profit.

Um another thing that can fall into this is our uh sponsorships, right?

And our partnerships as we look to do public partner public private partnerships, whether that's at Cactus Charts or at the riparian or any of our other assets, these would fall into that exclusive category as ways to generate significant amounts of revenue without having to fall into that cost recovery model.

Do I have any questions before I continue?

So, why do after-school programs, why are they in that higher cost recovery when we know that I mean we had to put together a youth community engagement team, and we know that you know idle hands do the devil's work.

So if they're an app-for-school programs, they're not riding down maybe the road on e-bikes doing wheelies, you know, and they're not out there, you know, kids are busy doing productive things.

So I hear you knocking, I'm about to let you in.

Um, some of the different tiers that we've had.

Um, when our team was actually contemplating which tiers should some of these things fall into, there was um even just like uncertainty and ambiguity amongst ourselves.

And so what I what I'll be getting to a little bit later is kind of what we're hoping we can do, is have a cost recovery study where we have that third party kind of tell us what tiers those should fall into.

Uh, a perfect example that we thought about with Romata usage, right?

Um there were some sentiment that Romadas should cost uh it should be tier four, uh right.

You're taking away that amenity from someone else to use, and you should pay a pretty penny for it.

At the same time, we thought about what if a single mother just wants to have a birthday party for her son, should she have to pay an exorbitant price?

And the answer is we're not exactly sure.

Um, but what we can lean on is some of that data that has been across municipalities and letting a third party kind of tell us what that should fall into, and then using some of our own discretion to see where it falls, particularly within that tier.

Um, the same way that you can mention the after-school programs, I I absolutely think about that intrinsic benefit and where it can be lower.

At the same time, what if it's a uh parent going to do let's say she's going to go do some private program and then she's just dropping her kid off but can't afford it.

I think there's can be an argument made about the uh the benefits or drawbacks of each tier, and so getting a baseline from a third party would kind of help us mitigate that.

Um, and if we were fortunate enough to be to go that option, we would bring that back to you for consideration.

I've got uh Chuck, I've got young, and then I've got Jim.

Chuck, you're up first.

Great.

Michael, uh, where does the pinnacle ball fall on there?

It depends on what you mean by pickleball.

Uh if you just mean open play, then that is a tier one.

That's just anyone can use that.

If you're reserving it, then it fall it would fall in one of those middle tiers.

And then if you're getting private lessons, then that wow, this would be higher.

And forgive me, Chuck.

I'm looking at the projector like you're right there.

Okay.

And uh, do we have plans for more third-party concerts?

I'll say better.

Um, we have more plans to generate non-traditional revenue to help our cost recovery.

That would include third-party concerts, I would imagine.

That would include more tournaments if once we have the inventory, and that would include the sponsorships and partnerships I was looking to earlier.

Thank you.

The answer to the question of where pickleball falls is in the kitchen.

That's a pickleball driven.

What about uh I think that obviously some nuance uh sketchy here that there's nuance in like how things are gonna lay out in this particular tier six exclusive, you specifically mention like a for-profit company, and I think that that'll be important as you continue to consider where things fall.

So that's a for-profit entity or commercial entity reserving the space versus a resident versus a minor, you know, that lives in the community.

I think there are differences there.

And I'd be really interested to understand and learn more about specifically field time, you know, my son's in club soccer.

So I kind of see how that kind of plays out and where they send us and all the of the fields and the price to reserve the fields.

I don't know what that price is, but that's almost to me like a regional market versus a local market.

And there's even places where you have to you know pay five dollars for game parking, things like that.

How can we layer that in if it applies?

Absolutely.

And uh when we were doing this internally, uh, we were planning a segmented approach where the first phase would just be kind of getting some costs on facilities.

Uh but then once we realized um and kind of understood some of the ambiguity with even identifying tiers ourselves, uh, we're looking to do a more holistic study that could affect even things like our field allocation policy or uh uh impact on the coalitions that kind of have some of the preference uh for scheduling and things of that nature.

So uh it's almost a domino effect that this cost recovery study will really help dictate uh a lot of our programming, how we program, the cost in which we do it, how we allocate those fields, and uh how we kind of determine who gets that that that prefer not preferential treatment sounds terrible, but who gets that kind of order of magnitude.

Yeah, um well, first I want to see were you and Mr.

Zalisco be able to communicate at all.

Uh so I sent him an email and said, let's go ahead and do it.

As long as I can sit down, then I'm perfectly fine with it.

Um, absolutely, I think those are unique opportunities to explore to see if there's ways to get to meet a generator.

Well, even if you we don't do business with them, I don't think there's somebody more versed in that arena, maybe in the country.

Jim, could you give us all context we don't know what you're talking about?

Danny's Lisco's basically the the premier concert promoter in the Southwest.

He was uh uh Bill Graham's protege.

And he started Evening Star, he sold it to Live Nation, got on Live Nation, he has Danny's Lisco presents now.

But he does tons of things here, and he and I have been close since we did business together in the 90s.

I wanted to make sure that Michael was in touch with him because I feel we missed the mark a bit in the the concert area down there.

I felt it since before we built it because we didn't build to build it from the perspective of promoter wanting to come in and maximize how it's used.

Uh we're still a little too park-ish rather than venue ish to capitalize on it.

Having Danny's input at no cost will help us decide if we want to invest more in that arena to make more money.

Uh so I just think it's sitting with a man is never a waste of your time.

He's a great and as a human being, he's an incredible human being.

I could get into you and say what he and I did in the 90s, but he made sure there was food in my refrigerator when everything went south for me in 97.

He wanted to make sure my son was fed.

He's a remarkable man.

The uh but I wanted to point one thing out with cost recovery for people like maybe Monty Chuck and I, cost recovery means more than just the operation.

It means the sunk cost.

For instance, I buy a machine, I can make a decision whether it's a sunk cost and how much does it cost per square foot, or do I amortize that over a certain period of life?

How do I account for it?

I think we need to be clear that we are talking only operational in this in this case.

We're not talking the cost of the actual venue that you're creating itself.

I don't believe you're charging for however you amortize the pickleball court over 10 to 20 years.

So I think we need clarity on what the cost recovery is on that.

And you're absolutely right, Jim.

Um, when we were thinking about what the actual cost recovery would be and what cost would go into that, we were thinking, well, do you include administrative costs?

If me and my team sit and talk about something for 10 minutes, do we charge that time to the cost?

Uh we we realize that we could get granular, or we could go and solicit a third-party vendor that can kind of give us what's the standard practice amongst parks and recreation uh agencies throughout so that we have something that's defensible and something that we can kind of lean on when we go to make these increases.

Uh but absolutely great points.

Uh, I do want to to note that I do understand the um the intent behind us building parks, um, but I also um understand the intent behind us generating revenue, and it's a delicate balance, and it's what I get paid the medium bucks for is to try to figure out how to make that balance work to where we're generating revenue, but not to be detriment of the park users' independence.

Because I know, Jim, that you understand us.

I know your council members understand this, I know that staff understands this, but I'm listening to the words that are actually said, so I just want to put some clarity on something.

It's great that you have a relationship with a certain business person who has brings an expertise and a knowledge and might be willing to share that.

That's great.

But I just want it in the live translation of this, it's staff.

You need to sit and talk with people who are actually in that business and understand what their needs are.

And that was the guidance that you were giving for Michael.

This was not an instruction for the town to do business with any particular vendor in that way.

I just wanted to make sure that the language around this was clear that it was at that altitude.

We all understood it was at that altitude, but anyone who's listening or who is transcribing the words might have heard it differently.

Correct.

You're dead on.

Okay.

So with that, I want to present.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Bobby had a comment back here.

Yeah, I just have really an overall comment.

And that is, I I understand the the for profit, and we need to recover costs, but I don't want us to lose the big picture here.

And these amenities and all the parks are built for the enjoyment of our public, of our residents.

And I don't want to lose sight of that in all of these negotiations and end up having things cost more than what you know, like you said earlier, the average mom that might have two kids, and we raise this to ten dollars.

Well, ten dollars if she wants to bring her kids to the park every Saturday, that's a lot of money for her.

And I just don't want us to lose sight of what all these amenities were originally put in place for.

Michael, do you want to comment on that?

Because Bobby has a really interesting point.

This isn't just about cost recovery, this is about the allocation of time, the dedication, the use of the space, right?

Not just the cost.

Absolutely.

So it's it's exactly the point I was saying earlier that there is an impetus to generate revenue, and I believe that there are opportunities there, uh, but the key is to make sure that it's not to the detriment of the user.

Uh but to be candid, uh the the cost of operating those facilities for providing that program has has grown considerably since the last time we raised fees.

And so the goal isn't to uh to put that burden completely on the end user.

Parks and recreation by design is meant to have that social benefit and to be subsidized to some extent by the governing municipality.

Uh that doesn't mean that we can't assign tiers within reason to try to offset some of those costs, fully understanding that we'll never achieve full cost recovery, especially for some of those opportunities that are meant for a greater community benefit.

And so right now in the past, we haven't really subscribed to a cost recovery model, and so that hasn't really lent itself to having a pricing model that makes sense for future increases.

And so uh the hope is if we adopt this cost recovery model that it'll be a little bit more proportionate to the impact on the end user, and we would offset a lot of those costs.

But I could not agree with you more.

We don't want to tax the end user to the point where they're they're dissuaded from using the amenity.

But I think Bobby's point went to we also don't want to uh be chasing revenue to such a degree that we're shutting off access to certain facilities or things that we wish would go to uh more foundational tier kind of levels, right?

This is not just about cost recovery, it's about not letting the not letting the chasing of revenue get in the way of people's enjoyments of their own parks and other facilities.

That they've already paid for and paid the taxes for, and and I think I think the majority of them would understand that there is some maintenance cost, maybe there.

I just don't want to see the prices go so high that it blocks out our residents, and probably and and mostly it would block out our our residents that have families.

You know, when we're we're a huge family community.

I'm gonna go to the mayor.

Just to follow up with that a little bit.

Um I talked the other night at uh the HE South Gala about making emotional connections in the community, and that's what makes for a stronger community economies and uh provides uh what we call the small town fuel in Gilbert, and that's because we are able to offer these types of amenities where people can make those connections and we don't.

This is something you you have to be able to offer uh without thinking about whether or not it's gonna have a profit or a turn of profit of some kind or be total cost recovery because it just it's not going to be offered by anybody else.

And that's why this is so one of the first things that some people in the community will talk about cutting if you're going to be cutting things will be parks and recreation.

And because it's not paying its way.

Well, as a use is not going to pay its way, but it has to be provided in the community in order to strengthen that community and make the connections that uh people are looking for in the community.

Thank you, Mary.

Mike, back to you?

Yeah, perfect.

Uh I'd like for you guys to keep those things in mind as we go over these potential options because those are things to absolutely consider as as we as I propose these to you.

Um so with that, uh, I have four options here.

Option one is an inflationary increase, uh, option two is a tier cost recovery model, option three would be a tier phase cost recovery model, and then uh option four would be no change.

I'll go into detail on each of these.

Uh so option one, the inflationary increase, that would be an across the board inflationary increase of all program facility rental fees.

Uh so what this would say is we would uh we would review our numbers, and uh for example, if costs have gone up 30% since 2018, we would just provide a 30% increase of all costs and fees across the board.

Uh, this would result in the most immediate increase in our revenue, and it would it would to an extent address the rising cost of service, uh, but it does not address cost recovery, and it will have that potential disparity of some of the lower tiers paying a disproportionate amount relative to some of the higher tiers.

But it is an option, it is the most immediate.

And as I go a little bit later into a summary, I can kind of go into the timeline of how quickly this could be implemented.

Uh, the second option, and I would ask you to hold your questions until I go over all four options.

That way, I may I may be answering some of your questions in some of the future uh options.

Uh, option two would be a tier cost recovery.

So this would be a strategic increase in our program and facility rental fees and the implementation of a sustainable tier cost recovery model.

So this would follow that pyramid that I referenced earlier.

It would allow for us to have cleaner projections and it would increase our department cost recovery.

Uh, one of the challenges is that if we did just a one-time uh increase, uh especially since there's been a seven-year gap or eight-year gap at the time would be implemented in from fees that that large increase may be unpalatable to some users to implement all at once.

Uh the third option would be a tiered phase cost recovery.

So, this would be a two-phase strategic increase in our programming fees, and the implementation of that cost recovery model.

Uh, this phase approach would allow for a more manageable increase.

Uh, it will address uh the cost recovery, uh, but it does extend the window for the realization of our planned cost recovery.

Uh, in this model, we would look to do an 18-month uh phase of the first phase uh we would and I'll show you on a later table, we would do that first phase, and then 18 months we would implement that second phase.

And then the fourth option is no change.

Uh, we could continue to charge the same cost that we do now.

This would maintain affordability and it would preserve the current participation levels, uh, but the challenges are significant.

Uh, that initial increase will be much larger whenever we would come to the table, and then uh keep in mind that every every day or every year that we go without increasing those costs, that subsidy comes at the expense of the other uh departments that are in that general fund, right?

So we are taking away from PDE Fire, IT, the people team uh as they are subsidizing because we haven't increased those costs.

I kind of want to go over a sample phase approach.

So if we were to do uh the phased approach, and I I want to uh caution that these numbers are illustrative, these aren't uh these numbers would actually be uh short up by the third party um vendor, but these are just uh for illustrative purposes.

The goal of a phased approach would be the users at the higher end would pay for the bulk of that increase.

The thought process being that those typically at the higher end of those tiers are more immune to uh market changes than those at the lower end.

Uh so in this example, uh the tier five, tier four and tier five would on a on a cumulative basis pay between 17 and 25 percent of the increase, while the lower tiers would pay a 10 to 20 percent.

Again, I I really just want to caution that this is an example.

Uh if we were to conduct that third-party cost recovery study, they would provide a table to this extent, but keep in mind that they would follow this same model.

This would be something that we would iterate to them that it is important that they follow a model where the higher levels pay the majority of that increase.

And that is by design, and that is to ensure that equity, equity combined two words, uh, equity and that accessibility for the end user.

So I'll go over potential next steps.

I'll go to the summary and then I'll open it up for questions again.

Uh, even if it's just for you guys to tell me that I'm doing a great job.

I'm so today the goal is to get some direction from council on what the preferred option would be.

Um just for reference, uh for option one, if that was the idea, which is just to do the implementation of inflationary cost adjustment, um, that would be something that we could look to do relatively quickly.

We would be able to have those fees be in effect by July 1st of this year for the start of fiscal year 27.

Uh, if we were to go with options two or three, or two and three, because you could give direction to do both, explore both and then see what the phasing looks like, uh, that would be a little bit more extended.

Uh, we would uh if you gave us directions to proceed up uh proceed with that option, we would spend the summer or the spring of the summer soliciting a vendor to do our fee analysis and cost recovery study.

We would complete that study, we would develop a fee table, and then we would be to council in October for council uh direction and potential approval for um fees to be implemented for January 1st, 2027.

So this table kind of summarizes the four options.

Uh I'll go over what each of these are and then I will open it up to any questions.

Uh so option one, well, actually I'll go from the left.

Uh so options one, two, and three are the only ones that address inflation.

Uh option four obviously doesn't, uh, but only options two and three address cost recovery.

And again, inflation is just getting us to neutral, getting us to today's cost.

Uh, cost recovery gets us to a model that's sustainable for future iterations and makes it actually much easier for us to come forward for future market adjustments.

The implementation timeline, option one, we could do uh it would be effective July of 2026.

Option two would start for January of 2027, option three, the phased would start the first phase would be January 2027, and then 18 months later in July of 2028, at the start of fiscal year 29 would be that second phase.

Uh, and then option four would be immediate because we wouldn't be changing anything.

Uh the increased distribution, but that what I mean by that is is how is the increase in cost uh distributed amongst the tiers?

Uh for option one, it's uniform.

That that if again, if I use that 30% number, that 30% would be paid for by every single amenity, every single facility, every single uh pricing model that we have.

Uh options two and three uh provide a tiered model that follows that cost recovery.

Um, and then implementation effort for option one is relatively low, it's just taking our costs and adding that percentage.

Option two is a little bit medium just because there's a lot of work into it, but we just have the one phase.

Option three has high um implementation effort, uh, it's just a lot of work, a lot of communication, uh a lot of intentional activities, not only by parts of recreation, but by office communications, uh all these different interdepartmental collaboration would need to happen in order to make sure that we did that in the most uh intentional way possible.

So for questions there, uh very delete.

So I'll open it up to any questions that you may have.

Michael, thank you for putting that up.

That helps a lot of clarity.

Yeah.

Thank you for providing these options.

Um just looking at them here.

I would suggest I like option three the best, the phase tier, but it doesn't start for a little while because of the study.

So I would actually also suggest integrating option one as like a phase zero, but maybe at like uh 10% or like a five to fifteen percent range as phase zero with option three and coming along with phase one and two.

You're you're saying you'd like a kick start to the revenue generation from the uh I'd like to echo that approach.

I think that that makes a whole lot of sense.

That gets us at least moving in the right direction.

Um I think the study is going to be important based on the one chart you showed.

I don't think we're in alignment with the reality of the market.

And I don't think we know what that is.

So that study I think is incredibly important.

But at the same time, you know, getting things aligned with at least we have an inflationary baseline, I think is very smart move to do.

So my thoughts.

Michael, I have a question for you.

If if council gives you direction that says start with uh with the option one, is in your thinking, is that actually a uniform rollout across the board, or even in that, would you want to preserve some flexibility to say that well, there are actually some that we would actually want to do before others or is uniform mean equal across the board?

I think uniformity would be key to this.

Uh uh just for expediency's sake, uh, we have to have a 60-day notice right to post before July 1st implementation, and it'd be much easier for us to take our current, add that 10% or whatever number we thought was palatable and go forward with that, and then spend uh the rest of the spring and summer going into the study.

So if there's council clarity about that, that works for you to do the option one fee and with the option three kicking in later.

Yeah, then I'll go on.

Other can I think um what Council Member Krowski said was really smart on board.

Question though.

Well, question and comment.

It concerns me that once again we find where for years we have not provided you direction to do um regular checks.

So we end up with these gaps in time, and then we have to make these large chunks, and then ultimately we cause pain to our residents.

Whereas if we would just a two-year checkup and adjustment, um less painful.

Um is there a plan to do that with this moving forward so that we don't have these large chunks again?

Does this cover that?

So um one of the reasons why I was hired here is people don't know because I have a secret power where I can pause time.

So I pause time and I created a slide that says we're gonna do biennial fee recovery.

Absolutely.

But it's exactly to your point.

The goal is to um we we feel it's in our best interest to have uh a smoother increase, right?

That's based off of market.

It's exactly what Jessica Teams alluded to for the public works uh for their enterprise funds.

We just think following that same model would be uh more prudent and efficient than waiting another seven years.

Uh so our goal is to uh have the fees reviewed every two years, and then every 10 years when we do our master plan to reevaluate our cost recovery model to see if things have changed where we should put things in different tiers, or if there are things that are one offset that we have assigned some arbitrary cost to, having it fit into that model.

I'm glad you're here.

And to our CEO.

If there are other areas, I don't know what I don't know, right?

And if there's other areas where we have these gaps, can we change how we do things, change the paradigm and start uh a plan for all of that so that we won't have these massive hikes and our public?

Thank you.

That was absolutely um Monty, I saw your hand up, but Chuck, I know you wanted to speak, so I'm gonna join Michael.

We're both gonna stare at the PowerPoint projector and imagine that's you speaking from there.

Gotcha.

Um, Michael, thanks for the presentation.

I I agree with um Councilmember Umsky and Mani.

I just had one request, and that is if we do a carve out, so we don't increase the fees for uh children um swimming lessons.

I don't want to see them priced out of that, that's really important.

Absolutely, we can look into that and present that option.

Um I do want to just note um it's really easy to think that the cost for the lowest tier would be exorbitant, but if you took a three dollar lesson and added 10% of the Psalter 30 cents?

Now I don't count anyone else's chickens, but I I think it makes more sense to just present that information to council and then kind of get some direction.

But it is really easy to assume that it increased immediately prices someone out when for the most part that the changes will be relatively minuscule, but I do think we owe it to you guys to show that to you and then take your direction on which option you like to receive it.

You good, Chuck?

I'll take that as a yes, Marty.

I'm good yes.

Thank you, Chuck.

Um, this may not be the right place to ask.

And I know Chris is not here and Kelly may speak to it, but the something that uh council member Buckland just talked about.

We are getting innovated with all of these rate hikes simultaneously.

Is there anything in trying to think how to redo this process because I think one of the reasons we got here is that staff was afraid to come forward and ask.

I got that impression just from past conversations with people.

So rather than facing the firing squad, we just put it off, put it off, put it off.

Can we by statute make some of these adjustments automatic?

And council look at what they are, set the baselines, and if there's a deviation, for instance, let's say there's a really bad inflationary period like we had during COVID, you guys would come forward and say, hey, the standard, you know, what you guys put in place for the normal increases, not going to win because we do cola raises for people's wages.

Why can't we implement a cost of living inflationary um mechanism for all these rates?

So it's at least stays with the cost of inflation.

So the only thing we're really looking at are the anomalies that may come in.

For instance, like the water treatment plant going belly up, you know, that's that's something new, or like with the the water issue, we need to drill new wells.

It's something that's out of out of the ordinary, but for regular inflationary costs, because that that word has come up repeatedly, we could put a mechanism in place to just automatically do that, and that would create some insulation to these.

I call it like lurching.

It reminds me of somebody learning to drive a clutch, you know.

We could whip lash to use it until you get it down.

But Kelly, is that something that you can talk about?

And really quick, Kelly, one of the things uh we had contemplated when we were whipping this up is um could we do where there's just automated or automated for lack of better terms, market review based off of the CPI, and then if anything was over a certain threshold, five percent, then we would bring it to council.

But to your point, I think that there's some regulatory considerations, right?

I was being very altruistic and idealistic saying, oh, we can just do this, we can set it and forget it.

But I think Kelly could probably speak to some of the nuances that we'd have to go through.

Yeah, in the past, the review from legal is that we can't just put automatic increases into place that update the future councils.

We can ask again and we can see what options do we have.

Um, but we could put something either in code or in policy that says we want these looked at every two years.

I think some of it may have been just busy with COVID, and there's only so much capacity and all of the things since then.

There's been a lot on the plate the last couple of years, uh, and the time's gotten away from us, I think, on some of the parts and right fees and some of the other areas.

Um, and then major changes in other areas that caused bigger increases.

So, Kelly, just to confirm, and we can we can talk to Chris, uh, our town attorney when he gets back, but the council can't approve a self-adjusting pricing mechanism.

The council has to vote affirmatively on those resources.

That's been my understanding on what we've been told in the past.

Interesting question.

And I think one thing that's important to consider uh when our team did some modeling, just uh, hey, if we were to raise it a certain percentage, what would that look like?

I think one of the key differences between maybe parts of IPPs and maybe those of enterprise is uh ours are a little bit more elastic, right?

An increase in cost to some extent will result in a decrease in usage, right?

We may price someone out, even if it's just conceptually.

So that is something to consider.

If we go up a certain percentage, there may be a certain percentage of the population that says I won't use that amidity anymore.

But uh, what we can't do is let that be a reason why we can't raise it, and that's why we need more of a reason uh or some some sort of data-based um kind of backing to support what we're trying to do.

Yeah, when Kelly just mentioned COVID, it triggered something in my brain about um during the pandemic.

We had some additional money that we put towards um perks for our residents that they could take a free class uh during that time.

And I think that I would encourage you as you go into this study for the tiered model to think of it like a business as well, and it'd be super fun, like if residents had a perk of um like one or two classes for free a year to try, something like that where we are giving a benefit to our residents.

We know there are they're already usually getting a discount or lower rate, but uh that just popped into my head, and I wanted to make sure you heard that.

Thank you.

Uh that's actually a really cool idea.

I I know we one of the thoughts were financial assistance, scholarship, things of that nature, but I love that almost like a rewards program.

I think this is a uh if council supports especially one of the cost recovery models, it's a really unique opportunity for us, and I have every bit of confidence in Parks and Rec team that they would come up with unique innovative ideas to kind of incentivize uh not just uh existing users but new users and find ways to kind of um fold in those unique ideas with this raise.

So I I think that's a really cool idea.

We're gonna I we just I want to make sure we express clarity here before we move on.

So Michael, let me repeat back what I think I've heard.

Council, you tell me if I've got it right, and you tell me if this is useful for you.

I I haven't heard everyone speak on this, but the general sense that I've got is um you're okay with uh option three, but you would like to see the the um the revenue generation start immediately with option one.

Uh the vice mayor asked to take special look at um uh children's swimming lessons and whether that could be excluded or not, so you'll consider options there.

I just want to say that's the clarity that I've heard from the discussions so far.

Does anyone have any is that what you've also understood?

Absolutely.

Anyone have any comment about that?

I'm looking at council members specifically, Jim.

I just want to say special attention, the kids' swimming lessons, because it's worth it for us not to hear some kid drowned.

Absolutely.

Bobby, if you want to add something, yeah, go right ahead.

Yeah, that's something for you.

Um I just have a quick question.

When will the survey be ready?

I think that crosses party line.

It would a better way of answering that is we would hope to have it ready uh before we present to council in October.

Uh so some of the estimates and the timeline we've gotten from vendors is anywhere from four to ten weeks.

Uh so uh given the direction today, our next steps would be to solicit that vendor through the procurement process.

Um our team has already done a lot of the legwork with the benchmarking, so it is it'll be relatively retracted.

So we should be able to get something in relatively short order.

Uh, but we want to make sure that we're very intentional about it, and um in this case, I think speed would be the enemy of good.

So we want to make sure we do it the right way.

Okay, and and can you clarify then when would this be coming to council after the survey?

So uh if we follow the option that council member Koprowski uh suggested, we would actually be coming to council twice.

We would have to come to council before July uh to do the uh I'll just say 10% for gravity sake of the inflationary increase, and then we would come back to council in October, uh, which I believe there that's right before the 60-day threshold to get the second phase of or the the first phase of option three underway.

So there would be two instances in which we'd have to go to okay.

Well, you know, it's it may be a good idea, but I'm I'm not particularly in favor of that, and it seems like it'd be probably maybe the only one, because I I just have an issue with making these decisions before we see the survey, and then once we get the survey, if the decision is and I don't understand what is the immediate need to do to raise these fees immediately.

I mean, I'm sure you've got a budget, but is are you gonna go over budget if these aren't raised?

Or what is the immediate need for us to get this today in March, and we want these raised by July?

Uh it's not necessarily about an immediate need.

Uh, there is just again, as I alluded to earlier, every day that we operate without a change in our cost recovery philosophy, just the the amount of revenue and expenditure gaps just gets wider and wider.

And uh so the emphasis for today's meeting was if there was any direction where we would need to change something for our 527, now would have been the perfect time to bring it up to council to get some direction so that our time our team had enough time to get uh things ready for a council meeting before that 60-day threshold.

Um I completely understand your desire to keep costs as as small as possible, but I just I I caution that that that gap will continue to raise, and more importantly, it is having an adverse impact on the other departments within the general fund because they're essentially subsidizing our subsidy.

And and this let me just say this would also be a good time to remember that we're not making any decisions today.

Right, right.

All we're doing is setting up staff to bring back to council at a properly agendized meeting the consideration of these things, and so the way Michael's explained it, there would be two points of consideration before the budget is put in place for the next fiscal year for changes that go in option one, and then for anything subsequent, uh you said October.

Absolutely.

So just the timing is what we're pointing to, Shaq.

Right, yeah, and I and I understand that.

Um Mayor, can I ask you?

Do you does the town do we subsidize parks and recs in any way, or can we?

Because it is something that is that we provide for the residents, and they paid for through their taxes and different venues.

Yes, we're looking and it's sorry, they hang on a second.

Let me get you back.

We do subsidize it.

And it's a it's a use that uh I know people have talked about in the past about why don't we privatize uh offerings and of uh different services in the town, including parks and recognition.

No business is gonna step in and um and provide that type of service as services provided for the public good, and we do subsidize it, and it's appropriate that it'd be subsidized.

And do have we done any increases in our our subsidizing amounts for them as far.

I'm just trying to find a way to get away from doing big big races, and I know we think three percent or whatever this is might be small, but to families, it it it adds you know, it it adds a lot of cost for them.

But do or or are we at a the same rate to subsidize subsidize them as we were 20 years ago?

No, no, so we we go up then okay.

My my comment addresses that exactly okay, right?

Don't sure I've been kidding.

So if I might shime in, I think um a place where this may make sense or to go uh in terms of looking at more regular looks at at these types of things, might be in our financial policies.

So I want to put that out there for the council to consider in terms of looking at those, and maybe there's a policy that the council would like to explore that would get you that this um can consistent review provide an opportunity for some um council to consider some changes if they'd like to see them.

Thanks, Kenny.

Thank you.

If I was so in regard to the question about is it immediate and and in Michael said it may not be immediate, I would disagree.

I think it is immediate because the slides you showed showed that based on cost inflation, you there's not enough budget to cover it.

So the general fund is paying that, and you specifically put police and fire, which is um fully funded by the general fund.

So to me it is immediate because we just talked yesterday that we have a 20 plus uh million dollar budget shortfall, not by anything the citizens have done wrong or the staff has done wrong, but by actions taken above us at the state and federal level, and so we're going into a big gap in the general fund.

We've got critical services that need to be paid on the general fund, and we've got this costing more, and we're not doing anything about it.

So I totally don't want to cause more impact on our residents, but I also don't want to cause impact on our police and our fire services.

Um we do think it is immediate.

Okay, so I just want to clarify what you just said.

I I wasn't aware, unless you're talking about why did you say that this has to do with police and fire?

Because I thought we're talking about parks and recs.

Are you talking about maybe they will have larger um calls and more work?

Because there's not enough money now, which is why we need to raise the rate.

So now it is currently being subsidized by the general fund.

We're already subsidizing it, meaning along with numerous other.

Yeah, yeah.

And police and fire and other critical services are paid for out of the general fund.

There's not enough money for that already because of the cuts of the legislature.

So the general fund is getting squeezed in from two ends cuts and not enough money in parks to pay for these services.

So that's why it is being subsidized.

Okay, well, I just want to clarify because that this has nothing to do with police and fire directly, and what we're talking about, we're talking about parks and recs.

But um I what I don't want to see, and what I feel like I'm seeing is a run on the general fund.

And it's like he who gets there first gets the money, and whoever doesn't is gonna lose out.

And and I think that's a wrong approach to be going at.

But to me, I mean, just sitting here, I'm listening and I'm watching and I'm hearing all this, and it it just because of all the rights.

I mean, council, we have been hit every month, almost every month from different, you know, different departments, and it just seems like there's just a big run on the on the general fund, and that everyone thinks we're gonna run out.

I don't think we're gonna run out of money on the general fund.

We're balancing the budget, we're looking at things the way we should be looking at them.

And if anything, we should be you know, being more cautious, and let's get our fund built back up a little bit, and I don't know.

But that's just me and here I go, blurring out exactly what I think.

So Bobby, that's what we're here to do, though.

We're thinking out loud.

Let me if you just let hold on.

Let me just let me just ask you, because I wanted to put this into the framing that Michael's given us here on these four options.

What I think I'm hearing you say is that you wish, given all the other um pressures that are going on uh on the city budget and all the other things that have been considered, the whole 10-point framework from yesterday.

Your wish is that we could actually do option four.

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, I just want to make sure I'm understanding.

You're wishing that at least as far as these options are concerned, that we could just find some place to hold the line and say we are for the time being, we are not going to make any changes in those prices.

Yes, yes.

Uh just because I don't see the need, and not that I don't think that that maybe, and the only one I would vote for maybe would be you know to address the inflation, you know, so that we we keep the the level of service that that we have and and can add to that.

But uh and and I want to see a survey, you know.

I want to see the survey, and that may change my mind.

So let me ask Michael again.

Can you remind us?

I know that that you don't want to get your cart in front of the horse, but in terms of that survey, would that survey be done in time for the council's budget process for next year?

Uh I don't believe so.

Um I I thought you said it was gonna be ready in October.

October, correct?

Or next year, but that's not in time for your approval this spring of next year's budget.

Right.

That's okay.

Correct.

But before October, it would be complete.

Uh and uh Bobby, I just want to say that even if you supported options to a three, or if you were against it, I think the direction for us to do the survey would give you the information that you would need to kind of be a little bit better informed to know okay.

Here is the impact on some of those services.

So uh the way I look at this this uh our way parks and rec should handle this.

Um I have an analogy that I think makes sense, and I know my wife's not paying attention to this, so I can say it.

But every once in a while, our house gets completely dirty, and uh we have to go clean it up, and my son is the laziest person I know.

And the only thing that he does is he will make his bed.

And while that doesn't address the whole house being dirty, at least the bed's made.

And he did at least what he considers his part.

And the reason why I think it's important for us to look at our fees, whether we do them now, whether we do them in 2027 or 2028, is I believe that that's parts of recreation's dirty bad.

Right.

How can we look to improve our efficiencies and catch up to the times?

And then have a system in place as Kenny alluded to where we can do that with some frequency that doesn't have that hit that has been happening a lot.

And so I completely understand um where you're coming from, but I do think the study would help at least to kind of identify what those impacts would be.

I just are we okay on that?

Yeah, we're we're I'm okay.

I'm I'm gonna pay attention.

We're about uh nine minutes over our agenda on this, and I know that we've got a couple things to do.

I've got Monty and Kenny, and then I'm gonna go to Monkey first.

Sorry, um, and then I'm gonna see if we if we just have enough clarity to move forward.

Um my understanding is correctly and correct me if I'm wrong.

If we we don't do anything given the cost that we're dealing with, we could come to a point due to other pressures upon the general fund to have to cut some of these programs that our community is using.

Is that okay?

So that's the risk we're looking at if we don't do something.

Uh we can we can wait and hold off till we did the study, but we won't see anything the next fiscal year, and there could be a gap in provided services until that comes in.

Uh not necessarily a gap in the services, but just the a decrease in the cost recovery.

You would see that we're we're our expenditures are continuing to go up.

Our team is does this amazing job of working with what they have.

Uh this is just a way to steady that.

So I I believe the option of doing the again being arbitrary with the 10%.

Uh, if we did some some measure of inflationary increase now, and then the implementation of one of those uh tiered models, I think that that's the appropriate action.

Uh kind of very delete, but that's the staff recommendation.

I pause time again to put that up there.

Um, but I think that that would be the way to go.

Uh but if we did the no change, then absolutely uh we would get to the point where we would have to consider reduction in level of service.

And especially if we have other uh stressors on the general fund on the general fund, especially we if we needed to plus the police for some reason or fire for some reason.

It was um this would be the first thing to probably make the agreement.

All right, thank you.

I gotta come back to one second.

Bobby, I know you have to follow it.

Okay, so I I just want to follow up on that.

Nobody wants to cut services, nobody wants to do that, but we have a budget to balance, and there is a good possibility that some services are gonna be cut in order for us to balance the budget.

So I we almost have the heart the horse before the car, I think, or the cart before the horse.

And um, but uh you know, I I don't and I'm not and I'm not against what you've done.

I think you have done a fabulous job, and and I like all the numbers and what you've done.

But I think every department in here needs to look at you may have some services cut for us to balance the budget.

We haven't gotten to that point with Kelly yet, but we've already been notified that we're gonna have to cut somewhere to balance this budget, and I don't think anyone should get too excited or upset about what they're asking until we find out what we're hoping we don't have to cut anything, but there's about, in my opinion, about a 99% chance that we are gonna be doing that.

So everyone needs to keep that in mind in asking for all these things because we can you can ask for them and you may get them, but then we may turn around and cut them.

So I don't know.

That's just my opinion.

Bobby, just so I understand, is is that also then an argument for doing the option one?

Because at least it puts a little more revenue back in, even though you know, even though it's not where we want us, we want to be generating money, but at least it's something.

Yes, yes.

Don't I I don't have an uh problem with asking for something, you know, the inflationary part, but asking for all the other stuff is I just don't I think the timing's off, and I think the timing is bad.

We need to balance the budget before anybody goes too crazy, bringing us more increases, the more things to put on our residents.

Thank you.

Um Kenny and then the mayor.

Thank you.

So, yes, uh, we need to balance the budget, and option four is doing nothing, which continues to do a few things.

It um doesn't help balance the budget, it keeps taking from it, which means we have to cut more things.

It is from my discussions with um our manager, one of the things that we're looking at as we move forward is um positions, not funding critically needed positions because we don't because the budget shortfall.

So budget shortfall that's affecting things is critical as the shortest staff agency in Maricopa County cannot push forward necessary positions, and at the other side of that, because all these things are connected, right?

The other side of that, you have a parks program that is already draining the general fund through subsidizing these parks programs, so it's being pulled from two areas.

So to do nothing prolongs that creates more risk to the general fund dollars, creating more risk to additional cuts.

It's this six-cycle carousel rent.

Option four, in my opinion, is exactly what we lived through with the water rates.

If you recall, I I did say option one would probably be more in favor to at least you know give them some revenue.

Okay, so that creation, originally it was option four, and we just lived through option four with the water rates from 2010 until 2018, and the rates cause more pain.

So that's all I was going to say.

And and I think in the big scheme of things, this is very minute compared to the massive numbers we're gonna be looking at.

Mayor, I'm gonna give you the final word on this.

I would see if we have clarity to move forward.

Just to introduce more sense of urgency.

We've got to remember that there's some legislation being proposed right now to freeze these fees for four years.

Um we need to keep that in mind as we talk about how increases now.

Or if it will pass so just one comment before we uh congratulate Michael on his great presentation today.

So I gave him an obscure word that he had to work into his presentation.

And uh he did a phenomenal job, but did anyone happen to catch what that word was?

That's a real one unfortunately.

Wouldn't like a glass high.

No, those masturbation.

I said vacillate.

That's I know I say that all the time.

I I was on punishment a lot when I was a kid, so I just read.

So my staff just made fun of that.

The word was not the lesson.

So it just means anything a cloud that is like out in the sky.

He gave me that word, and I was like, man, so I found a way to put it in there, but that's we went over all of our heads.

Let me also let me just summarize the clarity that I just think we heard, which is again.

We're not making decisions today.

But what you ask staff to do overall is to come back.

Uh I'm sorry, to pursue the option one to come back with the inflationary adjustment uh as soon as possible for the next fiscal year, and then get the survey done so that more serious consideration could be given to option three, hopefully sometime in the fall.

That's the clarity that I've heard come out of this conversation.

Um the I had one other point there.

Um, it also just occurred to me that when I facilitated your retreat in the fall, that was Michael's very first day working for the town of Gilbert.

So also incredible how far you've come.

So again, thank you to Michael, and we're gonna go right to Tom.

We're gonna talk about um Heritage District stormwater.

Woo!

PG job.

That's what I said a lot of the same word.

Literally, what we're doing.

Not collecting it.

Nothing.

Not the loose end.

Talk about a start here.

All right.

I think uh at the other meeting where we were talking about this, somebody said, can we do can we use stormwater fast?

Thank you.

What I said was that sounds like a flood.

Uh this is a lot of it's a recap.

I know we talked about this at the fall retreat, but we do have a little bit of new information to share and want to get some direction.

Okay.

Um purpose is again just to provide you with the latest information from our consultants and uh see some direction on our next steps.

Again, the history of the Vaughn Basin or downtown has been flooded in the past, it it uh it could very well be experienced flooding in the future, and we're trying to proactively uh do things like do the new Vaughn basin, improve our storm drainage system in the downtown just to avoid uh flooding issues, and and that I just love that picture.

We can't get it out in the presentations.

But this uh this is the area of the downtown.

You can see the again the railroad tracks form a natural barrier to flood waters, and currently uh there's uh many several acres, I think it's about maybe six or seven acres that's impacted by a special flood hazard area.

And uh the goal, one of the goals not only to uh because the current one basin is undersized, get the larger basin to accommodate the necessary storm water, but also to try and get this valuable land out of the floodplain.

So that's a secondary but also uh high priority goal.

Uh this is just shows the build-out storm water system.

There are a couple of CIP projects that Susanna and her group are working on.

The Ash Street realignment, which will install a 54-inch pipe, stormwater storm drain, and then the Vaughan or Neely Basin project, which is going to create that larger basin, bring the stormwater across the railroad tracks in a 72-inch height.

And then the consultant findings again, this is more or less from the last presentation.

We do have adequate capacity for the build-out conditions, and we can accommodate the additional drainage for as the heritage district builds out.

We also have some town parcels that are not in the heritage district that would benefit from that larger basin.

And just double confirmed from a couple of consultants now that we do have adequate capacity for that 100-year flow with our new basin.

And they also helped us size the stormwater drains.

That actually helps for floating on Gilbert Road.

One is the capital investment.

And so the idea is instead of having developers go in and put the smaller retention areas on the valuable property in the heritage district.

Why not allow them to buy into this regional system?

So that's one thing.

That would be a one-time fee at the time of development, and they would go in and you know, when they're developing, we do we'd have them do all the engineering calculations, come back to us with uh specific number of cubic feet they need, and then there'd be a just a if you need this many cubic feet, it's this many dollars to buy in, and that eliminates their on-site retention requirements.

So it's actually a benefit to the developers, it gives them that valuable land back and allows them an opportunity to utilize the system that we're building.

The other part of it is this uh ongoing maintenance.

Obviously, we're building new storm drains, we have a large new basin, there's a pump station that a new pump station is being constructed as part of that basin project.

All of that requires maintenance, so there's a an ongoing maintenance component to what we're looking to do for this as well.

So, again, the stormwater fee to capital cost, it's a one-time payment, and uh reflects the demands and costs uh for the new development and the additional storm grade issues.

And this is a slide I showed you last fall.

I we've updated it with sort of the latest costs, and uh it is about 24 little short of 24 and a half million for the land and all the storm grains and the basin construction.

And again, this this slide just shows what the uh the recommended fee would be.

Again, this may change a little bit as we get better cost numbers.

The bond basin is at 100% right now, the 100% plan, so those costs are getting much more certain.

There's still engineered costs.

I don't think we have a contractor estimate yet.

The uh 54-inch storm grain, though, those plans are coming up at about 60%.

So those could change as they get 200%.

Um obviously we purchase the land.

So this is a pretty good estimate.

Uh seven six, I think when I came to you uh in the fall, it's closer to eight dollars, so it's actually going down a little bit.

But we believe that uh the developers in the heritage district are going to really like this because again, it gives them more of their land that they can develop and utilize for whatever amenities and other things they want on the site instead of using it for stormwater management.

And the stormwater maintenance fee again, it's just as I said, a recurring payment uh associated with maintaining the stormwater infrastructure.

Uh, our consultant Will Dan has done an initial analysis on this, and it just came late last week, so we haven't as a staff team had a chance to really dive in and evaluate it yet.

Um we did have some thoughts and wanted to share.

Uh there's several options of how we could spread these maintenance costs out.

And just to give you a ballpark estimate of what this might look like.

Let's see.

If we went with option one, the maintenance cost would be allocated within the area served by the basin.

So it would be a specific area fee.

And those costs would again just looking at the initial numbers, maybe be something like a dollar fifty to three dollars a month.

And that would be per thousand square feet.

So that's just that is just uh initial numbers.

We don't we don't actually have fur numbers on that yet.

But that's just an example of what that could look like.

Uh option two uh that we thought about is again it's the specific area served by the basin, but it would just be spread uh equally, or no, it would be spread by land use.

In other words, there'd be a tiered like residential might be a little bit less and commercial properties in the heritage district.

So we could structure a fee in that way.

And then the the third option would be uh flat fee, and we already have a stormwater maintenance fee that's assessed across the town.

If we spread those costs across the entire town, it would be a much lower impact.

And it would affect all the killer residents.

And again, um don't have a dollar number for that, but it would certainly be uh pennies and a quarter of 10 cents, something like that.

And those numbers would still have to be fleshed out as well.

So those are the options that we're considering at this point.

That is still a work in progress for sure.

So the the two requests are one, should we make preparations to adopt that stormwater buy and be for new developments in the bond based service area?

Uh and if so, should we prepare that for council action prior to July 1st?

And maybe I'll just leave it there and should ask the other question next.

Yes.

Jim, your yes was put something for July 1st, 2026 considered.

Put it in for July.

That's a oh well.

We also gave it a thumbs up as well.

So that's a yes, Monty.

Yes.

Chuck, do you have a thought on this?

Yes, I'm good with it.

That's a good with it.

Have I looked it up, Mayor?

Yeah, that's a thumbs up.

So that's a yes.

Is there a second question we need to ask?

Yes, yes.

Uh and the second question is should we return uh with a recommendation on maintenance fees in a future study session or work session?

Jim?

Yes.

That was a yes.

That was also a yes.

I'm seeing Ed's nodding.

Kenny, Monty, Mayor, Young, yeah.

This anyone, Chuck.

Should staff return to council with a recommendation on maintenance fees in a future study session?

Yeah, yeah, I'll go to the past.

That's yes, it doesn't get more simple than that.

Anyone else have a comment on that before we move forward?

Uh that was a flash slide, thank you.

Impressive.

And thanks to Tom, we are now two minutes ahead of schedule.

It's time for our lunch break.

Oh, hang on, everyone from Jenica has an important announcement.

All right, your new name is.

Uh lunch is in the lobby, but we also um have some desserts to recognize a birthday today.

So council member butlin as well as our town manager.

Today is Don's birthday.

Yeah, can we all sing things?

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Speak.

No.

No, much, lunch.

So I heard a rumor that she wanted the retreat.

This was her present for that.

It's like we're wrapping up at 2 30.

It's lunchtime.

Good afternoon, everyone.

We're ready to uh get going on our agenda.

We are right on time.

That's to come for the question.

I'm gonna ask Mary.

I'm just gonna ask Mary to make a quick introduction before we get into our afternoon agenda.

Mary?

Hi, my name is Mary.

That's the introduction.

Hi, Mary!

Hi guys!

We have a new executive team member that councilor may or may not have had an opportunity to meet Zach Kleinhelter, who has taken our chief of emerging technology role.

Um I want to have Zach introduce himself, tell him a little bit uh have him tell you a little bit about himself and what he most recently did before joining the town.

Thank you, Mary, and hello everyone.

I have had the opportunity to meet most of you, not quite all of you.

I was getting around.

Um yes, uh, Zach, Chief of Merning Technology, very grateful to be here.

It's been so nice working with you the last few weeks.

Uh, been very impressed by the passion and commitment to public service and really the culture here, which was a big part of why I decided to take this offer was the four-leaning innovative culture.

I'm excited to help continue that.

In terms of my background, I came here from a defense contractor.

We were doing R and V contracts, uh, mostly for the defense department and some intelligence agencies, and um really helping keep the United States on the leading edge of that that sector of technology.

So I'm excited to bring that experience here and help uh continue the innovative forward-thinking uh nature of the work here.

So again, very nice to meet you, look forward to working with you.

I didn't have any special words or anything I had to say.

No, not yet.

But I think in a spare time also PhD from Temp.

So just you know, a little bit of an energy right there.

So welcome to that.

Thank you.

That would be doctors there.

Yeah, doctors with you.

Dan, we're gonna turn this over to you as we go into economic development.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, glad to be here with you today.

Um earlier this week I had the opportunity to uh attend the International Economic Development Council leadership conference in DC, and during that period of time, I had an opportunity to talk with some of my peers from Atlanta, Los Angeles, Texas, and other places, and I learned firsthand how those communities are reimagining their economic futures.

I just wanted to share a couple of examples that uh that my peers shared with me.

So in Atlanta, they have a redevelop they have sort of transformed the redevelopment district into the battery, uh 24-hour mixed-use destination next to the Atlanta Braves Stadium.

They are essentially using the development as a powerful revenue engine.

Really inspired by some of the work that they were doing.

Um as I was talking with my peers in Los Angeles, I learned how they're leveraging SoFi LAX and their extensive hospitality network to aim for a decade of sports, including the 2026 Speedful World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympics.

Through that immersive thing experience zone, coupled with a multilingual digital outreach, the city is utilizing parks and recommended as infrastructure for high capacity events and nature revenue growth.

Really inspirational as to how LA is sort of transforming itself in that way.

And so, you know, as we, as I was listening to my peers and considering the discussion about maintaining high quality of life for our residents, it became apparent to me that during this time, we are all experiencing a changing sort of funding landscape.

And considering those conversations, I was asked to come before you today to talk about how economic development is driving revenue in the community.

And so today I'm pleased to walk through how Gilbert is using redevelopment, tourism, and business development to drive revenue, and how these strategies position Gilbert for long-term success.

Your team was just re-accredited, one of about 90 in the country.

About 90 in the country.

Out of 19,000 cities and towns plus.

So just want to offer Dan and his team a congratulations for that.

We do together.

Those successful businesses then in turn create jobs, generate tax revenue, and add to the social fabric of our community.

And as I think about that, I then think about how all of that really plays into our quality of life initiative, where we're looking at investments and everything from housing to public safety to infrastructure and parks.

And so this sort of visual really connected with me as to the role of economic development in a sort of larger community development context.

And so our efforts are really guided by a strategic plan.

And I'm going to read a couple of things here as I go through some of those initiatives associated with that strategic plan.

As we focus our strategies, we do so with this idea of destination development in mind.

And we are investing and showcasing Gilbert as a preeminent town for businesses, families, talent, and visitors.

And we activate the strategies included in the Gilbert's tourism plan.

We also develop strategies to attract destination hotels and devise strategies for placemaking.

We maintain the heritage district as a premier shopping and entertainment district for residents and visitors while extending the heritage district's redevelopment success to other corridors in Gilbert, like the Northwest.

And then ultimately, we're curating and promoting destination experiences for those that visit the community.

Next, we get into tomorrow's talent, which is essentially talent attraction.

As we begin to look at that talent attraction, we are building that pipeline to fuel Gilbert's future.

And we do so by collaborating to grow career pathways, training for Gilbert's growth clusters.

We support growth of Gilbert-based Park University as well as the University of Arizona by creating a plan to enhance Gilbert's workforce ecosystem.

We naturally tie in the housing component by evaluating the role of housing assessment to better understand Gilbert's needs, uses and demands, and then actively promote and support young professionals throughout Gilbert.

Innovation for tomorrow.

We are creating an economy that further positions Gilbert as an innovative and resilient town for tomorrow.

And we do so through our business retention and expansion programs, lead generation activities, while focusing on scalable and mid-sized technology businesses, focusing on policy and support that support business growth, engage with brokers and site selectors for leads, and become a leader in technology focused industries and STEM and STEM-related workforce development.

We develop and redevelop real estate assets to attract targeted industries and only try to cultivate this notion of a premier entrepreneurial town.

We are becoming the premier entrepreneurial town by cultivating and supporting our business community while at the same time providing technical and training resources.

Additionally, we're developing a financial literacy and business initiative for home-based businesses to help them grow and expand, all the while celebrating Gilbert's entrepreneurial success stories.

We support a buy local and a buy-in Gilbert initiative, and then ultimately explore pathways for these businesses to access capital, particularly growing that small business ecosystem.

And finally, we celebrate our community.

And we do so with tremendous pride.

Our businesses and residents really love Gilbert, and they tell us that all the time.

We then share those successes and wins with policymakers, businesses, and certainly town stakeholders, and we grow the brand efforts of Discover Gilbert to attract more visitation.

We do this through three essential lines of service.

You've heard me talk about them before: redevelopment, tourism, and business development.

I'm gonna dive into each of those areas in a little bit more detail, starting with redevelopment.

On this slide, I want you to see sort of the proximity of the heritage district relative to the larger boundary of the Northwest redevelopment area.

And so by virtue of this map, we have two redevelopment, rather, two council adopted redevelopment areas to which the heritage district was adopted in 1989.

The heritage district is both a redevelopment area as well as an entertainment district and covers about a third of a square mile.

Whereas that larger boundary, Gilbert Northwest, is roughly 10 square miles and represents about 18% of the town's total land area.

I think it's really important to note that this area has mature neighborhoods as well as a very established employment corridor known as the Northwest Corridor.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to talk about how we use strategic planning, real estate development, and infrastructure improvements to drive revenue in the town.

So from a strategic planning perspective, this includes, among other things, as implementing the council-adopted redevelopment plans like the 2018 Heritage District Redevelopment Plan.

There's a companion document that goes along with that, and that's known as a real estate development master plan, and that really guides how we sort of acquire and dispose of properties.

But I think together these really shape our land use infrastructure and property sales to encourage private development in our downtown.

Currently, we're working with a group called the Lakota Group to develop our first ever tenure redevelopment plan for Gilbert Northwest.

That effort will involve community outreach, internal and external stakeholder groups, as well as a steering community committee made up of residents and the business community.

We anticipate that that Gilbert Northwest plan will finish up around the end of the calendar year.

The efforts of redevelopment team are really focused on real estate development.

Gilbert, as you know, has sold town-owned property to encourage private development.

And that private development is driving revenue for the community with key projects underway in the heritage district, which align back to that real estate master plan.

Next, I'd like to talk a little bit about the role of infrastructure and how it essentially serves to drive revenue.

Infrastructure as we know it, wet, dry utilities, as well as roadways and water infrastructure.

But in this case, infrastructure also means placemaking, wayfinding, art, things that add that culture that add that identity that add that vibrancy to the area.

And so as we look at how redevelopment drives revenue within the heritage district, and since the adoption of the 2018 redevelopment plan, we've seen 33,000 square feet of office and 44,000 square feet of retail.

And then, of course, 463 mixed use units will also add to the vibrancy.

It's important to note that this private investment in the district, where we've leveraged Gilbert property through acquisitions as well as sales, is driving revenue for the community.

So next, I'd like to talk about the role of some of our capital improvement plans because additional revenue will be supported through the development of our public infrastructure that ultimately supports our ability to dispose of, acquire, and ultimately sell town-owned property to drive that additional private investment.

Currently, the team is focused on collaborating together to implement projects, and a couple of notable, there's a number of projects up there, but a couple of notable ones.

Watertower Plaza.

When you take Water Tower Plaza and you sort of couple that with the vision behind Water Tower Way, we plan to tie events and placemaking together in the heritage district.

Next, the Bonn Avenue Ventilator, which creates another ingress and egress into the area.

It's currently in the design phase, and as I mentioned, this will create another direct access point to the heritage district, making visitation more convenient.

And then finally, we've just heard from Tom about the role of wastewater.

And so, as we think about that critical project, it's going to increase our ability to maintain momentum in the district through that additional stormwater capacity, or more specifically the retention capacity.

Once again, we're using redevelopment as a powerful revenue engine, and these investments attract new development partnerships, which ultimately result in new investment.

Next, we're about to talk about how those redevelopment efforts drive revenue by creating a destination that people want to visit.

The more unique and authentic experience that we have in the district, the more people are coming to the area, which results in more time spent in the district, and we reflect that in dwell time.

When we started, dwell time was about 30 minutes in the heritage district.

Over time, we've grown that to almost two hours of dwell time.

The more dwell time, the more revenue.

More time people spend in the particular area, the more likelihood they're going to spend money.

So again, since the adoption of the 2018 redevelopment plan, visits and visitors has increased, which has resulted in essentially annual sales tax collections, which have nearly doubled.

We are very much looking forward to that workshop as an opportunity to vision with you all together about the heritage district.

As we talk about tourism, I want you to take particular note of the different audiences that we aim to recruit into the area.

We start with the sort of foundational office uh audience, and then we're trying to build that promotional audience to more of an aspirational audience.

And so, from a promotional audience perspective, you know, we're bringing people into the community from a promotional standpoint.

We want to turn just those visitations into more event type opportunities, which then lead to long-term stays in the community.

The tourism strategic plan has three key focus areas.

The first, economic impact.

Economic impact is made through executing international and domestic campaigns to attract visitors to the community and engaging with trade and media partners, developing sports tourism opportunities, and focusing on friends and family.

We look to increase the amount of economic impact in the community.

Next, we get into the social impact.

And these are made through stakeholder engagements like our tourism action group to support our local business and the growth in their market.

We develop campaigns focused on elevating unique local businesses while at the same time collaborating with both public and higher education partners to encourage day visitations around youth, collegiate, and amateur sports.

And finally, we're working on that destination.

Destination development through tourism infrastructure, events and activations, growth of additional hotels, and development of experiential tours, as well as a do as the local do itinerary are connecting people and audiences, not just to Gilbert, but to the larger trade area.

Efforts in tourism drive revenue through increased visitors, which result in increased visitor spending.

Increased visitation supports development of new hotels represented by almost 7 million visitors, which then supports increased hotel development.

Currently, we have three limited service hotels under construction with another five hotels in the development services pipeline.

Collectively, these efforts drive revenue.

More visitation supports increased sales tax revenue in what we call tourism supported categories like amusement, accommodation, and restaurants and bars.

I think it's important to note that general retail is also supported by visitation.

As a subset of our tourism, we're using activations like sound bites, music, and food festival to drive visitation.

Last year, this festival generated 128,000 in direct revenue, and 47% of the attendance was from out-of-town visitors.

And typically visitation throughout the valley, certainly in the Phoenix metropolitan area, you know, we see visitation starting to sort of slim out.

And so by using these events to bring people in town and otherwise activate visitation, we're bringing people into town in what otherwise are low visitation months for the state, for Phoenix, and for Gilbert.

And then finally, cactus yards.

The tournaments at Cactus Yards in fiscal 25 drove 14 million in visitor spending.

At this time, I'd like to hand over the presentation to Jennifer Graves, where she's going to talk about not just business development, but more specifically the fiscal impacts and the ways in which we are forecasting future development.

Since I can't walk and chew down at the same time, I am going to stand up for hands because I don't know that I've got holding notes, two of the clicker and the microphone.

Dean is much more talented than I do in that regard.

All right.

This is on.

Yes, all right.

Okay, great.

Great, great, great.

Thanks so much, Dan.

I really appreciate that.

And I'm really excited to be here with you guys today, too.

So when we think about the business development in Gilbert, it really starts with a simple idea of creating the right conditions for our companies to succeed.

So the business development team is out in front every day, reaching out to our target industry clusters like aerospace and defense, information technologies, advanced business services to attract new businesses that align with Gilbert's strengths.

But attraction is only one part of our story because a big portion of our work is building long-term relationships with the businesses that we already have here.

We're looking at understanding what they need, where they're growing, and how we can help them expand right here in Gilbert instead of going somewhere else.

At the same time, we champion Gilbert's entrepreneurs alongside our partners at the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce to help them turn their ideas into new small businesses for our community.

It's all part of strengthening the ecosystem from the inside out.

And none of this happens in a vacuum.

We work closely with the development community to increase the inventory of employment focused real estate because companies can only grow if they have somewhere to go.

All of this ultimately builds on the momentum of our tourism and redevelopment teams by helping us tell a more compelling story and unifying around Gilbert as a place to invest.

At the foundation of business development is the generation of new leads.

Those leads come from everywhere through our own direct outreach, through our state and regional partners, through our brokerage community, sales missions and trade shows, as well as the development community.

From there, we work to cultivate each lead with the hope that it becomes an impactful investment, one that brings new jobs, new capital, and more employment focused real estate into our mix.

Since 2008, the Office of Economic Development has worked with projects that announced over 29,000 new or retained jobs, $4.3 billion in new and announced capital investment, and 19.4 million square feet in new or expanded real estate.

Turning these leads into projects requires the community to deliver on key site selection factors.

According to the most recent annual consultant survey, companies look at these top drivers when deciding where to locate energy availability and cost, available land in buildings, skilled labor, expedited permitting, and proximity to suppliers.

As a community, Gilbert is lacking, if a community is lacking in any one of these areas, you can risk falling off the list entirely, whether it's a new business evaluating our options, their options, or one that's deciding on where to expand.

And so in Gilbert, we know that we have some challenges within the first two areas.

Energy availability and cost is not just a challenge that's unique to Gilbert.

It's happening nationwide, it's certainly happening across the state of Arizona.

But available land and buildings remains a critical pressure point for our community.

And this only represents five of the factors on a list of 30 important factors that are impacting site selection decisions across the country.

One additional factor that we really did want to highlight, which holds the number 16 position on that list this year, because this list changes every year.

So just as the town has experienced challenges with construction and the rising cost of construction, that is also impacting our business community as well.

And construction costs are all encompassing because it also includes the cost of development fees and infrastructure improvements, which we've actually seen play out in recent months through an uptick in feedback coming from the development community about the rise of development related fees, specifically in Gilbert.

So we just want to share an example with you of recently a developer who had planned to build a medical office building in our community who reached out to let us know that when their project was originally approved in 2023, their total system development fees and wastewater fees were about 281,000.

Today, that total is $813,000.

For them, this represents a 289% increase in the cost of their project for the fees specifically.

This specific group indicated that the level of increase makes the project no longer feasible to build in Gilbert.

I want to be clear, and Dan, I want to be clear.

We understand and we've heard the conversations, we are part of Team Gilbert, and we know that there's a need to ensure that the impact of development and the impact of our infrastructure is paid for, that it's invested in.

But we've also heard our conversations over the past couple of days talk about the need to balance those needs with the cost of the community, whether it's the resident or the business.

And so again, we just want to highlight that these are conversations that our team is having as we're going out there and working with the business community to grow them in the community.

So business development efforts are a significant driver of revenue in the community, just like redevelopment and tourism.

New development and reinvestment in existing properties creates construction activity, which drives jobs and generates construction sales tax.

Since 2017, Gilbert's added nearly six million square feet of new retail industry and office space, and sales tax collections from commercial leases has increased 125%.

Growing jobs support a local workforce, helps residents work closer to home, and draws in workers from outside the community who contribute to our local spending.

These imported workers function very much like what our tourism team does.

These are visitors to our community.

They come in, they buy a sandwich at lunchtime, they might shop for groceries here, they might go to the mall.

And those are our visitors too.

Ultimately, every business will help it.

We help to attract and expand, add to the diversity and strength of our tax base.

Gilbert's employment areas have our highest concentrations of revenue generating uses, and for the most part, as you can see on the chart, they have seen steady increases in annual sales tax revenue over the last five years.

Heritage District and Northwest Employment Areas fall within our new Northwest redevelopment area, and they're expected to see significant new investments through the redevelopment efforts as well as continued investment in our key employment corridors.

The gateway and central area also contain several non-residential parcels.

So projects like the ranch, the continued build out of Rivulon, as well as the commercial centers that may be built alongside new residential developments in these areas are going to continue to support growth and generate revenue for the community.

So the specific impact of development and visitation on revenue can be examined through our fiscal and economic impact analysis.

So for today, I just want to make sure to be clear that we are only going to focus on fiscal analysis, fiscal impacts, which will get direct revenue to the town through fees and taxes generated by certain types of projects.

Specifically, system development fees and planning and permit fees, as well as sales tax from construction, commercial leases, retail sales, bed tax, as well as utility taxes.

So we use our own community project assessment tool to analyze four different types of developments ranging in size and scale, which have the potential to drive long-term investment for the community.

So first up, we looked at a retail shopping center of approximately 30 acres, looking to generate to build about 300,000 square feet of space.

And at full build out and full occupancy.

So keep that in mind too.

Full build out full occupancy.

This project is anticipated to generate about $700,000 in one time construction sales tax revenue.

Then ongoing, this project is projected to generate $4.3 million in annual sales tax revenue.

Second type of project we looked at was an employment industrial park.

So looking at about 200 acres and three million square feet of anticipated space at full build-out, full occupancy.

This project is anticipated that it could generate about $7 million in one-time construction sales tax revenue, and about $930,000 in ongoing annual sales tax revenue to the town.

Third project we looked at was a medical office building.

While we understand office in the market since COVID has either flatlined or declined slightly in terms of its growth, medical office is the one segment that seems to be still growing and new buildings being constructed.

So we looked at a 67,000 square foot medical office building on about two and a half acres.

This type of a project is expected to generate around 174,000 in projected construction sales tax revenue, and then ongoing through the lease tax uh lease uh commercial leases, it would generate um about 46,000 a year in ongoing sales tax revenue.

And then lastly, we looked at a hotel development.

So, as Dan mentioned, we have three hotels under construction, five more in the development services uh phases, whether it be plan review or in the planning process.

So, about 134 key hotel at 81,000 square feet, which is pretty typical for Gilbert's limited service hotels.

That type of a project would generate almost 400,000 in construction sales tax revenue, 100,000 in ongoing annual sales tax, that would be through food and beverage sales, but then on top of that, an additional 260,000 in ongoing um bank tax revenue.

Jen, yes, real quick.

Um, these are four projects that are you haven't named them, but these are actual projects in the community, correct?

It is correct, yes.

And up on the slide is the impact as far as estimated impact for construction sales tax and sales tax.

What may not be reflected is anticipated jobs, wages, indirect revenue, correct?

Absolutely, yes, and that's why um thank you, Mary.

I uh highlighted at the beginning that this is only fiscal impacts.

The economic impacts of a project, so the things like the revenues that come from the jobs, the spending of the business itself, so the function of its own operation within our community aren't reflected here.

Economic impacts are difficult to estimate if we don't know who the end user is.

So because these are just under construction, um, it would be difficult for us to assume what those ultimate economic impacts would be, but um just know that there's been the continued churn within the community of that dollar hiring a person, like I mentioned before, you're bringing in workers or buying a sandwich, so that's just ties into the like again, the concept of visitors and visitation through tourism.

Um, it's the same concept here.

And so next, I'm gonna talk a little bit about as what we're doing to look into the future and how we're engaging in scenario and planning and development forecasting activities right now.

So, first up, Gilbert has a landlord.

Before you move on, may I ask a question on that segment?

Yes.

Can you go back to the back to the lease phone?

Yes.

Good there.

So with the trade shows, is it just that um there's a huge jump?

Is it because we're now in those spaces where we weren't spending time there before, or what's the anomaly of that?

And then with GPEC since 22, it's shrunk pretty significantly year over year.

What's causal to that?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

So on this slide, we've um harvest out Greater Phoenix Economic Council and the Arizona Commerce Authority.

But because of our relationship with the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the leads generated by the ACA come to the town through the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.

And so we work and they work hand in hand.

So insight selection, what's often the case is that the um companies that are looking nationally, they post the state first, and then they look at the region and then they look at the individual municipalities.

So it comes into the state of Arizona, which is the ACA, then it goes down to the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and then it comes to us as a in the funnel.

And so most of the time, leads will come into the state, but then the Greater Phoenix Economic Council is our representative for economic development in the region and helps to coordinate our responses and activities and represent the greater Phoenix region.

Um so those two numbers tie together.

So that just represents leads that came directly to GPEC first, not to the ACA.

But GPEC and the ACA work hand in hand collaboratively on those leads that are looking specifically at the metro area.

So for our own tracking purposes, we separate them out.

One of the other things is most of this chart is post-COVID.

We saw a huge jump in new lead generation post-COVID, especially on the manufacturing side, and that has tapered off to more standard levels.

So 21, 22, 23 are actually the anomaly years.

If you were to look back before that, it's closer to what we saw in 24 and 25.

Okay.

That helps.

So sales missions are targeted missions that we might make into markets where we know there are companies that are looking to grow and expand into the state of Arizona, whether that be from California, a lot of our sales missions are in the California.

Um, sometimes they're in the East Coast because we're looking for a West Coast operation.

Um we've over the last several years put more emphasis on that sales mission that puts us in front of a client that we know is moving, versus going to a trade show with thousands of businesses, and thousands of economic developers looking for those businesses' attention to generate leads.

But trade shows like Select USA in Washington DC have proved fruitful, and so we've started concentrating some of our efforts in those trade shows.

So the last couple of years, we've identified very specific trade shows, and we're also um I think just been able to in the last couple of years um generate more significant leads from those trade shows directly to us versus just going and being part of a larger presence and just making ourselves known.

One of the things that I'm gonna add is this is sort of cumulative, like anything.

This is each team member playing a role in the success of an outcome.

And so while our team is directly sourcing leads, we're using these partners to also bring in additional leads, and a lot of that is contingent upon the inventory and the product that we have available in our community.

And so right now, our inventory or rather vacancy in light industrial is as Jim's looking at it.

Um so our industrial vacancy right now in Gilbert is 7.6 percent.

I just want to make note though that that is largely driven by a single 300,000 square foot building that we have on the market that's pushing us up.

So previously we were hovering around 3% vacancy, and if you don't have you know vacancy and inventory wins deals.

So if you don't have the vacancy, if you don't have a high vacancy and a high amount of inventory, those deals aren't looking at your community as they once were.

And so deal flow is subjective to what product you have available and what product you don't have available.

Thank you.

Just an observation.

Direct seems to grow.

GPEC seems to slow.

If you watch that, it's going down.

And I've questioned this for a while.

Is there an explanation as to why a growing community gets less leads as the time goes on from a group we're paying a membership fee to every year?

Why are we getting less?

So as I mentioned, for the purposes of our own tracking, we separate out GPEC and the ACA to understand where that's coming from.

But you could think about all of the ACA leads as also being GTA leads because they work hand in hand to cultivate those leads and to showcase the region as a premier destination to attract that interest to the state.

This again, it's it's kind of just a function of the industry itself.

Most of the leads coming in to the ACA are generally speaking interested in the metro areas, not the rural parts of our state.

So that would be either us or Tucson.

So if it's us or Tucson, Metro, the site collectors are generally going to go to the state first because the state also holds all of the incentives.

That's just the intake source, but then we rely on GPEC to position us and to represent our interests in the market to the wider audience.

Gilbert alone wouldn't travel necessarily to a you know really not to a foreign country for sure, but also not necessarily go out and just represent ourselves.

GPEC provides us an opportunity, a platform to showcase our value alongside them at these trade shows.

We joined the GPEC booth because again, it's the region that's getting the attraction, and then we're cultivating our own leads, and we're part of conversations that GPEC is facilitating meetings for us and putting us as Gilbert in front of clients.

So their service offering and the way that they support us and lift up Gilbert as part of the region is incredibly important to our work.

There are lots of reasons why leads ebb and flow that have nothing to do with because GPEC isn't doing something.

We've also seen leads this last year, just given the current state of financial markets, cost of capital, we've seen projects go on hold nationally due to some just instability again that that we just don't have any control over, and neither does GPEC.

Do you want to do we have a slide that shows us how this distills down to actual projects?

I I do not have that slide.

Um, each year when we bring before you the um GPEC contract, we um provide a summary in that about the projects that have occurred in our community that came directly from a GPEC lead.

But as Dan mentioned, um, our ability to um because a lot of these are like those again, those big kind of national projects, and a lot of these projects, um, one of Gilbert's challenges right now is back to available land and buildings.

So just to order of magnitude in the industrial space, which is the growing sector right now in terms of where all the leads are going, right?

All the leads are basically manufacturing, they're looking for light industrial space, and they're usually right now not looking to build, they're looking for existing buildings.

So in Gilbert, we have one 300,000 square foot building that's available for 70s, two buildings that are above 100,000 square feet, and then the next closest building is 89,000 square feet, and the next closest building to that is 50.

Most of the projects coming from GPEC are at 100,000 or more, 100,000 square feet or higher.

And so our team puts together the best package we can for the ones that we do have space for, and we submit for it.

We're not able to submit for all the leads that come in because we don't have the inventory to service them.

Whereas a community like Mesa, Chandler, Tempe, right now, Mesa has 50 some million square feet of light industrial space.

Jen with that three million comes online.

That's indoors.

It will.

But Mesa's vacancy rate is 26% right now.

And so right now what's happening in the market is a lot of absorption.

The good thing is that because employees don't know boundaries and either do businesses, a lot of wins in Mesa and others, the attraction of new investment to our neighboring communities that we share a border with, that we share workforce with, we share labor shed with, um really helps us in the long run.

And the more investment we can get to the East Valley, the more our real estate when it comes online, once absorption is higher in terms of what's on the market.

We're going to take, we're gonna uh get a lot of advantage from that.

We we saw it happen after the Great Recession when Rivulan was patient and waiting, and that project came online.

We started to get some big investments in our community, and so it's just a matter of the cycle that we're in and Gilbert's position in the market.

And I think Jim brought up a very good point.

Businesses aren't necessarily looking at Gilbert or Mesa, they're coming in to look at a trade area.

And as they come into a trade area, they're trying to identify what inventory is in that trade area, they're not necessarily looking at borders.

As you look at that, I would encourage you to think of the Arizona Commerce Authority primarily providing national and domestic leads, and GPEC is really ramped up on foreign direct investment.

So we're getting more sort of leads on the international side from GPEC, whereas we're getting more leads on the domestic side from the Arizona Commerce Authority.

Okay.

And this has to do with them with the inventory because you're saying inventory is low.

We have what three million square feet projected in the ranch.

The ranch, correct?

What is available to us to make that go faster?

What can we do to expedite the ability for those to be built and ready?

What are our tools?

Can you repeat his question?

Yes, I can.

So Jim asked, what tools do we have at the town to accelerate the development of the industrial inventory at the ranch, which is anticipated to bring about three million square feet to the community of light industrial space.

So I think some of the challenges with the ranch are not necessarily things that we can solve for, and I see challenges just in their own development cycle.

So there are capital market issues, there is timing issues with how their project was approved through the negotiated process with the company and the town.

Um for them to put all of that infrastructure in without being able to pull any buildings out of the ground to then generate revenue, they have to do that first.

And then they have to start building the multifamily and commercial first.

Then they can take an employment building out of the ground.

That is the negotiated agreement in the project as it was approved.

So there's nothing that we can really do about that.

Um, however, um, working hand in hand with Kyle's team, when they're ready to build these components and when they're going through the plan review process, our ability to respond quickly to help them accelerate their reviews, to get them you make sure they're ready, they know what we need, we're very clear with them, and we can get them through the review process quickly.

That will then help them get to market.

Uh speed of market is incredibly important.

It's on the list of 30 in terms of just the development process and getting through the process.

Um and that's really where that's a lever that we can pull in terms of just the reviews, the the timing, and just getting them through our process as quickly as possible.

This frankly, one of the best things that we can do as a municipality is to help make sure that that's streamlined for for the development community.

I just wanted to add to that.

Um probably on purpose.

Um I just wanted to add to that to Jen's point, the uh zoning, the phase agreement with the zoning stipulates to Jen's point that they put in that open space, they put in the multifamily and the commercial, and that was negotiated based on what the residents in the nearby community wanted to see the council ultimately um uh approved, working with uh AndyCap to determine what was going to be the best phasing plan to bring this into our community.

The uh development team is actively working with them on the open space on the commercial commercial and on the multifamily, and they're making great progress.

But those three things have to get through the pipeline before we can bring on that industrial.

So I just wanted to share that as to why.

And then as I mentioned absorption of existing space in the market is also really important.

Right now, they're not gonna bring on 400,000 square feet of industrial when there's millions of square feet of industrial lifted vacant right next door, right next door.

And then Jen, would you briefly talk about the process for which through that development process at the ranch when they can start positioning themselves to get the power because there's quite a lag time now and the ability to secure the power.

Because there's quite a lag time now in the ability to secure the power.

So that's the top one on the list: energy availability and cost.

So it used to take if you needed a new substation to expand a substation to add a transformer to an existing substation to add power to the your site.

So it's 36 months now.

The timeline to accomplish that is really, really long.

So if any of the users needed extraordinary power, that would be like five megawatts, which is the other thing too.

If it if we if our if we were to break down the GPEG and ACA leads, power, projects that need less than a megawatt of dedicated power are few and far between.

You start to get over five megawatts, which most of them need for this these large-scale manufacturing projects.

Even some medium scale manufacturing projects need over claiming they need over five megawatts, which is a whole other conversation in the market right now.

Um they're 36 months out, and sometimes they'll just walk away.

Why is that?

Walk away.

Uh supply chain for their industry.

It's it's the transformers, it's availability.

Yeah, and probably speak a little bit more to that as well.

Well, it took us years to get um the the uh like all the transformers and upgrade to SRP substations in the North Arch.

That's been a huge, actually like critical path for us, and that project's been being worked out for years as well.

So yeah, yes.

And there are some things that we might be able to do as a community to help facilitate that, and there's some interesting conversations that we might be able to have, but um that's down the road.

But the the other thing is even on the small scale, so right now, so SRP um uh is first and foremost a fantastic community partner, they have a dedicated economic development team.

We work very closely with them, but they're just experiencing the same kinds of challenges that we're experiencing, and supply chain is an issue.

Obviously, you know, there's the SRP also provides water, um, and so there's just a lot of compounding things that they're facing as a company, and so as we're trying to find solutions, one of the other things SRP is never guarantee power to a user.

So if a commercial building is building, and you go to them and say, Hey, I just want to make sure I have capacity here at this building for whatever it is.

Um, SRP will say, Yep, we're good to go.

That's that day.

Build it in 12 months.

They they never guarantee that you're gonna have power 12 months.

You ask them that day, they're like, Yep, we can confirm that you have power.

Well, what else comes online?

All those things, and and certainly they're looking at the full scope of a projects that they're aware of.

But previously, it was still there 12 months, 18 months later, because there just wasn't this high demand for power.

Now they're making a finer point for developers to say, Yep, it's here today, but just please make sure that we are not guaranteeing that we will have power for you when you're done building.

And the developers are like, wait, what do you need?

And they're like, Well, we've never guaranteed power, and it's becoming a kind of a stark reality that the development community is facing that it it just you didn't have to worry about it before, but now because of availability and cost, everybody has to worry about power, and they just they can't they're like I said the the the power companies are just making sure and making a finer point on this is not guaranteed.

So Jen.

How that thank you the power road portal down through there, and I'm thinking about the ranch development is deficient in power as far as available power down through there, and with all that growth going on on the Mesa side of power road and the airport.

Do you think that that's gonna have an impact on the branch's ability to bring industrial out of the ground there and be able to support what businesses may come into it?

It could, it could, it depends, but it could.

I mean, certainly that's what we're talking about.

It could um, yeah, and that's that one of that comment that we highlighted came from the ranch, you know, in their conversations with SRP and just understanding, you know, because again, they they don't just have industrial.

I mean, it's it's not just that, right?

It's um, and again, it's that extraordinary power use.

Now the power companies are getting better at you know essentially you know, working with their company, the actual end users, end users are overestimating their power needs.

There's a lot of folks out there that have brought more power than they need.

So there's a there's a whole thing happening in power right now that's um a little bit challenging for power companies to manage.

There are people who have dedicated power that they don't need, so how do you get it back?

So it didn't reply number one substation or something over there in that area.

Probably, yeah.

I don't think in Gilbert, but on the MACE side, basically have several.

Okay.

Doug couldn't that's something I'm concerned about counting on that light industrial to provide some space.

We're counting on that light industrial to provide some space, there may be some challenges along that path, especially that whole area from about what is it, uh Williamsfield North, I think, or you'd even go down to Paicas.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah.

We're talking about international stuff like that.

But we don't really participate in that, do we?

So we participate as a as a partner of GPAC.

So again, the the state and GPAC travel internationally, and when I say international, I mean you know, Europe and Asia.

So we travel to Canada.

Um we have for years, we actually cultivated quite a few leads out of Canada.

Um we have quite a bit of investment from Canada in Gilbert.

Um, but in terms of like the TSNC is going to Taiwan, Japan, or over to Europe, um RT doesn't travel that level of internationally.

But GPEG brings those folks here just last night, not uh night before last, I can't remember.

Um, they had um a group out of Japan here, and they host them here, and then we're all invited to come and meet with them, network, pick our communities under the umbrella of the Phoenix region.

So we do get access to those leads, we just don't physically travel to Asia, and we don't need to necessarily.

But if we were to come across something more Gilbert-centric than just regional, as I recall, we kind of restricted that almost as though it was a we were supplying a vacation or something, like people didn't believe in it.

And I recall this from like 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

Am I right?

I'll divert it, Dan.

If I might, um there's been a strong sentiment that traveling internationally for the purpose of business development.

The words that I've heard are things like junkets and those sort of things, and so in full transparency, you know, we have relied on our partners to bring international needs to the table.

We certainly follow up on those.

We don't travel to the paraseter show, we don't travel to some of those other areas.

Um, it's just generally been not supported or otherwise I don't know the right word.

It's just the perception of the business development team traveling abroad in that way, it's not been well received historically.

Right, but what if it was more like let's say it was TMC, SMC, which it wouldn't be, but you had somebody that you could actually you created a relationship with been whatever it could be Taiwan, it could be Belgium, I don't care.

Uh is that something we still have a policy that you don't go and discuss those things on their home turf?

There is no policy in place that says we can't do that.

And to your point, if it was a cultivated lead, a cultivated opportunity that has a genuine prospect component to it, I have no doubt that the community would be supportive of it.

And historically, you know, we've traveled um to Mexico and other areas, you know, on you know, trade missions with the state of Arizona um in support of that sort of investment coming into the communities into the state and into the region.

Is that a just your question?

So based on all of that, I guess my concern is and I realize and appreciate GPAG representing the whole region.

But our policy set by this council would pass whether it's set formally or you know a link and a nod to build it.

Um at least those cities who send representatives with GPEC that travel start building relationships immediately that we never get when we're behind the curve, and we're not gonna get, which is probably one reason why TSMC had no idea who Gilbert Arizona was.

Not because GPAC didn't represent us, but because we made decisions that didn't put us where we needed to be to show how awesome this community is and why they would want to look at us.

So what I'm hearing is we need a policy change, or we need a policy uh more than a week in an odd, we need to be able to if we can invest if we if it I realize it it you know, regardless of whatever people may perceive the reality is we are a business, and we're trying to generate business, and if we have to invest some dollars to bring in millions of dollars, why would we not do that?

In private business, we do.

Dan, I'm gonna point that Chuck has a comment to make Chuck Yeah, to back uh Council Member Butlin there.

Uh Dan, if you could wave a magic wand, how many more staff would you hire?

I wave a magic wand.

How many staff would I hire?

Um we go through a pretty extensive process during our budget process um to talk about our needs and what we can afford to do.

And I feel that um every year we present our needs and we go through that budget process like every other department.

Um and um and if it's supported, we certainly move forward.

I could weigh the magic wands.

Um I would suggest that any time we position a staffing request and there's money for it, that the business justification um rooted in this has a return on investment that this position is generating more revenue than the cost.

Um I would hope that would be supported.

In terms of specific numbers, um candidly, I I'd have to put together some sort of a strategy that says we're gonna go international and international is gonna require X, we're gonna go do this, and that's gonna require Y.

And so I don't think that there is a magic wand to wave to say I need X number of staff.

Hey Dan, this is uh let me this is Matt, and I'm gonna just jump in for a second on this.

You missed yesterday's conversation, so but but I'm sure you heard all about it.

There's a lot of expectation, right?

A lot of hope from council members that economic development is really important, not just in the long term, but in the in the short and medium term as well as a source for how do we grow out of the current financial challenges that we have.

So I and I see Mary's grabbed the mic.

I just want to tie these things together and make sure that we're giving council the opportunity to ask the questions and set the guidance that you want so that Dan can respond to it at the level that you care about.

Mary, do you want to tackle that?

I I do, I just want to offer a few things.

Um, one, I think what we hear from the council loud and clear is this is a key area of priority for this council, and that there is additional flexibility and some latitude to explore different things than maybe we have in the past.

And I I think we hear that loud and clear.

But I also want to offer as far as different trade missions and opportunities to explore your companies.

I also want to offer some perspective on TSMC.

They recently purchased through state land and working with the city of Phoenix 900 acres.

We don't have 900 acres, so we don't have 900 acres to offer to a company like that.

So TSMD is not Gilbert's play.

We have to figure out what are those opportunities that we can support in the community and what types of new development are gonna offer the most potency moving forward.

So I just want to contextualize that.

That Dan has nine team members uh right now, and LTA is about 10.

If you were to double his team, that doesn't provide those 900 acres that made that city competitive for that offering.

So I just want to offer that it's multifaceted, um, and what the team is trying to do, and what I'd like to, if we can transition to is walk you through some of the guided strategy that they're working on right now to figure out what are going to be some of Gilbert's best opportunities moving forward.

Yeah, let me just respond real quick.

And I appreciate that because yeah, I recognize we don't have the land.

That would never be an option, but where my head is on TSMC's will we need a lot of support from you know they're gonna have suppliers like crazy, and um we're an hour away.

We're not three states away.

So I just feel like um you um were not set up correctly for this space.

I think you go wrong because this is a council decision, right?

And and um hindsight's always 2020.

Everybody's trying to do the right thing.

Um but I think in hindsight, you know, if we could go back, I think anybody that said we should do that, probably say knowing now that we're because it comes down to the more generate more revenue we can generate, the less tax leverage we have to pull on our own residents.

That's always so do I just say Dan has more models?

Yeah, before before then I know Jim has one final comment, but we want to take the comment and then we want to go into those models.

Well, I want to point out the I hate throwing you under the bus, Dan, but I almost feel like that was the greatest staff answer team member because I it was completely not self-serving.

Sure, you didn't champion your team, you championed the staffs, but that is commendable on the staff side.

I feel you saw yourself short.

I've made that apparent to you, I've told you that since the day I met you.

Uh I want us, and I think this this council has made it apparent that your role in this town is extremely important.

Alright, so not having a number, not having, hey, I need two guys for this one guy for that.

Totally understandable.

But I think that in the future, the ask needs to be, especially if it's supported by numbers.

We need to have a high consideration of your needs to get what we want.

We won't get a TSMC because we don't have 900 acres.

We all know that.

But as you look at some of these things, public public private partnerships.

We've talked about restaurants and the repairing, things like that.

You are going to need staff for that.

It cannot be absorbed by nine people in an LTA.

So please don't be afraid to ask and fight for that because I think that's something important.

I don't think that I think being a great team member is great, but occasionally somebody has to ask for a pay raise on a team as they're providing a little bit more value to the team than they did before.

No, certainly I appreciate that.

Right.

And then we have a we have an LTA that's overseeing the Northwest redevelopment area.

The Northwest redevelopment area is a council adopted redevelopment plan, and we're staffing it with someone who does who's you know who's in an LTA role and isn't guaranteed a you know a position next year to continue that great work.

You know, we asked for a tourism position in this last, you know, um in this last budget cycle, and you know, to generate more visitation, and because of the needs of the town, that wasn't supported.

Wasn't supported out of the transfer, the the bed tax?

Kelly, probably call a friend here on some of those discussions as it relates to the bed tax relative to those positions, what's there and what's not for tourism.

He his question was you didn't you weren't supported for a position for tourism.

Doesn't bed tax pay for that position.

Yeah, there is not enough ongoing funding in the bed tax to add it at this point in time.

What is what are we to see in the bed tax per year?

I don't know that off the top of my head.

I mean when we looked at it, there was not enough ongoing funding.

We were hoping that the additional hotels over the next couple of years will create that capacity.

And what are we paying for out of that funding right now?

That it seems that's just the number I saw up there, would think there's more than just an employee.

How much money is coming in?

There's two employees over there and the operational and other event and items, and there's one time money for some design at the um fountain parking lot project at the library.

What do we call that project directory?

Yeah, South East Regional Library.

Yeah, but that was one time that was the ongoing that was already used, that capacity was already used by the operations of tourism that are over there.

Hey, if you'll forgive me, I'm gonna bring us back up to altitude.

Okay.

Um we have about a half hour left.

I really want Dan to have the opportunity to go through the models that you're talking about.

But I'm just gonna kind of put out here the the green, yellow, red question I'm gonna ask you at the end of this.

And Jim, just correct me if I'm wrong, but the the council guidance that I think I'm hearing you say you'd love to come out of this with something along the lines of making sure that economic development is both robust and well resourced.

Yes.

Okay.

So with that understanding, take us through the models and let's make sure we're all understanding what would be involved in how to accomplish that.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Um the first thing that we're looking at right now, so Gilbert has a land use model that was uh first developed in 2009 by applying economics, and we have engaged about economics to update the underlying inputs of the model.

So, what this is is a land use fiscal impact model.

It's an Excel-based tool that estimates annual operating revenues and expenditure for the town of Gilbert based on developed the developed acres by land use over a multi-year period.

It uses default development assumptions, density occupancy rates, socioeconomic variables to convert land use data into fiscal impacts, like assessed values, taxable sales, population employment, police and fire calls, and vehicle miles traveled, and it helps align the fiscal and development assumptions with current conditions in Gilbert and provides insights into the financial implications of land use decisions.

So we are also engaging with uh Urban Three, who the town has worked with previously, and so again, we've re-engaged with them to perform a deeper analysis in the community on how current and future development patterns affect long-term revenues and costs.

And um, they are updating all of our parcel and property assessment data they looked at before when they did the analysis on um revenue per acre for the town and uh working uh to hopefully then paint a clearer picture where revenue in the town is coming from.

So again, which properties are generating revenue.

And then they're comparing those revenues to the cost of infrastructure and services to show which areas are paying for themselves and which ones create long-term liabilities for the town.

And then they're going to create maps that visualize, like this one, fiscal performance across the town, and they're going to highlight which land uses generate strong value and which are more costly to maintain for the town.

And then they're going to model future growth scenarios, including some options in the heritage district.

And they're also developing a customized financial tool for the town to beta test as one of only three community testers, which will allow our staff.

This tool is supposed to allow our staff to quickly evaluate fiscal impact of proposed projects.

This work complements our existing model that we have that is being updated by Applied Economics.

So these two things work hand in hand.

We identified several properties throughout the town that may be able to do more for the community with the right kind of analysis.

So at this point, we are engaging with various experts to see quotes for some professional services to help understand not just what could go on these sites, but what should go on them based on market realities, community needs, as well as long-term revenue.

And so I just want to highlight that three of them are in the Northwest area, so downtown and outside.

So that will require obviously close collaboration with our parks and rec team.

And then the last one is a piece of vacant land owned by Maricopa County that is just placed right in the center of our community near the central employment area.

And so our goal for this is not planning for planning safe.

There's been a lot of evaluation done on different properties throughout the community.

But we want to transform these underused public lands into valuable assets that strengthen our economy and broaden our tax base to support the quality of life our residents and businesses expect.

And so that really concludes economic development's presentation, and we certainly want to end where we began with why communities invest in economic development, where as economic developers we are working to strengthen and create successful businesses who employ our citizens, generate tax revenue that ultimately funds infrastructure parks, public safety needs, and those quality of life amenities for our community.

And that's it.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Okay.

I guess I just wanted maybe ask or remind council that we have very limited land developed right now.

So as much as we're striving to lean towards economic development, the physical geography is a huge limiting factor.

We're seeing that when we see harvest growth come to us after that piece, which is 330 acres, all the other available land to develop is 90 acres, 40 acres, maybe a handful around 40 acres, and then it just drops off, and we're probably counting on one hand at this point.

So can you talk a little bit more about that and kind of how that is going to unfold in economic economic development?

Yeah.

That's a great question.

That is certainly what we're we've tried to showcase here, and some of the work that we just mentioned, like with urban-free, the redevelopment work that the team is doing, kind of the reimagining of different sites and infill.

There are very few that don't already have a plan for them.

Um, and so right now it's really identifying pockets where could we bring in an investment that would capitalize on what's already there and enhance the revenue generating power of what it's adjacent to, and that's really I think where Gilbert is positioned right now with some of these publicly owned sites and where they're strategically located.

The regional park is an excellent example, you know.

Um, it's been mentioned throughout the week, right?

And um, we have you know some uh vision there, long-term vision uh where some of that property has been to do a public-private partnership to um create an investment that draws in visitors and continues to just lift up the community through increased visitation and uh bringing money in from the outside.

You know, Kelly mentioned yesterday about how you know as population changes, the ability to generate sales tax revenue because of just the changing purchasing patterns of your population, you know, within your boundaries starts to decrease a little bit.

Though we're in an interesting spot, um, you know, I think we're one of the only communities during COVID where we saw massive increases in some of our um revenues where other communities saw declines because we're not a net importer of labor.

So all of our labor came home and they didn't leave all day long and they started spending money at home.

That tells you how if we create more jobs and we bring more people in and we you know subsidize than the people who are leaving, how we can start to generate more revenue for the community.

And so that's a good example of how that works, but we definitely have to make our properties perform better over time, and how do we do that?

And partnering with some of these expert groups, you know, one of the good things is right now, Gilbert's commercial real estate, the reality that generates revenue performs very well, even though we have less of it.

If we look at comparatively speaking, um it performs well in the market.

Um the revenues that are generated per square foot are above what we're seeing in some of our neighboring communities.

Um we have really low vacancies, comparatively speaking, and we're still a destination of choice.

We just need more of it, and then you know, that's stacking.

And so Dan can certainly speak to how redevelopment's also going to help create new investments in some of these areas that maybe when they were built in the 80s and 90s, this wasn't part of the conversation.

This you know, stacking, but it's part of our conversation now for the future.

Mati one of the things that's I think missing from here, we need to take a hard look at, and this speaks to what you're driving at.

There's empty parcels here that are owned by private owners.

So I'm thinking about, for instance, on Higley and the 202, uh my intention that the developers are going to come to us about that commercial property and look at putting residential houses in there.

And we can't afford to do that, and I think part of what's missing from this presentation is an analysis of private property that's owned, and maybe we can bring potential developers to the private owner connecting the two together and drive the development of that land so that it benefits us.

And that's the kind of a partnership with that.

But I know a lot of those owners aren't out going and looking at people to go, hey, come buy my lands, whoever shows up.

And when I look at that piece, and you know, that's not the first developers talk about coming in and filling that in with houses.

We can't afford to lose that commercial property for that reason.

And there's a lot of that type of commercial zone property in private hands that we need to identify and figure out if we can help, you know, uh match make, I guess would be one way to say that.

That's worth the investment to do because that could really help us in areas that we may not be able to control.

You know, so and then where we can come in is if that property needs some zoning changes or whatever would be necessary to make it attractive to a developer, we can help expedite that to make that happen.

But if we're not looking at that piece of equation, this is all we're looking at, then you know that's that's really not the whole picture.

And it will fix itself, we just may not like how it's fixed.

So they're gonna be proactive.

That would be ideal.

I was gonna say Dan, while you grab that.

We we um that's a really great point, Hansy, and um I would say the the intention here is to identify you know, town-owned or publicly owned properties that aren't in that space that we might be able to influence or really talk about how we can leverage our own property to generate more revenue.

Um, you're absolutely correct.

There are lots of you know, mentioned them, you know, some of the larger parcels where we might want to be strategic about where they are in the market.

Um, our what you just described is what our team does, um, and we bring users to these parcels.

Um one of the challenges is you have to have a willing property on the other side of the table.

And the other you know, factors because there's market forces that will start to push you around on the housing conversation.

And housing is certainly important to our community, diversity of housing is very important.

What's the balance?

But it's also the uh focus of policymakers like yourselves to hold the line on some of these things where we have developers that will come to us and say, well, it's been vacant for so long, so therefore it must mean that it's not good for whatever it's owned for.

And um, I think communities that are patient and are willing to wait for a project to come to private property and not give up what they have.

Um generally when the long run, but this is a you know, Mary talked about all the different components that come together that it's a nuanced conversation about that.

These are these are long-term ways.

It might take really long time for someone to finally decide that they want to take Gabriella Point if the project you're talking about, or um, the 90-acre property at Lindsay and Germain.

A property is fantastic.

That property is priced well above market.

There's not a lot that our team can do, but we're really trying.

We talk to that property owner every day.

You know, again, we're we're out there in the community working with them to say, like, hey, we really want to see this developed, it'd be great.

We have an employment corridor, and it's just kind of continuing to you know work that relationship again, please.

Certainly, on that 90-acre site that you're talking about when um uh privately, we brought more than a dozen developers and partners through matchmaking to that site, and the property owner um has just turned down you know each and every one of the uh uh prospects.

Um, as we're engaging in those conversations, we are trying to do those at match making, and we've seen property in the Northwest corridor, for example, um, zone like industrial, go multifamily.

And the compelling argument at the time from that particular owner well was this property has been vacant like this for a very long time.

Holding that line, maintaining that policy that's not converting employment land to residential land is absolutely paramount.

It's not now more than ever, that holding the line is a very important component in our overall build out of our community, and we are bringing today more mixed use opportunities because of the work that we've been doing with urban three to understand value per acre, height.

We use words like density, and we immediately cringe because we think of residential density immediately.

When we say density, we're meaning multiple uses, and those multiple uses drive the most return on that particular piece of property with the least amount of footprint utilized for development.

So what we do, we do together.

I would echo Deanne's sentiments, and I also think um to your point, Wilson ever, anything we can do to encourage those opportunities for our um private property owners to look and explore.

We want to be a part of that.

And I think that that's a great point to make for as far as future opportunities.

And the team is actively trying to cultivate those uh relationships and opportunities when things come about.

The other thing I would just offer to council as far as if you're uh looking for something kind of tactile that we can do as a community in redevelopment in Northwest Gilbert as we build out that plan, there are going to be opportunities for Gilbert to make a conscious decision to invest in infrastructure and things that will incentivize redevelopment because with the limited amount of land that we have left, both public and private, that is also going to be an area of opportunity looking at um that northwest redevelopment area, which is largely residential, but the commercial that's in that space looking for opportunities to continue investment in that part of the community.

Dan to that point, we were encouraged by that example that we talked about at the battery, and I know you very well aware of how the battery came on board.

That's a redevelopment area that was otherwise underperforming in that community, and they brought this mixed use entertainment district to an area that was otherwise underperforming.

It's those kinds of visions as you well know that it's going to take as we redefine what the Northwest area or Gilbert Northwest looks like today, tomorrow, well into the future.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm gonna start floating us towards the gentle landing here.

I know Jim and Monty have comments, and then I'm gonna Kenny, I'm gonna sum up what I think I've heard you say.

I'm gonna ask counsel if that sounds like what you're saying, and I'm gonna ask you to respond to it.

So, Jim Monty, Kenny.

Just as an observation, it's a it's this is just a quirky little piece of trivia here.

The Empire State Building footprint is two acres.

It's a hundred seven stories tall.

And I'm not proposing a hundred story building, but let's take that into perspective here.

A hundred times two.

Yes, height and density means everything.

So we're never gonna build a hundred story high rise, but let's keep this in mind as we move forward.

And the other, it's not an easy answer.

It's I don't expect it here.

I just want it to be odd of encouraging.

We lucked out just down the street, multi-family went to single family homes, which takes a lot of pressure off the electeds, takes a lot of pressure off people saying we're sowing the history of Gilbert off because they went to single family.

What would we do to encourage some multifamily to go towards commercial or industrial?

What is it we can do without breaking the bank, without uh picking winners and losers?

What can we do?

We have a cool, I think Monty said 11.5% of vacancy rates.

So what can we do to push multifamily back to commercial?

Thank you.

If we can give that to Monty and then to Kenny, and then I'm gonna have to see if I can't float us to a green, yellow, red.

Monty.

I I think the message that I want to send is that the environment that exists today, while typical for a municipality, the economic climate is different, and I think we need to look at novel approaches to things.

A different way.

One of the companies I used to work for, one of their values was finding a way.

Um I think we need to look at maybe things differently, and that may be pulling the chamber in Sarah's sitting over there to get some input from business leaders or um, you know, we were talking, Councilmember Storginson was talking about international travel, and then you brought up that Paris Air Show and aerospace is one of our industries here.

It may be worth looking at giving you guys the authority to go something, go somewhere like that.

I want to say also I'm not comfortable necessarily or letting somebody else lead me to the trough to eat.

So when we look at Phoenix or the state, you know, helping line up clients for us.

I I'd rather that's like my parents arranging my marriage.

I don't necessarily know if I like that.

It worked out for you.

Uh so I I would like us to take a look at, you know, maybe we need to make an investment and look at this in a different way.

Well, I know your wife's parents are your wife's parents wouldn't have chosen you.

Um so I think we're at the point now we've done things the same way for a long time, and they're no longer working, and we are late to this conclusion, but we do have to take differently that we're talking, and that means maybe we you know we have to travel, we have to represent.

We're still part of the region, but we're at the table.

Um not waiting for them to come to us.

So I think we've learned this council has learned a lot today.

This every session has been wonderful.

This session, I think is the most biggest light bulb coming on in terms of what we do and how we do it as the elected leaders here, the policy setters can help our staff absolutely thrive, or we can handcuff them and make very difficult do jobs.

And so I'll end with I feel like in some ways we have handcuffed you guys and Mary, you have led economic development.

Um I've asked you, I know Dan's a director, and he gets tremendous credit, known you since high school.

Got here, and I knew we hired the right guy.

Jen, amazing.

Um you have to have support above you, is what I'm getting at.

And Dan has had tremendous support from you as the leader over this, so that he can do what he can within those handcuffs that we put on you.

And I'm sorry for the handcuffs.

They're coming off.

You're a cock, you have to speak to you because I I think out of all the I I know PD, I don't know everything, but I don't know nothing here, but I know PD more than any department, and the most critical critical department for me, not as a conservative and not have to raise taxes on somebody is what you guys do.

So I think you have been inundated by questions from me more than anyone since the day I got here.

I've never stopped cheap, which means you know your stuff and knowing your stuff, you know how to lead this team.

Um really impressed with you guys, especially considering what you've been through and really counting on you get us to that that that finished line.

Kenny, thank you.

Let me see if I can't get you all to uh a conclusion of this.

This presentation was different from some of the from all the other ones that we've talked about because I asked Dan, he didn't come in with a set of policy decisions or recommendations for you.

And Kenny, I think you summed it up really good, which is we just meant an hour and a half kind of you know, awakening to all of this.

So I'm gonna take a general stab at this.

Tell me if I've kind of got it right, then I'm gonna put Dan on the spot and just say if this is what council is saying, what immediately off the top of his head comes to mind about what would be different going forward.

Okay.

Here's what I think council has said.

Um back to to how I framed this when Jim mentioned it earlier.

The council wants a robust and well resourced effort, include novel in robust, okay?

It's a good word.

But that robust and well resourced effort has to be tied to realistic strategic expectations.

And that realistic strategic expectations has a lot to do with timing and the dollars to be generated, the availability of space and what you can and can't control, and coming back to words that we used yesterday, return on investment, right?

Does it make sense to spend this money?

Is it going to be returned to us in a way that makes sense?

Let me first, I'm gonna ask you in a minute how that would, if council said yes, how that would change your world at all, what that would do.

But first, let me just ask council is that the is that the green or yellow light summation that you would like to come out of this conversation?

Is there anything that I'm missing in the course of that?

I'm looking around.

Jim, you're up, you're agreeing yellow with that.

Bobby, how are you on that?

Can I ask?

I can come back to you if you want to.

I I think that we should help economic development and whatever they need and they want, and they feel that they have the staff or always been very supportive.

And you know, I I the comment was made earlier, not and I'm not sure who made it said that you know, we've done things the same way for a long time, but I would also like to say look at what we have, you know, based on what we've done in the past.

So we've done something right and a lot of things right.

And I have every confidence on Dan that whatever he needs and whatever he wants for, I'm I'm all for that.

So robust, yes, well resourced, strategic, it's gotta get us somewhere, and building on the past success that we've had.

Yes.

That's great.

I'm gonna ask Kenny, anything you would want to add to my summation, Monty.

I I don't know how to say this in the back of my mind.

We in the past have failed to anticipate the future, and as a result, a large commercial property along the 60 is gone.

The airport was annexed.

There are other examples I can give, and I don't want to see that decision decisions like our outcomes, I should say, like that happen again.

I don't know how to frame that other than I don't want to repeat that.

And I don't know if that makes sense, and it's not an indictment on anybody in the past.

I just in some of the conversations I heard about the 60s we don't want a freeway running through Gilbert.

We got one cuts the thing in half now.

And it's that kind of thought process.

I feel like we got a break, and then I'm sensing, and I could be wrong about that.

So I don't know how to quantify that.

So if you ask me red, yellow, green, I'm yellow.

How's that?

Yellow is okay.

Yellow gets us in the right.

And if I was a little bit faster, this is a little bit earlier in the day, I would come up with the with a word to add that what you would go, yes, that's it.

I just don't have it in my head at the moment, but I'm looking to see if anyone else does.

Mayor Young, do you want to comment on this at all?

Did I kind of sum up what you're what you're thinking and hoping for out of this?

Yes.

Yes.

I'm gonna put this back on Dan before we finish this agenda item.

Dan, if council comes back to you, because I've now kind of heard green yellow on this.

They want economic development to be robust and well-resourced and smart enough to not miss important opportunities along the oh, I'm sorry.

Chuck, excuse me, I'm so sorry.

Everyone in the back of the room is waving at me.

Chuck, go ahead.

No problem.

You know, I I think it's I think it's important to understand that this was the last, I think the last presentation of the day.

So we can see how it all really coordinates uh together.

You know, for example, we we talked earlier about parks and rec and talking about, you know, is it making us money?

And then Dan's team showed us that Cactus Yard was um you know bringing in 14 million in revenue.

So I think this is a central point to everything that we're we're talking about.

Uh but I'm agreeing as far as your question goes.

Chuck, thank you very much.

Robust, well resourced, smart and bold.

I'm I'm trying to get there.

There, we'll get there.

But still tied to strategic, realistic expectations that have meaningful return on investment.

And how does that change anything in terms of your approach or how you would operate going forward?

Thank you.

Um first and foremost, appreciate this dialogue and the support of the councils, certainly the executive team and all of our partners, Sarah, um, and all of our partners that help us do what we do.

You know, um we don't live necessarily by an arranged marriage with our partners.

As you can see by our leads, we outpace all of our partners for the lead generations.

They are part and parcel to an overall strategy that brings in additional leads.

So rather than alienate one group like GPEC or any others, we want them all at the table with us in order to drive economic development opportunities.

So, with that in mind, um, and some of the comments that I I heard from yesterday, sort of grow your own out of the private equity model.

Um, you know, I started the presentation with a couple of groups that I was talking with in Washington, DC.

My peers in Atlanta, my peers in LA, and my peers in Texas.

I'm gonna reiterate what they what they said.

So they use they transform redevelopment district into a mixed use destination using redevelopment as a powerful revenue engine.

That's one of our goals.

And talking with my peers in Los Angeles, the city is converting parts and recommended into high capacity events and major revenue growth opportunities.

That's one of our recommendations.

Our peers in Texas are using low fees and taxes with a streamlined business friendly entitlement process and performance-based economic and business development tools to fuel long-term industrial expansion and revenue.

That's one of our strategies.

So as I look at that, I think about the policies to hold the line on anything that is questioning or putting employment land into question.

Things like converting that land into multifamily are incredibly detrimental to our long-term you know, fiscal you know, well-being.

And so if we can under that mindset of what we do, we do together, if we can develop a policy or something along those lines that allow us to push back on those rezoning opportunities where we have land that is positioned for employment opportunities, that would help us tremendously.

Those are some of my thoughts as to you'll have to help me with the word some robust, that's about the only word that I've really kind of in your words.

You and I don't know each other very well.

You trust me just for one thing.

Your notes for a second.

Okay, without looking at your notes, what's one thing that would be different going forward that council might expect given this feedback?

I think using the data and the modeling that Jen talked about to articulate how development the how is the best use of that development to come in and use that data to support policies that allow us to go after you know base employment and use lands designed for employment purposes for employment purposes.

Okay, now I'm gonna ask council real quick.

We're over time, so I'm gonna make spend time.

What else would you like Dan to do as a result of this direction that you're giving him?

What would you like economic development to do specifically?

Every and anything they can pedal to the meta.

That's the message you want to send.

Who else wants to say something?

Bobby.

Well, I I don't know that because I think it's relatable, but would so are you recommending that we not change or rezone anything that is commercial anymore.

Because I'm I'm with you if that's what you recommend, because commercial or retail zoning is how we make our money, right?

So your question is should we be doing everything possible to save all the commercial property that we have?

Yes.

That's a good question.

Do you have a quick off top of your head answer?

Off the top of my head answer.

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a start.

I think you need to use data and analysis, but the reality is mixed use development is what's going to get us there.

Using height and density is what's going to get us there.

It's going to do what?

It's it's going to allow us to maximize the footprint of that property to bring in the revenues necessary to sustain long-term growth and go.

And when you say high thin density, you're not talking about apartments, are you?

I am saying mixed use, and mixed use does typically include some component of residential.

But by mixed use, we mean sort of vertical, not this horizontal model that we have.

Everything vertical needs to be commercial or retail.

I mean, I'm sorry, horizontal.

Vertical would be vertical alignment.

What was the model?

100 stories on two acres.

Yeah.

Something along those lines.

Yeah, let's do 100 stories and two acres.

Something along something online.

So we're not gonna do specifics here, but the pennies metaphor.

If the handcuffs are off, and it's pedal to the metal, and and if it's gonna come back, again, we're not making decisions today, but if we're looking for guidance to staff, here's a council member who's saying I am open to the idea that we are gonna throw a policy perspective, try to protect as much of our commercial property as possible for the intervention.

Yes, I I've actually said that all along.

I've done my best.

Is there anything else that you'd like to share back on again?

I want to give everyone the opportunity.

Chuck, anything else that you want to add at this point?

No, I'm good, thanks.

All right.

I'm looking, Mayor Young, anyone?

Jim, we've got you, Monty.

It's still yellow.

Still yellow.

Yellow is okay.

We're good.

Okay.

I think we have reached the end of our agenda.

Would you uh thank Dan?

Thank you.

Um it is time for our wrap-up.

There are three elements to the wrap-up.

Don, I think you're gonna go first.

You got your summation.

I'm gonna give up a couple of closing remarks after Dawn, and then um I've been asked uh to uh ask you to stay for another minute because there is a video that we would like you to watch very quickly.

It's just a minute in.

So the first thing I'll say is um this has been an amazing retreat.

Uh, just all the conversation, the things that we've gotten some really good direction on.

So I thank you, council, for taking the time to be here with us.

Thank you, staff, for working with me to get this retreat up and running and provide all this great information to the council.

So, really appreciate everyone's uh participation.

Um, and the second thing I just want to show you like I have so many notes because there has been just so many great nuggets out of these conversations.

I can't tell you how energized I am by the conversation and just really looking forward to the future.

Um I'm gonna go through um our our feedback from you just so you know what those things are that we took as if there's anything in here based on that direction that is incorrect, please let me know.

We certainly can go through and we can update that just to make sure we've got that correct.

And thank you to Jenica and to Lena for helping to get this together.

So the first thing is I think on the utility rate study, what we have heard from the council is an interest in the proposed fees and adjustments to the rate adoption timeline and discussion on anticipated consequences.

Um future meeting.

Does that sound accurate?

Okay.

Um for the financial framework, which we went over yesterday afternoon, the council expressed uh consensus and exploring creative short and long-term cost saving ideas that do not affect staffing.

Um regarding the quality of life projects.

The consensus was to continue with group A as is and to explore a potential bond measure in 2027 for groups B and C.

And then the third thing out of the financial framework was during our one on ones in April, April, we will be bringing you budget information that um goes along with the framework that we brought from one, two and three that we talked about.

So we'll kind of wrap that in as part of that.

Um the parks and parks and rec fees item.

Staff will present council um action to implement uh an inflationary option for FY27, and then in October with progress on a fee study move toward option three, which would be a phased cost recovery option.

That's what I got from it.

Okay.

Okay.

Um on stormwater, staff will provide council action to implement the stormwater buy-in fee and discuss a future maintenance fee at a future study session.

Okay, and then on economic development, you guys have to bear with me on this because I got part and then the half, the rest I kind of scrolled in.

So I will uh make sure that I try to get all of that in.

So council requested a robust and well resourced, smart and bold effort with strategic, realistic expectations that provide meaningful outcomes in economic development and protect commercial properties.

Okay, so that's what I have for those.

So I will get this out to you all so you all know and can go back to what we what we will be bringing you back.

So you have it.

Um so I'll make sure that we get that out at the end of this.

And um, before I go through and thank the team who has been behind the scenes, really helping us, I want to say a special shout out to someone who this is their last retreat with us, and just to say we are going to miss you, Mary.

We are so excited about your opportunities.

But you are our Mary, and we don't want to let you go.

But we we will we know we're gonna see you flourish.

You're gonna bring your gilbert to the flags.

And uh we're really gonna see I just want to mention that.

This is Mary's last retreat with us, and we're sad but happy for the opportunities you have for you.

And I know Mayor wants to say some words as well, so I'll need to have an opportunity to do that.

Mary, you damplify those two words that I heard uh mentioned so much today, smart and both certainly there.

Um you got here, I think three years before I retired, and just during that three years, I can remember so many things that you have an influence on, and uh and it's continued during the 16 years that you've been with the town.

We greatly appreciate it.

Everything that uh the council member Buckland said just about the support you've given to the team.

There's none that's been stronger than you, and we appreciate that so much and know that you will have tremendous success in the balance of your career as you go up to FedSC.

So thank you very much for your efforts.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Um, and my final thing before I pass it off to Matt is I want to give a special thank you to the retreat team who put this retreat together.

Um we have our rising leaders, Denise, who's on the Mac, and Parker, who's in the back as well, who have been our staff team uh to help us to coordinate this, help us to get all the things in place, help this to go smoothly, as well as Jenica, Alina, just everyone who's helped.

Um, just want to make sure that I recognize them as well as our AB team, Bailey has been here with us.

You've seen Bailey up here, and I know Sean in the background helping us as well, and so just really appreciate you all.

This has been a very smooth retreat, and um, I think this is a lot of work that I know it doesn't necessarily seem like it, but the team has done a lot of work, and we're really appreciated.

We couldn't do this without them.

Um, also want to thank our food and beverage team, Jacqueline Parker and Andrew Hirsch, both with org Dev and the people team who got us our great food.

So if you enjoy that, that was on them.

Uh so just want to really thank them as well.

So that I will pass it on to Matt.

Don, thank you very much.

You know, one of the joys of having a microphone on you the entire time is that I feel like it's always on me to say something, so I'm gonna take the opportunity just to make some observations that you already know.

First off, council, of course, it's wonderful that you all did this.

I applaud you for your seriousness, your earnestness in taking on the conversation.

I I just have to call out a special thank you to uh Chuck Giovanni, who let me tell you, if I was in a hospital, this is not the kind of meeting that I would want to spend two days with doing, even though I wouldn't want to be in a hospital.

And so, Chuck, thank you so much for your commitment to being part of this conversation as well.

It says a lot about you, and we're all really grateful, right?

You want to applaud Chuck real quick.

Well, I mean, but I was a couple observations.

While the focus of this financial retreat has been about solving the town's budget math for the next fiscal year and beyond, I just think we shouldn't forget that all of these decisions, all these discussions are in service to the town's long-term vision, what you all refer to as being the city of the future.

And even though we didn't spend a lot of time talking about that, I just I hope that one of things you'll take home from here is what does it take to make these decisions tangible and feasible, and you all kept using the word realistic.

And it's realistic, not just because of what the market's doing, it's realistic because it's in service to something that you've already agreed to, and that this community uh that you've already made a promise to this community to do.

So we're not just floundering around looking to solve math.

We are actually working in strategic uh purpose towards a goal that you all have already said that you care about.

Just remember that we're doing it in that context.

Second, um, let's also just manage expectations a little bit.

It has been a very productive two days.

There's been a lot of great conversation, a lot of good direction that you've given back to staff.

Not to be not to yuck your yum, but let's also acknowledge that.

There are still hard choices to come.

You've set the staff up, you've set some expectations, but there is still hard, important work to do, and let's not for a moment think that those those hard decisions aren't coming.

Uh, number three, the values that you articulated are not just for today.

Among them, you talked about trustworthy, responsible, courage, stewardship, innovation, realistic, and confident.

I have to say, of all these ones, the one that's been resonating in my head for the last two days, it was when Bobby said confident.

Because confident means that as we're not just for this retreat, but as you're about to make really hard, important decisions for your community of real consequence that you should be in a position to be able to make those decisions with a sense of confidence that we are doing the right thing.

Even if those decisions are painful, and even if there are people who are unhappy with the decisions or are concerned with what the implications are going to be, that you come into it with the confidence as a demonstration that you've approached this exercise, this responsibility that you have with the integrity that you set out to do in the first place.

So I just want to kind of steal you for that, because you've just invested two days in getting yourself into that into that position.

I want to make a personal observation about this moment.

Obviously, we didn't talk about it at all, hardly, but you know, you've got an executive transition that's underway.

Um this is my I think my sixth uh retreat that I facilitated, fall and spring retreats, and and I've you know had a chance to observe the way things go.

So I'm just counseling I'm just gonna tell you what I've observed here.

I've never shared anything like this before in a prior meeting.

I had a chance to watch Dawn and Leah and Mary and Mario and the rest of the team working.

I got to see them in action.

What you've seen over the last two days, they made it look easy.

That's what professionals do.

They make it look easy, they make it look like they have this all figured out and it just smoothed all the way through.

Let me tell you, they put real effort and real heart into making this happen.

And we just should not for a minute take for granted the quality and collaboration and the professionalism and the expertise and the dedication that it takes your senior staff and all of your staff to be able to lead the kind of conversations and have welcome the kind of candor and input that you've all been able to give over the last two days.

And I just think normally I would say it goes without saying that the professional staff does it doesn't go without saying this time around.

We have to say it, and I think you should take a moment to acknowledge all of your senior staff, Dawn and everyone, for the incredible work they've done in preparing us for this two days.

If you would join me, please.

May I I'm glad you went there because I was not gonna let you close out without without um this.

Um I walked up on a conversation, Dawn.

You did a great job of thanking everybody, but you're never gonna acknowledge yourself because you're humble.

Um I walked up on a conversation, realizing how tired she is because she's been up at 2 a.m.

every single day to make sure that this council received exactly what it needed so that we can make smart decisions for our community.

And she said, this is what you do when you care about your community.

You stepped into huge shoes as an interim manager, and I forget the word interim because you you've taken it like um it's never ending.

And um that is a huge credit to your to your uh work ethic, your love of um the leadership team here, and um from the bottom of my heart, I think I can speak for all of us.

Thank you.

Um you've been amazing.

Thank you.

Uh I'm gonna call Candace up in 20 seconds to show you a video, but I just want to lastly just thank you for allowing me to help you, council members, uh, achieve clarity.

Sometimes that means me not leading you, but trying to put words in your mouth enough to make sure that we're all understanding what you're saying, and I appreciate your trust in me to allow me to be able to do that and and help you all have the conversation together.

It is an incredible honor that you've asked me to do this, so I'm very grateful to you as well.

So thank you for that, Candace.

All yours.

Yeah, just really quick to end on another great note.

Um, state of the town is upon us March 31st.

Uh and so we just wanted to share the teaser for the actual events and video itself.

Um so Bailey's gonna push one.

Wow, it is no idea what's gonna be what's gonna happen.

This is crowd.

And can you give me a clap like a meeting?

Future quality of life.

That's the big picture.

We have to review a packet of information.

Typically 700 to a thousand pages long.

Every council meeting.

Yes.

If we do our jobs right, the future of Gilbert is more secure.

The seven of us are also Gilbert residents.

We are facing the same issues.

We haven't lost our minds.

We have to work together.

All right.

Very good.

We haven't lost our minds.

And with that, we're done.

With that, we're done.

Thank you, everyone.

This is kind of like break it up now.

So we've got a lot of people.

I'll unfortunately my things are getting there, so I can.