The Lehi City Council convened today for a work session followed by a regular general session. The council addressed the review of the noise ordinance, adoption of the 2026 meeting schedule, and procedures for future vacancies. Key discussions included public feedback on bike lane safety, the establishment of a Small Business Council, and strategies for addressing state-level housing and transportation mandates. The session concluded with administrative reports, public commendations, and the appointment of council members to the Utah Lake Authority.
Um everybody in my voice is a little dead today. So I do apologize, but we welcome all that here. We have a full council today. Uh, Councilwoman Newell, Councilwoman Harrison, Councilman Harrison, Councilman Freeman, myself, Councilman Stallings, and Councilwoman Lockhart. So welcome. We welcome also all of our staff who's here with us today. And uh glad to have you. I've asked uh Councilman Harrison if you'll open the meeting with a prayer. Uh to determine what's best for the city and to hear um ideas and collaborate and work together. We are grateful for all that you have provided this great city. We're grateful for our um for our department and police department, all those that are in harm's way, and we ask for the special blessing upon them and their families. Uh, we ask that the spirit may be with us that we may uh be guided to do what's best for the city and um be accountable to our residents, and we say this in the name of Jesus Christ. Thank you, uh, Councilman Harris. We'll start with that. Uh let me remind the uh audience that today is a work session until our general session tonight at seven, so there won't be any public comment during this portion of our meeting. So we'll start with two point one, the park tax recipient report from the Harrington Center for the Arts. Are they here? Awesome. Come to the podium, tell us who you are and give us a report. What do I need to do to get on here? Um, I'm just gonna get this screenplay technology going. Don't go, yeah. Okay, we'll go to uh two point two, the noise ordinance review. Kim, I think you've got some stuff on that. And by the way, I think Craig is online from our legal department. He's helped work on this as well. So let's see. Well, we so last year, um, I think about mid year, we brought a draft through, we received some input, and then we came back anyways. I think it was in December the last time we presented some draft changes. And at that point, it was the last meeting with uh quite a few of the old council members, and they just said, Let's bring all this back when we have the new council, and we'll just kind of run back through this. So, and like I said, Craig's online, he's helped do some research. And I know Ryan's spent some time kind of looking at it as well. So, between the uh three of us, hopefully, we can answer any questions that you have. So, yeah, if we can go back to the screen. Um so yeah, in this first section with the findings, it's really just explaining why do we want to control noise, and it you know, there's obviously some harmful effects that noise can have, especially in the middle of the night, or if it's super loud, whatever that might be, actual physical harm if you're inside a building and the decibel levels go over a certain level. Um so this findings is really just kind of the the why behind the ordinance. But in this first section, we do propose, and it's in a couple of other sections, you'll see we're changing an offense. Like if somebody is um uh what am I trying to say? Um somebody breaks the law for our noise ordinance. Instead of a class B misdemeanor, we're proposing to change it to a class C. And the different there's pretty, you know, class B is a very serious offense is jail time up to a thousand dollar fine. It just seems really heavy-handed for somebody making too much noise. So class C still, you know, it's not nothing, but it's it's probably fits more to what we felt like for the offense. Um then you know, the next sections that it starts to describe well what kind of noises are we talking about, and it categorizes three different types of noises. Um, and I don't really want to go if you've read this or you can read this. I I don't think we need to spend time going into the different types of noises, but yeah, some of them are just commerce normal, like somebody's putting a roof on their house, or and then there's noises that are caused by machinery or business, and then there's intentionally caused noises that people you know are doing to maybe to annoy people or just ignoring the the it's after the quiet hours, which we'll get to in a second here. So again, that one has the class C instead of class B misdemeanor in it. Okay, and then the intent again just kind of talks about our intent with the noise ordinance, and we're trying to take into account the latest scientific advances, which we'll talk about with the measuring device in a second here. So then probably the first kind of review or the next revision after the class B to C is the hours, and we talked about this was just from our last meeting in December. 6 a.m.