Our Father in Heaven, we are grateful that we can gather together this afternoon and um do the city's business and we ask the two bless us with um guidance and understanding as we listen to presentations and um hear applicants and lessons so we can make wise decisions for the benefit of the community.

We ask a special blessing on our first responders and their families.

We're so grateful for them and for all that they do, and we ask a blessing also on our city staff and our workers and police lesson to know how much we appreciate them and all they do for our our residents here in Lehigh.

We're grateful for this wonderful community in the city we have to live in, and we ask C2 blesses to put forth our best efforts to do well by the people here.

Thank you, Councilmember Stallings.

Okay, our first uh start out today.

We have a presentation of development and analysis from the planning and engineering students from BYU.

Uh we invite you to come, whoever's gonna come present, we'll invite you up and come up and uh introduce all these guys.

So where's my input here?

All right.

So yeah, I was once a student like these guys, so be nice to them because I had to do the same thing.

But you don't have to be nice to me if you want to.

Yeah, anyway.

Although I do prefer the anyway.

Uh yeah, so these uh let's see where he's back there.

Um, Dave Simson back there is their professor.

He reached out and said, Hey, we'd love to do uh just a planning studio project, and Lehigh seems like a great town with a lot of things going on.

So we put out a few options for them to work on.

They chose this project, and it's kind of like a land use meets financial analysis for the city, you know, how kind of the question we want to uh get after is you know, can we be fiscally sustainable in the future, you know, once the city builds out, and are there a couple of scenarios we can look at um that may change what that looks like, like maybe more of a commercial focus or anyway, there's uh all kinds of scenarios you could look at.

So I just want to do a little bit of analysis using some of their GIS tools and and just take a look at what we may just kind of an initial look of what we may be looking at in Lehigh and how that can inform us to move forward.

So with that being said, I'll turn it over to these guys, I'll let them introduce themselves.

Sorry, Marcus.

Okay, so um for the for the project.

Our aim was to look at the different the fiscal sustainability of Lehigh as it pertains to different land uses um throughout the city.

So we used a a software called community vis to model the different scenarios that we um we'll talk about them the different scenarios later, but differ some different scenarios that um based on the general plan and and um future build out.

So we're we basically took an analysis of the the cost and the revenue of each of the different land uses and applied them to the city and um just just uh kind of get a picture of a big picture of the the impact of different land uses that the throughout the city.

So we started out with a community profile to give us uh a clear current snapshot of the city.

And much of the data that we found shouldn't be new to you.

You you know about the city really well.

And uh but essentially we took that data and focused on three key areas demographic structure, uh growth context, and then we focused on uh housing and infrastructure pressures.

So in terms of demographic structure, um the city has grown tremendously since 2020.

Um that's not news to you.

Um and then additionally, family sizes have have remained relatively high, even relative to other communities here in Utah County.

Um in terms of growth context, uh the city lies at the heart of the Silicon Slopes region, uh, which continues to draw new uh jobs, new investment, and uh new residents.

And so quite simply, people want to be here.

And so I would say lastly, with uh the housing and infrastructure pressures, we see that uh this growth has really put a strain on city infrastructure, transportation, utilities, public services, in addition to uh that housing demand.

And so really snapshot is about trying to uh take this data and then move forward with a model that helps the city plan for strategically plan for future challenges and align uh infrastructure and quality of life with the city's uh continued growth.

Okay.

So we worked within a program called Community Viz uh within ArcGIS, so it's a mapping tool.

Um we base it on the uh general plan and land uses.

We did consolidate some of the land uses to simplify the analysis, um, but we worked with the existing um land uses to kind of test our model with the uh current fiscal year um budget.

And so we had low residential build-out, medium residential, and then high with different transit-oriented development splits as well as multi-use splits to see how that would impact um the analysis.

And so we're working through these scenarios within community viz to um get those numbers as far as the revenues and expenditures for each of those land uses.

So in making our model, there are a few assumptions that we had to make.

We were provided a lot of information from the city, but some other dots that we had to connect ourselves.

So, like mentioned, we simplified the land uses because the general plan had a lot of land uses down to just commercial with retail being a subsection of that, residential, and then like open space, and then other which would include um like public facilities.

We also made some assumptions about the residential units like per acre and cost per acre, um, based mostly on the general plan, which suggests that like high residential, high density residential has a maximum of 12 units per acre.

So using that as kind of a starting point of like the highest level of development, and then working downwards.

And then, like mentioned, also some different mixed use and TOD splits, focusing on potentially higher amounts of residential versus higher amounts of commercial in those areas and how that could affect it.

And then finally different tax and cost rates to identify those expenditures and revenue values, such as the sales tax, police and fire cost, road or utility um taxes.

And those values were all determined using either provided city data that we were given or values used from the 2026 fiscal year budget document.

Great.

Um and so taking kind of what Kezia and Aaron are laying out is our analysis is focused on these three main uh subjects on like long-term sustainability in the city, um, how different scenarios, the high, medium, low, and different TOD splits impact budget flexibility as well as how that variation in land use just looks overall.

And all of these three categories are going to be covered more in depth in a written report that we are currently formulating.

Um we'll send that over to Mike and he can make sure that gets out to y'all.

But this is kind of where we're heading, just so you kind of know where we're taking the these scenarios.

Now that we've told you what we've been working on, um you're probably wondering what does this mean for you guys?

Like why is it important we did this?

Essentially what we've done is we've created a model that can now be used by city staff and other decision makers to determine the feasibility of different land use patterns um fiscally for the city.

So as Lehigh is approaching build-out and development decisions become more and more consequential, uh, this is a model that can be used to sort of predict how that will impact the city financially.