I'm like really rounding up that like that.

Yeah, it's all good.

Once you hit 50, it doesn't matter.

That's what I kind of figured out for us.

I don't know.

So fun.

So it's something that you get aircut.

And you have a mammoth hat on and your kid has a Vegas hat on.

Like that is awesome.

This is one way to remove it.

When's he gonna but break out the Boston hat?

I'm sure he does.

No Yankees hat so I get them a Yankees hat.

Chase on my three.

Maybe we have the fireplace.

All right.

Well we let's go ahead and get started.

Welcome to our uh work session.

On May 11th.

Tisha, we're ready.

We're recording, we're good.

All right.

On May 11th, 2026 here in the uh Lehigh Civic Center's uh council chambers.

Uh we have a full council today, Councilmember Stallings, Council Member Freeman, Council Member Newell, Councilmember Harrison, Councilmember Lockhart, and uh we welcome all of you here in decided for this discussion today.

Uh before we get started, I will offer an invocation and then we'll get started.

Our father in heaven, we bow our heads grateful for this day for the opportunity we have to meet together and to discuss the budget and the budgetary items that belong to the city and uh the tax money and the money that the city collects and how we might be able to best use that money to uh move the city and the needs forward.

We're grateful for the residents who live in our city and pray for each of them.

We also pray for our first responders and those who are working that they may also be watched over and protected as they uh do the work that they've been assigned to do.

We ask you to continue to bless us that we may uh work through the challenges that are in front of us that we may do so with patience, and we might do so with uh understanding and and an eye single to get the job done and do it in the very best way possible.

We're thankful again for all that we have when we say this in some in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Okay, with that, we'll open item two, discussion item A.

And that's a discussion of electric costs and service and rate design studies.

So Joel, are you ready?

So mayor, we are not ready on that one.

We need to punt that one.

Okay, just got punt it.

For later today or no, for two weeks.

Two weeks.

Punt it.

Joel, come to the table.

You're next.

So um item B.

B1, continue the budget review discussion.

Power department.

Anyone at the table have questions for budgets?

The budget for the power department.

This may be a little short for you, Joel.

Yeah.

Tell me about the the reserve funding how you were in that fill quickly.

From uh the result back in 2022.

Yeah, so um luckily we had implemented right before that the new rate design that included a power purchase adjustment clause.

So in the situation where wholesale power rates fluctuate severely, we can then implement that power purchase adjustment.

If we undercollect what we need to cover our wholesale power costs, we can turn that power purchase adjustment on and correct any of those losses.

That was the biggest factor.

And then of course, everywhere else we could delay projects or say on other areas as well.

So with that uh with the retail power chart and isn't it anticipated to not just cover maintenance operations but also to put reserves?

Is there a design that way?

The the the intent of the PPAC is not to increase fund balance, like your savings, it's meant to maintain it.

So if the fund balance needs to increase, that should come over time with the rates with the base.

Yeah, it was like November 22.

That's when I saw that first power bill hit that was really bad in the early 23 year.

Okay.

All right, and then when did was it 22 that you that power purchase adjustment costs?

The rates were adopted July of 2022, as I recall.

Okay.

And then it was that November when things happened quickly.

We anticipated waiting until July to implement the power purchase adjustment and do the calculation on whether we over or under collected.

But with that hit it, we knew we needed to act quickly, so we implemented it.

I think it was February of 23, as I recall.

So this kind of has to do with the power rate study.

Um but we drew down the reserves right in November significantly.

But I just remember in past budget discussions, but since I've been on the council, you brought up that we we are doing really well in our reserves, and we're at that 180 days, 80 days.

Um just a few years and we were able to catch up.

So was that because of the power purchase adjustment clause?

And yeah, we had one of massive.

Yeah, by far that was the most significant.

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head.

But if we would have just done the one-year collection of the power purchase, it would have been like a 20% increase, would have been massive.

So instead we left it in place, knowing we're gonna leave that increased adjustment in for a few years until we collect that back.

So it was like, and I don't know.

That two or three years before we could collect that back.

I think it was three years.

So 23 was a bad year, 24, 25, and then probably sort of harvest about two and a half years.

Yeah.

The fact that we reflected back so fast was very close price.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think you had the extra revenue from collecting those that off the power purchase adjustment.

Additionally, by good fortune, wholesale rates remained calm, and we were able to do well in those two years too.

So luckily those stacked, and that really helped.

Okay, but you're uh kind of wanting to keep that in place.

Absolutely.

Okay, I would recommend that.

Well, again, I'm not sure to ask this now or later, but uh I'm just wondering if that's enough to build up the capital for the projects that are coming.

Um it should not be used to build up reserve like to cover your capital, it's only just to cover fluctuation of wholesale costs.

So you're gonna see the in that cost of service study if there's capital projects based on your question, if there's capital projects that are causing pressure on the wholesale rates, or sorry, on our operations, that's gonna have to come out of the rate base, not a power purchase adjustment.

Okay, so if we're back up to our reserves, and that's one thing in the rate study that they talk about how over time if we keep as is, it's gonna deplete the reserves.

Maybe a question for later, but um it we're sounds like we're increasing the rate, but we're also keeping the power purchase adjustment costs.

It's like we're gonna have a lot of money by doing both.

We shouldn't.

We should, as the as it performs, if we do the capital projects that are designated within the capital study, and we and our wholesale costs are what they are, it should stabilize, and we'll spend the money we need for operation capital projects out of the rate piece, and then theoretically the power purchase adjustment would stay stabilized, assuming wholesale rates stay stable.

But you almost have two buckets, your your PPAC, your power purchase adjustment, strictly for wholesale energy and fluctuations, everything else needs to come out of the rate.

I guess I would just still confuse because the PPA helped us replenish the reserves, so it wasn't necessarily just for the wholesale.

Well, right?

No, the wholesale costs.

We had a bill due, and it was gosh five million dollars more, let's say that next month, and we anticipate it.

So we have to pay that bill.

Right.

So we tap those reserves.

Now we've got to put that back so we implement the PPAC, and then that refills the savings account until you're full again and the calculation stabilizes.

Okay.

Okay, that makes sense then.

But it's a recovery tool.

Just remember that PPAC only comes in the impact if the cost of wholesale power is more than the budget.

So if the amount that they put in the budget today, if the wholesale cost ends up being that exact amount, which it never is, right?

The PPAC zero.

Right.

So just because there's a PPAC doesn't mean there's necessarily it could actually be named.

Yeah.

If the wholesale cost of the power was less than what's in that budget, it could actually have a negative PPAC that will reduce the power.

Yeah, chart if I said that right.

Yeah.

That's exactly right.

So it basically stops at 180 days.

Right, because the goal is 180.

Yeah, well, we look at what our anticipated revenue collection is for the upcoming year.

So we look forward, we say here's what we think we're going to collect, and then we look backwards and say, what did we collect?

And it comes up with an over-under calculation.

If we overcollect it and we have enough for next year, anticipated, then we would actually put a negative PPAC and then we would lower rates.

Next year you come around, you do the calculation again.

Oh, we undercollected this year, so we need to bump it back up.

So it's not directly tied to the reserve fund.

It's mostly, that's just where you're gonna have to probably come up with the funds in a significant.

I would say 22 slash 23 was extreme that we had to tap that fund so heavily.

Normally you probably I don't know if you have to tap it.

Normally there, I think there's small fluctuations, but that was 18 million dollars in one year.

It was but we had enough with it in PPA to cover whatever fluctuations of power, but also an additional amount to replenish the reserves.

Is that right?

Are you I'm just trying to clarify your question?

You said the PPAC used kind of illustrated that maybe two things, maybe clarify that for me.

I think if I could state it, you can tell me if I'm right or not.

So we lost the $18 million, right?

Because the wholesale hour cost was a lot more than our budget, and so we had to charge it surcharge onto our regular rates to regain $18 million.

Normally you would do that every year, but to regain it all in one year was really really high.

So it's supposed to do it over two or three years.

I think we're gonna do it in like three years, but just good.

So the PPA was going to be increased the rate to replenish the reserves to set.

The the PPAC did increase the rate.

It's combined.

Like when you get a bill, the PPAC is another item in there that's added to the base charge.

But yeah.

So it's not exactly so our goal in past year was to replenish that is a request, right?

We got to that point.

Um, and then I'm just wondering if we continue that route, right?

So we've replenished it.

And I don't know if that was increasing the rate or because of the PAC that helped us do that.

Um do we need to continue that now that we've been our target.

Well, I think maybe the best what I would say.

It's not like we carry forward that amount.

We have a wholesale power cost, and it but then you look next year and say that the wholesale power cost was higher than budgeted the SMS PC for that, but the wholesale cost of power was less than the budgeted, and we actually get negative PPAC back.

So I think in the rate study and the rates put together, he's got an amount of keep us at 180 days.

So the PPAC in the past was adjusted enough to report your staff.

Yeah, right.

Maybe a good example, this might answer your question too, is if you if we were to go back and look and we can of what the PPAC was each year after it was first made when we go to three, you would see that like year 2020 and 2024 it stays the same.

I think 25, we actually reduced it a little bit because we could have left it and then shut it off halfway through the year, but we said rather than do that, let's cut it for illustration purposes.

We'll cut it in half and do the full year.

And we hit now that we had that we didn't think it could be less than that wasn't that if you can send us those numbers, sure own years, what that was.

It might be somewhere that I have a found.

Yeah, no, we can we actually probably no, I guess it wouldn't be in the P schedule with that sense.

It would be because it's tied to within the rate, so the PPAC would be different.

We'll give it to you.

Yeah, we know what it is.

Any other questions you can go?

I have a question.

Um I'm just curious to know.

It looks like the requests that you've made this year, the majority of them are one time with one ongoing request.

What happens to your department if these one time requests aren't funded?

Um yeah, I think we'd end up having to delay it and ask for it again next year.

And what do you it the impact?

What are you delaying?

Like obviously these specific items, but what's the impact from a project perspective?

Um probably be specific to the project, um what it would what the impacts would be.

Yeah, but it's just it's delaying capital investment in our infrastructure generally that might.

I mean, if there's like specific ones, Brent has he's more on operation side could dive into the very details of each one.

Yeah, I think I just been curious to know if there's like a particular project that all of this hinges on, or if this is more just an infrastructure of citywide.

I when I I I'm not a power expert, so I don't when I look at it, I don't fully know.

Brent, would you say these are standalone?

Like if one doesn't go through, then it's not like if we don't approve number six, then three others die.

Is that kind of your question?

No, and a lot of these projects over the years, um we we do based off our capital capital plan, the tenure plan, and there's a little bit of a cushion built into that, so that it's not like if it's if it's not completed on that exact year that we run into a problem where we have an outreach with a particular circuit.

And so with the issues that you've been discussing with the PPAC with the you know, trying to replenish the reserve balance, we did push some of these projects off to try and reduce our our operating budget and try to help with that.

But um, a lot of these projects do stand alone.

Um, you know, they don't necessarily affect each other, it kind of depends on on the ones we're looking at.

Um, but but a lot of them are individual projects that stand alone.

Okay.

Okay.

Can you talk about?

I mean, I have to really delineate in my brain general fund versus enterprise funds, right?

So what if we don't let's say you know we don't fund some of these ongoing costs, or even the one-time costs, like where are those, it's not like we can use them in the general fund, right?

So what where's that money?

Is that reinvested back?

It goes back to, and I'm not I'm not sure which statements you have, but it drops back down to the fund balance line item.

Okay, yeah.

Okay.

Within your department within our department.

Yeah, I think it's it's uh I can't read that.

Wow.

53, 50, 50, 01, this is inverse.

Like 5350, 50 the earlier ones.

That's our reserve.

So like in 26, we're budgeting 2.3 million to go back into that set, right?

That's uh I mean the power department, they had their own.

You're looking at the financial statements, they have their own balance sheet, their own first balance, their own equities part.

That's and they're what they bring in is what they spend, right?

So is that because I just noticed in the other departments there were things that went unfunded, but it looks like all the enterprise funds get to be funded, right?

All their requests.

And that's I think what I'm calling attention to, but I guess I understand they're different funds, but do they essentially have more control of that spending because it's an enterprise?

Yeah, they have their own revenues and so it's just different.

And they can control the revenue strength or rate where taxes come in and you set things, and it's not always like I don't know today what the next year's tax revenues are gonna be.

Yeah, that's we can control the revenue side, we can't control the expense side.

That's the tricky one.

Because our wholesale, if you look, I mean our wholesale power cost is 43 billion dollars on a 61 million dollar budget.

So it's a significant power stay where we expect and it's and we try to budget like this year we're planning on 75 per megawatt hour.

Is how we come up with that.

That's higher than what we've been, so we try to be conservative in that estimate.

Yeah, no, if that makes sense, then just learning.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You mentioned that in the sky area plan that we the city has to purchase the property for the substation up there.

Yeah.

Is that in this budget or uh it would be it's in the 73 funders?

We have impact fees.

So we have impact fees.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's our North Point sky substation 7350 23.

And have that our chat have that number.

Anyways, they said what is it?

It could be seven after a document.

Stage 67?

Okay.

So what's the about what's the budget amount of that 5.6 million?

So 5.6 million, that's where that is supposed to come out of.

The unfortunate part is that we had plan on the property purchase alone, but um we've talked a little bit that there'll be some additional costs based on the uh area plan with the developer that we're gonna have to come up with over around a million dollars for the excavation cost for that that was not planned on.

So excavation cost.

So would impact these cover that it will draw down our impact fee fund balance.

Oh, but it's eligible to be yeah, it's part of the substation cost.

It says here you have like 3.6 and surplus.

So we pull from that.

Is that what that's yeah?

That's what that's saying.

There's gonna be a portion of that for designated restricted funds for impact fees, so those can be used for that.

Cool.

So that just means you want to have impact fees for everything.

Yeah, I mean it cuts into our balance.

But then what happens is we need to be diligent on when we do our next impact fee study because the stuff's costing more, and we only do an impact fee study every 10 or 15 years.

But for example, if we waited that long, then we're basing our infrastructure costs off old data.

So we update regularly, and then we can make sure those costs are covered up.

So how do you like that?

Every two to three years.

Powers is a brand new spot.

I've been involved with a couple of them when I went into it.

I thought, oh, this is really easy.

We'll just knock it out in a few months in it.

I have their hard code across the finish line or so there.

They just take a lot of analysis, you know.

They're extremely detailed the information that they're getting, they're putting into these complicated formulas and we're going back and forth a lot.

And it's just so is that something you have to contract out to deal with, we do help.

I would recommend that.

Because you're gonna be contested.

Yeah, uh, there's a lot of people don't like impact fees, they're gonna question.

You might be legally challenged, and I'd hate to say, well, yeah, Dean Dean just did it on the weekend on the board or whatever.

It would be better to have somebody else do that.

It takes an engineering consultant and uh finance cancel.

There's a handful of people that are really experts on this.

There might be two on the financial part that really understand the law, and so we just basically questions for Joel.

Okay, Joel, and you're good.

However, are you gonna stay up here with Shay?

Yeah.

Fred, thank you.

Do you want to sit closer to Jason so you guys can share glasses?

Shea welcome.

Thank you.

Any questions for Shay on fiber on the budget items?

Same kind of thing as an enterprise time.

If you've got revenues, you can kind of have more discretion on your expenditures.

Yes, we have revenues, but most of that right now is bond proceeds.

Cool.

How's the progress?

Good.

So we're just looking at it this morning.

So we're our goal was to be able to cover our bond payment within about three years of build out.

It's a long track for that.

Yeah.

I did have one resident reach out.

And they just said we haven't seen an update on social media or publicly about because I think we were doing that maybe a year or two ago where it was pretty aggressive and informing the public and marketing it.

Um are we gonna continue to do that?

We haven't just because the initial like phase of construction finished, that's really what that update was for, that just that initial project.

Um we could do something.

I know we've talked about maybe doing like a quarterly update or something like that.

We do want to do a final update once we get the project fully closed out and have strata come in and see that kind of the result.

Yeah, just the final results of the project.

But yeah, we could look at doing something.

I don't know that monthly is the right way to do it just because there's not an a huge change.

So right now the changes are mostly like building out new developments and then also just the increase in customers.

Okay.

Yeah, I think quarterly could just be good.

Okay.

I think there's some residents who are following it closely, but um haven't seen anything, so I think it I think it would be good.

We can do that.

So that's our take, right?

So we are just above 29%.

Um close to 30%, but that take rate, we just have to remember is based on like a certain number of locations.

So that contract was about 22,000.

But our number of locations is growing, so really that needed take rate decreases.

So we really want to watch like the number of subscriptions.

So our target is really more like 10 around 10,500 subscriptions.

That's really what we're trying to fix mark.

What's our number today?

We're I'm almost at 6800.

And we're continuing to like track that when there's certain milestones we need to hitting and we're beyond those every month still.

We're optimistic.

Any other questions for Shay or Chill?

Okay.

Thank you.

Marlon.

I should be able to pull that up.

Hi Marlon, how are you doing there?

Good.

Any questions for Marlon on economic development?

29.

That's about 29.

Okay, please.

No questions tomorrow.

I don't think I Marlon, that may be the first and the last time I ever see go to the table.

There's no questions.

Thank you.

Just wait till my um that meeting.

Thank you, Marlon.

Thanks for talking about it.

Thanks for saying that's the different meeting.

Everybody knows BJ Benson.

I'm gonna take the opportunity.

Yeah, he's doing good.

He's doing well on the road to recovery.

So we may want to keep the Bensons in your thoughts as the uh those are tough things, so but we're like here.

So thanks for coming.

Any questions uh for BJ or Dave?

Um, I was looking at your budget requests.

What would you say are your like can you explain a little bit about them since I'm not which one do you got?

There's so the class C request and then general fund requests.

Um I think I'm looking at general fund right now.

Start with that.

We shouldn't since I wasn't able to be in the budget meetings for streets.

So we have a new employee requesting.

Okay.

Um just due to all the the work we're taking on the requesting new employee.

I don't know if you have a specific we have three groups we work with, the sign group, the concrete crew, and the asphalt crew.

So he would likely fall on the concrete or the asphalt crew.

But each year we're seeing the production go up on both ends of the ocean by quite a bit.

Um we just go through them all.

Sure.

Okay.

The next one is the nuisance trees.

Um we're asking for 25,000 more.

Last year we had 225.

Um the nuisance trees are those trees that are in the planner strips are causing damage.

We had the big project out in Olympic Park that we took on.

We've downscaled that quite a bit to individual people, individual issues, so it's not such a big impact on people.

But we have also been working with Jessica, and we're doing a tree inventory of what our city trees, what we own, and where their compliance is.

So that should be a big help.

They're going to do that study probably pretty quick, first part of June.

They were waiting for the leaves to get on all the trees, and it's uh Davies tree company.

But yeah, so and it's been we we've worked with other ends of the public works too, as far as like some of the trees were trying to close the clean outs or fire hydrants or whatever else.

So that's kind of it's kind of all throughout public works really.

So are you so you're outsourcing the armor, so we're using the in-house armors?

The they don't have enough in-house arguers to do all our stuff.

So especially like if we're doing a millin overlay or a chip sale project, we have to go trim a lot of the trees back almost every time.

Um that was just too much for Jessica because Jessica actually falls in the parks department.

Um we don't fund her at all, so she was helping us to do that.

But this Davy tree company is a program they already use in the parks, and so we're just working with them.

They will take an inventory and they'll show us what is outside of our compliance, so we don't have to go out and do it ourselves.

Um, and it should be a lot better to help us.

So when you're talking about outside of your compliance, you're talking about trees that are interfering in the park strip that are interfering with like sidewalks or things like that.

So I understand.

Road height over the road and over the sidewalk, um, any sidewalks being lifted, any of that stuff.

So I think that would also include like anything that would be a traffic hazard, like blocking signs, it's a comprehensive analysis of what trees are causing problems from a range.

Okay.

So you you outsource kind of arborists because the harbors we have is under parks.

And actually, that was a question I had for power too.

Was I hear that car uses arborists too to help with this?

Well actually it will encompass some of that.

We we met with the power department briefly about it, but it will also show them their obstructions.

So the roadblock back ladder, things like that wouldn't be covered by this study.

Okay, but that's the 250 NRC too.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's like just working on trees as we go to.

Um, we worked closely with Jessica.

Um, and she's like I said, if she feels like we need to put a new tree there, we do it if we don't.

Um, what the hazards are of taking the tree out.

Um we still take out quite a few trees, and so based on the situation that she either helps us create a new tree's price for one of the nurseries or whatever.

So that's about it.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's been it's it's a huge problem.

I know some of you that have been with me have seen it.

It is a huge problem, but uh we're making a little deposit correction, I think.

Um three is the 10-wheeler or the S22 bed sander.

Um, one of our trucks, S22, it was at the point that it needed to be replaced.

The sander for snow plowing um was falling apart.

So what our question was is if we bought a sander, then we would likely keep that truck in the system for longer, but it was due to be replaced.

So that was the where we were weighing that out.

We got the 10-wheeler, um, a new truck, a new sand or a new bed, instead of just buying that one to prolong something we're gonna be getting rid of anyways.

But we also are doing this with a wing plow, so it'll have the front plow and a wing plow, and that way it's essentially like having two plow trucks.

Okay, and so the 10-wheeler and plow replacement that's uh $57,000 ongoing expense plus the fleet expense would be 375,000 one time, right?

Yeah, whereas option one, the bed and sand replacement would be sixty-five thousand one time funded plus fifteen thousand.

But the truck's pretty close.

I think the truck's 10 years old, probably.

So, yeah.

So we're already paying $15,000, $57,000 a year for that truck that's the new sand or go on, right?

So you'd basically be taking one truck out from the new truck in at $57,000 already in operating costs.

Okay.

So it wouldn't be a new necessarily new operating cost, it would be the same, but you'd pick up a it would be a newer truck, you'd have an old truck out that you pick up a double plow and you wouldn't be spending 57,000 on a sander that may go away on a truck in two years anyway.

And the S22 is a bobtail, it's a smaller truck.

So uh having the 10-wheeler, we have started doing a lot of our own paving, way more than we have in the past.

It we use it for chip sealing, we use it for a lot of other stuff, just haul them for the parks or wherever we need to, but yeah, we use table way more than we use the bobtails.

So the next the next one was some some line increases of equipment maintenance.

It was like five thousand dollars different, so a total of thirty thousand.

Um those are just uh like we have a spray truck, a distributor, and every year we have a company committed dry ice clean off all the oil on it so we can work on it just because if you'd have to see it and believe it, but it's it just gets covered in oil, so there's just different things like that that we use to work on.

Um the other one is department supplies, uh like hand tools, cutting edges for our saws, saw uh concrete saws and stuff like that, and then the other one was a thousand dollars for uniforms.

Um when we're doing crack sealing, it's not uncommon for guys to lose a pair of pants, so we started buying some like recycled uh bibs and stuff like that that they can use just because once you get that stuff on it, it's it's over.

Nobody wants that in the washing dryer.

So can't wear huge bows.

Yeah, yeah.

And then we we asked for a um increase in our overtime budget.

A lot of our roads now, especially chip seals, we're starting to have to do some of that work on Sundays.

Uh we did have some leftover overtime funds from this last year just because of the lack of snow we had, but just forecasting the work we do and the snowstorms we typically have, we look like we're gonna be really close with that with our personnel.

So we just asked to bump that up a little bit.

And the crack seal machine replacement.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think that's over in class C.

Um I'll just go through our priority list.

Um our number one priority list for class C was signal light and signal development.

We're asking for another 120,000 on that budget.

It was typically 300,000, but we have 27 signals in operation and 28 now since this came out, but uh we have three more in design, so we're starting to need to do some more of the maintenance and updates on some of that uh signal equipment.

Some of it's pretty pretty expensive, so uh we just asked for an extra hundred and twenty thousand to start doing more of those maintenance costs.

So that's signal and signal development.

The road maintenance, our budget was one point seven.

We're asking for that to come up to uh two million, and if you had twenty million, we could spend it all.

So we can always fix the roads.

So that's what that goes towards.

Um the next one is 88 sidewalks and sidewalk replacement.

Uh we asked for an extra 75,000 on this budget.

Um the ones that live on the north end of town, you'll see there's a sidewalk trail right at the end of third north, and uh uh six hundred no thirty-two in the north.

We just seal coated that as you go home, you'll see them.

They've worked on Sunday doing that.

The asphalt trails that are in place of the sidewalks, it's kind of been a gray area for everybody between I should say between Steve and I.

Um, and so this year we asked for a little bit more money to help try to maintain some of those trails that are in places of the sidewalk.

We'll still do all the sidewalk to maintenance, but the the 75,000 extra would go to treating those asphalt trails, um, potentially paving them, repaying them, or seal coating them.

No, that would be if you look right on the side.

I mean, I know we're talking about 3200 north, I know that one, but I agree.

Yeah, and so there's just some of those throughout town.

Um there's some done by the splash pad.

Um on the south end of the splash pad park, I don't know what it's called.

You can out tell.

But uh it's just an asphalt trail that's nobody's ever done any maintenance on so you guys just barely did, right?

Yeah, yeah, we've we start doing some of those, but there's way more throughout town that I was like, let's start doing this and see how it goes, but that's what the extra money is for that.

But it's not in it's not in the parts or anything.

That's on Steve's well.

Okay.

Um the other one was equipment rental.

Um we're asking for an extra $25,000 on that.

When we do our chip seals and stuff, that's a it's a very abrasive cleanup.

Um our brooms that we have through the street, uh the uh storm drain division.

It's it's pretty hard on the equipment.

So we've started renting those out.

Um it's a lot easier for us.

It's it's not near the maintenance that that we have to do.

Um we also rent a crusher every now and then and crush up the asphalt that we uh tear out wherever we do.

So right now, anything we crush up, we recycle 100%.

The city reuses it.

So instead of just taking it up and paying to dump it, we crush it up and then we reuse it on projects.

So like right now, all of our millings, some of them went to parks department, some of them went to our um access roads for sewer, water, whatever.

Um, and then some of our road base we've reused in our under our sidewalks and road projects, um, and we'll probably use some of it on some site work that we'll be doing in our yard.

So that's great.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a cost savings.

Yeah, yeah, that's both concrete and asphalt.

He just said asphalt, we actually crushed the concrete as well that comes off of all of our full out.

And then we and then we can use that as a road based material.

We used to just haul it up and dump it, and uh before me before I came here, that's what that's what I did before I came here.

So I was like, we can reuse all this, and so that's better than buying it and use it and just dumping it and pay for it.

So what other rent will like I used to work on asphalt, yeah.

Yeah, especially crack seal machines because it's just so hard to maintain and clean, and so things are always breaking.

Are there any cost efficiencies if we were to do more renting of equipment or outsourcing of certain projects, or is it all more cost effective to do it in house?

Well, the thing is is like uh like take for example this year, the paving season typically doesn't start until April 15th.

A lot of stuff's not happening until then as far as paving.

So that's a great time for our crews to be doing crack seal because we're not out paving yet.

So from and they usually end like in oh October 15th or so.

So that window throughout the winter is a great time for our crews to start doing crack seal.

It doesn't affect the concrete crew as much, but uh when we jump over and have our guys crack sealing, outside guys crack ceiling, but the the machine we've had has lasted us 10 years, or maybe not 10 years, maybe six years.

So um I would have to do it down the I I think it's better to have our own to buy it, but I don't know that we would save a lot and say in maintaining.

And then fully answer that question, James.

So we actually hire companies to do crack seal throughout the year as well.

So it's a healthy dosage of both of bulk.

We have our own can to maximize the efficiency and cost effectiveness of our crews.

But when they're doing other projects, because we're limited on we can't we don't have crews that can just crack so all the time, they have to move towards paving, and that's what he was explaining.

There are times of the year it makes sense for our guys to do it, and then there's times there it's not, but we still continue to have outside contractors that are doing it during those time periods.

Okay.

So the 10,000 on the crack seal machine replacement.

That is that replacing parts of the whole cost we buy in the machine.

Okay, all right.

Yeah, yeah, the whole ones just do.

So like the new one that we're looking at, it's parts.

They're they're telling us it's six thousand hours of runtime, like the pump and stuff like that.

So that that's quite a bit of time.

That'd be like 10 years of runtime.

I'm sure there may be little things along the way, but for the most part it's a pretty durable machine.

So does any of your nuisance tree budget go towards education?

Like, you know, so that we can prevent maybe some of the keep people keep planting the trees that keep causing sidewalk problems, right?

Um that's what the nuisance trees working with Jessica.

I know we we talked to Mich uh Michelle and I have talked to Jessica too.

It's uh it's a huge problem.

Even in our new developments, we'll see them planting trees, and Jessica will go out there and she's like, This is the wrong tree.

And the problem is we just don't have the manpower to do it.

Like I said, Jessica's not really under my realm.

Hopefully, with that nuisance tree budget, we've handed out flyers.

She's talked about getting stuff um when they come together building permits and stuff like that.

They have to sign a paper or something acknowledging like, hey, this one is.

So she's actively working on that, probably more so than I am, just trying to help educate people.

Um so that's more of like a communication thing, or like the arborist, like the parks and or maybe development, maybe it's the building.

And you guys are more addressing like the already, you know, the already issues.

But we we have got the slices.

Yeah.

Um some of the roads we're doing maintenance on will go out and put those out, uh flyers out and say, hey, this is why we're doing it, we're coming in to do this.

This is what type of trees shouldn't be there.

Um a lot of education goes into it when we do remove them though.

If you want to put something right back, um Jessica goes over that stuff with them too.

So just because weight and gold for this is awesome.

Can I have a question?

What cost the city were to maintain that asphalt trails or sidewalks?

Um it depends where they're at.

Um asphalt, the the worst thing for asphalt is not to have any traffic on it.

It rabbles against uh UV rotted on the top.

So um concrete's pretty durable.

Concrete's way more to repair it and fix it.

It's usually a total removal and replacement.

Um asphalt you could use some crack seals and some other treatments on it.

So it kind of depends where it's at, but for the most part, I would say concrete's more expensive.

So is that mostly because of the tree issue or some kind of just usually cost more like asphalt, I don't know, sixty-five dollars a ton, a yard of concrete is 200.

So I just know that in the past developers would put in the asphalt trails, so then we get to come back and maintain them, right?

So I mean, is it better to just have put in wetter side locked or yeah?

I don't know.

I mean, that's the thing is there's a lot of preference with people riding bicycles on the trails.

Uh where they saw cut the joints in or or trowel them in.

So it's it's easier asphalt for everybody, I think, because it's easier on your it's easier impact on your knees, too.

Yeah, as a runner.

Yeah.

I think people prefer that.

And honestly, it's probably easier for us to maintain it.

Anytime we're replacing removing replacement concrete, it's it's a day project.

No matter if it's 10 yards or if it's two yards, yeah.

It's it's an all-the project.

Okay, that's good to do so.

Any other questions for BJ?

Okay.

Okay.

If you have any questions, thanks.

Thanks, guys.

Bradley.

Hi Brad.

Afternoon.

How are you?

Good Brad Cannes for engineering, and questions for Brad.

That's that's the difference.

We'll learn mostly about the impact base and grant related items.

As far as um, I guess head count.

Um recently announced retirement, uh, right.

So how does that fit into I guess the budget for head count?

So we have um we currently have hired a new traffic engineer, he'll start on Monday.

So he'll use the same budget that Luke was using.

And the intention would be that that's why we don't have any, we we don't anticipate any budget changes because we would hire Lauren's replacement.

Okay.

Now with that, I assume a new replacement would be probably right.

So there would be there would be a gap of savings there.

So we cut aren't you, Lawrence?

Replacement.

I think you were told that like in 2008, like three years.

Yeah, 2013.

2013.

You've had a wrong training, then that's a good job.

Okay.

Um, it's good to hear we have a traffic engineer.

It's great, news.

Any other questions for Brett?

Yeah, we are we gonna get an introduction to the new traffic engineer.

When did you say you started?

Uh, it starts on Monday.

It's kind of in in a week stuff.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Okay.

Thank you.

For sure.

Thank you.

Dave and Crude back.

Hey Greg, hello.

How are you?

I'm good.

Good.

Any questions for Greg?

Mr.

Greg allred or Dave Norman on water PI, sewer, drainage.

If you can go over your budget request, that'd be great.

And one thing for Dave, since I was gonna ask him again for streets, but there is a leftover surplus money from the snow removals from this year, right?

For streets.

So what's the plan just with that?

Well the streets budget.

Sorry.

Some years were over, some years are under.

So I know that they we're buying some wear parts for our plows.

Uh things like that.

That won't encompass all of the budget.

We'll fill up the salt shed before the season, before they're going to the next budget year.

Um be some money left over.

Um you'd have to ask part of them what they do typically.

I mean, I think it goes over to the next year, it's a little bit of savings because we have had years where we go beyond our cell budget.

So if there's there's already salt from last year, right?

Because we didn't really use it.

So there's some, but we always fill up the shed.

We always top it off before the season.

If we have budget to do so, so that we go into the next year prepared.

Okay.

Yep.

Okay, sorry.

No.

Rolling streets.

I'm gonna start with the wastewater budget request, and I only have one.

And it's an upgrade to an existing sewer lift station that we inherited from Thanksgiving Point.

Plus or minus 2002.

So is it it's a lift station Thanksgiving point Thanksgiving point constructed with the changes in the design and the plan for Thanksgiving Point around the golf station, around the golf course.

Um they change their plans and they build some so there's housing rates out there to go through this lift station.

We feel like it's we've extended its life by doing some retrofit, some upgrades four or five years ago.

Um there's some new technology, it's called an overwatch system, it's a fully enclosed system.

Uh we're asking for $360,000 to upgrade that.

Essentially, it's a 25-year-old facility.

Good on that one?

I don't have any budget requests for the drainage department, a minor one, just a uh increase in supplies and maintenance is the level around $5,000.

So I guess I shouldn't say I don't have any, but just that small one.

Onto the drinking water.

Um an additional maintenance crew.

We've ordered a new hydro excavation truck.

It should be here this year.

Jeremy?

Fingers crossed, it's ordered, it's it's being built, it's on its way.

Um part of the budget request for the hydro excavation truck was an additional crew to run.

So I've worked here since 1997.

In 1997, we had one maintenance crew, the fixed water leaks.

It's 2026, we have one maintenance crew that fixes water leaks in town.

So this is an additional four employees to run that hydro excavation drug.

And the main intent of that hide of that crew is to chase water leaks, non-surficeable water leaks, fix our water loss numbers.

When did you say it's remote two, right?

It's ordered it should be here this summer, late summer.

Okay.

Um the numbers went down from last year, so about two years ago when our numbers really spiked.

We started actively looking for water leaks.

So non-surfacing water leaks all over town.

Um I'll give you an example of one subdivision.

If you go south the roundabout on Main Street, not quite to 1900 south.

There was four employees, they went through that subdivision in about an hour and they found 12 water leaks that didn't surface.

They don't show themselves, you can't see them, you can't hear them.

They pop the meter lids, put their meter key on the setter, and then they can hear water leaking.

So they went and they fixed them when they got to 12, they stopped.

We'll fix these 12, we'll fix the other 10 that pop up in between now and then, and then when they're not fixing water leaks we know about, they go looking for water leaks.

So how long does it take to fix a water leak?

Depends on the water leak, but half a day.

So maybe two a day.

Yeah, they're doing two a day pretty frequently right now.

Just the pop-up.

Do you know what the percentages now would have dropped too?

Um this year it dropped like I can't remember.

I'd have to look.

I thought I heard 34.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, a few percent.

I heard the mayor's been spawning week.

He's been case.

We spent Craig because I call them all the time now.

He's 50-50.

I'm 50-50.

Found one.

Found one, not the other.

It's interesting a perspective that you have when you get into these kind of situations, right?

Because how many you don't drive around the city now looking at a totally different lens than you did before.

You know what I mean?

The same thing when you when we get into this world, you know what I mean?

You start to see like I'll go on a trip and I'll see fire hydrants that are totally different style or color or whatever.

I've been known to take pictures and send back these.

Check these fire items.

Have you ever seen this before?

Just it's a lens changes, right?

My second budget request for the water is a maintenance crew service truck.

So along with the additional crew, it's a truck, tools, parts, pieces, that will be required to mix water leaks as well.

Um the third thing was a satellite leak detection system.

I can't explain how it works.

I still think it's bad, it's magic.

How's that?

Estera is a company that's developed a satellite peak detection system.

Um St.

George City is using it, Santa Clara City is using it.

They've just came from California.

Um the best way I can describe it is treated water.

So drinking water has chlorine in it, reacts with the groundwater in the ground, and it gives off a heat signature that they can see from their satellite.

Um they will help us find water leaks that that are not surfacing, help expedite the process so we don't spend half a day looking for them and then half a day fixing one.

They they this is a year model program for 150,000.

They give us the satellite image, they give us the map, they give us the addresses.

It does we're not asking for a ongoing renewal.

We felt like we could in a year they could give us enough information.

We could keep an additional crew busy for probably two years or more.

Um if we felt like we needed it again in a year, we would come and ask for more money for an additional subscription, essentially.

And when you had presented this, I know you said it was pretty new technology, and you were gonna talk to Santa Clara.

Yeah, we're able to.

So we I called and I talked to Santa Clara City, they've instituted it, and he has nothing but good things to say about it.

Um it works, it's as good as promised.

They Astera sends, they call boots on the ground, right?

They send crews with them to help train city staff, show them how to read the map, show them how to read the image that they give them.

Okay.

Yeah.

New to the WASAS, new to Utah and then new to the Wash Grunt, I know they've talked to Hyde and City, a bunch of the cities up north, Bountiful, Davis County.

I haven't heard whether I have stopped communicating with the salesman from Astera, because I told him it's a budget request.

I wouldn't know the I wouldn't know the answer until after July.

So do you feel like the way that you're detecting leaks isn't sufficient right now?

I think it could be more efficient.

Okay.

Yeah.

Instead of like you said, looking going out and looking for leaks with the a meter key and four guys walking through subdivision, we could do it and be more efficient and cover the whole city with one image in one program.

And this would potentially show you where the worst leaks are.

Yeah.

Yep.

So you could start with those.

Is this an ongoing problem?

Like once you fix them, or it's popping up all the time.

Yeah.

You're hiring a whole nother crew.

And that's a big expense.

Well we're finding is these are poly service lines that are some of them are five years old, some of them are 20 years old, some of them anywhere in between.

There's no rhyme or reason.

It's not focused on one area of town.

They're doing them on Traverse Mountain, they're doing them out by James's house, they're doing them uh down by North Lake.

They're doing them all over town.

See if they're doing them, are you saying developers are choosing that material type?

We we it's a spec material type.

It's it's the material type we spec and require.

It's pretty industry standard.

Provocity uses copper, but I think all of the surrounding cities use the same material type.

Is that that was poly what?

Polypie.

It's a plastic, basically.

It's plastic, and it's only the drinking water.

It's not in the pressurized irrigation system.

What is the pressurized irrigation?

Same.

So the material.

You're not seeing leaks and pressurized irrigation.

Not as much.

Okay.

Not on the service lines.

And Greg's physics of expressed, he's looking to brought that up to our attention because I would have never put that together.

My theory, my theory is it's treated water is the corny.

I don't I don't have any basis for that information other than 99% of them are pressurized or uh drinking water services.

So Michelle, I think maybe I have down to your question a little bit.

So with the additional crew, for now, we anticipate we will keep very busy just chasing water and fixing water leaks.

If they were ever to come a time where they say that there were leaks, we didn't have leaks to fix.

That would be amazing.

These guys are most of these guys, we have really good guys that come from the excavation world.

There are projects potentially that we could do it.

If we were literally had downtime, there are projects that we could potentially do in-house to save money.

Right now, that's not even an option.

There's been numerous that have come up, and I've all come to Grave and go, you think our crews have time to do that?

It's like, nope.

It's like where I we have to hire you, do not have the time.

But I agree with them.

I'm not I'm not saying I don't agree completely, but if there were ever a time that our crews weren't busy, we could keep them busy with other projects that would save us from hiring contractors to do.

Um I I don't see that happening, probably I know it's not in Greg's career.

Um I'm not sure of mine either, but um so that that's that kind of a concern whether they would.

No, yeah, because I'm like if you catch up to it, are we gonna have people that don't have things to do with something?

Yeah, oh we would always have something to do.

I started here on the maintenance group fixed water leaks, and I thought when I'd worked here 15 years, like that's the last galvanized service light will ever replace.

And then woke up the next day.

Yeah, yeah.

So for one truck you mean four people as a crew.

It's not two.

No, it's not two.

It's it's a truck, it's a track hoe, it's a backfill.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's uh it's an entire operation.

It's not just two guys on a truck, if that makes sense.

It's a four-minute crew.

So are other cities that use copper pipes getting this same leakage problem?

I don't know.

Yeah, go ahead.

Provo city is the only city that I know of that specs and uses copper.

Could we change, or is that a mix of different projects?

Yeah, we could consider it um probably more expensive.

Copper's probably a little more expensive.

Copper, the the known challenge that I know copper, if the line gets dented or you know, but you have to be a lot more careful installing it.

Because if it can get kinked, it can get dented and get big, and that'll cause failures in a copper a lot faster.

The whole idea with poly was those state that it wouldn't be an issue.

But the question, and Greg's the one that come up with this is so our our culinary service lines are three-quarter inch, right?

And they're also potentially is it a three-quarter inch or is it treated water or is it a combination of both?

Wherever seeing with the one-inch lines in our PI system, we're just not seeing the same amount of leakage.

And so is it a thicker diet?

Is it a thicker sound signature?

Not the wall.

It's just the diameters or the counters, just slightly bigger.

There's it's good it's an SDR rating, the rating is the same, the wall thickness is the pressure.

Maybe the pressures, the housing it?

The pressure in the drinking water system is like five pounds more than the pressure irrigation.

So there's a slight pressure differential, but diameter pipe.

Yeah, so they're probably the wall thickness is the same.

But even if if you had a smaller pipe, I think the pressure on the walls of that pipe would be greater, right?

On a smaller pipe with higher it wouldn't pressure's determined by head, feet of head, not pipe size.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Um one question I had I had a good conversation with our neighbors out in Saratoga.

Their system, I think it's for culinary.

Um they have a system where they're getting, and given their they have a much newer city, much newer infrastructure, but um, they have a system where they can detect leaks automatically, like per household.

So they'll have like each household has an app where they can actually see their live usage of water, and then the city has kind of a master view of it where they can they'll actually call up homes where they notice that water's been running for four hours and say hey you may have a leak in your house.

Um is that something is that something you plan to implement?

Like, how does that work with leaks?

Technically, we already have that ability.

We're doing it.

That's all manually done by Allison Allison and her department because they have to go through the report.

We are now hiring a company that we'll have a similar portal that people will be able to access, and that will also send us reports that we can automatically generate to the people letting them know hey, we might the water's running excessively, the time it shouldn't be.

You need to check.

Those leaks can are only detecting from the meter to the house.

Right.

So that's not the one type of leaks that we're talking we're seeing in our system that are before the meter.

Is that so that's that's that's great.

That's a project we're working on.

We're we've hired them now.

We're just starting a kickoff meeting this week with them, so we have to have that implemented here in the next few months.

But technically, we already are doing that.

We're just having to send people out to notify them other than doing it, generating it automatically.

Okay.

That's fair to know.

Yeah, the leakage affects bond ratings, correct?

I don't know what it affected our bond rating.

I've been to the I've been in and I presented it though, as we've presented what we're doing to with this new crew and other things that we're doing.

I don't feel like it adversely really affected us, DD.

It can be hard to do it.

Um question we were asked when the when the uh when we the bond graders were interviewing us, that was definitely a question that was asked, and ours was really high.

So it's not a positive thing.

Um I think we got the same bond rating that we had before because other you know there's that's one measurement thing out of every thing.

So um controlling this water would be very, very important.

That's all I can say.

Like it the cost you think of how much how expensive it is to acquire access to water right now, and that's water we don't have to go buy again.

So getting the water we already own it's but I would imagine if we we don't see progress that that could affect it.

I guarantee if we go through one of them and it oh yeah, don't they talk about it, and I guarantee if we go back they'll look and say maybe it doesn't have to be fixed, but they want it to be better.

Yeah, no, I got I got asked that question every interview we have.

I had to explain what we're doing, and they were aware of it, and that there's a proactive matrix we're taking, and that's why after we had you know got the budget request approval last year to purchase the truck, but we knew the trucks take a year or more to get, and so part of that budget request was also for this crew, but we said that so in order to get the truck, we're gonna have to have a crew, but obviously we can't.

We only hire a crew until we have a truck.

So that's why this request is ahead of in front of you this year, is because we actually presented it last year with the truck, but there was we knew that it didn't need to be approved, but it did, but it didn't, if that makes sense.

They all were aware that yes, we would need a crew to let this truck and the equipment, but there was no reason to have in the budget last year because we knew we would be hiring them.

If that makes sense, okay.

Any last questions?

I have two more.

Oh, sorry.

Um this is more this is another another drinking water one.

Pilgrim's Booster Station.

It's a drinking water booster facility that's out by the flat park.

It pumps and supplies about half of the water to Traverse Mountain.

It's the only drinking water booster station in town that has a single pump and motor.

So there's no redundancy in the booster station.

This is a request for 350 to add redundancy, so another pump, another motor to the existing facility, not a bigger building, not more power, nothing like that, just another bottom motor.

Um redundancy for drinking water for travel style.

Let's this might not be appropriate time to say this, but let's pretend that there is development up in West Canyon.

You have to do a whole bunch of other improvements and boosters and all the things, right?

Yeah, and the developer would have to the developer would build if they built in West Canyon, it would likely require another tank, another reservoir, another bush station.

And we don't this was built in 2000, yeah, around 2000, 2003.

So it just when we build new ones, we build one or dump seat.

They have two we don't have two different pumps to get remote or something.

Just in case one fails or something like that, right?

Okay, and we have a second pump and motor at our shop on the shelf.

So if that does burn up, the pump goes bad, we can take it out of service, takes half a day to replace it.

Yeah, um this is a water slash sewer.

This is a utility extension into Willow Park.

It's kind of in conjunction with the parks department.

They would want to get rid of their pit toilet, put an RB dump and flush toilet in Willow Park, and then we would like to extend water mains and put the two existing bathrooms on our drinking water system.

Currently, we inherited Willow Park's drinking water system, which is a well, a tank, and a booster station that services the two bathrooms, and we have spent a significant amount of money over the past two years maintaining pumps and motors for wells and bush stations for two bathrooms, seasonal bathrooms.

So one thing I've talked to my colleagues up here about recently is the Willow Park.

I guess what's our strategy or vision long-term plan for Willow Park?

I think that's a conversation we should have in the next few months.

Um where I'm coming from is how much how much do we invest in this budget in Willow Park, not knowing exactly what we'll do long term in the park, right?

Now some of these things will have to go in no matter what we do with the park.

Um but what are those things versus the just the standard maintenance?

And I think Steve Marchbanks, we talked a little bit about that on the park side, but what about from your side?

Yeah.

From my side, the importance of this is this is this is the city owning a tank, a well, and a booster station for two bathrooms instead of 20,000 houses.

So it I don't have numbers in front of me and I didn't put them in the budget request, but we probably spent 40 to 50,000 replacing booster pumps and doing some well maintenance in the last two years at Willow Park just for those two seasonal bathrooms.

They have their flush toilets septic.

Okay.

Yeah.

But then you're also talking about changing the pit toilet too.

The pit toilet, we would extend the sewer, and that would be a flush toilet that wouldn't be accepted to go in a sewer.

So like along James Land, if we don't know exactly what little park would be in the future, would these improvements be necessary no matter what?

Or is it like a if we extend it?

If we extend these utilities now, what all it does is benefit what you want to do in the future.

It extends the water mains in, it gets the ex this water system and a sewer system extended into the into the park.

If you did more development, if you did another building, if you did improved campsites, all they would all benefit from this utility extension.

And I think I remember Steve saying the same thing when he was doing his and we brought this up.

He said that from his perspective, this would benefit anything we do in there.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a huge improvement for now.

It takes off all the challenges with the system that Rick's talked about, it's going to continue to just be a maintenance train for costs.

If we can get these in those maintenance trains, the costs go down dramatically.

And then it allows you to do anything else you want.

It fixes the current problem and also helps you if you have not do anything in the future with it.

That makes sense.

This is from the Enterprise Fund General Fund.

Yeah.

So and I I have no idea what could potentially happen there, but if for some reason the county decides to sell off the land, I don't know.

And development came in.

That's the only reason I would kind of pause about this, is that then they would pay for this themselves, right?

But that might be so far if they're never having it.

So can the send can we sell the land without I don't think so because we have a lease with them, correct?

So a hundred years.

Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be a little bit more.

So they would have to get I would imagine they would have to get our sign-off before we could go.

And then we can review it by refund.

That'd be a part of the deal to make a part of the soil.

Yeah.

Um the other challenge with the system doesn't want to stop chlorinated.

Right.

So we've there's always a risk that it a bacteria shows up in the water system, right?

And then we have a huge cost trying to retrofit the system to chlorine it.

If we put our just on our system out, all kinds of those challenges go away.

Is it connected to the water building out there?

The or the parks building.

The the parks building is connected to our system, yeah.

And when Steve built the new parks building, we extended the water means in.

This is just a uh I have a footage on here, 950 more feet further west.

I think I would be interested, like Michelle is just figuring out what the differences with copper and the poly.

Just I don't know if it's more if it's gonna be more durable or anything like that, but just since we're that's just maybe something I'm curious about.

Yeah.

So any other questions?

One more.

Oh but it's not a budget request, it's just a matter of fact, it's a light item increase for water share rentals, water from center Utah, water from irrigation companies, assessments, they all go up.

It's just we're asking just every year we do a budget with an incremental increase to keep up with the contract amount.

So it's not something you have control of something I have control over the price is set, you know, and we take it, they sell it to us, and we pay for it.

Okay.

That's it for me.

We're good.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and take a seven-minute break to two.

That's oddly specific.

So I would say seven minutes to give everybody a little bit.

It just seems like we can connect all the fleet requests back to other requests.

It's not really your request.

This is kind of how it feels from my side of the table.

So yeah, is there anything though that we can do to support your department other than just fulfill other people's requests?

So I do have two things.

Um if we don't replace, we have to repair, and that's why we requested more mechanics.

Okay.

And then the other one is we've got some trucks and traders that are getting old enough that we can't get parts for like a fire truck, you're four years out on a build time.

So we need to start getting those in the process to replace those.

Those are the only two concerns I have.

For tomorrow, I know there's a fleet surplus or I was gonna actually ask you about this anyways, Colleen.

What can you explain that?

Like what is the surplus?

It's the vehicles that we've replaced, and we're we have to sell it through auction.

So they're like old vehicles if you're gonna auction them off.

Okay.

So are we repairing more than replacing stuff?

No.

We requested I think it was just right around 18 million for replacement.

I think we're approved for about five ish.

Have we ever considered doing so?

I know there's like commercial truck leasing.

We should have done the leasing quite a bit.

Yeah, like we're it's it's basically like a two-year thing, right?

Where you get a brand new truck, use it for two years to swap it out.

The problem that we ran into, I don't mean to interrupt you, but the problem we ran into is they want us to pay for the vehicle up front, and then that's a uh guaranteed buyback, is how their leasing works.

So we we're still putting the money up front.

If we would turn them over in two years, we would probably get about the same amount versus what they're doing.

Um, with the fleet police vehicles, um my understanding is that we might get these through another mechanism than purchasing them through the city.

Are we a grant comes to that's still yet to be determined?

We've cleared a major hurdle by having our legislators put it on their ask list, but we we haven't gotten a response yet.

Okay, no win, we'll know.

Uh, but it wouldn't affect this budget year anyway.

It would be next next to school year.

Well, and I would maybe speak up just a little bit.

Regardless, we would still have that annual cost for that vehicle because it's gonna need to be replaced if you get someday, and not uh I'll speak for Jeremy a little bit.

Fleet is underfunded by probably quite quite a bit.

It's just been hard to it's just super expensive, and we've been trying to put we put some more money into it, but um the cost they replace those vehicles on schedule is we're just had a hard time getting there.

What determines the schedule that when you replace them?

So we we do two different ways.

Um Dean and I have put together a list that that based on years, we replace them, and then we have uh a point system that we use based on the APWA, which is mileage, um age, uh amount of repairs, understood ones I can't think of about my okay.

Can I ask?

And maybe this is more for the mayor and Jason on the tentative budget, but you requested 18 million vehicle replacements.

We ended up with five.

I just want to understand kind of like how we landed on that number of the objects, just the gap because we think we can get we can continue to band it forward, but I don't know that we can band aid it forward forever.

Um that's kind of where we landed.

Five million is the base really ultimately the base need that I saw, and I know Jason and Dean kind of looked at it too the same way.

Yeah, we have I mean, there's been a lot of years we put money from capital into fleet.

In other words, if ideally we would have this amount that goes into the fleet from all of our different departments and different funds in in a year, and that would be enough for Jeremy to fix some cars, replace the cars on schedule, and since that money's it's easier from the enterprise funds, it's harder from the general fund because it's competing with firefighters and and police officers and stuff like that.

And so we use capital money sometimes.

So he's like instead of having that go through the normal process, we said, hey, we got a surplus, we're gonna use $500,000, $750,000 of that capital money to buy a batch of uh vehicles, and if we get the grant, the federal grant, that'd kind of be the same thing.

It would it really helps, but in the long run, we need a steady amount of money going in there, and I wish I had a good answer on how to get there.

I mean, it's it's not it's not hard math, it's just again that money's competing with other things for for resources.

So you're saying that the departments are supposed to be paying for their fleet, but there's kind of like a capital upfront cost that fleet pays, and then the other departments are kind of paying off their own.

Yeah, ideally Jeremy's what I understand.

Yeah, ideally, Jeremy's budget would almost be like it's a third party.

James kind of talked about a leasing company.

It's almost like Jeremy would be the leasing company.

The police would come and say I need a police vehicle, and he'd tell them all that's $9,000 a year or whatever.

And they so they would always pay him $9,000 a year, with the idea that money would be enough to fix the car and get him a new car in five years or seven years or whatever they're interested in.

And so right now there's just not enough money in those departments going into the fleet.

It's easy like I said, it's easier to get it from power or water, but if it's police, I've got to do I hire a police officer with that, or do I put another hundred thousand dollars towards their fleet allocation?

And so we just tend to see.

That's a hard year.

That's probably the hardest budget thing.

I know we talk a lot about a lot of budget things.

For me, that's probably the hardest thing to get to.

How do we when we acquire vehicles?

Right?

Like if you look at the police vehicles or mostly fours and then a couple randoms in there.

Like, do we have an arrangement with Ford?

And is that the most cost effective if we looked at others?

We've looked at other vehicles.

Um, and the same if I can jump in.

The other thing that's hurt us is COVID killed the Ford contract.

Ford used to supply vehicles at um you know, for government entities, like they would sell them to us cheaper than the dealer could buy them back in 2018, and that ended with COVID, and it's not really bad.

But we're almost paying full market price more.

And which is significant, right?

Like I I'm gonna throw out a number that's probably wrong, but like maybe instead of $35,000 for a car, we might have been paying $28,000 for a car, like that much less because it was a national contract, not a local contract.

What's up, what's a one if F-150 right now is $54,000, correct?

So F-150.

If we buy one F-150 for a police vehicle or for just a truck.

A police vehicle, you're when it's equipped, you're gonna be about 90, 80 five.

But what's the stock truck?

So we buy the truck.

Yeah.

56.

Yeah, it's right there, 54, 55.

We're yeah, we used to get them so much cheaper.

And and part of our issue with fleet, too, I think that we run into is supply and demand because there's there's I don't know that the supply is fully back to where it was prior to the cars lost a lot a couple years ago.

Like we can't, now we have to order.

You can't just go buy them.

The other thing we did last year or two years ago, we did an audit, they and looked at all the uses for the different vehicles, and where we could, we switched to a uh more cost-effective vehicle to a lot of mavericks.

I don't know if you've seen those wrapped down.

Yeah, people didn't love them at first, but um it saved us a lot of money, and it continues to do so.

So yeah, we've tried to get creative that way.

Well, and I'm guessing what also extends the life of vehicle is if it has regular maintenance.

And I remember in the meeting you were saying that there are many late delayed oil changes or maintenance things, and is there an incentive to have that done or a consequence if it doesn't happen?

Yeah, maybe that's something we can look at.

I don't have a I don't know.

I'm just asking as a lot of people.

Well, currently it's up to the department head.

I send the department head for notification once a week.

Okay.

And that's up to them to really do anything.

I would love to see us do something, have some sort of a comp consequence.

I just don't know what that would be.

I don't I don't know.

I just wondering.

Okay.

So I'm gonna look at the consequence to not performing your maintenance.

Correct.

Sometimes just making that information available to airport departments.

And then you gotta drive a maverick to the city.

Yeah, you know, downgrade.

You get a bike, an e-bike.

Yeah, e bike.

Um also remember that there was a significant amount of money spent on idling.

It was in I just off the top of my head, I think it was 292,000-ish dollars per for the year.

Right.

And I don't know if that's something that like it can be explained or addressed, or like if that's just like that's just like how it is, you know, that's just normal.

I don't know if it's police.

I don't know who it is.

I could get an accurate report for the year and let you know which one department.

I mean, if you think it's like this is a normal thing that you know, I I know that people are in their trucks and this is kind of like their office of wait from home for some of them.

And for others, maybe not.

I don't really know.

I just am curious about the the cost.

If it's an ongoing cost that we're kind of funding, I mean that's significant.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Maybe any ideas?

Especially at higher gas prices.

Well, yeah, I mean that's something I'm having a conversation with my the drivers at my home.

Like you got a carpool because this isn't working for me.

So there is some instances where item is necessary.

I also think that we have a lot of wasted idol.

Okay.

Um that report is also sent to the department heads once a week.

So they see the actual hours of what over the week, how how long their vehicles have been idling for, and it breaks it down per vehicle.

Well, and I wonder if it's weather dependent or yeah, depart depends on the department.

Like I would just it would be interesting, and then if certain departments are doing that more, then that's costing them more, right?

Or is they pay for their own.

Okay.

Just curious.

Depending on the final budget, some of these some of these requests will change, right?

Like the SRO for the police since that fell through with that school 65,000.

That's true.

Okay.

Any other questions for Jeremy?

I know this one's this one's kind of a fun one because it's mixed literally in every department.

But for the um one other question.

Um so most departments have you know, they'll have a little um allocation for like fleet fund charges or something like that.

So that's what we're looking talking about.

And then travel and training is not under you.

But I understand.

Um but if they're getting if they're also getting some kind of allocation for um, yeah, that it's just basically what's within like 50 miles or something, is what we're kind of funding as a fleet, is that what I understand?

Of like where they would travel.

They're not taking the they're not driving the cars any like they are.

They are, okay.

So we have uh uh police go down to St.

George a lot in Las Vegas, and they'll drive their police vehicles down there.

Okay.

But normal departments don't.

Okay.

But I hold up.

Yeah, it's and I police and fire don't take them all that often.

I don't know that it's uh in fact, not all of our police cars are doing that, but there may be a few a year maybe, but yeah.

I don't know.

If they're going down to like a training and all the trainees are in St.

George, right?

They might drive a city vehicle down there instead of getting it.

Vehicle reimbursement, like in Liley for some or something, too.

That would but those aren't covered in the fleet allocations, are just they look at the number of vehicles and the type of vehicles.

There's a formula that calculates that that should be it's just some funds in general fund.

We don't have enough to put in the full amount of the I just don't I think we were talking we were talking about this last time about how much you get married for travel, like kind of headphone and the and the get you know, all of that, and we were talking about my where we would do where we do mileage or not and and those sort of things, and so I'm just kind of trying to ask questions about the process and and the decisions making processes.

When I was looking, it looks like different department heads get different amounts.

Um car allowance money, that's like allowance.

Does that not have to be not under okay?

Good to know.

Okay.

You done?

Yeah, are you done?

Jeremy, I think we're done.

I know Rachel.

I'm sharpening my elbows.

I'm ready.

Dan, come on down.

Oh, hi Dan.

How are you?

Very good, thank you.

Good.

Well uh let's turn to direct fire away.

Any questions for Dan?

Can you just explain your request, please?

Your budget requests.

Can you go through that?

Yeah.

Um let's start with the legacy center.

So we have a few lion item increases that we have requested for the legacy center.

If they there was a couple that were 3% or lower just based off of cost of uh supplies going up, so we don't have a lot of a write-up for two or three of those.

If it was more than three percent, then we submitted a sheet to go with it.

So the first one would be overtime.

Um our previous amount for overtime is $1,500.

Um we have an individual that does the um maintenance for the pool, and he gets um called out quite a bit, and he requested that he get paid call-out time for that.

So we visited with HR, and they told us that he probably qualified for that.

We probably shouldn't have been paying.

So that's probably the bulk of where that comes from.

Um, yeah.

Um the next line item that was an increase was only a thousand dollars, but it was more than three percent.

It was just for some increased fees for the uh software we use to send out emails to our patrons.

And so that was an additional thousand dollars.

Um the next one um was professional and technical, and that was for credit card processing fees, those who have risen, and so that's where that comes from.

We don't have a lot of control over what those fees are.

I don't know.

I had a question about that.

Yes, I think we talked about it as well.

For the I know there's a couple ways we can either eat that cost, which is what the slime item is, or we can do with some private vendors do where they just charge an extra two percent, right?

So the whatever the credit card fees are.

Yeah, whatever the fee is for if you're using a card, especially a credit card, then that that fee is passed to the buyer.

Is that an option?

Yeah, so probably the the best way I would describe that is sorry.

Um best way to describe that is when we open the legacy center, we built those fee or those costs into the fees so that they were paying those.

Um I I think there's some a philosophy behind not having that as a separate fee because we actually want them to pay with credit card.

It actually in reality costs us less paying those fees than it does paying our employees to take cash or to handle money in different ways.

Um credit cards are a little they're faster, we can have less people at the front desk.

We um encourage people to pay for registration online and use credit card fees.

So I guess the answer to that is I just we would answer that through raising fees, not necessarily um having that show as a separate fee and having those numbers be rounded um to pennies, so they're rounded to the nearest dollar.

Then so yeah, I do think again when when we originally set fees 25 years ago when we opened the center, those fees were um considered in what those costs were, and we just raised those fees along the way.

So I don't know if that answers your question, James.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And you know, not necessarily to encourage people to use cash because that brings in a whole other set of right, and there's more than cash, but but the most efficient for us as far as our largest cost is our employees, and so we do everything we can to try and keep those down, and trying to make those transactions as efficient as possible helps us in that in that regard.

So have you.

It just makes me curious to see why, just because I think that I've seen I've seen this in other public entities as well as private entities of having this little charge in you you know as the consumer it's it's annoying, right?

Yeah, they call it a convenience.

Like you go to Lyndon pool someplace, and you're like, well, I mean, it's not them charging me this.

It's you can see it's the 1.7 whatever percent or whatever it is.

So I think it it in my mind I I think it's worth exploring.

It makes sense because it's just being more transparent, and it's also it's not the city that we're we're increasing these fees.

This is correct.

The credit card companies, right?

So that would be an advantage.

I probably would still choose to book my kids' stuff online.

Just I would see the whatever percent be.

That's just me for conveniency.

But I actually had uh the last conference I had a conversation with some directors and did just kind of a straw poll with those that were around me, and there were probably 10 of us.

And I think there was only one city that actually showed those separately, probably for a lot of the reasons that I said, but I think their reason for showing that was so that people they're not like we're raising.

Pretty much what you said, Rachel, so that there was it was a little more transparent where that cost came from.

So there are some advantages as well.

And so I know Alpha and Alpine when Skyers does fundraisers, a success fund, and it there's always a fee, and it's because it's the now I understand it's online you're donating and it's the convenience fee or part card fee or whatever.

And is that only for credit cards that were also debit?

It's it's credit card and debit cards.

Correct, Allison?

I'm sorry, why uh our fees in in professional and technical are for credit cards and debit cards both, correct?

Yeah, anyone who pays with the credit card, debit card or electronic check.

I mean, credit cards and debit cards have a merchant fee on top of the transaction fees.

But our payment process charges us per transaction fee.

So are also the costs are going up, not because our fees are necessarily being raised, it's the number of transactions that we're processing, which means that we're processing more transactions online than we are.

Right, and again, in a lot of ways that's positive because the more the more we can push those those fees online, the the less staff I need to stand there and take the money if that makes sense.

So in some ways it's it's a positive.

Okay.

Uh all right, that was professional and technical.

Um next was birthday party fees.

Um, this is a $3,000 increase that we're requesting.

That's really just based off of volume.

We're doing more and more birthday parties.

So we spent $9,000 in 2023.

This last year we spent $13,000.

Um our revenue also uh aligns with that, um, but much more so.

We went from Frank, let me look it up.

I think it ended up being oh, here it is.

Uh we went from $26,000 to $38,000, so a $12,000 increase for an increase of $3,000 in costs.

So really we want to do more birthday parties because that helps reduce subsidy and ends up being more of a profit for us.

That's great.

Um, okay.

Yeah, that's all of the line item increases.

Were there any other questions about any light item increases for the legacy center?

No, I do have a question about the study.

If you are you can't do that.

That's the next one with the question.

What does that study mean to you and your department?

What are you expecting to get out of it?

What are what is that going to do for you?

Great question.

Um I I think this really originated from city council.

This this idea of of doing um uh a study um to look at uh I keep wanting to say feasibility, that's the second part of it.

Um an operations assessment.

And I think the idea is you have an outside company come in.

There are companies that do that, kind of take a look at what you're doing and see if there are areas where we can be more efficient, almost like that conversation we just had about credit card fees.

Are there ways that we can be smarter about how we're doing things?

Can we can we lower our costs for staff by paying a little bit more in credit cards and overall save more money?

And so um we're not opposed to that.

We're we're happy to have an outside entity come in and look at that.

We we are heavily involved in the Utah Recreation and Parks Association, so we compare notes with other cities and and and try and learn best practices.

And we know that we we're we do fairly well in that area, but we're not we're we're not perfect and we're not opposed to having someone else come in and take a second look and giving the suggestions, and so that doesn't bother us at all.

There is a cost obviously associated with doing that.

Um the second part of that is um when we did the parks and recreation master plan uh that was completed in November.

One of their recommendations is is with a facility like the legacy center.

Um they said you typically want to have a renovation, a major renovation of a facility like that every 15 years.

We're 25 years in without having had that happen.

If you don't do those renovations, you tend to have a higher subsidy.

So when we first opened um 25 years ago, I've been here the whole time.

Um we were kind of proud of where we were with that subsidy.

We were really one of the lowest subsidized facilities in the state.

But as time has gone by as you have the facilities that start to start to age, if we don't do things to um keep up with the times, uh freshen it up and and make sure we have uh more that some of the areas that I think where we're hurting is um if you look at like the private sector, you look at a place like 24 hour fitness or I always say gold scum, uh VASA.

Um Teleg done this for a long time when I want to call it gold scene.

Um most of what they have is cardio and waiver equipment.

That's where they make all of their money.

And if you look in our area, we're really kind of lacking in there as a part of that feasibility study or uh parks and rec master plan.

They identified those as areas that we were really lacking.

And so as a part of a renovation, we might be able to add to those profit centers in our facility that will help us as far as a subsidy as well.

And so that's just an opportunity to come in and look at both of those items and see where we can make some improvements and how it might impact us.

Um one example I would use would be Provo.

They were operating some older facilities and we built they spend a lot of money, they spent 40 million dollars to build a facility, but they're actually breaking even with their rent center right now, which is highly unusual, right?

So yes.

Well, so we last meeting we talked about um the re reno or the redoing of station eighty-one, and uh 300,000 was thrown out as like an amount needed to just to study that issue.

So I think I look at the 100,000 and I understand like the operation assessment, but if we're looking at a major renovation, I'm not sure if the hundred thousand is gonna meet that like are you gonna get what you need out of that with that amount of money, or do you need something similar to the eighty-one conversation, which was more like three hundred thousand?

So I think that's a good question.

What I reached out, so the company that I approached to get a budget number from was V CBO, that's the same um company that runs the architecture firm for this facility that we're sitting in.

And they do this for Rec centers quite a bit.

And so I reached up to them to get that information, and the number they gave me, he said to do both of those.

He said sixty to a hundred thousand would be sufficient to be able to do that.

So is that design drawings?

No.

All that all that does is come back and say, okay, if if you were to renovate the facility, here's what we think would help you to be more financially successful.

And then you would actually have to go in and spend uh money on top of that later to go and get drawings and and see what that looks like.

This is really the preliminary step before you make any determination whether you want to do something like that.

And does this include the Curtis Center and that pools?

No.

So that was just for the legacy center.

I'm just gonna get to that.

So when we were in the budget meeting before Jason, he suggested that we we might want to look at that with the um with and add the outdoor pool to that.

So that could increase that amount.

So it doesn't include the outdoor pool?

It doesn't.

That was just the amount for the legacy center.

So to do the feasibility study.

So if if if we I guess that was one of the questions I wanted to ask, if we want to look at that and we could do that for the Curtis Center, for uh the outdoor pool and the legacy center, we probably would need to get an updated number there.

Um I mean he's he told me sixty to a hundred thousand to do that.

We could probably fit the outdoor pool in that.

I don't know, but if we're if we're for sure if we're adding the Curtis Center that we'd want to add more to that.

Why do we want the to add the Curtis Center?

I mean, we just went and toured it, it seems like it's it's great.

I know you have um you know goals of getting the city more involved there, but I'm not sure why we would need to involve that in this discussion.

It seems more of like a legacy center outdoor pool conversation.

Well, why was the Curtis Center why does the why does the city have the Curtis Center?

What's the process?

What's the vision?

That's a long story.

Well, okay, shortly.

I'm happy to give I'm happy to give that long story short, there was an individual that approached a previous mayor a couple of mayors ago asking if um she has a group that's a nonprofit group that's um adult individuals with disabilities and was looking for a home for them.

And she asked if the if she could get money donated to get a facility built if she could then gift it to the city and have the city run it.

And the and every year the city spends over $500,000 running that facility, but we don't have much going on in there besides.

We're gonna get advantage of of uh other programming that we could run out of there.

Um so I put together kind of what those costs would be if we were to run that fully, and I think as a part of this, there were four options.

We're basically doing option one, which is the lowest option.

Um option four um would roughly cost us a little over a million dollars, probably one point one, one point two million dollars.

Um that's cost and and then recovery uh I have sorry.

I I I um I can pull that up in a minute and we look at kind of where that was, but I mean we have the pro we have the programming space from what four o'clock on or something.

We're we're paying for the building that's sitting there empty.

Well, that's not true.

So with option one, we do treat it like we treat uh um like a high school.

Big school.

Right.

So uh if um what for junior jazz and for some of our programming, we'll have a site supervisor go and open the building, we'll run um some of those programs just in the gym area and then close it right behind them almost like when we're what happens at the high school rent that space from the school district.

So um there's definitely an opportunity there, but uh to back to your question, Emily.

I think the difference that there is that's a new facility, and we're talking about opening, you know, what the cost would be associated with opening that, and I've given some estimates for that.

We could bring someone else in that could do that as well and and uh check my math.

And um I I I do think that I I gave some estimates of what option number one was gonna cost, and those have been fairly close to where we're running.

So that's kind of we're in the ballpark.

Yeah, I feel like maybe adding the Curtis Center to this study wouldn't be fully necessary.

It's more so the outdoor pool and the legacy center, because the estimates you have for the Curtis Center seem to be hitting target.

So the whole half of that study is to really address and when we have an outdoor pool that's 46 years old, as a part of that study, they told us that the life of that pool was done.

And when we get to the pool, I need to give you some an update on that as well.

So yeah, I I think that was my question.

Just what was your expectations out of the study, and then um did you have enough?

Yeah.

And what I'm hearing is you might need another 50,000.

Yeah, I would have to ask some questions if we want to add, depending upon what we want to have.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yep.

Okay, any other questions uh about that first capital item that we looked at.

Um, some of these we can go through pretty quickly.

Uh the second one.

Sorry, let me get there.

Uh second one is a boiler replacement.

This really comes from Steve and his guys.

Uh we we um had some trouble even having hot water in this last year, and he's telling us that we need to replace there are two boilers.

This would be one boiler that we would replace of the two.

Um they would just purchase the boiler and they would install it themselves to save some money.

So that's really what that one is.

Um next one is fencing.

I don't know if you guys got the pictures.

If you guys saw that.

Basically, that fencing is the original fencing around around the pool at the legacy center, and it's rusting out.

And so um, yeah, we just it's time to replace it.

It's 21 years worth of.

So okay.

Stop me when you have a question on something, and I'm just gonna buzz through this.

I think that's I think there was one more that was in the mayor's uh budget.

Uh it was uh structural beam repair in the leisure pool area.

So um uh it uh in a previous budget year we actually wrapped some of the beams that are around the lap pool with some stainless steel.

They were corroding, and we really it took us several years to really find an answer of how to fix that.

We think that that's working well for those.

So this would be uh adopting that same principle to some of the beams that are in the middle of the pool area, it's above the tile wall, have some of those larger beams in there, those are rusting and we continue to grind and paint and at some point we need to find some other solution to try and preserve those.

That's really what that's about.

Okay.

Any additional questions about Legacy Center?

Well, back to the study, sorry, I just thought of one mayor thank you for me.

Yeah.

Um if we know a renovation is needed.

Why would we spend money on this feasibility study when we already have the answer?

I think it was linked to questions.

Operations for for how that would impact us on upper on the operations.

So we we do know we're past, we're overdue, we're 10 years overdue.

So I mean, potentially we could save that money if council said, hey, we just want to skip that that part and just go to getting plans.

Um I don't I don't know that that's wise.

I would still recommend that we go through that process because I think they can have, I think some of the value in that study is they help us to understand um uh what areas we want to renovate first, what can be most profitable.

Again, um adding to our cardio room, our weight room, and our uh fitness classes, those tend to be more uh are gonna have more of an impact on our bottom line.

And so um getting some of that information could be valuable of what that might look like and how that might help save us so many.

So I think spending the money before you spend a couple million dollars to do a renovation, um I think there should be some value in it.

For sure.

I'm just hearing you say the answers that I think this study will give us.

That's why I'm thinking I think you know what the study is gonna say.

Emily, it's a fair question.

I think it's a great question.

Um I do think the value comes in for knowing what to target when we look at that renovation.

Does that confidence that we are doing the thing?

Okay.

And I think what's key is one thing that I think would be good with this feasibility study or whatever we call it, is getting maybe a clearer vision from the elected officials on what that facility should accomplish, right?

Because we talk about making money, there's a lot of things Dan could do to make money, make more money on it, but it may not be it may or may not be what the vision that the council has for a city recreation facility.

So for example, if the idea is this is gonna provide opportunities for youth in the city that maybe aren't on the elite soccer teams or whatever, like that's that's a vision for the city and a mission, but it's probably not the most profitable.

Does that make sense?

And so I think there really needs to be a discussion from you to set what that mission is.

Because I think Dan kind of it's like he's trying to accomplish his mission, but then being told it's losing money and it's it's hard for him to assume different messages.

Super huge point.

If if we're just about if it's just about making money, then we'll just go open VASA, right?

They they cater to single individuals and not families, and it's mostly around cardio weights and and fitness classes.

And we're really more about family, about community, and about providing opportunities for kids and and the value, there's and I think I've shared this with the council before, but there was a study done in 2023 that showed that every one dollar you spend in recreation facilities like this and parks will save you four dollars in police costs and some other costs down the road.

And so we can decide where we want to spend that money, right?

We want to spend that money is not that I'm wanting to take any money from our police.

I think that money is needed, and I'm not I'm not I don't discount any of that, but but where do we want to spend our money?

Do we want to spend our money in trying to reform individuals that are that are for crimes, or do we want to try and spend that money on places where they can go and spend valuable time?

And so I'm happy to share the information from that study with the council, and you guys can poke holes in it and look at it and see if you know what you think about the information that they provided.

But um that's not the only study to provide that there's studies like this that are done fairly regularly to show that information.

And so I think back to back to your point, I guess.

And there's a balance to that, and you have to know what the balance is between providing an amenity for the city's residents and not taking up too much of the city's resources.

And I think this study could maybe help it helps us in balancing that, right?

Well, and I think that's one one of the reasons that I I think we should include the Curtis Center because that space that we have that we're not utilizing, it falls under recreation.

It's gyms, it's gym space or programming space, what you can call it, and it would be great to see and have someone tell us how we can best utilize that.

And you know, I mean, right now we're you're we're just paying for it, but no one's we're not really utilizing it.

So I don't think it hurts us to price it out and see what cost difference would be, because I can't imagine there would charges that much more.

I'll have them itemize it and add both both the Curtis Center and I I think there is some economy of scale when they're doing this type of a study, so I don't know that we're talking about a lot more.

Well, when we're talking about recreation too, I mean you utilize park space too, so they're gonna be looking at that.

And if you're talking a lot about you know, baseball, soccer, what are the outdoor sports?

Um yeah, I mean, I think I would like to find a little bit more of a balance so that every year we're not continually sinking more money into like more in the red, to be honest, with the legacy center and recreation programming.

I know that they're you can do it, you can do a balance where we are providing these recreational facilities and we have time, but we also like let's pretend we have open space at the Curtis Center, you can rent that out to a club who's gonna be paying a lot more top dollar to help balance out some of that recreate rec space.

Do you know do you know what I mean?

I I can I can see that happening.

I like I've said before, I have several friends who own private gym spaces, fast all gyms who who have to find that balance too with the different clubs and just open time for people to come scrimmage or whatever.

So yeah.

Oh, clubs.

I was just gonna say that like I don't think anybody expects rec centers to like make a profit, right?

Like it's just not it's not a thing, it's it truly is an amenity.

And my understanding based on our previous conversations is about 75% of the subsidy is for the pools, right?

I don't know if I know what a per what the percentage is, but but in a rec center pools, which are and and I don't I don't want to make this sound negative for pools because you don't see pool pools are are the most expensive part of what we're doing in a rec center.

They're they're the biggest loser when when it comes to financials in rec center.

But but they're probably one of the most important things we do because you don't see them replicated anywhere in the private sector because they are so expensive.

And so I I don't want that to sound like a negative thing.

I think it's a positive thing that we're doing pools, and as a part of the parks and rec master plan, um we had 79% of the people that were polled, it was this statistic statistically relevant study to represent our city.

79% of those individuals that were polled said that they would be willing to spend additional money for additional recreation opportunities.

And one of the higher priorities for them was pools.

And so pools cost money.

So again, it comes back to that balance a little bit about you don't you don't see pools at VASA.

Sometimes they have one or two lanes to try and have to make up for not having pools, but they don't have pools for open plunge, they don't have pools for swimming lists, they don't offer that stuff.

That's no high high schools, right?

Our high school swim teams are key, and and you know, having enough space for those is a big issue.

Yeah, and I'd like to just chime in that I don't like how politicized the legacy center becomes every two years with every election cycle.

I feel like it causes so much tension with the public and with our city, and if the goal is to provide recreation, slamming on how much it doesn't make is confusing, I think, to residents and also to city the staff, right?

Like what is your goal?

What are you supposed to be doing?

If we're out every two years saying, oh well, they don't do enough, but then we're not but residents want more.

I just think it's getting political when it doesn't need to be, which is maybe why we should align.

Well, let's go back to the history of that because I believe the residents voted to not build it.

And then it was built.

So I don't know if that's accurate.

Okay.

So I think there was a $19 million facility that was put to vote for the citizens, which included way more than the rec center.

So they did not they did vote that down.

And then the rec center was built separate from that with the um with a special revenue bond, I believe.

You probably tell us a little bit more about how it's not.

When that's a geo bond, and it failed.

And then the council voted to do it as a revenue bond.

Right.

But again, the geobond was not for a rec center.

The geobond was for a library, for a rec center, it was for four or five multiple things.

So I don't I don't know if that's accurate to say that the rec center failed.

I I think it was one of five.

I just think that it was politicized many years ago.

Yes.

And there's still those feelings from decades ago that are there.

Sure.

Yeah, it just doesn't redo it over the years, and it's 2.6 million dollars it's getting a contribution from the general fund.

I think that's significant.

We're looking at tax increases every two years.

So it to me, and I you know I've asked for this a long time.

Let's reduce that at least a little.

A million dollars would say this, you know, probably the tax increase this year.

So it's whether it's political or not, it's to me it's financial, at least financial sense to to really look at it.

But I I did have some questions about the pools.

Um there is uh 430,000 from swim program revenue, and the the outdoor the expenses for the two pools, the outdoor pool, and maybe I'm agreeing as right, the expenses, so I guess ongoing, not capital, is like 156,000, the indoor pools 157,000, the outdoor pool get the revenues is 225,000.

So are the the cost the the capital improvements that you have to make each year to repair or upgrade or whatever, because it it looks like they're doing well.

Um as far as Michelle, their their wages are included in the salaries and wages for the like on the first page.

We're not seeing that in the revenue.

Okay, yeah.

I think also you're comparing revenue for the cost of the outdoor pool.

That revenue also includes um their membership costs, which at the legacy center you're comparing those membership costs against the entire rec center, not against just the outdoor pool, uh, the operation costs for the outdoor pool.

So I don't think those are apples to apples, I guess is what I'm saying.

Well that that's what I'm like helping me understand where the expenses are.

So it's the employees is not included in the revenue.

Well, it's included in the cost and the expense and then the expenditures.

And maybe one also one other clarification Michelle is we're talking about the the subsidy for the legacy center, the 2.6 million dollars is for all of recreation, not for the legacy center.

That includes the outdoor pool, that includes the legacy center, that includes uh when we've done the um ice rate.

So if you look this last year you didn't put the previous center.

Yeah.

So they outward that also includes outdoor concessions at the ballpark.

So is it fair to say that the legacy center loses two million dollars a year?

Um yeah, honestly, I don't in in the most recent years I don't know what that is with with the way we have that tracking as it have to look at it.

I can put more more information works.

Yeah, there could be more information.

Yeah, we're all the same.

If I could rephrase what you just said, yeah, I think an accurate thing would be to say the city's recreation programs cost the general value.

2.6 million dollars.

2.6 million.

Currier.

It's everything.

Well, and that's again back to the political nature of it all.

When when you know, we just we're told by our communications director that we represent the city.

So when we get online and we talk about the deficits of these departments and things, I just think we need to be really clear, and and we all need to be on the same page of what these are and what they include.

Because it causes confusion among the residents, and then it causes confusion for staff, and that's why the council needs recreation.

Yeah.

We're happy to answer Michelle.

Not a yeah.

Not afraid to get any information that you're looking to.

So can you can you provide the update on the outdoor pool?

Yes.

Okay, so that's kind of the next budget to look at.

One of the things, so last week, one of the challenges of running an outdoor pool is at the end of the season, you put a cover on it, and then eight months later you peel back that cover and see what condition your pool is in because it's another eight months.

Um running through that process uh last week.

Um the liner associated okay.

Let me back up.

The history of the outdoor pool was built in 1980, it was a gunite plastered pool.

Like what do you think of when we were a kit pool?

Um I think around I think it was 2014.

I wasn't ever able to go confirm for sure what the day was on that.

But uh now, or sorry, not 2014, 2012.

I believe there's the date that we put this liner in.

So Mirtha pools have been kind of what um uh cities are going to when they build pools in the last 30 years.

I think that's gonna be changing in the future, by the way.

We'll discuss that too.

But um, so uh I around 2012, I think it was 2012, um, we put a line, a Mertha liner on the inside of the old gunite pool as opposed to replastering the pool.

Fast forward when they peeled back the cover this year, that liner had had um unattached in most of the deep end, there was a tear, and water was getting in underneath it.

So uh we uh approached the company that put that liner in.

So Mirtha liners is only one company that's authorized to put those in.

Murtha is a company in Italy that does all of these pools here in the United States.

Um they're telling us that we can't we can't repair that liner, it would need to be a replacement.

So we have another company that we deal with for a lot of our pool stuff that uh gave us a quote that they could, and they believe that we can come in, just take out the liner.

Um they they went in and kind of peeled back some areas of the liner to see what condition.

So Dean and Alison don't even know this yet.

This is like news as of late last week.

And well, actually, this morning, as far as what these costs are, but um the they peeled back some areas of that liner, and they believe that the um gunite or plaster is in good enough condition with some minor repairs that we can get through another season is open this summer.

The cost associated with that is they said $15,000 to remove that liner.

There is a little bit of a risk that they find something under there that we're not aware of, and then there's some cost associated with that.

But we're basically if we're gonna open the pool for the summer, that's a cost that we need to incur.

So it wouldn't have a light.

What's that?

It wouldn't have a light.

So it wouldn't have a liner, we would go back to that gunite um plaster pool that we had prior to the liner.

And they there I know one of the areas that was an area kind of in the shallow end where it was kind of rough, we'd have to grind that down so we're not scuffing up feed.

And that's our best option for getting the pool open for this summer.

Okay.

Can we do that in a timely manner?

Like what's the timetable?

He said as soon as he gets the okay, he could get it done in 10 days.

That would require that's with us doing some help and some man work of hauling off all of the liner.

They would they would do all the technical work.

We would have to provide the manpower to haul off the liner, have to have a dumpster provided that we'd put it in and then haul it off to the gun.

So again, there's a little bit of a risk there because we don't know for sure what's underneath that liner.

It's been 15 years.

Um the maintenance uh the person that's over maintenance at the outdoor pool was there when I was putting my talk to him.

He seems to think that we would be okay.

And so I think I think that's the right answer.

If we want to open the pool this summer, that's that's how it's gonna happen.

Um and then we'd have to look at long term, what does that look like as far as replacing the gun item in the purple?

What would that look like a year from now?

Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong.

If we replace the gunite, don't we have to adjust the depths and things to make sure that it meets current safety code and standards?

Uh I don't believe so.

So I think you can just re-plaster.

Um so there were some issues associated with that.

The diving boards, we don't meet the current um health department, state health department requirements for the diving board.

So if we replace the diving board, we would have to redo the deep end.

Yeah, and that would be a lot of money.

We're not deep enough on the shallow end to be able to hold swim meets, for example, so we don't qualify for that.

We just can't hold them there.

We can hold practices there, and that's what we currently do.

So I think I think that's the issues.

So really part of this question is I think we need to make a decision on what it looks like to get it open for the summer, if that's the case, then we need to look long term.

Do we this is a 46-year-old pool that we're being told by um the parks and recreation master plan that we need to look to um replace?

And so it doesn't make sense to start spending several hundred thousand dollars to replace something that we that's gonna be short term because we need to replace it anyway, so maybe I don't know if I want to say it here at well.

Some I wonder, is it the right location, or do you do where you extend the legacy center pool to make it so that it is a long course instead of having two pools?

Do you know what I mean?

And since it looks like you have to replace the roof of the pool, anyways, in the legacy center and do some other things at legacy center.

Do you do a whole renovation where that is like the pool that you can be indoor out?

Or I you know, to me, uh and then we have the Curtis Center facility and some ground there.

I mean my understanding was that was a potential future site of expanding recreation.

So I think those are all things that I would be interested to find out what the recommendations were.

Yeah, there are also some challenges to the current site for the outdoor pool, meaning that there was a million dollars given uh grant money that was given to build the facility, and it has to meet certain requirements, whatever we put back there that have to meet those requirements.

So that's that I was eight in 1980, so that predates me a little bit and have to do some research to know exactly what that is.

I'm under the impression that it really the j the crux of it is that it has to be an outdoor facility only.

So I think that an outdoor recreation facility needs to be there.

Okay.

Yes.

Does that be products?

No, I don't believe it has to be quite.

I think it can be any recreation facility, but I think that would be something we'd have to check for shipping.

Just want to make sure I'm following what you said correctly.

So like a million dollar grant was given in 1980 that today in 2026 it dictates to us what we can use that parcel for.

Correct.

Who gained the grant?

Uh there is lack of the colour.

Are they still alive?

Run of it.

Why are you emailing that super work?

Because I'd love to see the grant.

I believe it was state.

But I believe it was state funds, and I do believe that that organization still exists.

I wonder if we could renegotiate that.

Not that, and I'm not saying I'm in favor of any, I'm just what an odd thing.

That's just one of the challenges, one of the hoops we'd have to jump through.

I I don't know all the answers to that.

I think this all goes back.

Like, I think from my gut tells me, I think we all know, like the legacy center needs a renovation at some point.

The outdoor pool, we need to figure out first do we want it?

And if the answer is yes, what can we do to make it more attractive to get more people going there?

Maybe it's a correct maybe it's one of those bubble pools where the winter is still open because we have the bubble over it in the summer it opens up and and you and we can renovate it to the point where you can have needs there.

The high schools could use that, so it opens up more than that.

And sometimes sometimes renovations are more expensive than just building new, right?

The the parks and rec master plan said tear down and rebuild whether they're another place.

Yeah, and I agree.

I think at some point, the same with station 81 that we had other conversation about.

It's it's like we I go past the Oram Community Center quite a bit.

And I mean their lot is packed, um, especially in the afternoons.

And I'm I'm thinking about all those memberships and everybody going in to pay and how much they just went through this process about four years ago.

Really, they had an aging facility that was built in 1977, 78, trying to remember when it was, and financially they're in a much different place.

They they still have the the capital cost associated with the facility, but their operations costs have have improved drastically by building that facility.

Um if you go into that facility, notice the number of cardio weight room and just free weights that are available in that facility.

It's that's was huge in that facility really helps in that process.

And have you looked at partnerships at all with like boys and girls clubs, YMCA, sort of the sort of thing?

Is that no, because none of those exist in this part of the country in Utah.

But those are popular in other places.

Yeah.

And really in Utah you don't see those exist, and so cities really um build facilities where you might see a boys and girls club or YMCA build them in other places.

So they don't come because we have recreation centers, is what you're saying.

No, I think it's reverse because those are not here, cities have built rec centers.

It's really been in the last 30 years that you've seen cities in in bulk building these facilities, and it's because those entities don't exist.

They're really addressing a gap in service.

Well, we do have boys and girls clubs.

Like I know there's one in Robo, and I think Eagle Mountain may be giving a chapter, but I don't think here in Lehigh we have and it's probably not to the extent that it is that case.

Yeah, it's the hybrid version of and and definitely not YMCAs.

Yeah, definitely not.

I mean, I just know there's YMCs in Arizona, so you know.

There's good and bad with saying that.

In in some respects, cities are gonna pay for cities get involved in helping to fund some of those operations anyway.

And in some respects, I think it's better for the city just to own that operation and pay for that operation and make sure it's run right correctly and have control over how that money is spent and and make sure that it's done right.

So I I don't think that it's a bad thing that it's done this way here.

I don't I don't have anything negative to say about YNCAs.

I'm just I I think it was a result of our situation here, what's happened in Utah?

I don't know that it's a bad thing.

Yeah.

So for the I guess for I think there's only two line items right now for the outdoor pool.

No.

Correct.

I think there's three, right?

So there's the fencing around the outside pool deck, there's the outdoor pool operations and maintenance line item, and then there's outdoor pool lights.

So considering its current state, what I guess what should we do?

An outdoor pool might be.

So the budget committee, their recommendation was for the city council to not fund those lights.

I visited with Josh, he's our he's our guy over all of our aquatics, and he thinks we can live with that.

So let's not fund the lights.

Yeah, that's okay.

Let's get through another year at the outdoor pool where it's a little more clear, we have a better idea of where we're headed with this.

Okay.

So Dan, uh sorry, back to pools.

This program breaks in pretty good revenue.

Is that from the indoor pool and outdoor pool?

Um I'd have to see exactly where we're talking about.

Maybe I'll be able to do that.

It's under recreation funding.

Is it on the budget request form part?

Or is it just on the page 43?

Yeah.

What would your question?

Where does that come from?

Is that indoor pool outdoor pool?

Is that like the high schools or swim lessons too?

Probably both.

It's probably both.

Outdoor pool.

Indoor and outdoor pool.

Just any program that's related to swimming to the pools.

Well, there was a time when high schools had swimming pools.

In my day.

Yeah.

And Alpine has told us that yeah, they are not going to get those.

They're smart.

Which is fine.

And hopefully we're, you know, they're paying a good amount to help to use the pool.

That's what I'm saying.

I know that there's competing interests there.

There's a USA swim team that is I I applaud the efforts there because I know now that Lehigh is has a good one.

They would love if we didn't offer USA swim team.

They but they're fantastic and they have a good program.

Draws people from other cities.

Do the do the high schools use the indoor pool?

Is it big enough?

I mean, I've heard that it wasn't.

Yeah.

So yeah, there's not enough pool space for high schools.

That's um kind of a common issue in Utah County.

So we currently have four high schools that are in uh using the legacy center.

One of the challenges for us is um some of those are for high schools that are not completely in Lehigh, but they come from Alpine School District.

And in return, we have to rent space from the high schools, and it's a challenge for us to get enough gym time to run our junior jazz program.

So there's kind of this magical relationship that we have with the district where we try and get enough uh gym time and they try and get enough pool space from us.

Um and so for us as as the district splits, um, there's going to be some high schools that are currently using our facility, but they'll no longer have leverage from the school district to provide space for.

We've been vocal with those cities so that they know what's well aware.

Yes, so well aware.

They're building the pool in every high school, is what we were told.

So they're they're gonna have some high schools that don't have a place to swim.

Yes, it's probably very answered.

It's a go for some of the high side.

Utah we gotta do that.

Yeah, back to your question, Michelle.

If you're looking at four and Allison would have to confirm this.

But if you're looking at the difference between this blue program and this outdoor pool fund, I believe center for both of us or something.

All of them outdoor pools separately.

But is that correct Allison?

Yep.

And the swim program revenue is swim lessons.

Right.

So I said art fees.

This is all legacy center.

But it's not outdoor pool.

No.

We don't run swim lessons at outdoor pool.

I just know the USA swim.

USA swim is nine months out of the year run out of the legacy center.

All of the accounting for that comes out of the legacy center, both the revenue in and the expenses out.

And so when we're looking at that revenue that shows outdoor pool, that's mostly we're looking at those that pay the daily fee or those that purchase a membership.

I guess the only other thing would be rentals.

Rentals and then concessions.

And concessions, right?

But one of the challenges again is we're talking about the outdoor pools.

We're talking about the challenge with this liner that we've come up that has come up.

We've sold memberships since January.

We have almost every weekend is reserved for board parties and family parties and business parties.

We have most of our staff hired.

So this is kind of the challenge we're up against for this summer, right?

This year.

Correct.

If we do need it in May, right?

So we would this is a budget amendment, not a next year's budget, right?

Correct.

Maybe there's room in a line item maybe already has.

But he would need to spend the money before this budget goes into effect.

So this is a surprise to Dean, so he we're we'll have to go look at that.

Well, 15,000 is better than most numbers.

Right.

That's that's not a good thing.

This could have been a lot worse.

So maybe I can email you and talk to you later about this, but I I would like to know the indoor pool and outdoor pool, what the expenses are ongoing and then capital, what their revenue is for each one separately, how they are doing.

So I want to understand that better.

And then I don't know if we're gonna look at redoing the legacy center pools or whatever.

Do we want two pools?

You know, do we want a hybrid where it's indoor and outdoor?

I don't know.

Well that's what I wonder about the operations assessment and renovation physics feasibility.

Like how how long do you project that will take?

You know, I I know we'll give us some information, and then we would have to go from there of probably some kind of architectural whatever design thing.

But how how long would it take?

And yeah.

I I don't 100% know the answer to that question, but I I'm almost certain that we could provide that information for the budget process next year.

I don't think this is um I I think it's a six-month type process roundabout six-month type process would be my guess.

And then in the meantime, I would support what Michelle seemed to be able to break down the costs.

Yeah, so and maybe some clarification, because some of the information you're asking, we just can't provide.

So let me help you to understand that a little bit.

Um when someone purchases a membership to the legacy center, I don't know why they're purchasing that money.

That's that's our largest source of income is memberships.

I don't know if they're buying it because they want to use the weight room.

I don't know if they're buying that because they're gonna use the pool or a combination of part of the family's doing some or not.

So I can we can get that breakdown a little bit better for the outdoor pool, but it it's impossible for me to tell you what that what that the membership doesn't include the outdoor pool, right?

It doesn't, right?

So for the outdoor pool, we can give that breakdown a little bit better, but for the legacy center, it's really hard to separate the pool from the rest of the facility.

It's within the four walls.

Right, right.

And so I I can just tell you generally, an industry standard is the pools cost more money.

Um it's the reason why you don't see them at a place like Blasa.

So and it's interesting because some places will have a tiered membership approach.

I don't know if this is me just leaking out loud, but that's something to consider in my mind.

Yeah, and I think there's another thing that maybe connect with Marlin on where there's another vendor that may be doing a study that would actually be able to include the feasibility like financial assessment on the legacy center and no cost to the city.

So we can connect after on that.

But um the only caution I would have for that is I'd want to make sure we get someone that does this on the recreation side because it is, it's a it's a record perfectly.

So along those lines, I I agree with with uh Emily and Rachel and Michelle, like we're I think we're uh I think it would make more sense to look at it holistically to see what we want to do with that pool, what we want to like what it would cost, right?

Like because if we were to redo the whole legacy center from the ground up, it would be a bond, and it would be we would just have to have a good idea of what the costs are.

Like I think we're beyond the band-aids, especially for the outdoor pool.

Right.

Um maybe we can I mean I'd love to see what we could do to make it open this year.

Let's get one more band-aid to get us through the show.

Right, but but I think it would be the last year before we'd have to do something more serious and permanent with with it one way or the other.

Okay, that was any other outdoor pool questions.

Let's keep this going.

Um I think we're really the last one is the Curtis Center.

This is the information that I think that I bring in.

That's probably not what you have in front of you.

But really, we have kind of four options there.

We've kind of had this discussion.

Um the buildings there.

Um I honestly think when the city I this is before Jason's time, even I honestly think when the city told um uh the just for kids group that they would take over this facility.

I don't think they ever thought that she would get it built when she did.

So that's just an opinion.

I don't know.

I wasn't included in those discussions to be completely honest, so I don't know the history there very well.

But um to her credit, she didn't get it built, and it's it's an opportunity that's there that we have the opportunity to use, and right now is is sitting empty for hours of so her time there is roughly 9 30 in the morning, so we can go in early mornings like we do it till the business center.

Um she's there 9 30 till 3 30, if I remember right.

Right 3 3 30, and then we're available there in the evenings.

She has a some a couple of Saturday evenings, I think Monday evenings, but outside of that, some of the key times that we would use for recreation, right?

Kids are in school during the daytime.

That's that's a hard time to fill in next centers anyway.

So it is a pretty good marriage, but that's time that's available to us.

Currently, we're using it for overflow for junior jazz, I think some volleyball, soccer, trying to remember, just a couple of programs that have questions about the Curtis Center.

Yeah, I three of us got, I mean, maybe you you got it before another, but we got kind of a tour after the Hope of America event that we attended.

And there's a lot of programming space, like there's several classrooms.

Um it's a good amount of space and outdoors.

I think looking beyond just your purview, Dan, but like there's other opportunities I think we could.

100% that to maximize the use and make sure that's used from 7 a.m.

to 9 p.m.

every time.

We'd love to run programs there and make that available to our residents and let them enjoy the facility for more than just what it's being used for.

So any other questions?

I um just put the caution out there because I don't know if you present this council for different options and firms, but I know like the highest use of that did end up costing the city like six hundred thousand dollars.

So there's there's always costs involved.

So yeah, and here I have a projected at 759,000.

And that's why we didn't report on that, even though I know it'd be nice to have programs more accessible for that area of the city.

So I mean, would you also consider how much we're spending to make programs adjustable for this side of the city?

So that's why I wonder that's why in my mind, I think there could be a balance where I mean you have these private entities that come in and they're willing to pay a bit for gym space, right?

And we're just leaving it empty and that can have help offset some of the costs of having this space available, anyways.

It's just idea.

I don't know if it was to you, but to say that you have mission.

To at least two private entities to use the space instead of SP.

Yeah, I mean, I'll I'll be honest.

My my preference is to try to make that available to our citizens on the recreation side first, and generally the um the private side takes care of that.

Um most of those facilities that are doing that, Rachel roughly break even.

But we could look at it.

There's it's an opportunity that we should explore.

Well, I think it's better than nothing.

I'm like just having it sit there and hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money paying for it to sit there.

So yeah.

Something to think about.

Okay.

All right.

Anything else, Michelle?

I think we're good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I guess probably the birth year budget amendment.

Yes, $15,000.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, and then possible and some sanders.

And then I think we'd just add for polar and then possibly for it.

And being in there, possibly if we're gonna look at the Curtis Center and outdoor pools are part of that feasibility and okay.

So let me ask just real quick on a question.

Let's say we we we go 15, we get this thing.

There could be underlying issues there.

Are we gonna do we have a stop gap at a dump where we're gonna go or not putting any more into it?

Where are we at on that?

I I I if I can address this case and you guys can add whatever you want.

I think the answer is we pay the 15 and and see if that takes care of it.

Get it opened up and see what's there.

Right.

And um I'm I'm being told there's a good chance that that's likely what the cost is.

But then you'll see what the costs are and know what those are and can make those decisions now.

Okay.

But I just don't want to I don't want to pull out the line around.

That's 15, we're risking by doing that, right?

Right.

I just don't want to get level.

What sorry, what's up?

You can't operate without spending the 15.

Correct.

Right, so you're dead in the water today.

You have to spend the 15.

Right, yes.

Yeah, you have to spend the 15s by you.

Yeah, we have lifeguards for the floating in no water.

I don't know.

I don't know what the internet.

So you have to spend the 15 and then depending on that, you may or may not have to spend more, or we just call it and cancel all the reservations and all the parties.

Okay, I just want to make sure we were good there.

That's all the SAD.

And back to Jason's question, how soon as soon as as soon as I get the go-ahead.

And we're two weeks away from opening time.

So as soon as I get the go-ahead, we're told ten days before they would have that process completed.

If we can provide some if parks can help us provide some guys, and we can give some lifeguards to go down there and help clear out the liner as they're tearing it out.

So you need the budget amendment tomorrow.

So I heard parks help up.

Yeah.

So get in the stand up for that one.

Turn out the liner.

Turn out the liner.

So facilities.

So they if if if that's the case, then and his guys are busy.

Um if that's the case, they tell us 10 business days.

So what if all you have them?

How much does that cost?

I can ask them that.

That would be my that would be my hope at this point.

I do think that we can utilize lifeguards for a big chunk of that.

Meaning that I I we've got lifeguards that are down there prepping the facility to be ready.

Okay.

So it might be.

Sure involved in this, and I can get dumpsters there, and we don't have to do the work that's I'm happier.

So you what I'm hearing is you need a budget amendment on the agenda tomorrow in our regular meeting, or you won't get the funding in time to be ready for the parties.

Correct.

That's what I'm hearing.

We would have to do a budget amendment later, because you need a seven-day.

You have to prove it again.

Tell me that when you see it in a month that you can do that.

It's important if it happens.

Okay.

Sorry, what was the date who was supposed to open officially?

Memorial Day weekends that we can.

Yeah.

Correct.

We we do some training in the month of May that's not going to happen.

So we do some deep water training for our lifeguards.

We're we've made arrangements for another facility to be able to do that.

The fire department comes in and does some training in there, then they're not gonna be able to do in there as well.

So outside of that, um, I think we've made arrangements for all of that.

Um it's just being open for Memorial Day weekend.

Okay.

Yeah, we'll have to put out the notice to residents soon and just kind of explain it what's going on and the structural issues and everything to say.

This is a late last week um emergency that came up.

Communications got it.

Okay, thanks.

We were gonna talk about it.

We'll talk about you.

Yes, thank you.

Okay, one more item.

Um non-departmental.

Um there's not really any requests, but I'd be happy to answer questions, or I had some correct questions on and I can address some of the questions I had, or you can ask me questions.

Anybody have any questions for me?

Non-departmental.

It looks like we're removing the museum project Thanksgiving point because we're kind of the part of time.

Right, and I should say this budget hasn't changed.

Otherwise, we're not making a change every week just because I thought that would be really good.

Yeah, this one has it.

So, like a credit card and bank charges, is that the similar issue where we're having to pay fees for the whole basically the whole city is paying these fees.

Uh yeah, uh, or how about you?

Just like facilities aren't in here.

Rec center is paying 20,000 plus dollars, right?

Yeah, Allison will have to go on this.

Okay.

Because I think our that doesn't come anywhere near what we pay for the U2.

Yeah, no, the utilities need to pay for their credit card fees.

This would be for like fees for development fees uh like general fund related fees.

General fund-related fees.

Okay.

So these are transactional credit card bank charges?

Just merchant fees.

And then we have merchant paying.

And then we have a monthly charge for our banking for our suite account.

It's very minimal, but each of the utilities has a billing expense that pays for certain credit card fees and other fees that go along with the bill.

So I have a question about the contributions to the chamber.

I've always heard that we rent out space or we give them space in the train depot in the membership fees, but is this just separate?

We've always paid a fee.

Every year I've been here.

It's like a dollar.

Yeah.

I asked about that in an email.

A dollar.

No, we don't charge them.

No, they just get it.

Yeah.

I think this, I think it was, was it 20?

And it moved it to 12.

I think it's gone down a little bit.

Yeah, it was moved down to 10, and then they're more talking about it.

And just a heads up on the Fox Hollow Golf course.

Do you want to explain that?

Yeah, Rachel's asking some questions too.

So everybody probably understands, but I'll just go really quick and really basic.

So Fox Hollow Golf course is one by the three cities.

We hire president growth for joint.

So it's kind of our facility, but it's kind of share it, right?

We each have responsibilities.

Twenty-ish years ago or so, they issued bonds to build a new clubhouse.

There's a long story in that, and we can talk more, maybe it didn't produce the revenue that they thought, which happens sometimes.

Anyways, so there's bonds outstanding related to Box Hollow Golf course.

In order to issue the bonds, they needed a pledge from each of the three cities, basically saying that we'll make sure that the golf course is bringing in enough money to pay for operations and pay for the bond.

And so we are the three cities are kind of jointly obligated for those bonds.

But that last bond payment is next year, October 2027.

And what happens after that, I don't really say no better than I would, but the three, I mean, I don't know what happens next.

I'm sure the golf course will say we have other improvements that we'd like to do and keep receiving money from the cities, but it's there's not like a promise.

There's not a contractual agreement.

The three councils are gonna have to work with the Fox Hollow board to figure out what happens next.

Well, that had to be unanimous with the can out photos.

Unanimous, yeah, majority of each city council, not all 15 unanimous, but yeah.

So like our city council can choose to do something different than a different city council.

Well, three of you would have to agree with three from American Fork and three for PG.

Like I'm guessing if they wanted to continue, like if they wanted to do a project, they need a majority of all three councils.

So maybe they had I think Michelle's question was it has to be all three cities, not just two.

I don't think two cities can force.

Yeah, it has to be all three of three from every city if you have that majority for every city.

Yeah.

So it probably has to be unanimous, whatever happens because we're partners in it.

Um like in the oh, I'm sorry.

Like in December, they they gave that presentation on the new driving range improvements that they wanted.

And the top off everything they would have.

So that's going to be their next ask.

So you guys will have to decide whether or not you can.

I'm just saying there's potentially 250 dudes and five disorders.

Yeah.

Yeah, in a future budget that just gonna be a lot of discussion between the three counts, and it's been you know 20 years now, so it'll be good to have.

So it's Lee High, American fork, and I think it'd be good to have that as an agenda item in the future coming months, just to figure out like maybe we should come up with what we want to do or not do with it.

And then they need to come sell it in the three cities.

I was just gonna make that suggestion uh they they ought to come and pitch to you guys what they see that vision is, and you guys can decide whether or not to do that.

Okay, so we're not presenting since it's I know I'm trying to not interrupt people.

It's like but I it's not I'm not perfect.

Anyway, um since you know how we do like the transportation meetings where we'll get all the cities together and talk about it.

I wonder because it's been 20 years, we're all new and different from 20 years ago.

Maybe we should put one of those on the books for 2026, saying, hey, we know next year this is coming up, and just like as an opportunity to talk about it with the 1518 of us.

I mean we could host or if you guys want, but that it just might be a good time to just get us all in the same room and talk.

Before after 8%.

I think both.

Do one 2026 percent, do one in 2027, talk about it, like notice it.

Our last bond payments, the 20 2027, correct documentary.

Yeah, it's actually in the next year.

Not the upcoming fiscal year all year.

Following fiscal year.

So it's yeah, we're still.

My recommendation, I think maybe we have Fox Hollow come in and present so that you guys understand the context of what we're talking about.

And then when we meet with the other cities, you guys can you you know, yeah.

Well, I maybe we should make sure that we're together.

I'll I'll tell you, and again, this is I I don't work for those cities, I don't know as intimately as their city managers do, but they seem very poor old golf course, the other two cities.

So the golf course addressed in Snail is is breaking it's doing well.

They just want to expand these other venues.

Like I said, when they presented the county was there.

I don't know.

But they were talking about miniature golf and a talk golf kind of thing, so it's it's new things that they want to add.

It's it we keep I mean we keep it.

The idea their hope is that it would make it even more profitable, but again, that probably needs to be seen.

They do it study on that, or they just kind of had research to show that.

So they get to study on the golf on the clubhouse and project.

Right now I get enough money from NIL from BYU on the north end.

We can tell that right now.

Tony females parked out there every day.

I don't know too much.

Other questions?

Yeah, on the dispatch costs.

Yeah, um is there any is that based on like what how are they coming up with that number?

I think they base it on there's a formula that's based on calls per call.

So is this true just to cover it?

Is this transactional?

Is this just true?

Like is it just like it's to cover their payroll part of their payroll costs and their costs to send them to session?

But I I don't know enough about their business model, right?

I haven't been there or anything, but I'm like that's really high, and if we get more officers, I is that one of those like domino effects where like you increase your police department and then this balloons as well as the court like do you know is that related?

I I mean I do believe it's a lot of people.

I think that's obviously maybe a little shy.

Yeah, it's based on call volume.

Yeah.

So more cost to be able to go and see the facility and talk to them.

Not that I'm not gonna negotiate on the city's behalf, but I'm just so curious.

Yeah, oh you can arrange that.

Cool.

So is there a way to recoup any of those costs?

I mean, I know that there's is there a way to recoup any of those costs?

I mean, I know that there's like ambulance charges, but that's not it, right?

We could get and we keep our ambulance charges.

I mean, they're not agreed, but I guess some of I guess maybe some of those calls we wouldn't see in higher ambulance rather than.

But like a minimum one call, I don't bother we would think of that or things like that.

Are we paying so if I'm a Lehigh resident, but I'm in Eagle Mountain and an incident occurs and I call, is it is it charging Lehigh because that's where my billing address is on my cell phone, or is it charging eight mountain for where the incident occurred?

I could be wrong.

I think it's charged to where the call you have to respond to.

I think it's the I think it's the responding entities dispatch calls.

So like if you call from Eagle Mountain and said, hey, my relative is being assaulted in we high, and you respond there.

We have to get it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, I would love to know more.

Um Health Insurance Reserve Fund.

Can you explain that to me?

Oh, sorry, we're trying to looking down.

Oh, I just remember in it.

I don't know.

Oh he's good whenever we could have questioned first.

Healthing insurance reserves fund is not really an expense.

We are trying to set aside funds to possibly de self-insured for health insurance somewhere in the future.

We set aside six hundred thousand dollars last year.

Again, we didn't spend it, it's just there.

This is to set aside another six hundred thousand, is it six six hundred thousand?

And that might give us an option in the future to have a really different health plan that would be primarily self-insured.

Oh, okay.

Um we've been talking with our broker the past few years.

At some point it might make sense.

I not a David had to go to some interviews, so David could give you a lot more better.

We're not we're not there yet.

This is payment two of three.

Right, yeah.

Okay.

When they when we talked about originally the reserve funds to be in a good spot, was 1.8 million dollars.

In order to have in order to be self-insured, we need uh pool of money to draw and have yeah, okay.

But it would help us manage and be able to keep our cost down because we could talk about health insurance.

We could manage the the deductions.

Your buying power is different.

Okay.

Because you're self-insuring, you're you're taking more risk.

Risk management.

Do you know how much that 25% increase is cost against that in dollars?

Well, we mitigated that though.

Yeah, it's not 25 in the discussion.

I don't have all the answers.

The plan that we renewed is not the same plan that we were on, so it's not a good thing.

We had to make some modifying we had to make some modifications.

It's a less expensive plan to fit into the estimated cost that they have to the budget, which was 10%.

10 and a half, yeah.

So that is reflected.

Health insurance costs are covered.

Is there is at the 10%?

We have to change the plan to get to where we have January tomorrow.

Marlin, you're ready.

I think we're just asking out the contribution to the chamber.

I think you have to consider it.

Why are we making one?

And since they're not going to be able to do that.

How did they run for training?

We're giving it the their space to free, so why are we making a contribution?

So the currently the contract is actually through the Hutchings Museum.

And they're just a subsidiary of the Hutchings Museum for that contract at the training museum.

So yes, you are correct.

We do cover uh they don't pay lease, uh, we cover the electric bill and stuff like that.

And then we do give uh membership donation, which is a 12,000 dollars.

Um it was at 22,000 at one point.

Uh I whittle that back.

Uh we did 10,000 a couple years ago, and then when Marcy came on board, because the chamber started to ramp up, um, they're now at uh revenue neutral.

And so we bumped our uh membership to 12,000.

But who owns the train depot?

We do.

So we own it, but Hutchins Museum.

They have the lease on it.

They're leasing it to the chamber.

Well, they have a lease.

Yes.

Part of that lease includes the chamber, letting the chamber utilize it.

So the city lets Hutchins use the museum, and Hutchins lets the chamber use.

Let me take a step back.

Okay.

I apologize, Council.

But no, you're trying to understand.

So I think that I think the lease agreement was signed in like 2017, 2018, and that included when the basement was utilized as the train museum.

So there was artifacts in there, everything was in there, and then the uh chamber of commerce was just the upstairs.

Um since then, all the artifacts have been removed from the train depot.

Um they utilize that main room.

Uh if there's like a large meeting or something, they've utilize that.

Other organizations have utilized that meeting space there as well.

And then the chamber currently maintains an office on the upper floors, as well as they're utilizing some space over to kiln buildings so they go between the two buildings.

Okay.

Because my understanding was that COVID kind of changed things where it was more of a museum, and I don't know, fourth graders or some like kids would come and do field trips there until COVID basically kind of changed that dynamic.

And then is that true or not?

Well, the director at the time, when COVID came, um, they did take out again the all the artifacts were in the base on that first floor, and then they turned that into office space for um Daniela and I think one or two other employees in that main area.

And so they kind of utilized it.

There was uh a room that was set aside for podcasts in the back.

Uh Daniela's office, Daniela's office podcast, and then the main main room, I think they had like one or two desks in there, and then they were utilizing for um miscellaneous uh sign storage, you know, if they were swapping out signs, different things like that.

But the city owns the train depot and the surrounding land.

I believe I looked at the contract, and Hutchings is only supposed to utilize that space and have that space if they keep operational as a museum.

That is correct.

Correct.

They can't use it as storage and stuff.

I don't think we clarified that they had to leave it as a museum, but we did clarify they couldn't.

Our concern was that they would move the train museum out and then utilize it as storage.

So this is a very historic building.

Yes.

Yeah.

It was moved from like Hutchings has given the chamber permission to use the space.

It's part of the contract.

Okay.

Any other non-departmental questions?

Yeah, I the contribution to recreation facilities fund.

The 24%.

Um just help me understand where that shows up.

Yeah.

So if you're asking why it's gone up, it's mostly just related to salaries and things for recreation employees.

But this number is gonna match this expense number, is gonna match the revenue number on the legacy sale.

On page 43.

So is this why they're saying 2.6?

That's the taxes.

That is the this is where it comes from.

Thank you so much.

That was very helpful.

Any other questions?

Well, and then I see there's contributions to like risk fund, IT fund, things like that.

Like it's just these are the expenses of the city to run a half these things, right?

That's an ADR.

Okay.

Uh there's only one other city, and that would be Saratoga Springs, and I'm not quite sure what they pay.

I shoot myself in the foot on this.

I want to say it's six thousand, between six and eight thousand.

I know they're not at the 12,000 mark.

I do know that.

Okay.

Is that based on like membership tiers?

What's the difference between what we're paying and their pay?

I no.

Um the chamber itself, the history of the chamber used to be a city function.

And then they formed a five, they went to 501c6 and kind of split off.

And that's why we were at the 22 or I mean, we were at a large amount and we've slowly branched it down.

I think we've stated that at where we're at now, just out of um trying to be consistent with the chamber to provide to help them with funding.

Their annual budget's about 230,000.

They're based in Lehigh.

Yes, they're basically.

And they there's a membership fee for those who join the chamber.

That is correct.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So they they actually support uh Eagle or Saratoga Springs, uh, Lehigh.

They do have businesses from American Fork, Eagle Mountain, stuff like that, but American Fork has their own chamber, pleasant Grove has their own chamber, America Fork has her own chamber.

And it's common for cities to be involved in chambers.

Like it's too common.

Oh, yeah, that's very common.

I'm I'm involved in the chambers in Salt Lake County, and there's cities in all of them.

Well, and and the opportunity for us to also utilize the chamber, like with uh grand opening ribbon cuttings, uh support in the small business community.

I do work, I'm on the board with Marcy uh as a government, is this the city city side?

Um I do not um I'm not on the executive board or anything, but so I do call the board, I do go to all the board meetings, I try and attend all the functions that the Marcy does and stuff like that.

Cool.

And we do as a part of our membership, we do have access to all of those functions as well.

So you a city council members have the opportunity to borrow the ribbon cuttings and the luncheons and everything like that.

Okay, can I ask about the employee wellness?

Since I've done that so professionally, is that just some benefit that we have to employees?

Is that that doesn't have anything to do with the health insurance?

That's the wellness aspects, right?

It's the wellness aspect, and then we have um is this where we pay nice data?

Is that where we pay nice data?

Yeah.

And so yeah, we have a separate company that um provides like cost of how to reduce cost to employees that we pay for that.

So it's one of those.

I guess a question is a benefit to employees.

But the idea hopefully that would save us on some help on the case.

We're supposed to have right.

I mean, that's I mean, we've we've talked about whether it's worth still keeping or not, and so we've gone back and forth.

But okay.

But we're gonna do it one more year and try and push it in place a little bit more to see if we can get more utilization on it, try and reduce the cost.

Okay.

Okay, any other questions?

Let's take a break.

Yeah.

Okay, as we kind of lead into this next one.

Let me maybe start or give us some preface and help us lead people lead a discussion a little bit.

When we put forth this budget, you all know that we put forth a tax increase.

So we went through it, that's the kind of wherever we landed.

We have prepared by law to do so in the case that this council comes to the point that we that we feel like that's the way to do.

So all of that part's been taken.

Now, if the council comes to the to the uh point that we don't take tax, that's okay.

That's all been determined.

So I think maybe where we start is where do we start?

So are we are we in a tax or are we out of a tax?

If we're out of a tax, you know, there's then some things that happen there along the bottom.

Um I don't know that this necessarily needs to become a line by line issue.

Uh we have professionals that do this stuff every day, lead and guide direct that, and I think that they'll I think we need to get them the information of council-wise where we sit, then that then that group can then leave the lead the charge on making sure everything runs from the top down.

So with that said, ums to that, Jason.

I was just gonna add, you know, obviously we want to respect the council's priorities and the things that you want to see.

Um but as far as yeah, getting too far into the specifics, I like the mayor said, I think we kind of take it back to the departments and get some feedback from them, let them be a part of the process also.

But certainly like uh capital projects or things like that that you guys you know really want to see happen in this budget year, certainly yeah, we can talk about those at length.

But so with that said, um I am gonna kind of throw a hard stop in here at six, so have a good two hours to start going.

Are you is everybody okay with that?

Yeah, that's great.

Awesome.

Okay.

Well, that's that's great news to start that we do have a hard stop set at six.

So with that, let me uh let me go ahead and open the floor and and um let's have a discussion and kind of see where everyone's feeling and and we're all gonna come from a maybe a little bit of a different spot, so uh kind of give us your opinion as as we're moving forward, and then we'll have a little bit of a consensus as to which way to go and way we go.

So unless Mayor's just wondering if we don't do the tax increase, where are your priorities?

Like, are you gonna give us like okay, if you don't do this, this is what I think we need, or is that where what direction would you like us to go if that's what's chosen?

I think I think that's uh to be determined by the council as we move forward.

I think that's that's a talking point that we can make as we move forward, but I don't know that there's necessarily any direction if there's no tax increase, then it will be a top-down um look.

I think everyone everyone then is on the table to be looked at.

Public safety parks, it all then comes into play.

I don't think it's one necessarily or the other.

I think it's across the board.

So that would be my answer to that question there.

If I think I had a really good conversation with Jason and Dean earlier just to try to set the I guess try to make it as clear as possible so that staff has the right direction, and I think the first thing that would be helpful for Jason and Dean is to know are we in favor of the tax increase or some version of it or zero tax increase, at least from the majority, and would that be helpful, Jason?

If we just did it.

Again, well, sorry, I'm getting a lot of doctrine.

Um, that would be helpful to kind of set some parameters as to what we can work from.

And then I think the second set of parameters would be okay based on other things that you've heard or priorities that you don't feel that the mayor's budget addressed, um, things that you would like us to consider.

Um basically we have the pie that we decide how big to make the pieces, right?

That's what we're talking about.

So go ahead.

I'll I'll go first.

Um for me, I'm I'm not in favor of any tax increase personally.

And and after my other colleagues speak, I think it would be good for us to kind of go through.

I guess the very top each one of us can kind of talk about our very top level um priorities in the budget, and then you know, maybe if we have any additions or subtractions that are very, very important to us.

You want to you want to go?

Do you want to cook straw poll on is everybody else I guess who else is anybody else uh the same billing as me as far as I've done my research, so I'm good.

I I just I don't want to raise taxes.

That being said, if we go after our current employees to fund campaign promises, I'm gonna big beef with that.

So it I guess it's not for me, it's not this binary taxes yes or no.

What are we doing if we're not raising taxes and who's gonna bear the brunt of that plays into my decision?

Well, so this is just so my preference would be no tax increase.

And I think if the majority of the council feels that way, then it gives staff direction to be to kind of go through with a scalpel, and um instead of us just kind of hammering away at different items in the budget, not knowing all of the implications it can have.

So I think that's where we can start.

It's not we're not voting on the budget or a tax increase right now.

Did I say one thing that maybe answers that question?

So maybe it doesn't, if it doesn't, I go away.

But I think if we don't do a tax increase, you know, right now in that budget, basically it has four percent for each employee, right?

If we don't do a tax increase of some set sort, it's whatever the pay plan it's got to be less than that.

So no matter what.

Well in the policy, the HR policy that David Kitchen passed.

Each one, both coal and merit, so it's based on the availability of funds in in each one of those.

So obviously, like I just want to make sure that we can operate within the budget, and it's um and and then maybe the version two the staff can come up with will have some other options maybe we haven't thought of.

Yeah, um, some of the cuts can be more evenly distributed.

Um so that's that's my thoughts.

Yeah, and I know like you and I have talked about like different approaches, right?

There and like ways in which it can be done, and we've both had ideas about that.

I think again, like for me, it's not this black and white issue of taxes or not.

I I we I don't want to raise taxes.

That being said, if we don't raise taxes, who's bearing the cost of increased services, or are we not in create increasing services at all?

Like, but it but it sounds to me like if we don't raise taxes, our employees will bear that cost because we can't meet the four percent.

And and that I mean I want to I hope we can talk about that philosophically.

How are we how do we feel asking our employees to take that on?

I don't know if that's necessary, sorry.

What do you what is that?

That's what I was just said.

Because you can well, that's what Dean said.

I yes, but there's other cuts that could also be made and looked at, like and for for me, like philosophically, right?

Like if the tax increase is putting that burden on the residents, right?

And we and we can say, like, well, it's $35 a year or 36, whatever it is, but you add that into taxes from the county, from the school districts, from inflation generally.

My personal opinion is um I know financially it's much easier to raise a little bit of taxes every couple years on a regular basis.

I get it from a financial standpoint, from a kind of moral issue for me.

I think the city needs to operate on a continual basis identifying cuts.

And I have a hard time going to the residents because I don't represent the city, right?

I represent the residents to the city.

And and so for me, I want to be able to explain.

We have done all the cuts possible.

We've trimmed all the fat, we're operating very, very efficiently, and we've looked at every corner of the budget, and now we have to raise taxes.

I don't think that's this year.

Okay.

Um so that's just my personal thought on it.

But I think if we can if the majority feels like I'm not gonna vote for a tax increase this year, period.

So are you not voting for more officers then?

No, I will, and I think we can find the the space to well we have the discussions won't be uh well yeah.

That's why we're discussing.

Well, I thought we were doing this draw pool first.

Yeah, that's that's that's what I was hoping for.

It's like if if majority feel, if the majority say we're not gonna vote for a tax increase, that changes the discussion afterward.

Okay, and I'll just clarify.

I don't want to raise taxes.

That being said, I don't know what my options are unless we get into the weeds.

So I really am trying to understand what are you cutting and what are you asking of our employees before I say yes or no?

But I can be last instead of second.

Staff needs to go that's said in industry.

That's administrative little system.

Some of it so here's here's what happens ultimately.

And you know that.

So you're gonna you're gonna pull a number that's gonna go back to staff staff's gonna figure out how to run it through the most of their budgets are people.

Correct.

So when we say cuts, we're not talking about subscriptions to uh you know Calabunga Bay versus employee appreciation.

We are talking about people.

Right.

That most of their budgets are people.

So even if we gave them a number and said cut two million dollars, that is people.

So are you the most thing that you're most worried about is having a four percent raise for employees every year?

No, I'm I what I'm worried about is how it gets done.

And I don't have answers.

That's why I'm like, I'm not quite sure.

So I'll go last.

You guys keep you know, you I'll go last, but I don't know how you're going to do that without putting it on our employees.

Well, it's not it's not gonna be up to the council to identify all those.

That's what we're doing is enabling staff to take our preference of do we want a tax increase or not?

If you don't, then you can say I don't want a tax increase.

They can go to work, we can give them some input, and then they can give us another version of the tentative budget that identifies where they've identified cuts.

Yes, and all the conversations I've had thus far have been if they make cuts 2%, 3%, 5% cut in their budgets, it's people.

That's that's why I'm just well some of us even just like okay, we don't need an SRO.

So some of those things are already changed.

Or if the park tax coming out is how many hundreds so and that's not in this budget right now, right?

Right.

But like that's some stuff that is with the.

I guess I just had questions answered already that answer that for me.

But again, I will go last.

Well, I guess we can go around just that's my thought.

I I would prefer not to do a tax increase.

And if we're talking about people, we're also talking about people that we tax.

And again, it's a small amount, but when you do it every other year, it adds up, and there's people that are struggling.

So I would prefer not to, and I've I've said how I felt it before, that you know, we're we're in a period of growth, and there was a study, and I probably should have brought it, but growing cities in Utah.

This is from the Utah Tax Payers Association.

It's every seven to eight years to look at a tax increase, not every other year, and not even a big one.

So I I want to get out of this cycle of every two years.

I want to be more conservative in our spending, and I think there are some ways to find more efficiencies.

And it might not be this year that we find that, and I think we need more, and I've asked for this for a long time now, maybe we'll get it.

But I I've asked for more information of how current money is being spent, not just the new ask, but you know, if the library comes and they want whatever X more dollars in books, how much are they spending now on books?

I wanted I kind of want to know the whole context, not just the new requests.

Um but I I think there's creative ways to reduce spending.

Um I hope we'll have enough time this year to look into that, but definitely for next year.

Um I know I've talked to Dean about this about maybe in the fall to start in on the process of looking where money is being spent in each department.

But I can I ask a clarifying question.

More than because you have that in the budget document.

What's we spent?

Like what you say is more blood question.

It's pretty broad.

Um like how many books total we're buying, or how do we understand that?

Well, it's kind of like with the pool, you know, how much how much revenue really where the numbers are, and just more clarity in the budget, I think would help be helpful.

I mean, we have most miscellaneous things, professional.

What does that mean?

What are they spending it on?

You know, really go back and justify um current spending.

And I I know there are things where we approved them expenditures for previous years, and I kind of want to go back.

How is that working?

You know, is that been helpful?

Because I know like for instance, an auditor was one of the positions we funded last year.

So do we have a lot of auditor now?

Did you get hired?

How is that working?

What is that worth you know what we're spending the money on?

Yeah.

So maybe revisit some of those things.

That that kind of thing.

And I've, you know, talked enough of the other cities to know some of them that do that, take that approach.

That's what I prefer.

But yeah, but basically, yeah, I I would prefer not to do a tax increase this year.

Um yeah, so I I always said that I would prefer not raise taxes, but I would do everything else, figure out what else can be done before that.

I see that as kind of a last resort.

Um obviously I've kind of patched this budget and gone through it a lot.

And I think that I you know, I know we're not we're gonna try to not get in the weeds, but if departments need some help, you know, I think the council is we've we've spent the time we've you know lost sleep over this budget because we're concerned about that we're serving our residents with we're providing enough services, we're meeting the obligations of previous councils, and that we have as a city we're we're helping our employees that will help our residents, right?

And we're being accountable to like taxpayers, and I just it's a it's I know I'm sure that the mayor has been similar when he put this together, and I appreciate all the work that he did and all the work that you guys did as a budget committee.

It's it's no easy task, and I really appreciate that.

But um, yeah, so that's where I stand is where what I've seen, um I would I would say no tax increase.

So yeah.

I don't think anybody ever runs for office and says they want to do it.

Like I think you know, like nobody I think we could all say nobody wants a tax increase.

Um I my concerns are how we go about doing it.

Um I'm not okay with robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Um so I think that they're like I think it's a good idea to go back to the departments.

My most important thing to me is uh employee retention taking care of our employees.

Um I don't want to get down this rut of we put this on the backs of our employees five years down the line and ten years down the line, we have to do major wage increases because there's market studies that are done to show that we haven't kept up with inflation.

I mean, Social Security keeps up with inflation.

They do, so it's like I I don't want we're already at the low end of appreciate dean showing like what the other cities are proposing for their raises, and we're already at the bottom of that.

There's only a couple of cities that are below us, so I want to be really careful with that.

I also want to be really careful that we as a council don't take the surgical knife.

I think if we went back to the departments and said, hey, um, this is the amount of money that you have, how do you want it to be?

What's most important to you?

Is it gonna be wages?

Do you want to not get offers so much in wages?

Do you is in hiring this year more important and put it back on them and determine where it really is at?

Because I I feel like when we've gone to departments before in the past, it's always been we need the wages to keep who we have.

Um I'm concerned about making this so political that our employees leave based on principle and based on the fact that they can be paid more elsewhere, and so I don't want to have to pay for the cost of turnover either.

So I'm totally on board if we're going to go through it.

So it's hard to say no tax increase when we don't know what that actually looks like.

We kind of have an idea of like here's the things that would have been funded with the tax increase, but what does that actually mean to each department if we're going back to each department saying, hey, we're not going to do this?

Um so I think it would like still having our options available.

Um if we're gonna do a tax increase, I think do it and don't dislike I almost kind of wish like that they had just done instead of two small tax increases, do one the two and four years ago and just put it all together, but maybe that's just the political line speaking because you asked residents that are like would rather just pay an extra dollar a month than to have to go do that.

But if that's the direction council is going, I'm all supportive of it, but I will you know, I have really strong feelings about becoming the city that decides to fund it on the backs of employees and their families.

So Mayor, can I add to that?

Yep.

So last time we talked about the council mayor's budget, and I proposed that we not take two trips to DC every year, and there was resistance against that.

I we have a $50,000 line item for special projects, like before we turn to our departments and ask them to do more with less, what are we going to cut?

It better be DC trips, it better be increased.

I better be the special project.

But the thing is we're doing we're looking at this every two years.

So I feel like there's an ongoing problem here.

If we have to raise taxes every two years, what why?

I mean, there were many years when we did it, and we weren't necessarily behind because of that.

And somehow, I mean, to me, it's just it's the thing now.

And a lot of that I think might be the wage war with our police officers and our firefighters, right?

Um, and you have to remember for a long time inflation was next to zero for over a decade.

It was next to zero.

And now we've seen inflation push through the roof, and the way you talk tax structures is set.

We there's no way to capture inflation without going through tax uh through the taxation.

For property taxes.

We do, we do.

But property tax is still a very stable, important part of our tax base.

So yeah, you we do have other tax revenues that do capture inflation as the cost of goods go up, we we capture more sales tax.

But you also have to remember that that property tax, we still have to pay for inflationary costs as well.

Employee costs, stuff we buy, widgets that we buy to implement, those costs more.

Every everything costs more for us just like it does for the school district, just like it does for the county as well.

So we have to say if we're not if we're gonna keep the dollar steady, then that means our services have to go down.

And its inflation's gone up by 25% in the last five years, we need to offer 25% less services.

That's how it would be.

Our sales steady increasing.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Our property tax are increasing with with new growth.

So again, we're growing cities still.

Well, what I'm talking about is that it's a good idea.

It is the total dollars is increasing, but also the total lane miles that we have to maintain increases.

The total number of uh lane miles we have to plow.

So the the demand on services also increases as we grow.

And a lot of those things come from their spar special funds, right, that are dedicated to those things.

So what I'm seeing though is not snow pl those are both general funds.

Right, for some of those streets, but what I'm seeing is not necessarily the employees, and it hasn't looking back historically over at our budget, it hasn't there hasn't always been this 4% increase for our employees.

I mean, I know I look back, and sometimes it was a lot of times it was zero, sometimes there were a lot of market adjustments there.

So what I'm seeing now, clearly, and I uh sent David Kitchens a ton of questions about this, but is we've we've kind of changed things.

So now that we are 4% is expected, um, which is significant.

I mean, it's not like we're cutting wages, you're just not getting as much more.

You're getting more, and maybe a little less more.

So you're getting more, right?

And that I mean, we could talk about public and private sector, how nice that is to get that um, but it hasn't always been that way, and it's more recently that that spend expectation along with every two years less increased taxes.

So that's that's where I'm seeing this coming from, and I that's not the direction I would like to continue.

And Michelle, I understand that and I respect that.

Since I've been here, raises have never been zero.

That that's not been a thing since I've been here.

But even with us doing three, four, five percent every year, we still fall behind in certain positions, and we have to do market increases on top of that.

And I I would like to see more where that's coming from.

We have extensive.

Oh no, if we don't do the 4%, we're gonna lose employees.

But you know, where where are we losing employees?

Are they going to other cities laterally for the same job at better wages, or are they going for a career move?

You know, I've seen some do that.

Yeah, uh, I don't remember the exact year, but we lost a bunch to Riverton, a bunch of police officers to Riverton, we lose uh firefighters to different agencies.

Um is this those two departments or that again?

That's I asked David with those specific things with departments.

Here's here's the thing though.

On a and this is a question for you, Jason.

Um when someone comes in and they move, they don't we don't have you don't have that data.

Like when someone comes to me and they quit, I don't ask them where they're going.

We have we have general well no, but yeah, but I but if you're looking for strong data, I don't know if you'll have data.

I said as much as possible if it's a lot of curious too, but I anyway.

So Jason with that, I think our consensus is a no tax.

So I think I think we change the conversation into okay, where do we where do we go on?

What are the sacred cows?

Like if like you're giving us direction, okay, we need to make all these priorities fit within what are yeah, what are the sacred cows?

What what can we not touch or what must we include?

I mean I'm fine getting rid of the council special projects.

I don't have any special projects.

Well, again, from a leadership perspective, this council better be ready to make its own cuts.

We cannot ask departments to go cut with the market.

Any increase in the salary, which I was happy about.

I'm happy to look at other cuts like whatever we need to do.

Well, yeah, and I and I'm also I kind of feel like these were throwing out pennies.

I know.

So from a leadership perspective, we need to be able to take those two.

We lead this in.

I agree, and I'm I'm on board with whatever cuts we need to make in our own like.

I want to clarify too the the percent increases for employees really quick.

So I have them all right here.

In 2019, I'm not gonna go back to when Jason started, but we've never had zero.

Jason's correct about that.

2019 we had 4%, 2020 we had 4%.

2021, we had three percent, 2022 we had three percent, 2020, no, I'm sorry, five percent in 2022.

2023, we had seven percent, 2024 we had four percent, 2025 we had four percent, 2026 we had four percent.

Is that every department?

Yes, if you look at the merit and the cola together.

But it's not the market that used to have been.

Some departments might have more because that's the selective increase.

Adjustment, we might have hired yes.

That doesn't include the police or the fire.

Police also had additional it above those, and there was a couple times when fire did, but police have holding and a few other.

We've had some selective to try and keep different industry or different engineering, yes, yeah.

No, I I mean I mean if you look in back, this is FY20, and it used to have another column where it showed the percent increase and decrease, and that I noticed went missing.

Um but there's some where the employee number of employees stayed the same.

Um fire wages and salary percent increase decreases zero percent there, no change in employees.

Um that's what I'm talking about.

I went through that, and and then there's others that there was one I think it was finance that got like a two percent increase, so it wasn't always a lot of different things.

Well, a lot of it has to do with turnover because we budget according to the person, and let's say take for example before Dean was hired here, we had a finance director that was paid probably more than him, he came in, and so it would go down.

Kind of depends on what happens in the year.

But the numbers that I just gave you were across the they were the amounts of budget.

So it doesn't maybe it doesn't necessarily re-fund across the actual because it's based on people.

Because last year's last year's budget might have included some people that were lower paid and now they're higher paid and market adjustments.

We have different employees.

Some departments have part-time employees that we have to adjust the amount with their part-time employees because we didn't quite budget enough last year and they were stored to be able to do that.

So are you saying that always you it's been four percent forever?

Yeah, I have it clear back to 2012, and there were there's been a raise every single year since 2012.

But they're not all four percent.

No, they're not all percent, they're different.

Some quite got quite a bit more, yeah.

But those might have been market adjustments, they might have been every year something different is coming up, right?

Yeah, on that budget document, it doesn't necessarily just because their salaries increase by more than seven by more than four percent doesn't mean that we gave that department.

Yeah.

So again, what's what are some things that that we need to make sure that are I think I think it'd be helpful if we just went around because I think maybe most of us have some similar things that we agree maybe shouldn't be in there, or maybe we should add and so it would probably save time if we just kind of went around the horn.

Well, I'm Rachel, you're up sure.

Um I think you know, speaking with the Justice Corps and having them here, I feel like the two full-time clerks, or if you want to do four part-time, I don't know, but just supporting that because they seem to provide and make whatever recoup whatever costs that they spend.

And I and I especially and he said whether or not police increases their drowning.

And I um they've made requests for multiple years, and and I just I see that as a priority.

Um I also think the police, I think uh half a part-time record clerk.

Um something that they said.

I well, I think they said full time, but I think I would support part-time.

Would it be the same because it if we move our part-time recorder to full time?

Then you'd have to be a good one.

Would it be the same?

It would cost more than if you bring in a part-time, right?

Two part time is cheaper than a full time, right?

Because the benefits would be as high as 40%.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Anyways, um, yeah.

That's kind of what I think some other people might want to speak on the police.

I think what I landed on was only three police were needed instead of the ones requested, and I I would support the three officers.

I think someone would be calculating a total cost.

Is that okay that's that okay, Alison?

Because I I can write it down.

I just will do my best.

So my understanding of the police, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, because it's it's gone back and forth even since this tenant budget came out.

Were it currently the original request was nine, they reevaluated their metrics and said actually we need we're just gonna put in five.

But one of those was an SRO that went away.

Yep, so now we're at four.

But wondering if you gave the AI tool.

Because the AI tool is how they're justifying not needing the city.

Sorry, I just wanted to include it.

I just wanted to include it to make sure you knew the decrease was because they're utilizing the AI tool, which came up in the police department meeting.

And I'm supportive of both the AI tool and the forehead count for police.

Yeah, and I'd say three for I think it went down to three.

I think it's well, I think one is funded through their without a tax increase.

Yeah, I believe so.

So yeah, we're talking about.

It's only two in addition to the three.

Three plus without a tax increase.

Maybe it's two.

I think it was three.

I wrote down changes nine to three.

We it's just on the back of the little thing.

Yeah.

What?

How many without the tax increase, how many do you offer?

So basically one.

I thought it was three.

Is it two?

It's two, it's two without and then three with the tax.

Three more.

Three additional with the tax.

He amended his request to three with the AI tool.

Oh, in there.

He said the AI tool was equivalent to two officers.

So he and then he wanted to use those wages, that those two officer dollars for an increase to wages at about a dollar eighty per hour.

So he didn't.

So he didn't change his request.

He changed how he allocated the money.

Yeah.

So I'm not touching that, but uh I do think from my experience just working shifts and everything, I feel like fire is something that is a little bit um easier to commute somewhere else when you're working a 48-hour shift versus somewhere else.

Like that's something where I mean I even know people they'll fly from a like as a travel nurse, you go to a different state because you're working your shift, and it's that's that retention to me seems like it would be more difficult for us to keep for us to keep than the police, in my opinion.

So I think I can understand why um Chief Craft was like this is really important to increase the fire wages so that that those are competitive because just with my experience with shift work, that's something that I see.

So yeah.

I'd I'd be supportive of the case.

So what is she sorry to do what she was saying for five?

Fire wages increasing the whole amount to keep it to what it was.

That's what I would say.

So I think it was 820, 819 too.

But we've got another one of our chiefs in here if he wants to craft them.

I think I would be supportive just based on Chief Craft's presentation a couple weeks ago, which was very insightful.

I would be supportive if if he can wait another year potentially for the assistant fire chief position.

Yeah, then let's give the full.

And I'm okay.

I'm fine with that.

Both police and fire said that.

If we're not doing a tax increase, it's really hard to justify hiring if that means like people are not getting over wages.

So if like if it if there's two that comes with like not having their tax increase, I would have a hard time pushing it beyond that.

Unless there's like a lot of people.

And everybody's including where police and fire both need the increase of wages, that would be a more of a priority than hiring the head count.

And they only had count from my understanding was for fire was the assistant fire chief.

Yeah, plus the vehicle.

I mean the wage the police wage is what they're talking about, is a difference between two 2999 to 3147 an hour.

Yeah, it was like a dollar forty-nine an hour extra or something like that.

Just yeah.

To break it down.

I know looking at jobs myself and I get paid hourly sometimes.

I mean sometimes you just you choose different jobs based on a convenience location too.

But if you're community for a 48-hour shift, it's a different matter is what I'm saying.

Yeah, so I'm saying this is for the police shift differentials when I'm talking about these numbers.

But when I asked Chief what he wanted, do you want head count and the AI tool or do you want wages?

He said wages first.

And then he'd want head count AI toll.

And that's the same thing that buyer said.

They would want wages first, then head count.

Do you can you talk about the we did a wage increase from the police two years ago and did a tax increase for that?

And maybe you're not going to ask.

I don't know.

But um can you explain how they decided to use that money?

It wasn't based on position and percent, it was kind of across the board.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, so they all got the same dollar amount raise something like that.

How would that affect um their averages when they compare it to other cities, would it or not?