Good afternoon, all.

Welcome to the special meeting for the city of Mesquite, Wednesday, March 25th, 2025 at 2 30.

We're gonna get started.

It's not an agenda, but let's go do the Pledge of Allegiance, please.

Pledge.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

So we are gonna start with our opening public comment period.

Um, this public comment period is for things not pertaining to the agenda item.

So if you have anything that's not pertaining to the agenda, please come forward.

If you have if you want to talk to the agenda, then you will do so at that time.

So if you have anything generally to talk about, please come forward.

All right.

Okay, we're gonna close the opening public comment period.

Um so I want to start off.

Um, I guess with an apology.

Um this was kind of a rush job.

Um mostly my fault, and I take full responsibility.

I apologize to the council that they weren't informed uh with more time than they did get, as well as the public.

We did go to, of course, through their proper noticing procedures according to NRS, but I realize people sometimes like a little more time and a little information than they got on this on this item.

Um this is potentially a time sensitive issue, and so that's why I chose to call the public meeting.

Um that that's that.

I apologize for that part of it and and messing up there, and I hope you'll listen to the presentation with an open mind and forgive me for for messing up on that.

Um I'm gonna give a little bit of history of this project.

So, probably a year or so ago, gentlemen approached me who's involved in business and was basically like, we need workforce housing and mesquite.

We've got a lot of new business, hotels, different things coming into town, and we don't have any place for this income level of people, you know, the the 35 to you know 80,000 earners in our city.

We don't have a lot for those people.

And so he had a relationship with Switchpoint.

Um, as many of you know, Switchpoint has a homeless shelter in St.

George and one in Towilla.

They also have a bunch of other projects they do.

Um, their goal is to start people, and they'll speak to this, but I'm just giving you my part of it.

Their goal is to start people from homelessness to single family homeownership, and to help people along every rung of that ladder, whether they come into that ladder in the middle, the beginning, or the end.

That that's kind of their goal is to basically make give people a house at whatever income level they are, that they have someplace to live.

And so our goal or my goal, um, and I think a lot of us share this goal, is we want something that is nice but affordable for people that have jobs that are trying to make a living, that are trying to survive, that they can have something available.

And mesquite, the country in general, that's a really huge problem across the country.

So back to the beginning.

So I talked to them.

We met on a Saturday morning and basically toured mesquite.

We looked at the property in question.

We looked at the property next to the parking garage.

We looked at all the city properties, we looked at other properties throughout the city that were for sale or that I knew potentially you know, people were interested in selling.

And they saw this property that they ended up with and said that is perfect.

It is close to the schools, it is close to Walmart, it is close to the bus stop.

It is a great location for people in this income bracket.

And there was a first sale sign on this property at the time.

And so they called the agent, the agents says no, it's under contract.

So they actually kind of gave up on that piece of property.

They looked at another piece of property and went under contract on that.

Turned out that wasn't a good fit.

So that they got out of that contract.

In the meantime, the other property fell out of contract.

They ended up with that piece of property that they originally thought would be the ideal location for this project.

So along the way, you know, every few months we would talk, they'd kind of give me updates.

Um that's how it went.

Um then they get closer, they're like, we need a letter uh or a resolution saying that the city wants this type of project, you know, because it's to be able to afford it and be able to afford the house affordable housing, they have to get what they call a LITEC, and of course, they'll explain that better to you.

Um there's different levels of that, right?

We have our Hafen Village, which is basically a 30% of AMI.

This is gonna be more the 50, 60, 70, 80 percent AMI, which AMI is around a hundred thousand dollars for Clark County, so that puts people in the you know, $50,000 to $80,000 income range, and it depends on whether they're single, married, have kids, you know, how many people are in that family, that number will, of course, change throughout that.