The Payson Town Council held a special work session on August 20, 2024, to receive a presentation on the proposed recreation and aquatics center. Staff and consultants presented results from eight months of community outreach, including stakeholder meetings, workshops, and a scientific survey with 519 responses (95% confidence, ±4% margin of error). The recommended conceptual design, Concept 1B, includes a multipurpose indoor gym, a recreation pool with six lanes and a slide, and an outdoor walking trail. Estimated construction costs range from $44 to $49 million. Public comment was taken, and no formal action was requested; a follow-up special meeting on August 21, 2024, was scheduled to consider bond funding.
Public comment allowed. You don't have to fill out a form, but anybody that would like to give a public comment after the presentation and council discussion is welcome to do so. So I just want to make sure, and that will be also true for tomorrow night as well. So there will be public comment, but it will be after the presentation and council discussion. So at this time, Mr. Town Manager, could you please give the presentation? Thank you, Mayor. And just a moment, I'll introduce our project team and Mr. Rob Buchanan, who will be doing the presentation this evening. As you mentioned, the purpose of tonight's meeting is to present to you our latest community outreach effort related to the construction of a recreation amenity in TASIN. The outreach included a second hosted public workshop, a statistically valid community survey, and a web-based community survey. Based upon all the available information, the project team will present you a recommendation tonight based on the input of all of those different factors, a recommended facility for our conceptual design. At the conclusion of the presentation, council's welcome to ask questions and offer feedback. Staff is not requesting any council action be taken tonight. Thank you. With that, I would like to introduce Rod Buchanan, our program management office director. Thank you. Good evening, Council. Nice to see you all. Tonight, um, we're going to present the findings from the outreach efforts that we've been doing since January. So it's been about eight months or so. And we'll cover some, then we'll cover some of the financial and economic projections for our recommendation. And then finally, we'll present the recommend recommended concept design, and this will be followed by some next steps. So here's our agenda, some summary of community input. This is a very important process because uh this is very involved, and we have a number of touch points for the community to give input. Planning concepts and operational evaluation. In other words, if something was a highly desirable item, we still took it through an evaluation for cost and return on investment basically. Um then we're gonna go over the recommended concept and the next steps, and then open it back, uh turn it back to the mayor for discussion questions. So the first thing we're going to do, I'm gonna introduce John. John is the project manager from LPA for the design team, and he's gonna take us through the beginning of our community input, and Winston will follow him. Thank you, Rod. Um, as Rod indicated, uh, we did start this process uh back in January, the first week of January. Um so we've covered a lot of territory since then. Um, and this slide shows you the wide array of community input that uh was planned for this project and then executed. Uh we walked into it. I want to make it really clear. We walked into this with no preconceived notions, uh no design that was hooked up in a design studio somewhere. We we came to the community um to gather ideas and to develop uh really what the needs of the community were and and engage with with your community members in a multitude of different settings, um sizes of groups, um, and then essentially let that inspire the vision for the project. Um, and so you'll see the progression through the whole slide uh show here that we're gonna we're gonna present to you. But this slide summarizes summarizes the community input that we did. So we started at the very beginning uh right before January with the plan the plan meeting to set the schedule uh for the project. Uh it was a pretty aggressive schedule, and I'd like to to um to thank Rod for keeping us on schedule and for us for actually executing everything that we said that we would do. Um, so the next thing was an in-house staff workshop where we got together with uh staff who were gonna uh who operate the existing facilities and who would be tasked with operating anything that we knew to brought uh to the town. Um we developed number three um a series of stakeholder meetings, those are one on one. So I talked about scale. We started small and built bigger and bigger as uh as the iterative process went along in the schedule. Um so we met with those groups and summarized all those comments. Um we developed a the initial community workshop based on all the things that we learned from those stakeholder meetings and from the focus groups. Um, and that workshop um over 200 people attended. It was a it was a really fun evening.