Okay, thank you.

Test test.

Okay.

We should be good.

Appreciate that.

All right, Alex, if you're ready.

Uh you should just be able to click it.

Perfect.

Green.

There you go.

Great.

Thank you.

Uh hello, everybody.

Great to see you guys again.

Uh appreciate the special meeting, making sure that we're keeping kind of this early uh park recreation open space plan, pros plan uh momentum going.

Really the crux of today's conversation is about public engagement.

Um we distributed distributed a draft public engagement plan um and looking for kind of any preliminary feedback that you guys have.

Uh and in addition to that, um today we transferred over to Cody a draft of uh the survey that we plan on distributing.

And uh, I think a big part of today's conversation is gonna be just going through this survey.

So uh those are kind of the two topics that uh I want to discuss today uh with you guys, start to get some of that preliminary feedback, and then just to set uh the intention here, we'll take all this feedback that you guys provide, uh revise both of those draft documents, the public engagement plan and the survey, uh work with uh Cody, make sure all those uh revisions get taken care of, and then move forward towards finalizing those documents so that way we're not waiting until uh the next meeting in early January to uh start to get the survey out in particular.

I think the public engagement plan is really kind of the baseline of that survey, so making sure that we're all comfortable with the approach is important before we start uh distributing the survey.

Uh so with that being said, uh the public engagement plan, uh I'd be happy to just kind of take any questions, comments, um, considerations, revisions uh that you guys have um and kind of go from there.

Maybe we can start there.

And I think the intention is uh for this meeting, uh making sure that we reserve about 15 minutes towards the back end uh for Cody and some presentation materials that he has.

Um, but yeah, with that, uh any thoughts, comments, questions on the public engagement plan.

Sure.

So uh one of the things that I've noticed in here was the uh the talk about how the there's a change from using a uh uh level of service based on population density and more on uh surveys, both uh online, seems like mostly online, but also obviously in paper.

And so uh one of the things that uh caught my eye was that uh in the 2019 one that it was one, it was only about a month long, maybe two months that were we were uh open for uh comment, but that the uh the amount of people that were uh responded was very small.

381 people for a city of almost 50,000 people.

It just doesn't seem like um it really covers everybody that's here.

And so especially when you look at some of the things here where they said that uh about 23 percent uh did not pre- uh uh participate in parks and rec programs in the previous year.

That seems very concentrated.

Um and the other thing was that there was uh about 25% that seemed unaware of programs.

So I'm wondering if we can do a better job of educating people, if there's a way if you had experience in the past of how to get the word out better, how to reach out a little bit better and make it more well known.

I know we talked about a lot of different places where you're thinking about engaging with the public.

Um but also wondering if there's maybe a hybrid system to where you can look at it and think to yourself uh if we don't get at least 10% of the population responding, that we maybe go back to looking at the old system of level of service based on uh population density and see how those two can work together.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I might have to re-look at the public engagement plan to see where that change comes into play.

But I believe the intention is to make sure that the level of service is tied to population because I think that really establishes what that level of service looks like community-wide, independent of survey respondents.

Okay, um, where level of service uh typically is kind of an acreage lineal mile calculation.

It's it's not very um, it's not a subjective exercise, like a survey largely can be, uh, where opinions are uh kind of weighed of priorities and things like that level of service is meant to be an objective metric.

You have X amount of acres per population uh number, and that that can help dictate uh some policy decisions of uh which parts we want to improve.

Do we need to look at acquiring potentially new park land based on level of service and comparison metrics there?

Um so I would just kind of note that maybe those two are decoupled and maybe we need to be a little bit more explicit in that public engagement plan that the level of service metric is is really meant to be an objective uh acreage park number count as opposed to um dictated by survey responses from what we hear and and I think both are are valuable.

Yeah, but I think that we need to make sure that uh we get a larger survey sample.

Yes to really represent the the residents of of QALUP, and especially as we grow, and we're gonna grow even more.

I really think 381 does not really represent the city very well.

Yeah.

Um so uh with that being said, there was also um a thought that uh as we uh as we grow, if it would be possible to work with the uh the planning commission to maybe set work with developers to either set aside some some land in their development, or you know, if it's possible that maybe they can donate some some land and there could be some sort of way of working that out with them.

Um but I think it's worth the conversation with the planning commit commission or to work between parks and the planning commission to either set aside pro green space within the development or put money towards making green space available to people that are especially in the the higher density population areas, the the apartment complexes that we're seeing go in, the uh the townhomes and the high rises and things like that.

Yeah, and on this one, I'm gonna defer to you, Cody.

Is there a metric like that in place in terms of either impact fee or park acreage calculation in association with development at this point in time?

Yeah, there is that option for park impact fees to be waived based on green space or park space.

And so the mixed-use development that's coming in at the Cornforth Campbell property did get their fees, their park impact fees waived um in exchange for some open space courtyard.

Uh they're providing a public bathroom along Meeker Festival Street and some storage space that the city will have access to.

And so um there is that opportunity for developers to propose similar exchanges.

And honestly, I think that should be something that we should be proposing to developers, not waiting for them to propose it to us, is that we should put it to them, say this is an option, and we'd like to talk to you about this.

That happened on the council side, Cody.

You know, I'm not sure if that was proposed during their, you know, just their overall development proposal, and that was just you know approved as a as a package.

Um, but I would imagine it needs council approval.