The Riverton City Council held a hybrid work session at 6:00 PM followed by a regular council meeting at 7:00 PM on November 12, 2024. The work session included discussions on animal control, fee schedule changes, and the youth council ordinance. The council meeting featured citizen comments, presentations, three public hearings, and action on several ordinances. Votes were taken on a development agreement (denied), accessory structure regulations (adopted with amendment), planning commission code changes (adopted), the youth council ordinance (adopted with amendments), and the false alarm code (adopted).
Okay, well, we'd like to call our work session meeting to order. We have all of our elected officials present here today. A number of things to discuss, so we'll start right away with item 5A. This is an animal control discussion. Kevin, we'll turn it over to you. Yes, thank you, Mayor. Um council, I've put together, or I shouldn't say I we, I mean, this has been a joint effort with uh uh myself, Jason Lethbridge, Craig Calvert, um, Chief Shane Taylor, um, and Nick Geere as we've been looking at the different options to now roll out the city animal shelter. Uh, we've put together a presentation. Um, the plan is to go through and just show you the different options that we've come up with, and then from there talk about some of the considerations that we need to think through. Um, the hope is that we can have a good discussion and potentially have some direction from the council so that we can come back on December 3rd with a budget adjustment so we can get the ball rolling because we do need to move relatively quickly to get this thing up and running. Um, so as we go through, the first thing I wanted to show you is uh just a little quick background of what has happened over the past seven years just to refresh everybody's mind. We've uh about seven years ago we left Salt Lake Cannon, Salt Lake County Animal Services and decided to contract with Stone Ridge Veterinary Services for the shelter. Um over that time frame, the city, when comparing with what we would have been paying through Salt Lake County, uh we have saved the city about 1.5 million dollars. And you can see there it's estimated that each year it was about 240, 250 ish. Some years was a little bit more, uh, depending on obviously um how everything panned out. Um if we go to the next slide, um, jumping right in. As I mentioned, I will move relatively quickly, jumping right into uh what it would look like for us to do our own animal shelter. Uh the operating budget, we would be asking for one additional FTE. Uh, that would be someone that would be more of a shelter technician that would help run the shelter. Uh the intent is the adoption and placement services are gonna be overseen by the communications team so that they can help get everything on Facebook and also help market work, have some good relationships with the different uh uh animal rescues in the area so that we can uh keep the animals flowing through quickly. Uh we would anticipate the first year's net expenditure, so that's after all of our revenues that we would be bringing in. Uh, we would expect those to be about 355,000. Um, do a little bit of comparison for you. If we were to go to Salt Lake County Animal Services for this year, we'd be paying about 475. And so we would still be enjoying the savings, even though we are looking at bringing this in-house fully now with the shelter. Um, and for reference, so you can understand a little bit, Harriman Animal Control. You can see there, they they spend about 440 per year. Draper animal control spends about 414. Um, the big issue though, as we know is going to be the startup costs. Uh when we looked at the different startup costs, we did have five different options that came up. When we were considering these options, we didn't look into purchasing land because obviously that would take some time and it'd be pretty pricey. We looked at what options could we do with the land that the city currently has. And then there is one rental option that we also are looking at as well. Um I have confirmed with Stone Ridge. They have graciously uh been accommodating to extend to June 30th. So we have through the end of June of next year to um uh to uh um utilize Stone Ridge. In the event that we can't get this stood up by July 1st, Harriman has also offered us some help as a temporary solution. I just want to emphasize that's temporary. That wouldn't be permanent, but it does give us that ample time. Um, really, I I do this is a moment where I'll give give the mayor some props. I think um Dr. Cannon was very adamant that he wanted to help out and not leave us stranded. I think the relationship that the mayor has with Dr. Canyon has kind of helped alleviate that even with some of their concerns they've had. He was very willing to say, no, I don't want to leave you hanging. So I definitely want to publicly thank him as well for their willingness to um both Dr. Can and Ann Marney. Um so here are a quick overview of the different options, and we'll go through each of them individually. Option A, and this is not really in any particular order, they just it's how they played out as we started coming up with some ideas. Option A would be station 120.