I ain't driving on the back.

Well, okay.

So you have a 1300 sale car.

He's online.

Oh, I'm not going to mention that.

Yeah.

Thank you for always printing attention for me.

I know.

I think I didn't have it out today.

And I was like, what if today's the day he needs that?

And I fell the little happen someday.

You know, I told them.

But I know you have all your like marketing.

You do all your spouse.

I do mine, but I just put what page in one there's been so many times everything.

I don't know.

I started doing that last month.

Why?

Why?

I'm in American Samoan.

And I'm like, oh, well, certainly I'll have to get that.

Certainly on that one.

I have just not even.

I think you're gonna show that able to access.

Oh, very good.

Alright.

Sounds like you're part of the in your own situation.

You're right, you're right.

Yep.

Let's go.

Okay.

I make it uh 30 seconds to the hour, so we'll go ahead and start.

Uh to let you know that Jordan was planning on attending remote tonight, so he may or may not be online.

Um we will call this meeting to order.

The first item on our agenda is public comment.

This is a chance for the general public to bring to our attention, something that we may be able to talk about at a future meeting.

We obviously can't discuss anything that is on the not advertised as on the agenda.

Is there anyone here tonight that would like to bring public comment forward?

Seeing none, I will close public comment.

The next item on our agenda is we have a report, an update on the Utopia Fiber project for Syracuse City.

I see that Roger's here.

Were you gonna give that presentation?

Yep.

Okay.

It's your turn.

Right.

Um you got wherever you feel comfortable.

Um share for this slide, so we'll give it a place.

Thanks for having us here though.

So um I'm Roger Zimmerman and Paul Cottle's here with me.

She's our deputy director.

Uh equipment fiber.

Um, so if you ask any really hard questions, that's why I brought her here.

But she's awesome.

Um just we were we weren't here that long ago.

You know, I was like, weren't we just here a few months ago?

But it was actually last November.

So there have been some changes and updates, and so like there's the good time to come and meet with you and just say where you were at because it is kind of a critical point of the timing of the revenues and customers and and the debt obligations as well.

So anyways, just historically for anybody not familiar with us, it was started as 11 city project.

Uh had a few years that were a little bit rough, but then things gotta turn around.

I'll show you timeline of that real quick after this slide.

Um, but we then after things started going really well, the man skyrocketed.

Um we had cities start reaching out wanting to partner with us.

Uh and then we did a little bit of outreach after that too saying, hey, this has worked really well.

We had a new model for how cities could uh participate with this in the financing of a project.

Um kind of piggyback off of what had been done before and uh the economy of scale that we had at that point momentum and all that was really good.

So we looked at cities across the state uh search with really good.

I had pretty bad broadband and we had a pretty good option for you.

So uh we uh did an agreement.

So you're kind of here.

Let's see.

Kind of in the middle.

We've done several projects and new partnerships uh since then.

I'm gonna go to the next slide.

I don't know if it was the point.

Okay.

This is that timeline I mentioned.

So we had um some years uh that uh they they built the backbone.

There's a lot of important things that happened during that time, but Utopia had a little bit of reputation for um cities having to cover short financial shortfalls.

But every project since 2009, uh we've issued debt, build those networks, and we get enough customers on those systems that they would be uh paid for by the revenues and not the cities.

Uh and we've done a lot of that.

In fact, a lot more of our history has been successful in those types of projects than the earlier years that are pretty rough.

You guys can uh well, the next slide.

A few things I want to bring attention to.

Uh so we're the largest open access network in the country, uh, and we're the largest municipal system by uh addresses past.

Um we're up to 23 citywide projects now.

Uh and so we're kind of proud of that.

Uh with fastest speeds in the country, keep remembering needing to update the slide because we do have uh 400 gigabit with businesses now.

Uh, and that's mostly with not really business, but the University of Utah uses us uh 400 gigabits, it's their biggest connection.

Um it's our quickest connection, too.

Um, but we offer a lot of connectivity across the state for various purposes.

So we talked here about kind of citywide, it benefits residents and businesses and all that, but uh even outside of the cities that we have citywide coverage, we're benefiting school systems.

So the uh Davis School District uses us for a lot of their schools inside and outside of the city, and obviously got to connect to places outside of the city, because that's where their data center is, and uh you know, they've got one in Kesville, uh, which we're connected to, even though it's not one of our city projects.

Um, so there's a lot of things that happen outside of the city that you benefit from because they're on the utopia backbone.

We bring all of that here to the city.

But anyways, lots of really good connections, and we continue to expand that and connect your city uh to the major data centers and exchange uh points of the internet.

Uh it's the most competitive system, and what we mean by that is uh we keep getting more and more options on the network.

Some of these providers have different bundles, like they can bundle wireless services or home security systems or different innovative things.

Um, and so uh we keep adding more.

You know, it's just uh you have 19 options on utopia.

Sometimes it's hard because people sign up and they're like that's a lot of choices, um, but they all do kind of have their own niche and benefits.

Um, and it does keep things competitive and priced well.

Um, but you have more options here in your city than anywhere else in the country, um, other than the other utopia cities.

Uh, there's no other system like that.

Um, over the last few years, we've connected more schools than any other provider.

We continue to win uh awards from uh the Utah education network for school schools and other education related facilities like libraries, things like that.

So from our perspective, we like it because it's revenue, but at the same time, if we're winning those bids, we're saving those entities money.

And so how we win those, right?

So not only are we saving the residents and businesses money, but uh we're saving taxpayers' money and school districts money and improving education uh that way.

Uh we install a air quality sensor.

It's just something we wanted to know.

Uh, every time we install fiber hub, we put an air quality sensor in there.

So if you were to look up like the KSL weather app for air quality or other places where you can see air quality coverage, you'll notice there's a bunch of sensors in your city, and that's because we automatically put them in all of our installations.

You can almost tell which cities are Utopia Viber Cities by which cities have lots of sensors in them because it kind of shows up on a map that way.

Uh, but that's just kind of part of what we do.

We like to enable smart city applications.

One of them that's been kind of interesting lately was the wildfire detection.

Um I have the PDF version of this power presentation doesn't have the video in it, but uh I'll send it to you, I guess.

But there's a video we have of the fire just happened in Provo, uh, where we have a thermal camera uh and an optical camera that we turned on to that to watch it and you can see so much more detail in the hot spots that are there when optically, like with your eyes you see smoke and things.

Um, but the multiple cameras and types of imaging can be very helpful for first responders or not even first responders, but the the later responders, I don't know.

We call them, right?

That come in and they're doing the fire suppression that drop the things on the hot spots.

So there's really cool things we can do when we have connectivity.

Those are just a couple of examples.

Some of them are obvious, like Wi-Fi in the parks and public spaces.

Um, but you know, this this fiber connectivity is here and it's everywhere in the city now.

And as we come up with uh you know things we can do with that, and as the city has needs, we can you know it's really nice.

We can make those things happen.

We have a really positive net promoter score, that's a customer service satisfaction score.

So we do surveys and ask people like, you like it?

You would you recommend this to a neighbor or colleague?

Um, that's a common question.

You probably answer surveys for all sorts of types of products from when you buy them.

Uh, and that's used to kind of gauge how much people like what they have.

And that's a very good score for broadband, and we're pretty proud of that.

Now, before we came here, we did a survey with the city, and we asked that same question.

Said, we don't really know what you have.

You might have Comcast or wireless or something, but what for whatever it is that you have, how likely are you to recommend that to a friend or colleague?

The exact same question.

It was a negative score.

Most people were it was it zero, it was negative.

People are like, I wouldn't recommend it.

It's terrible.

I want something better.

So we have dramatically improved um the service available trucks.

Google rating score is pretty good too.

Let's go to the next slide.

These are the choices you have on the network.

Before you just had Comcast and parts of the city, that's TSL parts of the city, some wireless providers.

Now you have lots of fiber providers in the city.

And uh most of them are local companies, right?

So this isn't money that's going to some company back east or some you know, profits and and shareholders of some uh corporation.

These are mostly Utah based companies.

We love that.

Um, some of them regional.

Um, but uh you know, this is the money that you're paying for the service is being reinvested back in the community to local companies and employees.

That's that's a huge benefit.

Uh this is just I'll just sit this real closely.

We continue to upgrade this network.

Even from we when we first started talking to you, um, we have improved the capacity of the network.

And right now you basically have 10 gigabits available supported to every single address in the city.

And even our just our normal installation, we have switched uh anybody getting installed today, uh, actually gets a 10 gigabit capable device.

Um, when we started it was one gigabit, and they only got 10 gig if they ordered a 10 gig service.

So we're already and it's been at the second generation.

Um that's better than any other system out there.

And even in how that system, we talked about this a little bit when you were evaluating different options.

The way we build it is everybody gets their own connection.

The other fiber providers out there use a it's called a pond system, which is kind of shown in the bottom one where you get a time slot and you share connectivity with your neighbors.

Um, but on ours, everybody has their own connection, and that is the best way you can build these networks.

And um, most of them are actually doing it the cheaper way, but you have the better way.

You have the best system in the country, and you're if your neighbor is obnoxious with their internet or like use downloading and hogging all that bandwidth, it doesn't affect your connection at all.

And that's unique to this type of system.

But most of them actually do slow down if they're built this way.

Uh I know I'm gonna get this question because you brought it up.

So everybody who was a first generation subscriber in the city got a one gig connection, but you're now saying you have a 10 gig available.

Yes, there they order one gig.

We still only we limit it to one gig still.

Right.

But is there an upgrade option for people who yeah, if they order two and a half gig or 10 gig, then we do have to send someone out, but they'll replace the device with the 10 gig device.

And is that an initial cut?

No gossip.

I'm just asking questions that I know I'm gonna get.

People know the city.

Yeah, the ones that I'm not sure I'm got, but yeah, yeah, there's no cost there.

Same okay, go ahead.

But yeah, we encourage as many people as want it to upgrade to 10 gig or 10 gig, and there's no charge other than just the monthly feed.

Okay, okay.

Uh, next next slide.

Um, this is we didn't talk about this before.

We just kind of said there's a lot of other benefits that happen in your community when you bring a fiber network in.

But this is kind of a little more quantified.

Um, based on some of our own studies and some studies done on other municipal fiber networks.

But the closest product that we have and the most popular that's out there was was running about 109 dollars for 1.1 gigabit download and about 50 mega and one gig symmetrical is actually much better, more reliable, lots of things, but it but that's the closest thing that would be here otherwise, and the most popular thing here otherwise.

It's very easy to say, well, compared to what we have, people are immediately saving about 29 a month for a and they're getting a better service.

If we just apply some numbers to that, and we've got when I did this slide, I was looking at a previous month's report, and you had 2790 residential customers.

We stay 2790 by the annual savings of 29 a month over a year would be 348.

That many customers and that much annual savings are saving residents of the city almost a million dollars a year, just money in their pockets.

That's huge, right?

Like, especially as seems like everything's getting more expensive, right?

And this is the way the city has actually uh helped help people save money dramatic.

Um, your numbers actually uh about 3,000 now.

Um, so it's it's a bigger number than that.

Businesses, we don't have as many businesses in the city, there's not a ton of business in the city, but there's some.

These are our non-residential customers, about 88 of those right now.

Um, we average they can there's a lot more variability in business, but we're saying they save about 50 bucks a month compared to what they'd have otherwise.

That's very conservative.

In many cases, it's much more than that.

That's another 50,000 or more into your saving businesses by having this in place.

And again, if this costs the city a lot of money to put this in place, it'd be worth it.

But we asked the city, you know, or just bring it up like how much have you paid for this?

You haven't paid anything for it.

You know, the model is working.

We we issued debt, we built the network, and the subscriber uptake is very good.

Um, and we'll show you the chart and where we're at with that.

But it would have been worth it if it cost you anything, but it's even more awesome that it isn't cost in city to just counsel to put that in perspective that 348 a year for those who subscribe.

That's that's a little more than half of the average annual property tax built in the city for residents on savings.

Yeah, yeah, stop and the blow on some other things.

It's the average property tax bill for the city is around 600 some 650, something this is a very strong man situation.

No, I'm just it's a fact.

Um, there was a study done on uh the Chattanooga fiber network, um, which is another municipal fiber system, and they were they went in and looked at a lot of different aspects, uh, a lot more than we had been thinking of of you know, property values and education and business investments and all these different things.

We went in there and said, okay, what are the categories of that that apply uh to Syracuse and size that to Syracuse?

And according to their thing, and there's a link to it that you'd be able to go read the details now, the their logic and everything that leads into that.

But basically, by having the network in place over a 10-year period, that there would be an economic benefit of 243 million dollars for Syracuse.

Uh, their estimate was like 1.9 billion dollars because it's a much bigger city, but the same benefits apply, and and the ones that don't apply, we pulled out of this the number uh they had some smart grid things and things like that, which still benefit you know, at least but you don't have a power utility.

So we pulled some of those things out, but still just the idea that there could be if you considered all the things that benefit the city that there would be a 10-year economic benefit of 243 million dollars as a result of this investment.

That's enormous, and it's not made up or bacon.

And we'd encourage you to kind of look at that study if you had you know need some reading material.

That's pretty interesting.

Um, but it you know, we believe it's an amazing thing we can do for our community by providing this.

Um next slide.

This is our total subscriber base.

People wonder like, is this still popular?

People still liking this.

Um we just had the best three months we've ever had with growth um across all of our systems.

So um no satellite isn't meeting people's needs, uh, cable's not meeting people's needs.

All of the other things out there are not meeting people's needs except fiber.

Fiber is increasing in popularity and become critical infrastructure uh everywhere in all of our communities, and you're you're there benefiting from that.

We see demand continuing to increase.

Uh next slide.

This by city.

Um probably more of a chart of demonstrating the size of each city relative to each other.

But the nice thing is that we do see that even cities that have had fiber for a long time continue to add customers to the system.

So it's not just like, hey, 30% of a city is gonna sign up, and then we're done.

We continue to see take rates and subscribers grow.

The ones that are growing the best, obviously are the ones that just got it recently.

So which color are we?

This one can't miss it.

All the way to the right.

We've got your own chart next, so it'll be easier to see.

Ready the next slide.

So this this represents the build out of the system.

So we entered into an agreement about a year before this.

So this is like how many addresses in the city could sign up.

Um, so we finished about September 2023.

Better for a couple years.

Uh next slide.

This is the number of subscribers on the system.

So that kind of follows that, right?

System becomes available, people sign up.

Um, but that's still growing pretty well.

Um, I did mention that we're over 3,000.

We're like, well, wait a second, you know, that's a little bit of a jump there.

Well, there was a jump.

Um, we had uh door-to-door sales team come through the city just recently.

Uh and so this last month, um, where we were averaging about 45 subscribers, we were about 160 subscribers that signed up and were installed last month.

So it's actually like our our report that'll come out the first of the next month, we'll have this nice little jump up there uh representing that.

Uh next slide.

Okay, this is this is the financials of this thing.

So the the light lines, we showed this last time, but we didn't have as much history on it.

The light lines were what we had planned originally.

We said, okay, there's gonna be a debt obligation, and there's gonna be revenue growth.

And if we follow this light green line, we're in great shape.

There's no shortfall that falls to the city, even though the debt payments start here and we're making those debt payments, but we we have more we have this revenue that was accumulated here, and so that actually buys us uh several extra years um before we actually need the revenues and the debt payments be matched to each other.

Um, the trend line is still ahead of where we're at.

We're like, oh, it slowed down a little bit, but it actually jumped up uh really well last month.

So we're still ahead.

And even if this flattened out quite a bit and didn't cross over to like way out here, we're still good because this area here was ahead of schedule.

So this was essentially uh buffer excess cash, right?

That's a buffer uh for any possible exposure to the city.

So as we look at this, we're like, yeah, we're actually great.

That's not gonna take us five years more to get here.

Um we're actually like halfway there now from here to there, and we'll get that easily over the next few months.

So you know, we're not declaring victory, you don't want anybody to like stop promoting the network, but it's great.

And and you know, what else is happening?

I mean, there's new development going in, more homes are coming in, more people signing.

There's a lot of things uh that give us a lot of confidence that that's an easy target.

Um, but uh we're still vigilant, still want to see people uh signing up.

We still want to be the very best option for people.

Um, you know, we don't take that for granted, and uh we appreciate that people are signing up and uh and that there are other options out there.

You know, nobody's been compelled to sign up for this.

I'm gonna show the next slide.

So this shows where who where the customers are.

Um, the red dots are customers, the blue dots are business customers.

Uh and they're all over the city.

So it, you know, this once it's all over the place, it's like, yeah, this doesn't really disclose anything confidential or anything like that, or to competitive uh people.

We're like, yes, is we're probably easily the most popular service in the city now for broadband, and continuing to get more and more customers.

Um, so we're we're happy to see that, and as you feel in pockets here and there with new homes, that's also helpful too.

Um the next slide.

We continue to update and improve the system.

So when we started this project, we didn't have that two and a half gig tier.

That's a new offering, and it's been pretty popular.

Uh we lowered the price for 10 gigabits.

Uh we continue to improve our apps and uh capabilities to make um sign-ups quicker and easier uh scheduling and installations uh automated now.

Um we keep doing more and more smart city partnerships with cities, just finding things that we can do to help uh the city itself with its functions.

Um, and then we just see a lot of future stuff coming in as a development, like uh well, VR or virtual reality, I met a reality, artificial intelligence.

Not only do these things need speed, but they need reliability and then in low latency, and that's something that a lot of people are like, I don't know what that means, but that's the time it takes for your your signal to get to the data centers and back to you, and fiber beats everything else by a lot.

Um, and so as we see the the future and the needs and all the cool stuff coming out, we're just like, hey, that's great.

You know, so far that everything that's happening and everything that all the best crystal balls of predicting the future technology and all that all indicate more and more demand for this this service, and we're just glad that we're here and have this a place for our our communities.

Um that would be a video of um if you click the if you were to go to that link that'll actually show you a live video of that camera.

Um, but these we have a bunch of these cameras that kind of scan over high risk areas for wildfire.

Um, and that's just like one example of how you can use connectivity.

And that'd be a big project, a difficult thing to get connectivity for that sort of thing, but we have a city, so it's like you want a camera, let's put up camera.

Want a sensor, let's put up a sensor, right?

We we can get anywhere uh pretty easily because that infrastructure is in place.

Probably the last slide.

So we're about over time, but anybody have any questions?

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

We seem to be in a really good place, Rabby.

I was just gonna echo that.

You know, I think I think a lot of times we focus on our problems here because we have plenty of them.

But um, I I think you know, it's a good time for this the council to kind of take a win.

Um, and that goes for the mayor.

You were on the council, then this deal was done and Jordan was.

Um I think so far, right?

It's not it's not conclusive yet, but so far, this has been a win for the city and for the citizens, and I think you know should celebrate those.

And it has been a win for business recruiting that we have fiber available throughout the city, and it has been a win for some of the other productive things that have come up with uh home businesses that say they need the uh accessibility in order to run a home business, and our home businesses have jumped as well uh considerably in the last couple of years.

So I think that this was a really good move, and I'm encouraged that we are ahead of schedule.

I'll feel much better when we are above the uh recoup line, but uh as long as we stay on the right trajectory.

So I have noticed on social media every time someone moves to the city and asks about internet the first 10 comments or Utopia.

I don't I don't use GTOP, but I do notice people are very, very happy to have and that that's the first one that comes up every time.

You'll love it, Utopia so fast.

Well congratulations.

Totally agree.

Whichever council member pushed for this at the beginning.

Kudos to them.

Yes, yeah.

Thanks, Jordan.

Uh we're gonna move on on our agenda for appreciate your time.

Uh item D uh will be our planning items.

We'll take these in order.

Number one is recommendation from the planning commission.

This is an application for a zone change at property located at 2402 west, 2700 south.

This isn't currently in A1 uh area that is asking to go to an R2.

Noah, would you give us an overview?

Uh yeah, of course.

Uh, this uh is a requested rezone for just the house.

So they want to sell the just the house off and the area that they want to part off is it's a hand is too small for a one zoning.

So the fenced-in area is as uh just this needs to be rezoned.

Ready for the highway our house that is down the other news, but it's that one.

So we just got the hayfield piece into it.

I think that's one thing we can do, right?

So there'll be two lots.

The the next action that they're wanting to do after if they're successful in a rezone is to do a lot split.

And so there'll be the house lot and then the hayfield, and that'll be zoned A1.

If they ever want to do something else other than a hayfield, they'll be in here asking for yeah.

Okay, sounds good.

So this seems more academic than anything.

Uh is anybody got any particular questions?

I mean, I feel like the house is already there.

So it's not like they're we're building nobody's building anything, nothing like that.

Right.

It's just letting them sell their house with it and keeping their hayfield.

And I support that hayfield.

So all right.

Is anybody see any reason why this would not go on a consent agenda since it's pretty much just dealing with what's already there?

It's not a real change to the city.

Okay.

I'll move that to the consent agenda.

The next one is item number two.

Continue discussion and review of city land rental and lease policies and identification of properties potentially available for lease or rental at a commercial entity or to a commercial entity.

So we uh met with the city staff that would be involved, um, which would be parks and rec and public works and economic development and talked about what they felt was really viable but didn't actually end up more of a hassle to the city.

And to be fair, most for the most part, if we start leasing city land to independent businesses, it puts an undue set of management that we would not, we just wouldn't have otherwise.

And then the uh second part of this question is if we do engage in this, are we giving an unfair advantage to a business?

And I'm gonna let you discuss that one openly, but it does seem that in most cases that would be uh a case.

So we did come up with uh three potential, wasn't it three?

Um yeah, that are varying degrees of options of what might work as a rental property.

But the first question that I ask council is do you feel like this is something you want to engage in?

If it is, let's look at those possible first three.

I think the discuss or the recommendation from the department heads of the people involved would be let's suggest those for lease first before we try to identify any others that might work because they would be the least impactful to the city.

Now I will say that there is one group that we decided to handle uh in a very specific way, and that is there's been a lot of talk about what happens if the city ends up governing park and rides.

Because we don't at this time, there is no reason to discuss that until we do.

It really, if we start putting that cart before the horse, that could mess up the rest of the things that are surrounding that project.

So we're not even dealing with park and rides at this time.

We're dealing with just things that the city owns.

Okay, and I would add uh the same evaluation criteria could really be applied to any property, you know.

Every and uh especially for mobile businesses, I guess there's other kinds of businesses like fireworks stands that might not be as much infrastructure, but um, every business is gonna need power, it's gonna need a place to park, it's gonna need a bathroom, a bathroom, water, and uh they need a place to dump their food, wastewater at the end of the day, and they need garbage, and so you know, we can evaluate any property based off of what infrastructure is available, and we and another important uh criteria is we don't want to lose money, yeah, or a lot of money, and when we subsidize these, we're just losing money to the taxpayer.

And so uh we I've in the packet I've included um a list of of some of the properties.

The the first one is the one that we're already doing, and we've discussed we are losing money on the current lease rate, so that'd be the number one thing that we'd if we're gonna keep doing it, we gotta increase the rate to about a thousand dollars a month.

But that one that property um at Bluff Ridge is already pretty well worked out, they've got all the things.

Um, there are still some safety concerns as far as kids will still dart across the parking lot sometimes a road, and sometimes a road too, if they're on the south side of the road.

Um, but for the most part, out of all of the properties, that's the one that we've already been doing it, and it's been worked out.

And keep in mind that uh when we talk about what is potential for a future property, over time, the city's paid for most of these upgrades to that property.

So I think that that's where we have to fundamentally talk about what's our future.

Should we keep paying for these upgrades so that these things can happen?

Because it's it has cost the city.

So I I have a question.

This is this was what was brought up at the last work session that I wasn't, and I'm the tiebreaker on this one.

I might not.

Yeah, I'm I'm with Miss Crestall on this.

After looking into this a little further, I don't think we should do this.

And I don't feel like the city needs to be liable for any of this.

It's just a bigger headache than it needs to be.

So I it's gonna be a no from me.

And I also feel like where they want to put the next, it's I don't think I'm no expert, but I don't think it would do well there.

The only reason the one that's there does is because it's next to uh where the kids play.

Yeah.

They're not adults playing in that flash pad.

Uh I agree with you.

So the question really comes down to first, should we be entertaining future business sites on city property?

No, I agree with it while that one.

I'm I'm not opposed to it if it's not a if we're not losing money on it.

I think there's certain benefits and gives us maybe uh keeps kind of that smaller town feel to having stuff like this.

But some of the things that we've talked about, some of the things that make some of the sites not great, are all things that should be passed on as cost to those renting.

I don't know why we're providing a dumpster.

You should have to provide your own your own trash receptacles and empty them daily.

If you're caught dumping water where you shouldn't, there should be language in a lease agreement that finds you for that.

I don't like port a potties, but there's locations where you can do that.

If power needs to be fixed, it should be charged as a tenant improvement um as part of the as part of a lease agreement.

So I I'm again, I'm not I'm not opposed to it as long as we're not losing money over it.

Right.

I'm a no.

Okay.

Well, that's three right there.

Jordan, well, let's give Jordan a chance to talk.

I think you were a no too.

If you can, how do you know if they're gonna lose money?

I think like just the personal loan it would take to keep up with that is would be a financial burden to the city in its own.

Let alone all the stuff you got to add immediately to a burger.

We need a whole new inspector.

Let's become a lease agreement.

Yeah, but who's gonna go check to make sure they're following through?

An inspector.

Okay, so Jordan, I want to give you a chance if you wanted to weigh in.

Yeah, thanks.

So I agree with Paul on this one.

If if we're gonna do it, it needs to cover the cost of the service.

That's kind of our our mantra in a lot of things.

So as long as it covers the cost, I'm okay with it.

But it sounds like you've got three, so it doesn't really matter.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, thank you for being on the record.

Uh, it doesn't look like this has enough support to go forward.

So uh we'll not move this forward as an item.

This uh brings us to item C, which is continued discussion of a consideration to lease a specific property.

We've just decided that's probably not in our best interest.

Um, and that property, the one that was being requested, we decided was one of the least favorable for a site um when we evaluated all of them.

So I'm just gonna put that on the record, but it appears like that one follows the previous item.

Does anybody disagree?

But I really do love this coffee shop.

I'm a little heartbroken over there.

Yeah, hey, I already said no.

I know, I thought I'm heartbroken over it.

I was like, man, I gotta put my own personal feelings aside and make the right judgment call here.

Okay, so we wanted a coffee shop.

So here's what I'm gonna see.

Here's what I'm doing.

Here's what I'm gonna say to that though.

But we did go out of our way to see if we can't help them locate.

I know, I don't know.

And I really think that that's a good move for the city, and I would encourage us to continue that.

That's great.

And Bruno would also be a wonderful suggestion when Bruno's followed through.

Okay.

So that's what I yeah.

I mean, I think that that's a good thing.

Let's continue to try and help them find their own arrangement on uh private property and just keep the city out of it.

Isn't anybody we all agree there?

Okay, all right, good.

So I'll move us on to number four continued discussion and review of Syracuse Municipal Code 9.15 regarding building permit requirements.

I'm gonna invite uh Brian Lemons up to the table here, our city inspector.

Um, there's been some discussion, everybody wanted to kind of talk about what requires the city code and why.

I will say that we're doing some research.

I think we have one of the fundamental things that came up when we were doing questions with uh traffic.

There were people that said, oh, we really think that there should be some traffic changes in a particular neighborhood.

And uh at that time, a previous city attorney came back and said, Well, you have a fundamental problem that when you do something other than a national standard, you incur some liability because you decided to change it, whereas the national standard has uh some automatic built-in defense that somebody had studied this across the entire country and decided that it was a good idea.

So similarly, when we decide what requires a permit and what doesn't, we do have some backing that this is a common federal practice.

Uh, it does not mean that we have to go with the exact thing.

I'm just bringing that up that it has a very similar feel to that previous discussion.

So um there were some specific questions, and we can talk about that.

Uh Brian's here to answer some of those questions, but I wanted to put it on the table and bring out the background that I did look into so that we had that as a discussion basis.

Yeah, we've we've adopted those national codes and we enforce them and we require building permits.

Um I know that there's some questions.

Hopefully, we've answered the questions in the staff report, but we can talk about any questions you guys have, and we got the expert here.

So I guess my one of my questions and or concerns is I think there's I think we're requiring permits on things that maybe we shouldn't necessarily require permits, and I'm probably talking about a very limited scope of things.

Um, new construction roofs, all of those things that have major potential impact.

I'm probably talking about limited things of replacing existing equipment in a safe in the same location within a house with just updated uh equipment.

There's a list.

Which ones are you specifically talking about?

I'm kidding, too.

Oh, sorry, so it's HVAC systems, heating and air conditioning, water heaters, and then potentially some uh potentially some electrical updates, um, whether it be like singular breakers or things like that.

Um, those types of things, it seems like it's I don't think people are for the most part doing it.

And I think it's a bit unreasonable to ask for people to pull a permit to do those types of updates.

So thoughts on somebody fixing whatever they've already built and had inspected as a replacement.

A DIY.

What could go wrong?

Yeah, well, if you wire for a DIY, it's already taking place.

I mean, you can juggle as as much as you want, but it's true, it does take place.

People do it all the time, and there's there's dangers in everything we do.

At what point do we require the citizens to take some responsibility on their side?

We cannot save everybody from everything.

Um, but but yeah, I I mean, if I wanted to replace an HVAC system, I'm not going to do it myself, but I'm going to vet a licensed contractor who does good work and I'm going to hire them to make sure it's done appropriately.

I just don't see why my city needs to be involved in in that.

Well, I mean, cities can pull back pull back on what they require.

Uh, but if you do that, insurance rates do go up to for our residents.

Because we're exposing the.

That's not a that's not a for sure thing.

That's that's an assumption.

The data, the information that I read on it with bare risk and ice ISO is that that may be a portion of it, and it may come into play, but still the things that impact insurance rates are still going to be primarily building materials, age of residence, floodplains, fire areas, those types of things, those are the major impactors of insurance rates.

So again, to say that, yeah, if we pull back on a couple of things that rates are for sure going up, I don't think any of us can make that claim.

Yeah, it would it would hurt our ISO rating.

And I'm not an insurance guy, but I I know that some insurance companies look at that.

And like I said, it's up to you guys if you wanted to.

So if that down in the insurance company said, okay, it was because of this breaker that you switched out, who inspected it and where was your and they say, Oh, we don't have one because our city doesn't require it.

Well, the national standard says you have to have it, and you didn't have one.

So, how does that work on being paid for your house that just burnt down when you didn't do what uh the insurance company requires you because you didn't read the fine print, and you told the city you don't want them involved in your shit?

Have you this is actually happened?

Have you when lots of news stories?

You know, you when you're dealing with electrical and gas, like there's a lot of examples that we can point to.

If an insurance company can prove that you didn't get a permit that it'll required, and they're an insurance company doesn't want to pay, that's happening for they've not covered a whole house fire like that or the house to the ground because of one.

I mean, I deal with insurance claims day in and day out.

I have in my business for my clients.

I've never been asked by an insurance company for permits.

Well, but that's a different this is this is a different question than what you had anyway, because this is this is about getting a permit, not getting a permit when you should have your question is should we even require the permit in the first place?

Correct.

I've got some numbers in the packet on page 63.

Um I know that that we don't have all of all the water heaters inspected.

There's homeowners that are doing it, there's uh homeowners do an HVAC.

All these permits that are in here that are failed in the pink are by licensed contractors.

So this is this these are licensed contractors can't get a permit because they know they have to have a permit.

And we had 156 total inspections, and out of that 53 of them failed for safety reasons.

And and and this is the uh this is the licensed contractor that you said you're gonna hire that make sure they did a great job.

Because I don't know nothing about that.

I wouldn't know any different until I tied carbon.

This is licensed contractors that are felling inspections for safety vote.

I think that part of the part of the debate, I think is we're deciding if we should change what's in the city code abiding by what's in the city code really still is a personal decision.

I mean, no one is gonna go uh to track down that you bought a new water heater and find out if you used a licensed contract or if you installed it yourself.

Right.

But we're using examples and making claims that but that based off the data that we provide that that has impact on our insurance rates, yeah.

Um, and that's just one portion of it.

Well, yeah, and that's one portion of it, but it's one that's been repeated a couple of times.

Um, but I just lost my turn of thought.

I I guess at this point, what I would say is I think that for the the DIYers out there who want to replace their own water heater or want to switch out a burned out fuse or a burnt out switch.

I don't think anybody's even gonna know, let alone ask them if they got a permit.

Oh, sorry, that you just remind me what I what my point was.

So part of the question or some of the question things that were brought that they may look at is enforcement.

If you require something and you're not enforcing it, then that can that can have the same impact as as what we're talking about the ISO rating.

Yeah, yeah.

So if we're if we're requiring something and we have no way to enforce it, are we any better off?

That's a good question.

But how would you like literally?

I just we were talking about this for the meeting.

I just had the whole system this year replaced all the HVAC and water heater and everything.

And I was like, my address isn't on this list, and it was a contractor that came in.

And why is why didn't an inspector come to my house?

I feel left out, you know.

Remember, yeah.

Uh and then I asked, like, how do they know?

Because it's a rental company, so I have they applied for any of them.

Has it ever happened with them?

Because they've been replacing a ton of stuff on older homes.

So and he was like, Well, it's usually like the contractors, because if we see you walking in with a water heater, we're not gonna stop, be like, what do you do it?

Well, that's fair.

Police people and the cops definitely aren't looking to do that.

So but enforcement and compliance factors in.

We would we would love to enforce it though.

I don't know.

Yeah, we would love to sell report.

All they ask is do we do inspections?

Uh sensors can tell us.

So if we were to tell them no, we don't do that anymore.

I met that's that's are they asking on any or this new construction or any, yeah.

They ask us if if we do um inspections on water heaters, HVAC, electrical.

So if we were to tell them no, then that word connect, but they're not saying asking how many numbers, you know, they're not asking us how many um people aren't getting permits.

Like we have no idea how to tell that.

They're just asking if we do because that is a code that's required, but that is a that's something that's required by the international building code to get a permit.

So if we tell them no, we're not falling out, that does it flip your that could we we would love to inspect every single one, but like you said, that is sometimes the residents don't do that.

And remember last time we had the data, and last month we had like two permits for water heaters.

We know there's more than two water heaters going in.

So we talked about like education programs, you know.

There's that's up to you guys to know what resources we want to throw in.

Talked about that too.

I didn't know that you needed a permit for that until I saw the packet.

I was like, wait a minute.

Hold on.

Last time this meeting, uh the mayor asked her to do a educational thing, and that started.

Yeah, it started already sending that out.

And it it had some negative and some positive feedback.

You know, some people are like, Well, why are you asking?

Well, you know, education.

That's you just need to know that this is what's expected.

We're not I I think that this is one of those things that we don't ever expect to go around in police.

We are not gonna start, you know, how new is your water heater?

I don't see any permits that were got, or but in the last four years and of when you replace this, we're not doing that kind of stuff.

Uh that would make no sense.

Um, and there's a lot of people out there.

I will give an example.

My very own brother and I were talking about uh older water heater in a home that we are a part of, not in this city.

Let me just say, and uh we said, well, the whole water heater's old enough, should we replace it?

And my brother said, Well, if we do, I'm doing it myself because I'm not paying anybody else, they won't do a lot of things.

Yeah, they won't do any good as good a job as I'll do.

And I don't fault the people out there who think they can do a better job and they will care because they're involved in the property.

So I have a step after that, and the step is that now you should be inspected and have the inspector.

Yeah, and that's my question.

What would it cost to normally have an inspector come out?

You would you might know that what does it cost to normally have an inspector come out and check something?

Oh because with your permit comes an inspector when you're done, and that's a hundred dollars.

And I feel like if you're just gonna have an inspector come out anyways, that's probably pretty close to the cost.

Is that it's a hundred bucks for the permit, yeah.

It would be more than that to have like a home inspection company built to do that, yeah.

Well, permit pays for the inspector later out.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I'm not suggesting that we change the policing at all.

The question on the table tonight is should we change the code?

And really the fact that what we really adopted was an international standard.

Should we deviate from that?

And then that is your question.

And I don't know that we should whether we do or not.

I I don't think that we do anything about changing the policing.

I'm not gonna try to track people down.

Am I so fervent about home repairs that I'm literally like, wait, it's my inspector, but I want to make sure that I like I said, you could like let's say somebody has a gas range that they cook on, they could replace that and blow themselves and their neighbors sky high, which is why we don't require a permit for that either.

I'm just saying there's so many things that you could you could do at your property, but does it require a permit that causes equal amount of agree of risk?

But we're saying no, these these things the national standard will intercept those at some point.

Pretty soon we won't be able to do anything.

I think I think that the homeowners that think that way, they're they're doing they're doing it that way, they're just running on their own, or you know, like I don't think that's gonna change anything.

Yeah, and I think what's the penalty imposed to a homeowner if we find them carrying a water heater into their house and elsewhere permit.

No, in the past so here's my been my experience in the city in the past.

If somebody needed a an inspection or a permit and they didn't have one and they were found out, the suggestion was, well, would you fix it?

I mean, like, okay, you know, you need one, so you're gonna come in and get one, and they still may not.

I I mean, we're not like tracking people down and arresting anybody, we're not finding people, it's just kind of this is the standard.

There's a benefit to it.

I've had neighbors tell me, Well, I don't want to tell you this, but I'm thinking about doing building my own deck.

I'm like, okay.

Well, because of the threw that out, but I'm like gonna like bless it, or I could just say it.

Yeah, I think it's important to remember what is the purpose of inspection.

And it's a public, it's a public safety service that the city provides to not guarantee the safety of anything, yeah, but help ensure that it's safe.

Um, it gives it gives the consumer some added comfort with the fact that their contractor who has a specialized skill that they know nothing about actually did it the way they're supposed to do, and like me.

That's the that's the whole purpose of the service.

And so, yeah, the I the fundamental question is how much should the city get involved in safety of the people's homes and businesses.

I wonder how many times uh contractor has charged the homeowner for the permit or never filed for it.

I would be like, where the hell is my inspector?

Like, I know that permit was on my bill.

I've never had an inspector from see, yeah.

So I I think that what our responsibility is either, yeah.

In 25 years, I'm just gonna say that I think that where the responsibility for us is we put what the expectation is according to the documentation we have.

If people follow it, we are here to provide it.

If people choose not to, I don't think that it's something that's of a value for us to chase down.

And I would say that Brian would never do this, but let's say we had a less experienced inspector that missed something.

I think there's inspectors aren't perfect either, just like there's contractors that might misinstall something.

There's certainly inspectors that could miss something on an inspection as well.

So it's there's no way to you know guarantee 100% that nothing is ever going to.

It's bit it.

So with us inspect, and we we put a lot of confidence in the contract, you know, start with.

So we're just more of this a second set of eyes on it, and also we have two people looking at it.

Um I can tell you that I've been here for 13 years and I've never find a homeowner for getting this.

It's more just we just want to we just ask them to get it so we can look at it.

We don't find them.

We do have a fine in the fee schedule.

We can, we just it's not the the fines in the in the fee schedule for the contractors as well.

And and we found out that a lot of contractors do charge people, or they charge more than what our permit actually is.

And so about a about a month ago, two months ago, we we created a paper for these old accounts permits, and the contractor has to have a homeowner sign up, and it tells them what our uh the cost of our permit is, and I asked them not not to pay the full contract price until they've had a final inspection because once they haven't finally we don't have any hold, you know, I mean so there's something wrong with that.

They've already paid for it.

We can't do that about it.

So we just we do the mate some uh some changes in order to kind of help the homeowners so they're not getting shafted by the because we talked a lot about elderly folks and how a lot of the things we hit their pocketbook and I there's some skeeny people out there that'll take advantage of that and charge 500 for a permit and never file for it and do shoddy's work, you know.

And that's I'm glad that you guys, I didn't know that you guys put that out.

That's the investment.

And we've published in the last couple of years.

I've published some scam alerts when we've heard stuff come around and we were alerted to it.

So I shared it and said, here's some of the typical scams.

People come and say, Well, I can do this work today if you'll pay me in full up front.

And if I've advise people never do that, never pay the full amount until the work is done.

And we try to educate people as best we can, but in the end, it is individuals' responsibility to except for lawyers, except for lawyers.

I should have already known this, but I've spent so much time learning about how public works pay is broke down between the different compartments that I didn't spend enough time learning about theirs, and theirs is actually done off of the permits that are applied for, not the over-the-counter ones, right?

Explain that the houses, value base, um, uh like commercial buildings.

We charge a plan energy fee, and that's where a lot of our money that that covers the building comes from is from those, you know, the real over the counter permits, they don't we don't make money basically based for inspection the driver to go out the pays for wages and the driver to try to do it.

Oh, it's not like from the it's not like a taxpayer thing, it's from the ones that are applied for is what it's a use for paper use to use department.

Yeah, the the new the new buildings and things like that that add new traffic, they pay impact fees, yeah.

Proportionate to what they're adding.

So I want to circle us back to the question.

Is there a strong feeling that we should change what's included or deviate from the national standard?

I am in the minority, but I would exclude HVAC replacements and water either replacements.

Anybody else?

I would like to stick with the national standard.

What's that, Jordan?

I really like following a national standard.

It's easily defensible, and you can explain why you didn't didn't do something.

It's just easier to point to like what I'm seeing is a majority that we just let the national standard abide.

Um, we're not gonna go handcuff anybody that's carrying a water heater into their home.

We never have.

We we don't.

Yeah, we're not.

It's so we'll go with that.

Um, I'm gonna move us on and we won't revisit that one for now.

Thank you for coming, Brian.

I think that we've resolved some most of that.

So the next one is code enforcement policies related to business landscaping.

Um, I think some of the concerns have been raised over time that we do expect homeowners to enforce some stand reasonable standards, and we have had some businesses who've not applied any effort to the same standard, and what do we do?

Because it is a reflection on the city.

It does have an effect on people who would be neighboring businesses not wanting to move in next to somebody who doesn't take care of their business because you don't want to be the business next to the shabby one.

So I think we have to do something.

The question is what?

I'm gonna need a little bit more of a definition on shabby.

I don't think I've seen a shabby, a real shabby business in our city.

I would okay.

So I so I'll I hesitate to okay.

I hesitate to call anybody out, but our citizens for years have called out the fact that uh our movie theater parking lot has weeds taller than humans, and of course, our ordinance says that once it gets beyond six inches, you should take care of the weeds, and the we've visited with that business and said, Can you get somebody to take care of this?

And they say, Well, that's a corporate thing, go talk to corporate, none of our employees do this kind of work.

So we just send corporate a bill.

Well, now that's an abatement issue if we choose to go uh to do it ourselves and abate it.

That is an option.

The question is is should we be more enforceful on the standards that are there?

Because the standards that are there say that we shouldn't have to obey a business, they should take care of their own property.

Listen, everybody's boss has a boss, Mr.

Mayor.

Get on the phone and call their boss because you're the boss.

But we but at this point we're discussing what we're even going to enforce and call that boss above.

So yeah, so we understand.

And it should be them calling their boss, not us.

Yeah, we they're not.

So we gotta take next death.

So for for weeds and dead trees, we have the tools.

We can turn the screws and we can find them, we can abate it.

It's already in the ordinance.

You can't have the weeds and the dead haunted house trees.

But what you what you what is not covered in our ordinance is very clear on the other items like building maintenance, or what if the parking lot is cracked and falling apart and you can't even drive through there anymore.

Or what if what if they um go on in the why don't we already have a corporate person on speedal?

Yeah.

Well, what if the the grass is all brown and dead, but it's lower than six inches, you know.

And so we have a that's okay.

So we've got businesses, yeah.

And they're not all large large corporations, they're not small and we're talking on the one that's yeah, no, but this applies to everybody.

There's a lot more business properties that are that are have these things that we mentioned, like the building has trim that's falling down, yeah.

It's not painted, parking lot has cracks, the it's not paint, the lines aren't painted in the parking stalls anymore, or it's just blah, the mulch is gone, they haven't done anything for years.

You know, they still have weed papers, yeah, almost deteriorated too.

Poorly maintained properties, and so I proposed an ordinance in the engine driving around town because I don't see any of this.

Really?

So there's a balance that should be debated.

You know, we we don't want to pick on businesses.

I know it's hard to have a business, but at the same time, we want it to look nice and represent our community well.

So that's I I've proposed an ordinance.

If you guys like it, we could follow something like that.

It adds some additional regulations that they would need to follow, or there could be somewhere in between wherever wherever you guys want.

I'm gonna suggest that we have to consider businesses in the same way that we consider uh residents, and that is the reason that we allow residents to call and complain if there is a code violation living next to them.

The reason that's allowable is because it does affect their property value if the whole neighborhood is not uh kept up.

Well, I think that we owe other businesses the same respect, and that would be if you call because your neighboring business isn't keeping up their property, and that deters people from coming to your business that you have the same loss, whether it's property value or business loss.

So there should be something there.

The question again is how far do you go and and how do we enforce it?

Well, I mean, some of the stuff in this updated portion talks about maintenance also includes continues upkeep of all architectural site plan elements is originally said, including a limited oning to windows trim elements, roofing, sliding, masonry, light fixtures, and other and/or exterior cladding.

So what if what if a business happens to have something?

Maybe their the wood trim on their building is not painted and doesn't meet the standard, and they've got it budgeted for next year, but they can't get to it this year.

Are we gonna escalate the fines and then get to $500 and then $500 a day and give them a misdemeanor?

I mean this misdemeanor.

The code says we can't.

I understand.

This is a great question.

I think it is way too aggressive.

I think it is way too much.

I understand.

I I agree with you.

I understand uh you don't think a $500 a day fine is too aggressive for having peeling paint on the wood and a miser from the misdemeanor.

Well, we would never get there until we're working with them a lot.

What was that?

We both said that it's too aggressive.

Oh, you said it's too aggressive.

Yeah, we don't support you.

Yeah, I think it's aggressive.

That is good.

Yeah, okay.

So, but I feel like when it's things that it is a corporation, like the movie theater that we know about, we go higher, and I feel like I shouldn't be the only person that knows that.

Like, go up further.

Somebody's boss has another boss until you get to the big guy and be like, listen, this is a problem, and you are the mayor of the city.

Who doesn't want a phone call from the mayor of the city?

A corporation boss, that's who.

All right.

So I will I I will address this one by saying this.

You're right.

Everybody has a boss, and I used to say the same thing.

What I've realized is there are some businesses, not very many, but there are going to be exceptions to the rule where the person's not even in state.

I mean, we have a couple of vacant lots that were purchased by people who are out of state, and we have tried to get a hold of them and say, uh, you need to clean this up because it's a fire hazard at this point.

And they're just like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll take care of that, Click.

And you, you know, I can't go two three states away and chase this person down if they don't respond.

I have to send them a penalty, a fine.

We can issue citations.

Yeah, we have a process where we send a notice of violation letter, and if they don't comply within the amount of time we are that we give them, then we send them a citation letter, and then the five fines start piling up.

So it is a long if they don't answer to it to us, they'll have fines.

I feel like I'm gonna say the same thing I say every time communication is free.

Yeah, communication is free.

And and there's I actually disagree with that.

When you're trying to chase down a corporate president and Dave is trying to call him week after week after week.

That's not free at that point.

Yeah, in in the art of code enforcement, right?

There's there's the law, and then there's the discretion and application of the officer, right?

Personal relationship.

So and so this the law is meant for those who are just being recalcitrant and not complying at all.

It's good work.

I agree.

And and so they the application and discretion of the officer.

If they say, hey, I'm gonna get it on top of this, it's gonna take me a couple months, but I'm working on it like a little at a time.

I'm gonna do this tree first, and then I'm gonna do this mulch over here.

They've always worked with them and said as long as you're making progress and headed in the right direction, we're not issuing a citation.

But as soon as you stop or go backwards, then we start moving towards the citation.

That's kind of the art of it.

Sure.

It's not that's not gonna be in the code.

I feel like it's unreasonable to expect people to change uh fix a lot of things all at once, especially in today's economy.

You know, we all it really is, yeah.

So the grace goes a long way with things like that, but when it comes to something just just so repetitive, and I think there's a few people in here that would refer to those as frequent flyers, they they require a bit more attention.

Yeah, and we've always we've always preached to our enforcement that compliance is the goal, not punishment.

Right.

Um, however, you have to punish when they punishment is still an option, it's an option, it's in the code, yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so our first choice or our second still viable.

So there was a first step made, and that was something that was put in the packet to say here's something we could at least base um a policy off of.

I'm fully expecting people are gonna ask to modify that.

So let's start there.

What type of things do you think uh need to be modified in the first draft?

I think that at addition was great.

I can I make a slight modification.

Yes, please.

One of the items I'd like to do is as we're going through this, we we talk about uh they need to match their original site plan.

I I'm okay if they want to submit a replacement plan.

Like if they decided to, hey, you know, I'm gonna take out a lot of this lawn and I'm gonna put in rock.

I'm not gonna say, no, I'm sorry, you can't do that.

Your site plan clearly shows lawn here.

So I'm okay if they want to submit an amendment to the site plan that their architectural plan that says, hey, we're gonna do this instead.

I want to give them that leeway so that they're like, Yeah, we found out that was way too expensive.

We want to go this route.

I can work with that.

Um, a process or a revised ready in our ordinance.

So that's a revice architectural plan.

I'm good or landscaping plan.

Yep.

I would like to find that option.

Noah's suggesting he thinks that's already there in another part of the code.

Are you okay if it's already somewhere else?

As long as we refer to it here, because this very clearly shows the original site plan.

So either put in here site plan or amended site plan, sure, whatever, as long as long as it's clear that that there is some leeway there.

I would be good with that.

Is everybody else good with a revision like that?

Yeah, and I mean, when we start when we started discussing this, we went from okay, weeds that are too tall, uh, six inches is too much, to well, they should have weed barrier and you know, maybe replace mulch and rock and things like this.

And the this that is snowballed to this laundry list of mowing, edging, trimming, all the the maintenance and things like that.

Yeah, we are encouraging people to actually maintain their property.

You're you are correct.

Uh yes, I am correct.

And a lot of this, a lot of us might fail on our personal properties on these types of things.

Right.

So yeah.

So I hate that one.

I think it's aggressive.

I think it's I think it's quite aggressive.

I would I would again it's that's just a high standard best practice.

So what would you remove?

They're gonna be the bare minimum.

Well, here's to to Paul to your point.

I agree that what we were trying to do is get something that would be a standard to take care of the worst offenses, obviously.

We weren't looking for the minutiae, but if you do decide to craft a policy, it's probably in our best interest that we try to address future concerns so that we're not having to constantly modify a policy.

So that's why the following one of this.

I'm not saying that we need to start going around going, oh, they didn't edge this week.

Let's let's talk to somebody.

I mean, honestly, it's about hey, this is really I I couldn't walk across this without being attacked by a 12-foot milkweed.

And like Jordan mentioned in another meeting, uh, broken windows is a very real situation.

The more crappy the property hits around it, well, the more half they're hazards with mosquito pond.

Yes.

So there's yeah, but we're talking about properties that are overright.

So that's what that could have been.

It's called the broken window effect.

It it tends to spread.

Just like go heads.

Yeah, hazards.

Where is the warning period defined?

It's further down in the penalty section six one zero point zero nine zero, page 70.

I don't think it mentions a warning period, does it it just is an escalated page that says after the warning period.

And I'm just wondering who sets the warning.

So the code enforcement officers officer sends out a notice of violation.

And I believe it defines it in there based off whether or not it's hand delivered or mailed.

And if it's mailed, I want to say there's a standard time in there, like 10 days or 14 days or something like that.

I don't have the ordinance right in front of me.

Is that somewhere else?

I and it may be in COVID.

I didn't propose to change any of that, but it is in there.

So it'd be another section that defines that.

And we could reference that other section if you want to put next to the warning period, put a in quotation.

After the abatement after the novelist period, I don't think it defines the novice period in this section.

I think you have to go earlier in the ordinance, so I probably didn't put in the on that one pager.

Uh so if I'm understanding this, so the first civil citation after the expiration of the warning period, so you get 125 fine, which I don't think that's a the second civil violation is 250, and then it escalates to 500, but then it makes mention of a daily rate.

So is that daily rate then at the 500?

Like Brody mentioned it, there is some discretion there on whether or not you can consider every single day a new violation where you can continue it on.

Yeah, because it says you can.

I I just considered that it allows us to do that.

I I think that this is the reason for any kind of aggressive escalation is that there's usually uh two weeks to a month period of grace to say, will you take care of this?

And if we get to the it we experience this with a similar policy with uh watering restrictions during the drought, where there were some people that said, Well, by the time I get around to the full fine, the season's gonna be over.

And so I'll never get shut off because I you know it takes 90 days or so to get to a full fine.

I think that this point the the point is is that if you won't take it serious in the first two months, because that's about what it takes to get to the second fine, then we need something to draw your attention to the fact that this is this matters.

So the the warning period is under definite uh under definition, they see it.

And I would say this that uh keep in mind that when we get something like this, that now falls on the uh prosecutor for the city who does have discretion and leniency, who could say, okay, we understand that you've been fined three times, but if you've now fixed and corrected the whole thing, we'll knock the fine down or something.

That's a possibility.

I think that the question is when you ignore people for citation.

I agree.

I don't want people to ignore this.

But you don't want to make it.

I also don't want it so egregious that we're closing business down because the dollar daily fine.

Well, I think so.

It's defined uh it means 10 days after the date of notice, unless a greater period of time is given by the enforcement officer.

If the notice of violation is delivered by first class mail, the time for correction listed in such another shall include the additional five days required for delivery.

So I feel like we should kind of also keep in mind that so for residents.

If they we have a resident that can't get to it or is having an issue, we uh Leonella will contact uh uh what are they called?

Volunteer the emergency people and the uh the group, and they'll send someone out from one of the wards to help them right because that's the type of community that we live in, right?

Now I feel like this is directed specifically to large businesses, because if it was a smaller business owned by people in our community, our community would help.

And uh that seems like a very common theme.

So I don't think this is attacking the smaller businesses.

I think it's just mostly and I it could, could it?

Yes, it could, but discretion on like four different levels is available there for that situation.

But there are certain businesses like you did say that are corporations that money is the only thing that matters.

And just for the sake of argument, I'm gonna throw this out there because we don't have to do anything.

The the question that came forward that started all this was what do we do for these businesses that just don't seem to care when we ask to try and work with them, or we reach out and say, Can we help you?

Can we find some resources to help you?

We have tried to help a few businesses that have just kind of ignored us.

So we don't have to do anything here, but if we decide that it's worth doing something, we should probably do something that's complete enough to fix the whole ordinance or at least address things that we expect could come up.

See communication is free.

If you reach back out, we can help the effect.

Yeah, we can't.

Yeah, but if you want to communicate, it's gonna cost you some funds.

You know, in the past, we have used RDA funds to help with some failing items, like in the town center.

There's like that waterway.

I remember we helped pay for that.

We've helped pay for signage in the town center.

Um, we helped uh Dons Meets with their parking lot, their little parking lot improvement thing.

So, like the RDA is available things like start snowballing and we're trying to help the business.

You know, we there is some resources that we can help.

Yeah, we continue to grow, so it's good to have these things in place now.

And if we want to go way back back when there was more prevalence of things like groups, youth groups like scouts.

Sure, we've had scouts help businesses refresh projects.

Yeah, I mean, it's been a while because those have kind of gone, uh, they're not as prevalent as they used to be.

But again, we've tried to help people in different ways, and I think that that's the the core of what we're doing.

All they got to do is communicate, right?

What if we put in language that says before a daily fine is enforced, the enforcement officer has to come talk to us.

You us, the city council, right?

I'm happy to be able to do it.

No, that's it can be escalated up to the 500, but before any kind of daily fine isn't it?

It would be discussed at this level.

I think that's acceptable because we they would appeal any fine to this level.

That's already in our core.

I thought that would take a lot of pressure off of that department, also like making that decision.

You're saying the daily fine before we impose it because after the 500, it then becomes a daily fine.

And I'm assuming that's a 500 because it's gonna the daily fine that's gonna carry is gonna be the last fine issue.

It's good to bring it to the to the council.

Is that way, you know, we still have to say you had the cataloging we're gonna hit sometimes it'll just take okay.

So I'm gonna rule that it's pretty much accepted that that's uh friendly amendment, and I have no issue with that.

That works.

Uh I I'm still uh I'm still a little concerned, and maybe I'm the only ones concerned with how we've gone from six inch weeds to this paragraph.

Okay, should be twice the tweets that covers the the that covers the gambit of everything.

I don't know.

It seems like we've gone from hey, you can't have six inch weeds to this.

There's people have six inch crafts.

You can have six inch weeds too.

You should maintain your landscaping with everything that's there.

Yeah.

I think this is a good change.

Okay, so let we're split here.

Let's see what the majority is.

We've got Jordan saying this is a good change to go that far.

You're saying it's not.

What are the others?

Come within.

I think I think it we have to define the whole thing.

Okay, Brett.

Yeah, I mean, I think less normal wear and tear kind of thing.

Okay.

But so I think that we we leave this obviously.

I don't think the enforcement's gonna get to the real nitpicky stuff.

I think this is covering your butt in case you find a case where somebody and I don't mind going on the record saying I own a commercial property in Syracuse.

So I feel like I have to be a voice for people that experience that.

Except all your results.

We have dead bushes, we have dead bushes.

So maintain your crap.

Paul and we don't have any money to replace them, George.

Unless they jack my HOA, my business HOA fees.

Just communicate.

Yeah, just come in, give it, give us an amendment.

I'm in a site plan.

And so if we don't have a budget for the year that we get the fine, then there's concern.

You're communicating.

I'm one of the few on the council that uh that live this.

So uh if I take it a little personal, that's okay.

Uh no, I think this is all good discussion, and uh all good to have on the record.

Is it I feel like a lot of things can be just be avoided if you just communicate?

Leonella is always willing to communicate with residents and businesses.

I communicate with her so well, she just gets a lot of things.

I will not necessarily always be here.

I know, but nor will this council administrator people communicate.

I think the last couple of code enforcement officers we've had have been pretty good at communicating.

Okay.

So all right, so I think that we have a majority opinion on this, so I'm gonna move us on.

Um, this will be on the agenda, but not under consent.

We'll talk about it again freely at that point because there's not a 100% agreement.

So let's move us on to item E.

Oh, this is gonna be much more exciting.

This would be our discussion of our recruitment and retention plan.

We have said for a long time that we would bring this back and discuss where we're at at a different time.

So um I feel like we need a mental break before this one.

A lot.

Another one of these, yeah.

All right, we're we're still under two hours, so I'm gonna keep us moving and see if we can finish the whole meeting in under two hours.

Um so recruitment retention.

We did discover, and this was told to you during the budgeting process that the plan that we had at the time was uh necessary during the the post-COVID couple of years, it was acurate to be competitive with what similar cities were doing during that time, but we've determined that it is not sustainable under its present outline, so we did say that we were gonna have to look at it again.

Uh, this is not a meeting where we expect to settle all of the challenges all in one meeting, but we are bringing it forward for discussion.

And we want to hear everybody's feedback.

Um I'm gonna open the floor with that and just say what are some of your concerns, because we do know it's it's challenged.

Well, one of my concerns is the oh, I didn't see it in this packet, but we had it in a previous our our budget retreat packet was that discrepancy in revenue growth versus costs of uh staff and employees, and so one of the things that we have in our in our um in our policy is this the concept of benchmarking, and other cities have a similar benchmarking policy, so all of these cities are constantly benchmarking off each other, which in my opinion creates uh a false escalation of salaries.

I think the the uh US labor statistics states that the it for 2024 average escalation of employee salaries was about 3.6.

Yeah, and so I would be interested to know maybe before we make a recommendation what historically is the average increase of our employees' pay rate year over year.

This is where I'd like to be able to just like snap my fingers in point and you could rattle these off because we did look at them, and I know we know these, but I don't remember them all.

When you study for the test, but it didn't retain.

Yeah, because during the budget, we looked at these numbers very closely, and I will say that between if we look at a decade span, the overall rate was between two and a half and three and a half average.

Okay.

The challenge was that year that we had rapid inflation and COVID, and everybody was working from home suddenly.

And during that time, we had a 7% increase.

And the reason was that everybody around us, and it was a lot due to certain departments, it wasn't citywide, it was a real escalation in police and fire, which I'm not saying that's wrong, but we were trying to stay competitive with people who were very aggressive in those departments.

Um of the challenges, and I think that it is unique to that pandemic era, was what it's already a tough job to handle, and you're gonna be out in front of other people.

That's one more reason to maybe hinder your decision to apply for a job in that area.

Okay, but I think that's strange was also because the councils before that didn't do any pay raises, so it was a catch-up.

So that one seven percent was the catch-up from how many years of them not at all received.

No, there was there was how hard is it for us to pull that data to see a year over a year, maybe like five or I think it's pretty easy, and I'm back.

And and I appreciate wanting to compare to an average of some sort of index or something like that.

One one thing we have to realize is that in an average, especially like uh Bureau of Labor Statistics average or something, it has all industries, right?

In that average, you have computer programmers that may have had 25% pay increases, you may have had you know uh uh electricians that had 10%, you may have had uh administrative clerical people, you know, five percent.

So it's all over the board.

I think I think what we don't have control over, and we have to recognize is we don't have control over what other cities pay for those same positions.

Okay, that'd be nice if we did, because we could adjust the price, sure.

But we don't we we we can't control that and we don't control that.

The question is is how are we going to compete or not?

And well, the city well, the city was overall around a seven percent during that period.

We had double digits in some of the first responder positions.

Sure, but that was also because that was happening all around us, and we would not be able to maintain our staff if we were not being competitive with the county, basically.

Yeah, I feel like one of the most elementary standards any city should have is if your employees work for the city full-time, they should be able to afford to live in the city full time at the very minimum.

Well, I think that that's a nice idea.

I think the real question comes in what does that mean?

Because depending on your position, I mean, I can guarantee you.

I said the very minimum.

I yeah, well, uh I mean it's just it varies so much on your family situation.

I'd like to hear from the staff what the what the challenge is that they see it is now, what the employee retention issues would be and what is reasonable.

Well, and I and I thought we came up with in that budget retreat.

I thought there was a proposal, which I didn't see in this.

Um, that I thought to me at least made sense.

I can't remember if it made sense to other people.

But there was a proposal that there was it didn't make it back into this.

I don't know.

Is that because of that was what and the the reason for that is we had a one-time decision to do it this year outside of the adoptive policy.

Right.

And so what we're talking about that's gonna be the the right thing going forward, but it it was for this year, and that's and that's an option that the council has in the policy, and it's really meant to be kind of an emergency, you know, safety valve, safety or pressure relief valve, I'll say, which is what we had this year in the budget.

We had deficit.

Um, and so you know that's that's uh arguably a good time to use the safety valve, and so but it's not necessarily we didn't really comprehensively talk about that's gonna be our policy going forward.

So you're right.

We this is but this is what we're starting to talk about now because we're expecting that this will be adjusted by the time that we get through the next budget cycle.

So it's this does not have to be decided in one meeting.

Yeah, sure.

This is one that we have to decide on what a new standard and what that standard will revolve around.

Because at one point, I'll be very clear that we talked about could it be as simple as taking the standard policy of the average of the top three competitive cities to the top four?

And what does that do to us?

It does make an impact.

I think that it's not that different.

We looked at what is it really competitive to be the average of the top five or six?

And you can start getting down there and you start falling to being several departments ahead of you, and we do know that we are considered one of the bigger city.

Well, mathematically, we are the third biggest city in the county.

So can we really say that we're going to pay less than half the competitors in the city in the county?

That's a tough one because you'd think that um, you know, I mean, the question is is it worth it to take that much less um and still be here?

So you have to cite where is this go?

But when we were doing our evaluation, we realized that's maybe not the best way to solve it.

Maybe it is.

Or we talked about maybe a more true index for the sit for the state is to use the retirement index that the state uses because it only figures Utah businesses, it doesn't figure regional businesses.

That's what we're discussing.

We were discussing that so and that's a that's a call adjustment that we added into that.

What if we took did the second?

Because I know that top one, I believe sparnington, right?

And these theirs is way higher than the rest of them.

They got to jump between them and everybody else.

So what if we did second, third, and fourth cities, the average of those and eliminate the top and then eliminate the top, what would that do?

It's certainly something to consider.

And the reason why that would be really good to consider is there are at least two cities in this county who compete for being the top pay with the goal of always being the top pay.

So actually, no, it's clearfield and latent, but uh Farmington only really competes when they they did a major adjustment.

They realized they hadn't done anything in years, and if they didn't catch up, they were gonna be eighth or ninth on the list, and they know that they can't.

That's correct.

That's for business development business, which we do not have.

Yep.

So if we took because I remember on that on on the comparisons on all of them that we looked at, the the top one was quite a bit higher than even second.

So can we do mean instead of average?

If we do mean, then you have the question, and I'm you we absolutely can.

And maybe that's the right.

Um maybe that's the right decision.

But let me say what one of the challenging points was in the system we used before this system, people started to feel like they were just being compared to a mediocre and they would never be a top paying position because of the system was directing them to the 60th percentile of this of the county average.

And so people started to misinterpret that policy, and we were hearing people say, I'm my only 60% of a employee.

That was all wrong, in my opinion, but it was the argument that was coming forward that was destroying morale.

Yeah, that's not how statistics work.

Yes I agree is key in some of these aspects.

But yeah communicate to that message.

It's not about communicating it's about receiving that but what the what the message that came back was it wasn't enough to feel like you were working in a top city type position not that you have to be the top but you have to be competitive with the top and the message that was getting back to us was we don't feel like we're even competitive with the top cities at that point.

So remind me on our in our current benchmarking is there a is there any sort of a cap that says well even if the benchmarks come in at this and show that there's a there's some sort of I guess restrictor on there that says an individual won't exceed X amount or X percentage increase in pay in one year.

For our top there's currently not unstiped if there's not a ceiling stipulator we have for a couple of consecutive years done that to this uppermost two levels.

Yeah yeah the council hasn't imposed those which mainly you know it hasn't it's just not stipulating the council of what that is been sort of just decided during the budget process but again that's a question of uh and I know that's a that's a question of affordability is what you I think we're getting at um the the decision point is is if there is a cap and you do go through a you know a scenario like public safety did during COVID and right after COVID um and we we cap ours but others aren't capping theirs uh then it's the same thing as just falling behind lower on the scale but I feel like we should I don't want to I know it's our responsibility to look at this from a financial aspect but I I feel like because you touched on the morale of it I'm I'm gonna to that they're still humans and if you would compare the difference in attitude for with these humans that work for the city from about six years ago to now it's drastically different.

They talk to the city employees they're they're much happier now than they feel more valued and the level of service they provide is just better and they're not upset and they're still human beings with that have a standard of mental health that they need to be able to do their job and if they can't pay their bills if you take too much then you're gonna have disgruntled employees and pissed off citizens and everybody's going to be mad.

I'm just going to throw out there for the record that this is one of the hardest things to manage as a city council over all the years that I've been involved in cities um it is such a huge part of our budget is what you pay employees it's vital to keeping good employees and it is hard because you don't control what other there's so many factors that control the amount of revenue that you have to work with.

And so this is one of the hardest things of all and in a lot of areas it's a tight labor market.

It is a very model you get what you pay for.

That's all it is it's tough now we have to look at hiring where where are we going to be in a hiring there has to be cost of living to make sure that everything is caught up and then what does it look like from a merit loyalty is there any way to most out of the three yeah factors.

I think we did the cola this year but what didn't we do that we discussed the cola for this we did I I think I mean what Brett's describing though is there are many we don't have to do all of them and we can do all of them it's a matter of which levers do you pull to manage the situation that you have and I have seen us do different things and sometimes they've worked better at different times this is one of the most inconsistent parts of city management by far.

Well from a policy standpoint we have to hire at a reasonable rate.

Yes to get the right person yeah people yeah so so I don't know what that looks like to department are you able to if you can get the people are you able to get them and are we competitive there I think that's different for different departments.

Well yeah so let's do this let me let me interject this point it really depends on the people the workforce available in different departments which we're gonna have to be dealing with yes so we can ask each department head and they may have slightly different responses but the bottom line the thing that affects it the most is the availability because we've seen like in particular in police one of the challenges that we've had as long as I've been here has been the police academy applicants have been extremely low compared to 20 years ago.

So we could ask each department head, and they may have slightly different responses, but the bottom line, the thing that affects it the most is the availability because we've seen, like in particular in police, one of the challenges that we've had as long as I've been here has been the police academy applicants have been extremely low compared to 20 years ago.

You know, Garrett told us before in these meetings, he says, you know, it used to be you'd have 50 people in a class, and not all of them were gonna get jobs because there weren't that many jobs.

Today there might be four in a class, and there's 10 positions that are need to be filled in the area, so we don't even have enough people to fill the jobs.

Making it more in demand means that you're gonna have to pay more in a position like that.

On the flip side, I can tell you that many office worker positions.

There is a long we we we put one out and we get 50 applicants in a day.

So the fact that there's an abundance of people willing to do the job means we don't have to, you know, pay a max rate to get a good qualified person because there's many choices.

So again, this is why I say it really depends a lot on the particular department.

And we can I I mean, I can quiz the ones that are here, that's not an issue, but it really depends on the job and the availability of people to do that job or interest level.

So I'll just start.

And Alex, are you having a chat hard time or an easier time?

So I'll just give you a quick snapshot of um we just did new higher testing PT test on Friday.

So I've got I'll have three vacancies as of September 6th, um, which is a significant number when you're 31 sworn department, two frozen positions.

So I've had 20, 25.

Um, so we had 23.

No, I'm sorry.

Yeah, 23 applicants show up for testing.

Uh 21 applicants.

I'm sorry.

21 applicants show up for testing, they'll all pass the PT test, they'll go to the animal phase.

Um, so we'll select three off of that.

By policy, we can't start background testing unless they have positional job offer.

So background testing of those three, there's a high likelihood that two of them get washed out.

So now I have to start that process over.

So that's two to three weeks.

Um, so then I go to the next two on the list.

One of those gets washed out, I go to the next one on the list.

And I'm trying to meet academy deadline dates as well.

So I've got to try and get somebody in the academy.

You brought it up, Nara.

A lot of these can't, a lot of these police outfits before were self-sponsoring.

So they were paying their way to get their own certification.

That doesn't exist anymore.

People realize that the market is what it is.

They know that a uh police department's willing to put them through the academy.

And so now we're gonna send the academy 12 to 15 weeks, depending on the schedule, they're gonna come back to us.

So right now, if I was to hire get somebody in October class, I'm not getting them off of FTO on the road working for me until probably June or July.

And so when it comes to my my biggest concern is can I get people through the door to test and interview and get them hired?

Yes, it's gonna be it's gonna take some time, but I can get them back.

My biggest concern is retaining those people once I've put the time and money into training them, um, which again when we want to an FTO process, I'm taking an experienced guy making them running part with them.

So I'm not really plusing on the body right there.

So it's the it's the retention that I see is our biggest issue right now.

Um, if I want to look at our starting wage to bring in a brand new officer.

We're not super competitive.

Um other agencies, you know, if you go stand on a different street corner in Clearfield, you're gonna make about six bucks more an hour to start, um, which is significant when we're talking well.

I'm sorry, that's probably about five dollars more an hour to start.

Same thing with Leighton.

To be fair though, those were just advertised.

That's not a year ago's wage, those are very recent advertisements.

That's correct.

That's correct.

So it it is a challenge, certainly, and retention is a significant challenge.

And I think you know, the way I look at it is having experienced officers on the road is a significant benefit to the city, but it does come at a cost.

And so my average year zone patrol, if I were to eliminate supervisors right now is under three years.

Um, and so I I would like to be able to keep the people that we have right now, and that would be my biggest motivating factor behind our retention policy.

So a question that's now the uh background checks.

Is that common practice doing the background check after the um offer has been made for in law enforcement, or do they start the background check before and anywhere else?

Is that holding you guys up?

What's what about that?

Great question.

Um, what I would like to do is take a pool of qualified candidates and say we're gonna send you to a background, and they they would have to authorize us to do so.

So then I could start on five for only three positions, or I could start on six for only three positions, which would help me to um limit the time.

How many times you got to cycle through that process?

So is that more cost effective for us to do it that way than how we were normally doing it?

It's currently it's more labor intensive on our end to begin with, but it it would appear that most of the time we're gonna have the same result, right?

So for every two people we or three people we background, we end up with one.

And I'm just throwing that as a statistic as an anecdotal, just based on my experience, but yes.

So if we say background 25, we got three physicians back, we send a bunch of them, and we get 10 back that checkout, then we're gonna fill those three spots, like right.

So it seems like it would be more beneficial to change that specific part of the policy to help get cops in sooner.

And if it was financially feasible.

If we were to have to do that that frequent, we would have probably have to stamp up HR in order to handle all the background checks.

I'm not saying we would send all 25.

You know, we probably have five for three positions.

But man, mayor, the burden falls on the police too.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, is it yours?

Okay, so yes, that that would be the limiting factor how many we can take the ability they that they can do.

Well, it's something to think about.

Well, if that helps changing that policy, then why wouldn't we?

So let's stay on the task at hand.

I that's a good solution, and I think we should come back to that.

But let me go over to Robert and you tell me your reaction to the labor market you're in.

Yeah.

So um the entry levels, I don't I don't generally have too much of a problem quite getting entry level folks in.

There's not a massive amount of application.

It's a very slim amount of applications that come in, but generally it's enough to fill the positions I have.

I my entry levels are no experience basically needed.

Um so uh a lot of times I'm getting kind of the eight, well, the yeah, 18 to 22 year old uh with basically no experience wanting to get a little bit of um and if they stay on, we can advance them through.

You know, we start them at level one, we can advance them through, get some a little bit of a bump to level two, but there's some certifications required, some time and experience is required, and then level three.

My my toughest, my most challenging thing is keeping the employees once they reach like a level two or a level three, particularly level three, they're very experienced.

Uh all the certifications they need to do the job, and then they find out other cities they jump ship.

My last one was two months ago, jump ship up to K's built for seven bucks an hour more to do the exact same uh the exact same position, uh less work because they have all of the utilities that we have to do.

And uh, and then he also got uh because it was July and the fiscal year, we got another dollar an hour.

Like it was like that was the reason he left.

Um, so that hurt us a lot, and then um this didn't affect us directly with indirectly.

Uh like Clearfield's uh water guy left for more pay.

They were scrambling a little bit and they were having a tough time with their water system, and anyway.

So we jumped in help out, which was great.

But it put in my mind the thought of what if our higher experienced water guys or water superintendent left.

We would be scrambling like hard.

So yes, my biggest worry that keeps me up at night is if is retaining the experienced people.

I'm not as concerned about you know the entry entry level pay as far as pay goes, but definitely um my uh level threes, the crew leads the supervisor um they're essential to keep the operation going.

The other thing I was gonna mention is uh on call pay.

So other cities have already done an increase in their on-call pay.

Uh they went around, got information from all the other cities, say what did you pay?

What are you paying to try to benchmark it?

And then they raise theirs and then share shared the data.

Um, it is definitely ours, hasn't been changed for I don't know, eight to ten years.

So as far as public works goes.

Um we like I mentioned, we do more utilities than any other city.

Um most cities are like three utilities, which is usually like uh water streets and stone drain.

Uh some do sewer, some don't do sewer.

Um we do, and then we also have uh street lights and uh secondary on top of that.

So we have six utilities that we get.

There's a higher probability of us getting calls on um to go out probably more frequently than others.

Anyway, I just feel like that needs to be looked at at some point.

Um for uh with that evaluation that is something like I still said it out to you.

So anyway, so that's do we need to retain who we have, you know, before our infrastructure.

There is uh okay, recruitment.

I'll just talk about recruitment really quick.

It's as Bertie mentioned, it's usually it's just what the demand is out there.

It's the pipeline usually is unfold.

There's three fire academies in the state that uh bring in outside students and most of them either come in with the job in hand or they leave before they have a job.

So or they leave uh they leave with a job, they get a job while we're in the academy.

So um sometimes the pipeline will put out a job applicant application for two or three positions, and we might get one or two applicants.

So it changes, it really does.

The the recruitment issue that we have right now is probably more with our part-time.

That's where we kind of see a lot more of our turnovers with our part-time staff.

Um, as far as the retention side of it, um, or go back to the recruitment side really quick, because we talked about the the competitiveness.

You asked that as we sit right now in the fire department.

I feel like our wage where we're at now is competitive.

Uh, but if you recall just in July, our fire department did go through the benchmark.

The wage scales were moved with the benchmark, although uh the fire department was not one of the departments that had any kind of movement within that benchmark range.

So it did create some compression.

We had some positions where new hires were coming in making as much as a three, four or five year guy.

Um, so it did create some compression.

We were able to kind of tentative or temporarily work through that, I believe.

But um, so that's part of as we sit now for recruitment coming in.

Retention is always a challenge, especially in part-time.

Part-time, it's like a revolving door.

It feels like we're constantly moving through part-timers.

Um, and a lot of it's you know, work-life balance, pay.

I mean, there's just a lot of different reasons out there for that.

Uh, full-time right now, I feel like we're we're doing all right maintaining full-time, but I think we also have a great department with some great morale.

And I think I think when you talk about uh retention of employees, you've got intrinsic and which is everything the morale, the department, the the home, the the good feeling that you have there.

And then you got the extrinsic, which is the money.

So I think there's a little bit of vote.

But I think right now, I think we're we're sitting in the fire department.

I think we're sitting okay on that, but I can see that if we don't maintain or keep up, there's gonna be future problems.

So that's why mine is very similar, I think, to Robert's.

Can we kind of you know follow the same kind of maintenance level?

We do have a little struggle getting a lot of applicants that are experienced at that lower level, it's like $18 an hour.

So you get like these young kids coming in, and then it's it's sort of all the door, which we've been really lucky to keep a lot of ours um lately.

Um, one of the biggest things for ours is we will benchmark every other year with public works, and so when they benchmark and they'll go up, you know, $2, and then we're going up against them trying to get people.

It that's a nightmare.

So I would definitely recommend in this that we benchmark every year so that all of us are kind of in the especially in those similar jobs or the same.

Um, because we'll have his part-time employees right now are making more than some of our park maintenance too, and that's a huge issue for us.

But retention, again, it's a huge thing if we can just keep people here instead of having them out the door and retraining and retraining because that seems to be what is happening.

And that was one of the suggestions that we made at this year's budget was that we would move to an every year instead of an every other year.

And I think that's still on the table because it will lessen the impact of the movement.

But that's just that's up for discussion.

That's not resolved.

Steve.

I think you're seeing the complexity of a city that has very drastically different services it provides and we need to say um for administration, depending on the job.

They have several applicants.

It's less time intensive to train that.

But every job is unique.

And when we do these benchmarks, we compare every every position to get to the average in the top three of these seven benchmark cities.

We have good data on some positions, we don't have a lot of great data.

Um some positions when we benchmark, like we're here and a year later, they're already out of the market.

We're we're behind, some move a lot quicker.

Um so the challenges of a policy, a holistic policy is trying to come up with a game plan that we can benchmark each position individually compared to other cities.

But you are going to have a variety of change.

You might have a position, I think we had a couple this year that didn't have any increase in benchmark versus I think our IT position went up 25%.

Um, and everywhere in between.

So to try and just say let's do a one percent fits all it doesn't work with things anymore.

And um, what we did this year with the budget to try and make it fit is we followed our same game plan on the benchmark studies.

So we moved the scales, but what was different this year is we didn't move that person the same position in the scale, meaning if they're halfway through, if you if the scale moved now, they they didn't move the whole way.

And what we were hearing as well is if you had a two or a three-year person that was maybe 20% up the scale, if the scale moved that 20%, now they're being now they're being paid the same as an NP level first first year person.

Um so there's some problems with that, but we did it the trying to balance the budget.

Um, we did some other things, some temporary measures to try to make it work.

I think what we're looking at trying to do from this policy standpoint is start at a high level, and that's why a lot of the numbers weren't in the packet tonight.

We're trying to start from square one and say on a high level, how do we want to compete with other cities?

What are other cities we want to compete with right now?

We've identified seven.

Um, is that enough?

Do we need more?

I would say in some positions we need more data.

Um we have some unique positions out there that we may only pull two other cities.

Um so there's there's some things we need to work through.

You know, there's questions on average of the top three, average of the top four.

Um, where should we fit in to be still remaining competitive?

So we're not a training van.

I think what you're hearing here is we're not necessarily not getting applicants.

We're getting them, just not as much as we'd like.

We're having some fall proof back down with other things, but I think the bigger concern is if we don't maintain and and keep up with other cities, we train these individuals, and in two to three years they're gone.

So we spent all this time and in training and um getting up the speed, and then another city comes in and takes them all trained and ready to go.

You know, historically our turnover rates been anywhere from 15 to 20 percent citywide, and I don't think that's changed much between the two different versions of the policy we've had over the last decade with 15 years.

We've had some spikes, we've had some more, but it it averages somewhere in that 15 to 12 percent range.

And I wouldn't say I'm gonna say it's all due to wages, it's not.

We have a variety of reasons why people leave.

Uh wage does play a factor.

Um so you you gotta work all these issues into this policy, and I think that's what we're trying to do is let's let's start from a high level, see where we're at.

Is that where we want to be?

And then and work from there on polling numbers and data.

If we're saying, you know, the chart we gave you a monitor April in the budget retreat, does show a projection that is not sustainable.

Um, but I think we need to work through where we go from nowhere.

So we're only in CED, we're only 11 people.

So the other departments have a lot more staffing and hiring.

Uh, and so recently there's been two positions.

Um our planner one had to move recently, and so we're we just got done.

We have a position that was just we had good.

We had uh a good number of applicants, and we did so I think that we're in the right place there.

Um our employee that moved is interviewing for a place in Idaho, a rural Idaho County, and I talked to the the planning manager there, and and he says that they might have a hard time matching what he's earning here.

So I think that goes to some of the points that have already been made that um who we're comparing to is important or geographically varies a rural county in Idaho can't pay the same as well.

The same we we might not be able to pay for I-15.

That and that geographic qualifier, I don't think is in our policy of being whether or not it's on I-15.

So that's kind of an interesting point as far as what factors we should take into account is as far as who were preparing to.

Um, before that, we had a couple years ago we were hiring for a building inspector, and that was that was tough because we had like two applicants, and we were just happy to be any, and that was a different hiring environment like COVID and things like that.

Um, but as far as and this has already been said too.

Um I think this is not directly related to the specific wage, but the amount of job duties that a person is expected to cover is important too.

Because if somebody can go to a different city and have less work for the same pay, or maybe a little bit more pay, they're gonna do it.

And so that right now uh having a hiring freeze or not being able to grow as a city grows.

That's that can be a problem too.

So we need to be able to create new positions as we grow.

So that's those are the two points.

So we compare to and making sure we can continue creating new positions as we grow.

Hey, Brody.

Yeah, anything you wanted to add?

Well, yeah, I mean, all of this.

Uh what I would say is what we've got to get out of tonight is what do we want this policy to do from a high level.

Well, what is it that you want this policy to do?

We can craft a policy 120 different ways with you know who we compare to and to what level and how are advancements done and all these, you know, how our merit increases done.

We we can craft you you've got experienced staff here.

We can craft anything.

Um, what is it that you want the policy to do and to what extent do we as the city want to fight to to fund it is really what it was down to.

So I have an I have another question.

Um we heard Chief Davis mention it about there's the closest person to the season is three years on the road experience.

Is that what you said?

Excluding supervisors.

That's what I mean.

Yeah, it's three years on the road.

So and Mr.

Robert touched on the experience, the teachers is what I call that.

All the departments have the teachers and the students.

And I've noticed in most departments, except maybe in uh city hall, that there is a drastic gap of experience years between the teachers and the students.

And if we lose the teachers, we're not gonna have anybody to teach the students.

So I would say from seeing it in each department, want the two of the main things we should address is keeping the teachers and getting more teachers to join us in the middle level.

We don't really have any in the middle across the board in most of the departments.

And correct me if I'm wrong, because I could be wrong.

But I want to throw in because you're talking about getting people to that teacher level.

We have in the last couple of years started an internal, and I credit Brody a lot and Chief Atkin, who spent a lot of time.

We have a leadership academy now in the city that's helping grow some of the mid-level uh people to where they could be our future managers.

So we've thought that through.

We've implemented one part of that solution.

There may be more.

Yeah, pay.

Well, okay.

So what I want to build on here too about what Brody brought in is we can talk about all the different uh situations with each different department, but right now we have to figure out what policy can guide us through.

We can always make exceptions.

That's what I was getting at is if we make our policy to where we ensure we're keeping the teachers and making it more palatable from people from other cities that are mid-level to come here.

It I don't feel so bad about the lowest, lower newest people making a little bit less.

Okay, so what are where I was going with this is in this policy that we have to craft, we have to figure out also what the city can afford because we could say, well, we just need to find lots more resources, but we also have the question of what this city will tolerate.

Because if we just say, okay, well, we just need 30% more income to pay everybody, so we're gonna put that on our citizens and they revolt, it won't last very long.

It will go away very quickly.

And then what good did we do anybody?

So I'm gonna cut this off at this point because this discussion is gonna go on for months, and we will revisit it in sections, and we'll try to be more organized in the future as to which section we're taking on at a at a time, but I don't think that we're gonna put we we've heard from most of the department heads uh left out Colin, you only have one employee.

Um so uh I think that what we need to do is keep in mind that we're we're trying to figure out something that our employees can look to as guidance for expectations for feeling like they're being treated fairly.

I don't know exactly what that is, but this is not about what we pay individual people.

department has uh i left out colin you only have one employee um so uh i think that what we need to do is keep in mind that we're we're trying to figure out something that our employees can look to as guidance for expectations for feeling like they're being treated fairly i don't know exactly what that is but this is not about what we pay individual people this is also about what they feel is a fair balance between what we can do and what they're willing to work for so that we we have to balance both sides of this equation so I'm gonna cut it off there we will come back to this the point of tonight was not to have a final resolution I'm gonna bring us to item number F annual fraud risk assessment review we have to do this every year this is brought by the state auditors department we have to assess our risk we have to bring it to council and talk about it um I don't we have never been a high risk city there are certain things we really just can't functionally do but other than those kind of small things we pretty much do everything anyway so we've been kind of a stellar performer for the situation we're in but I'll let Steve talk about it.

Yeah so there's a matrix in here there's a chart um there are two things on this list that we don't do uh those come with money and time so internal audit function the whole antenna a lot of function is you need someone that's independent from staff that can report objectively to a body which is an audit committee which we also don't have currently so in order to do an audit internal audit function that should operate properly you'd have to put more resources to uh paying someone in their outside to come in and do it or a staff that is dedicated and reports to an audit committee.

So we currently haven't done that but other than that we are um sitting at a low risk we can see the score in there all right yeah the same two things every year though yeah it is everything we do all the time and and we do this at special districts we do this other places just so everybody knows we are really a stellar performer but there are certain things that it just does not fiscally prudent to try and take on we would spend a lot more money and get and we would not be reflective of a real different status so thank you uh let's move on to uh discussion regarding scheduling of heritage days um this really comes about that we have for the last couple of years realized that we on the years that the air show which is now become every other year happens we've kind of rescheduled around it uh the suggestion was made after this year's heritage days maybe we should move it completely so that it's at a time when we don't have to move it ever it's always at the same time the suggestion was made to go to the third week instead of the fourth week of June because there's no real competitor the nearest competitor is South Hogan City we don't really consider them a draw uh that pulls from our resource whereas Hill Air Force is second to the last because second to last so most of the time it'll fall in the third week but when there's five weekends it'll fall fall to the fourth so I can tell you from experience people don't have horses in the parade because on the weekend of the air show because it annexed the horses that's why we don't have them in our Heritage Day parade on okay what is the same with well I think just in general we don't want to compete with against the air show.

And so it's just confusing to everybody if you see the dates in there those would be the dates that we have until 2031 and we can start putting those out for vendors and uh care will be know what when it is Leslie and we'll be able to move forward.

I think it makes sense does anybody have a problem with this okay I'm gonna put this on the consent agenda we'll just move forward the next question to do this is it does pose a uh challenge with Juneteenth which we in our policy we have celebrated on the 19th which would normally fall during heritage day so we would end with a holiday in the heritage days week however the state has adopted a policy for the best interest of all employees that Juneteenth is the closest Monday to uh the 19th and if we did that it would most all it would really probably not impact heritage days because we don't do much on Monday anyway if it was on that week and if it was outside that week it still doesn't impact us so if we adopted the state policy for Juneteenth this is solved it doesn't impact us at all it impacts them so how do they feel about it well they brought the suggestion so they just want to get I don't think you'll ever hear someone complain about having Monday off instead of Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday.

Um we're doing a lot of road work on 3000 at this point in time.

While it's torn up, we think it's the best time to move stuff so you don't have to pay to tear it up a separate time.

So um moving these lines to the right position while it's torn up, we think makes sense.

We've done the analysis.

Does anybody have a problem re-evaluating where this falls and I okay?

Makes sense to me.

I'll put that on the um we should advertise that we're saving.

So one thing on that man real quick.

Time is of the essence, so we'd like to get going on the project.

We bring us back in a formal budget opening when we do a discussion in September of what an October approval, but we'd like your go ahead, at least a not head nod to Yeah, unless anybody has an objection, we're gonna just include this in the current work.

Is there anyone who has an objection?

No, no.

Okay, then it is done.

We will move forward.

We'll do official resolutions in a future meeting.

Um, and that brings us to the uh point where we are going to move into a closed session.

We have an update on a legal interest issue.

You know, when we talk about legal issues, we can go to closed session.

So thank you.

Uh let's take a two-minute break.

Yes.

I'm not running, but okay.

You don't have to say I'm welcome.

And um I didn't know.

Yeah, I don't think yeah.

We don't, I don't know.

Um usually a lot of people's open on.

Yeah.

Can I go?

No, you can stay.

Don't stress me out then.

I need to send I sent uh I'm gonna send a shower day, so that shouldn't be too free.

So I'm gonna bring it up on it.

Yeah, we shower day.

Thanks for doing that on Tuesday.

Yeah, I mean, I will I'm gonna say it's probably about 13 or 14 hours ago half.

Actually, you know, if you just did it every other Tuesday when you got them right, I'd be good with that.

See, I'm on, yeah.

I started at seven this morning.

Yeah, don't let the fifth all off.

Yeah, yeah.

I can't keep track of a schedule like that.

Thank you for coming.

I can't keep track of what day is shower day.

I'll just do it every day.

So we're just gonna email examination.

Okay, yeah.

So with the post office.

So say like for the June paint thing when we do passports.

And they have to go out.

Does the post office just lock our stuff up?

Because that's been a thing, like where it's boxing.

Yeah, I know.

So the post like where passports have to be mailed out the same day by the department of states guidelines.

So they're just gonna lock all of our stuff up.

We're gonna call this business meeting to order and uh consideration to move into closed session.

Can I get a motion to move into closed session?

So moved.

Okay.

Moved and seconded all in favor.

Aye.

Any opposed?