City Council - Regular Meeting

Council member Berry. Here. Council member Hattiesbach. Absent. Council member Beard. Absent. Council member Hustis. Here. Vice mayor Goodman.

Present. Mayor Warren. Present. Thank you very much. Item 2A report presentation on results from the 2026 community survey from Polkow representatives and Mr. John Mulhall, you're gonna kick us off.

Yes. Good afternoon. Mayor and councilor John Holland, city's communication team here to introduce Sonia from Polco. Her team runs out the national community survey to our residents every couple of years. And what's unique about the national community survey is that it's a benchmarking survey. So not only do we get to see what our residents think about how we're doing as a city, but we also get to see how we stack up against cities that take it across the country. And Sonya, you're just telling me that there's 400 cities across the country that take it. So we're a part of that. And the NCS, it takes into account all facets of livability from mobility, public safety, economic development, and we actually did pretty good this time around since we last took it in 2023. So Sonia's gonna run through this year's update for you.

Thank you so much for the introduction. I am the executive vice president of data and insights at Polco. I've been working with local governments on research for the last twenty years, and I'm really happy to be here with you today to share Buckeye's community survey results. So before I begin, I do want to, behalf of myself and Polco coworkers, I wanna thank Daniel Bronis who provide provide a very thoughtful, communication and input throughout the survey process to make sure that it ran smoothly and we can do a really good job for your city. And then also acknowledge my colleague, Angelica Frost, who did the bulk of the work and then sent me here to do the presentation.

So a little bit about Polco, just in case you don't know this. We provide tools to empower resident voices, visualize community metrics, and support strategic planning, budgeting, and performance tracking. NRC is the research arm at Polco, and we've worked with hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide for over thirty years. There are just a variety of ways that the results of these surveys can be used, and most commonly, jurisdictions are using their survey data to monitor trends in residents' opinion over time, inform budget processes and strategic plans, assess the community's needs, and then measure impacts of policies and programs you implement over time. So those trend lines become a really important benchmark for your community.

The NCS itself is as as spoken, it's a standardized five page comprehensive survey. It's used to assess resident opinion of of both the community and local government. If the questions on the NCS are categorized into these 10 facets of community livability and providing a whole holistic picture of your community from the perspective of your residents. These facets have been identified through extensive research as being the most impactful on community quality of life. There are many survey items related to each of these facets and the facets align broadly with municipal departments.

So that makes it easy for your staff to find the information that's most relevant to their work. This is Buckeye's fifth time conducting the DMCS. The last survey was in 2023 and 2022 before that and then a larger gap before that. So how a survey is conducted really matters, and that's why I'm here. We use our expertise to ensure that your results are representative.

We select our sample without bias. We oversample multifamily housing making statistical corrections for common response disparities. A US postal service list of all households in Buckeye was compared to GIS boundary files provided by the city and 5,000 address that were confirmed to be within your boundaries were randomly selected. A postcard invitation to an online survey was mailed on January 20, followed a week later by a paper survey with posted paid return envelope. The survey remained open for eight weeks.

A total of 487 completed surveys were received from these efforts, providing a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4%, which is excellent. This is just 5% is the standard for this type of research. So perfectly on target for our best practices. The demographics of your respondents were compared to the most recent census in American community surveys and then statistically weighted to to, which is a research survey research best practice to help improve improve represent representivity. And basically what I'm saying there is in every survey we ever have conducted, older adults responded at a higher proportion than they are in the community, younger adults a little less than their proportion in the community.

So we weight them so they're a correct proportion in the community and overall your results are reflecting your community. In addition to that randomly selected probability sample I just spoke of, a link to an online community open participation survey was publicized by the city, and that was open for four weeks in February and March. We received 431 responses to that, and that's just to give everybody in the community the chance to give their input. But for this presentation, we are just basing in on those 487 response from that mail based survey. The responses to the open participation survey are online.

So as mentioned, one of the advantages to local government for working with Polco is the opportunity to compare your ratings to communities from across the nation. We were the we're very proud to have been the first organization to conceive of creating benchmarks of public opinion for local governments. We did that over twenty five years ago and have been working on it since. So this is gonna allow you to compare your ratings to services ratings from other communities. And throughout the presentation, I'll highlight those benchmark comparisons.

So just to say that there's just a ton of information in your online report, including cross tabulations by geography and demographics. And I'm not gonna cover it all here. This is gonna be a quicker overview, but I'm gonna I'm just gonna point out some main themes and invite you to dig deeper in that report if there's things that are of interest. So first, the high level results. In the survey, we have two questions that ask directly about the facets of community livability.

The first asks the community to create rate the quality of each of these 10 facets. Quality questions, just to orient you, were asked on a four point scale. So residents could choose excellent, good, fair, or poor. We consider excellent and good to be pause the positive results. Fair is okay, but some people might choose fair because they don't actually like to say So throughout this presentation, we're gonna talk focus on residents who show or how many residents said excellent or good, and that will also help with our comparisons just in terms of it's hard to look at all four scale points and compare across different areas.

We'll also show the national the comparison from national benchmark with the shading on the charts. So and if there's a difference be over time, we will also put a little symbol, a little graph, or up or down arrow next to those bars. So here we see that most items are similar to the benchmark with three below, health and wellness opportunities, culture and arts, and transportation. The second question asks about those same 10 facets of livability, but it's centered on how important residents think it is for the community to focus on each facet in the coming two years. So we asked about both the quality and importance of each of these facets and we use these these answers to create quality importance gap charts.

So you can see here that overall your residents have about the same vision for what is most important to the community as residents across So here's quality important charts. It's also included in the report and it helps determine which areas of our relatively higher importance to your residents and of lower quality. Those are the things we wanna focus on. It's one of many ways to interpret data, and it can be used to identify key findings and help where which areas may need a little bit more focus or resource allocation in the coming years and which others are performing well by comparison. Here you can see mobility, education, arts and culture, community design, and health and wellness show the larger gaps.

So that's where the overall quality were is lower rated than the importance. So you could see that, you know, 90 or 85% think that community design is very important and 48% are saying that that's excellent work. Of the 121 unique survey items that that residents could provide a value to the ratings on, Three received ratings that were higher than that national benchmark, a 100 received ratings that were similar, and 18 received lower ratings. Ratings were considered similar if they're within 10 points of our national our benchmark average and higher or lower lower if they were more than 10 points different. Lower were related to transportation, health and wellness, community vitality, and economic opportunity broadly.

And higher were the cost of living. So better than the benchmark for the cost of living, variety of housing options, and availability of affordable quality housing. So those are some of your high strengths. When compared to results of Buckeye's NCS survey in 2023, in 2026, 40 items received ratings that were statistically significantly higher than the previous survey iteration. 80 received similar ratings and one received a lower rating.

Lower was natural environment ratings. Upward trends were seen in many areas including community identities, safety inclusion, economic vitality, community development, health and wellness, and arts culture and education. Moving now into the highlight to a little deeper into the highlights of our findings. We're just gonna dig deeper on a few of the items. But no again, lots of additional stuff in that report.

So to start, residents enjoy their community and they plan to stay in their community. About eight in 10 respondents rated Buckeye as excellent or good as a place to live, for the overall quality of life of the city as a good place to raise children. They also said they were willing they were likely to remain living in Buckeye or and they were likely to recommend living in Buckeye if somebody asked them. Residents do feel safe in the community and they feel supported by those safety services. Nearly all residents said they felt safe in their neighborhoods during the day.

A large majority also reported they felt safe from natural disaster, from violent or property crime, and in Buckeye's downtown commercial area during the day. Healings of safety related to property crime and being downtown both improved significantly from 2023. About eight in 10 residents rated police services and ambulance or emergency medical services as excellent or good. And over nine in 10 residents rated fire services positively. Lower slightly lower marks were given to fire prevention and education.

But all all of these marks are still quite high, but a little lower than ratings seen they're similar to ratings seen in other communities. Overall, improved scores were seen in items related to community connections. Most of these scores related to community connection were similar to the benchmark, but importantly are on an upward trend. That included making all residents feel welcome and valuing valuing and respecting residents from diverse backgrounds with seven and ten giving positive ratings. And just over half saying residents connection and engagement with their community and opportunities to volunteer for excellent or good.

Recalling that transportation was the lowest rated facet and have the largest important quality importance quality gap, we see some lower ratings in this area. Travel by car, walking, and bike are on par with other communities and also saw an uptick in ratings from 2023. So some of that work is really paying off there. Rated quite low is public transportation, and that seems to be dragging the overall rating down. Efforts to improve arts and culture opportunities have been noticed by residents, but there's still room for improvement.

Just over one third have positive ratings for overall opportunities for education, culture, the arts. Opportunities to attend cultural arts and music activities and community support for the arts. About half half had excellent urban ratings for k 12 education. All of these were lower than the national benchmark, but three of the items were on an upward trend from 2023. So progress is definitely being made.

There are some positive gains, but also areas for improvement in the economic health of the community. Cost of living is a tough metric across the nation, and Buckeye is definitely doing better than most. Other items related to economic health of the community, both work and commerce, were lower rated than comparison communities, but improvements were seen from 2023. Buckeye opted to add several of their own custom questions to the national community survey to get input on current or potential plans. To gather information about how to best communicate with residents, we ask where residents got their information about the city.

Residents rely most on your website, magazine, and e newsletters with nine to 10 using them as at least a minor source. 66% cited the website as a major source and 59% said Buckeye magazine and 45% said e newsletters were a major source. All other sources were at least somewhat used by the majority of your residents. Asked what street improvements should be prioritized by the city, About 66% wanted new roads and lane additions, while four in 10 chose better lighting, improved traffic signals, and pothole repair. Fewer were concerned about increased street sweeping or better signage.

Signage. So to wrap up, the results show Buckeye continues to perform strongly in several key areas. Residents give high marks for overall quality of life. They feel safe in the community and are likely to stay and recommend Buckeye to others. We also saw positive movement in community connection and inclusion measures, which is really encouraging.

At the same time, the survey the survey highlights opportunities for improvement particular particularly around transportation if you have options for transit. Education, arts, and cultural opportunities improves, but are still comparatively lower than other communities. And perceptions of the con economy are more mixed across key measures, but with with the affordability in your community being really good. Overall, the results provide strong foundation while helping prior helping you identify priorities

for future investment. So

Buckeye can also continue engaging residents on full go. I think your staff know all about this, but there are 2,300 Black Eye residents that are subscribed to your Vocal profile and those they can be asked for input on quick input on different topics if you want to dig deeper into any of these results or have things coming up. So that is the survey overview, and I'll take questions if you have any or comments.

K. Thank you very much. Questions from council? Vice mayor. Yeah.

Was there an opportunity to provide open ended responses to anything?

There were not on the survey. Generally speaking, we find more people will do the survey if it's quicker to answer, and then we can get more comprehensive answers. Definitely encourage follow-up surveys or like that more open ended format.

And then on the

I can't remember how you the 431 responses that were just opened. Did you do a comparison on how

they

responded versus Yeah. Overall, I mean, they are I mean

Is it a similar similar feedback?

It's similar, but slightly lower ratings overall for the folks who are in the open participation. Participation. Okay. You want

Those results are available as well online.

Okay. And no duplicates. Right?

No duplicates in terms of o

b two efforts? So

many you got a solicited opportunity versus somebody who can answer on open ended for the open survey?

We wouldn't know if they did an open ended survey and the, like, the the the randomly selected survey. We're careful with our methodology to, you know, reduce well, there could possibly be a couple duplicates, but we rarely rarely get them. But it's we don't do anything to say, if you did this, don't do that. Having said that, usually most people won't do a survey once, if at all. Okay. Thank you.

The question of transit or transportation, I think we're all really, really familiar with the bottlenecks that we have in Do you think that some of that score is, I don't know if people really differentiate between transit and transportation, transportation being the roadway network and the issues that we can fix more immediate there. Is there there's probably not a way to tell if there's a clear delineation between the two.

So we do ask just to flip back to it. So if you look at the the top ones, ease of public parking and travel by car are on par with other communities. So you're doing pretty well there. The same with walking and travel by bike. So it's interesting to me that the overall transportation system is below our benchmark. But really the only items within that are the transit ones. So the public transportation and transit that are lower. So I think that that is people are thinking of it as that entire network and that's bringing that overall mark down because when you look at the components, that's the only place that is lower.

Think the the way that the questions are worded, people understand more that it's about either transportation or transit. Road roadways or buses and Yeah.

Mobility broadly, like how you're getting around. Okay. Mhmm. Okay.

Mister Myers? And then and then we do one other question. The the open space, I think that we said that was just one of the only ones that went down. Can you tell me how that question was worded?

Yeah. It it's just asking actually to re rate availability of natural areas.

Okay. Which which is interesting. I think that's probably semantics that we're getting into also. Think Mhmm. I think a lot of folks would look at open areas as what the farm that exists right next to you.

Yeah. You could. And then

when that farmer decides to sell that property and it develops, that what is considered open space that was always private property slated for development.

Yeah. And I think it was natural areas specifically that went down. So it could it could be that. It could be that they feel like there's farm lands that are going away Right. As opposed, you know, as opposed to something that's

like parks. Right. Yeah. Because I think we I think we've expanded open space Uh-huh. More so than decreased it except if you're counting the the farms as open space.

Right. And that could be I think I think that's a really interesting point in like whenever I usually say somewhere in the presentation that these are people's perceptions, right, which are really important. But it doesn't it's not always reflecting what is going on.

Right.

Like but both are things to to respond to. Right? And maybe it's just promoting that there's there is open space that is growing even if farmlands are going away, and also what the city is responsible for and can do. I mean, I don't think that's your decision to whether or not farmlands

are Yeah. It definitely is. Yeah. And I think that that on some of this is is probably some messaging opportunities. That's the beauty of this. We can see, you know, transportation. We we know exactly where the bottlenecks are. Give us a year or eighteen months. Yeah. And that question, I think, will answer a lot different. Mhmm. Open space is one of those that it it really is a perception thing. And I think there's an opportunity maybe to inform public of here's what truly is open space and what will stay open space forever, and here's what is private property and is likely gonna develop at some point in the next five to ten to thirty years. So Right. There's there's probably some opportunities for for messaging things different ways.

Mhmm. Based on the feedback we're getting out of the out of the flickering. Don't It's the thing with the side mirror. I can see the look on your face.

I'm feeling comfortable. Can see the corner of my upstairs. Right.

But based on the feedback we're getting there, I think there's certain things to take action. I think there's certain things that are gonna take some Engestation. Constellation.

We've got Festival, Tartessville, West Park, Verraro, Sundance, Allentown. Was there any way or is there any way that you could see the responses from one area being different from another? Because different parts of the city, as large as we are, have different groupings for different reasons. Downtown is not the same as festival. You know, were you able to, or did you look at different responses coming from the different areas? Because one might want more transportation, one might want more something else. And were you able to break these out to see which ones were which? I believe we

did track the districts, and that is available online.

Was there much difference between Festival opposed to downtown, for example, or Sundance opposed to Torcheska? Did you see any differences? Because I'm sure transportation might have been on the minds of some more than others. Did you see any differences between these areas?

I I didn't note them to be able to speak very succinctly to that, but I can certainly follow-up.

You've got 400 and something responses, maybe more than 80 something responses. And I was just wondering if they were broke out by districts or areas that you can see a difference of a response. Because I think my my thinking is the different areas and different regions will be different in their responses. But because of different area I mean, the people in the festival cannot shop down down in the rest of the city. Go into the surprise. And different ones would have different reasons for answering their way

to do. Yeah. We can look further into the report council meeting and get back to you. More

out of curiosity. But I would think the different regions would have different reasons for different answers.

Yeah. Absolutely. And that when you think about those messaging things and everything, it's it's good to be able to look at those cross tabulations. So there's a lot of cross tabulations also by different demographics. So you can just look how if your community is experiencing things differentially or, seeing things differentially.

Vice mayor, you had something to add?

Yeah. Just looking at these guys over here. How how is this data gonna be incorporated into our operations and planning?

Overall, what we do is as we're going through the budget process, we're definitely looking at it. Mean, some of these things are just growing pains types of stuff. The biggest things that you know that you can hit on transportation wise. When we look at specific questions like where would you like us to spend our dollars on? We're definitely looking at that as far as streets, new street construction, things like that before we go to that next level. So we're doing that level of stuff. And then from just an interest standpoint, I'm really looking forward question on availability of retail in the area with Verado marketplace opening up and seeing two years later, what kind of an impact that that has on us.

So we do this on a two year cycle?

We do this on a two year cycle, Yes. Isn't Yep. We do it on a two year cycle. And then the actual data is provided to every department head as well so they can pick apart each of the ones that directly relates to those and have an impact on that.

Great. I'm a huge fan of applied research. So I want to make sure we make this investment, have a well designed, well implemented study, and that we're using that information. So thanks for that.

Thank you. The retail perspective also. I know there's a lot of conversation about all of it is is at Broadway 910. But a perspective is from Broadway 910 to the very North end of Victory. Actually, not even the very north end to to the Vic.

As the crow flies, it's about three and a half miles. Mhmm. And that same three and a half miles that I can get you all the way out to Jones Ford. So while it while it's at the bottom of the community of Verrado is it's very much centered in the growth and development that we have right now within the city of Buckeye. So perspective is all around. Exactly. Because the fix to that is hurry up and build the next center out at Miller or Sun Valley Parkway or something along those lines.

I received that request this Saturday afternoon at one of our town hall events that Target should be at the corner of Sun Valley Parkway and I-ten. So I talked to Susie, she's on it.

Is No problem. This is the applied research that the vice mayor was talking. Exactly. Okay. Appreciate that. Thank you. All right. Yeah. Thank you for the presentation. We appreciate the feedback and going out and getting the information, bringing it back to us in an easy to digest manner. So thank you for all you're you're

doing there. You're very welcome. Thank you. Happy to partner with you. Thank you. All Thank

right. Item 2B is presentation on the findings from the City Hall Commission project, including key themes identified through stakeholder and community engagement efforts and surveys to discuss those findings and provide direction to staff. Mr. James Bravois is coming in right here. Thank you.

You're set. Are you guys I can queue you up again. I didn't sort of want to.

That's all. We were a

long time ago. You told me I would be back. So here I am. Good council members. My name is James Brayboy. I am a project manager for the capital improvement program. And this afternoon, we're gonna be discussing the city hall of visioning, task one, findings, and recommendations. Just a recap on how we got here. Back in 2025, the council tasked the city to envision a new city hall. In FY twenty six, this was a strategic item for you gentlemen as well.

A council directed the staff to explore answers to answer these questions. What would a new city hall look like? Where would it be located? What function should it serve? And then of course when I came to present this back in October to you gentlemen, you specifically directed me to say, hey, I want to hear from the public about this particular project. So in this project, in this presentation, you will see exactly how Smith Group did that. How did we get Smith Group? So council I mean, a member of five of us, we unanimously selected Smith Group. Smith Group is one of the top architectural firms in the country. Smith Group is in the city of Buckeye so unique and so special.

I told them that we're special group here at Buckeye. They not only gave us one lead strategist, but they also assigned a second lead strategist who came all the way from the East Coast to do that from Washington DC. So as I turn this over to Smith Group, me introduce them. Kerry McShea, lead strategist from the West Coast, Madeline Dunsford, strategist from the East Coast, and then Chris Levith is the project manager.

Good

afternoon mayor and council members. I'm pleased to today to share with you our key insights from our findings in engaging the community. We're also going to share our recommendations recommendations and solicit any input from you today as well. We're gonna also present some next steps around three themes that we'll get into a little bit later, but they're focused on delivering services, accommodating growth, and investing options for community gathering gathering spaces. We'll get into those in a little bit. Of course, before we started this, we needed to understand Buckeye. Not just Buckeye today, but Buckeye in the future, and what considerations and constraints do we need to consider in our study. As you all know, that you are growing quite quickly, and so that really became a central theme of what

we were hearing and what

we were planning for in our conversations with the community. And along with the resident growth, your employee growth is also expected to happen and potentially exceed what workspace you have today. We know that there are some external factors that are also going to affect how you deliver services and how get work gets done in the city, specifically around AI and technology. And, of course, there are budget considerations, so we had to be real with our recommendations and understand what really could be implemented with your other priorities. So we had a number of key engagements from interviews to surveys.

We got the opportunity to interview each and every one of the council members and the mayor, and we're able to hear a lot about your future visions and your how you're representing your community. We had several workshops with the public, but also with employees, and we got that employee perspective as well. We had focus groups from people with different perspectives, from the business perspective, from the arts perspective, from the young professionals. We wanted to hear from them because we are the future of the city. And surveys.

We got a lot of response from the surveys, which was great from the residents, from business owners, and from developers, as well as informed by the concurrent Polkow community survey. So we were able to get a lot of information from the community through all these variety of engagements. And I'll also say it was across the city as well. We had our public workshops, one in the South, one in the middle, and one up north. We're able to touch on a number of different demographics and perspectives.

So through all of those engagements that Carrie just talked about, what we heard were four major themes. And they really were came in these big buckets of the residents rarely visit city hall. They just don't come here very often because virtual is preferred, their preferred method of how they wanna interact with the city and virtual services. But we did hear that community and community programs was really important and very highly valued by the residents. And we really heard a very wide range of opinions all over.

We had over 500 respondents to our survey, and we'll get into some of those opinions that we heard from them as well. Okay. So first, residents rarely visit City Hall. We saw that about half of residents visit City Hall either never or less than once a year. So and the and the other half, we know that there's probably employees in that mix.

We got that as well. So we we know that they're part of that. And the residents in the southern part of the city really come more frequently than residents from other from either the central or the northern part of the city. And we wondered if maybe there's a correlation with the distance of those residents and how convenient it is for them to come and how frequently they visit. Why?

Well, residents prefer to engage virtually or digitally with the city. So when we asked them how would you ideally access the following city services, most of them said virtual or digitally for everything except for community programs. In fact, we we particularly called out utility billing. Even long term residents, two to one favor utility billing to be virtual. For newer residents, that's ten years or less.

They want even more for that to be to be virtual utility billing. Frequent visitors to city hall, when they do come, they come for council meetings, permits and licensing, and zoning and planning. And, you know, we heard from the workshops that downtown people, residents of downtown feel strongly that city service should be delivered in person. But in the central and the North, we didn't hear that quite as strongly. We we heard it should be a mix of digital and in person.

So overall, we heard that residents really prefer to engage digitally and virtually with government, but they wanna gain engage with each other in person. And that's really what that community piece is about. More on why they come and really digging in here to the value of community. So when residents do come to city hall, they come for community programs, to pay their bills and for council meetings. So we're really seeing the connection, connecting with community, connecting with city officials, connecting with business resources, especially the business, entities. That's why they're coming. And so we see this as and we're seeing this with other cities that we work

with as well. The role of

city hall is evolving from transaction based to really connection based with the with the public and the government. Digging in more here on community. This was a theme we heard so loudly through multiple questions in our survey. When we asked them what word to describe city hall, 41% said community. When we asked them when you see city hall, what should you feel?

57% said a sense of community and belonging. And there were other choices here, but that came out really strongly as a thing people want. When we asked them what elements they wanted out of the city hall, we heard community meetings, outdoor gathering, things that really talked about the importance of community and belonging. Community was just very important, and people want places where the community can gather, connect, and participate in civic life. We dug into that even a little bit further in our workshops.

What does that mean? What is a community space? What's in that community space? So you can see here on the slide the different options we provided and the responses we got from people as far as is this outdoors, is it event, arts and culture, library, community meeting? We were really split all over there. I wouldn't say any one of them is 100%. But even when we met with you council members and the mayor in our interviews, this theme of gathering, having event space came up as something that was really important. So I just wanted to let you know those sentiments were were also heard in our workshops and in our survey. So you are representing your constituents well when we hear the same themes echoed from both.

So I do wanna dig in.

This is the wide range of opinions we've heard from residents. So we have two open text boxes in our survey. And I do wanna say here that we did not take any comments of social media into our study or analysis. We only did analysis on the open text responses in our survey. We just think that's more statistically relevant.

Social media comes with lots of bias and baggage, and we just didn't want to get into it, so we stuck with what we heard in our survey, which was great and a lot of data. The big headline here is that there was no consensus from residents on meeting a new city hall. We had half had positive comments, about a third had some negative, and 15% was a mixed back. The four big themes we heard, really fascinating stuff here. If you guys wanna scroll through 300 comments, you're welcome to.

But the big themes we heard was really about the small town feeling. People had a lot of positive and wonderful things to say about the small town feeling of Buckeye, but that was sometimes tinged with this fear of losing it, becoming any town USA, was one of the quotes we heard. So we wanted to bring that up as something we we heard of this fear of losing identity. We all started deep attachment to historic downtown Buckeye, but that's the heart, the soul where Buckeye began. And we got a lot of thoughts about moving City Hall and how that residents might perceive that.

So we wanted to talk about that as a loud theme we heard in the comments. However, on the flip side, we also heard about geographic divide and the access inequality, mostly from in the, like, central and northern residents. They felt that they were underserved because things weren't near them. But even here in the kind of the downtown historic, felt like they were also, you know, not getting everything and that other groups were getting it. So interesting interesting divide and thoughts there.

The last theme we heard we're just bringing up, this is like a vocal minority. This was not the majority of the themes, but there was a distrust around government spending, where money should go. This drove most of the negative comments we have.

Like I said, this is

not the majority, but we did hear it. It was with a lot of emotionally charged language, and we thought it was important that that came out as one of our themes. Not only did we talk to residents, we also talked to business owners. They also don't come to City Hall, even less than residents. Of course, we have a smaller number of respondents here, they're less business owners, but they're not coming either, about 55% only visit once a year or less.

Why they come? Council meetings, community programs, building permits tend to be the top reasons for building owners to come. We also heard from developers. Developers visit City Hall much more frequently. 30% of them come monthly or more. And we asked about City Hall and other kind of city locations, so City Hall East there as well. They have a preference for doing all meetings and relationship building in person. So things where there's permitting, meeting with staff, meeting with council, they prefer those things in person. Location's not important to them as it is to residents and business owners. They'll come wherever it is because that's just part of their doing business and that's how they see it.

Then Carrie, I'll take over

for strategy recommendations. So we took all that information that we collected and we distilled it into three high level recommendations. And what drove these recommendations was allowing the city to remain flexible, being responsive to the growth that you're is happening and is anticipated to happen, but also aligned with your operational needs and community expectations. So the first one is making services more convenient to residents. The next one is optimizing the space you already have and growing in place for as long as you can.

And the third one is about that community gathering piece. How can we solve for that? Because that was an item that we weren't necessarily expecting but came to the forefront of our studies. I'll get into each one of these in a moment. But it also was brought to our attention by leadership that these aligned really nicely with the citywide strategic plan components as well.

So we are happy that there was alignment there with our recommendations. So bringing services to residents. Because of Buckeye's unique size and your growth, we believe it warrants a progressive model, what we call a hub and spoke model, where these services key services are gonna be brought closer to the residents. What that might do over time is reduce the reliance on the centralized services like the city hall and city hall east, particularly if you were to implement more and more digital services like the public was asking for. And then maybe there's other opportunities to bring in virtual participation in city council meetings, for example.

There's a whole host of solutions that can be implemented without reach. And what does a hub and spoke model look like? Similar to the central hubs that you have today where you're providing key services in these centralized locations, maybe over time you can bring in more community programs or more community spaces perhaps. And maybe you'll start to introduce new centralized services. DMV services was something we heard residents mention request a few times.

So just putting that out there. But then you have these service outposts, and this is a new model for you where identifying where these would be within the community, most likely those that are farther away, where it's not convenient for them to come to city hall, and putting key services in those locations. Those services can align with what that community needs specifically. It can be tailored or it can be generic, however model makes the most sense for the city. What we did hear requested by residents for this type of model was to have permits, passports, and bill pay.

We know that they prefer to interact digitally, and so that I think will be their primary option. But having that as a backup should something go wrong or they run into a problem, they like to have the option of having that. Employees have some suggestions as well around recreational registration, cemetery services, and customer service. And from their perspective, these are things that they know that the residents need. It's something they're requesting more of, so why don't we make these convenient for the residents as well?

Growing in place. So we see that there's opportunity. You are getting space is getting tight. We know that. We think that there's still opportunity to optimize the spaces that you have that will buy you a little bit of time before you need to reconsider how you're going to fit more people in.

But what that does, it gives you an opportunity to prioritize some other budget items. We know that roads and infrastructure are really big and important priorities for the city right now. And maybe it also allows you to invest more in those digital services, again, that the community was asking for. And then there are some strategies that we can implement about how to optimize your space, looking at the space planning, how can we make the spaces more efficient, and what are some other strategies maybe to lessen that demand for the work space needs. So ultimately, what we're saying is that we do not recommend a new city hall at this time.

I think you have an opportunity to test the hub and spoke model, bring decentralized those services, which is gonna put less demand on the central hubs that you have today, and also implement some of these digital services. And you might find that you might need less space in your centralized location perhaps in the future than you might need today. And lastly, the community gathering. This is not necessarily in the scope of the city hall project, but certainly there is a lot of synergies there. And we recommend taking the integrating the findings of this study with some other concurrent studies that were happening for Park and Rec and the arts and culture studies to see if there's any synergies there that might contribute to creating a vibrant community.

So I think that there are some I know some conversations may have already been started around that topic. So I think that even without building a music hall, you may have opportunities to fulfill that community desire for more community gathering.

So I know you guys have been sitting in meetings for a long time. You have a long ways to go, so we want to just put it all on one slide. In summary, we think now is not the right time for a new city hall. But we do wanna move forward with the facilities master plan to flush out some of those things that we talked about. The service delivery model, what's in those outposts, what services, how big are they, where are they, how many you need. There's still some work on planning there. And also planning for staff staff growth. Carrie mentioned, you will at some point space is getting tight. At a certain point, will be at capacity. What planning can we do now to help make sure that that can last for as long as possible?

And then look for opportunities to collate facilities with community spaces or just kind of go and expand on that community need on community gathering and those events. So we do have a facilities master plan with the following steps in place, really looking at growth and future proofing, service delivery and facility location strategy. Those are those outposts, where they are, who's there, how are they staffed, all of those things to unpack and figure out. Space utilization and operational efficiency, how we take your current footprint and make it as efficient as possible so we can accommodate the headcount growth for as long as possible. There's some public safety and critical infrastructure work there and also implementation and capital planning.

What is this gonna take? What are the priorities? Rough board magnitude budgets, that kind of things to help you make this an operational and and a plan that can be executed upon. So with that, any questions?

So questions from council? Yeah, can you

start from the beginning? We'll

give you the cheat sheet. Yeah, this is the too long didn't read version of our presentation.

You know, the satellite idea right now sounds pretty good. Would you recommend, since we do know a lot about where our growth is going, which direction, which locations, Would you recommend now possibly looking at purchasing land in different areas while it's still less expensive? And what's going to be in five or ten years that we might decide to build in five or ten years? Would that be a good suggestion to to buy 10 acres in, say, the Northwest Corner and another 10 acres down here? Would that be a kind of a suggestion or not?

That is something we have to work out in the facility's master plan as part of a long term real estate strategy. We know that you'll need space pursuing whether a leased strategy or an owned strategy, I

think, is one we would have

to consider and evaluate appropriately. If own strategy seems the best for a long term, then evaluating potential locations for where that would be and prioritizing it with other capital capital investments, I think is something we'd have to look at. And ultimately, you would have to decide on that.

I mean, because if you look at what the value of the property was ten years ago compared to what you get to pay for it now, I can just imagine what it's gonna be ten years from now.

Okay. Thank you. Other questions, comments?

Yeah. The survey that you guys did is pretty much basically what I hear all the presidents say all the time. Kind of worked out great.

That's wonderful.

So when you said, in Penn Center, gathering place, arts and culture, I was just telling our city manager we need to build a big, you know, multi generational rec center. So where people can gather and get together and just be themselves and enjoy what Buckeye has. It kind of what you guys said was kind of exactly what all the residents have been telling me for several years now.

Mhmm. So thank

you guys for the survey.

You're welcome. I'll add to that the business community. We also heard that there was a desire for meeting spaces and incubator space, etcetera. So there's certainly a synergy there too with the community space and offering business. Yes.

City doesn't no one has it. Not even the private sector has that in our city. So people's always looking for somewhere. I got people calling me asking me where can we have a wedding at? And you don't have weddings at churches no more? But you know, people people are looking for different spaces to plant things and do things. And I believe the city should have the ass the assets for allowing our community to

do it. So thank you for your time. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. I think, you know, the the hub and spoke makes a lot of sense and I like the term outpost.

Oh, good. We worked out that. We can kinda

like that front guy out for one, two, three. Yeah. I like that idea. Not sure we need to purchase land to do that, you know, for lease space that, you know, existing commercial development or, you know, future where folks can touch down. I think too, and I'm kind of speaking to the staff as well right now, you know, creating that space where those business services can residents can access the business services, but have that community meeting space that, you know, against how much do you plan for.

Right? But have some kind of a a multipurpose space that community can use or the city can use and just rather get people coming to government, government's not going to other people. I think that's a good approach. Yeah.

And I think there are different as you said, there are different ways to implement the satellite outpost model, which there might be synergies with a library, for example, or other city facilities. And also, I think it gives you a little bit of freedom to test things out and see what works and see where the services are really needed. If if people do start to use more and more digital services, you might find that you want to maybe shrink that footprint, for example, on a particular location.

Thank you for all your work.

And even though I wasn't here, I'll just go off of what Clay just said. Think that's something that we said when we used to talk before, meeting people where they're at Mhmm. Rather than they didn't come to one spot. So and I agree with Jermaine that we were gonna spend a a large amount of money on something that would be a city facility. I think we need to build something for the residents, not for the city.

I think that would be well received from what we heard in the survey.

Thank So thank you, Councilman Yunker. The are you able to tell from the responses, not the ones that had colorful words on it, but the the others, where they were coming from. Is it was it all over the city of Buckeye, or was it I know this is an emotionally charged issue, especially for folks that live in the area. I would suspect that the majority of the responses had come from the the central more more central downtown area.

We do know that information, and I actually think there's a pretty good representation from variety of neighborhoods. I wouldn't say that the preponderance of responses came from just downtown or even the southern part of the city. We looked at it, and we actually got a pretty good distribution over all all of the districts represented by council members. Not a 100% even, you know, but I there's not nobody was particularly I think I we got better response than I thought and better representation from from, I

think all

of the city. But we can get

you that information. We've broken it down by district. To be honest, we struggled

a little bit with the data. People knowing which neighborhoods they're in, saying typing in their neighborhood, maybe not matching up with how we had it in the spreadsheet. But we were able to doing some some match up and we have

we have a pretty

good estimate of those responses. So we are happy to follow-up and give you

that that Would would be interesting to under and would be interesting to understand that a little bit better. And the so we we are gonna continue to grow. We'll continue to to cramp in, and we can gain some efficiencies by different designs in the in the facility, specifically this facility here. The the landing facility, not City Hall East. It is the landing. It is the landing? This is City Hall. We don't have a City Hall East.

Okay.

The landing That facility is because you only have one city hall. Yeah. Right?

So that one. Let's go with that.

Post one? Outpost one. Yeah. So that that that too is is growing, and and we have a lot of people that are moving into that. And it's a temporary stopgap for I I think going back to where we were a few years ago, it was we are basically planners in bunk beds here at city hall and needed a a safety valve.

That safety valve was the landing, which consolidate a lot of operations in one location. It's it's really the the business connection. That's where business development or or whoever's coming in for permitting those sorts of things go to. And and so that release of that population of workers from here to there gave us some breathing room in the in this downtown core and the city hall. But we're gonna continue to fill that up, and there's a I hear y'all say there's a there's an amount of time that we have to for here.

What what do you expect the time is until we need to figure out what we do with this building or increase the capacity

here or more?

That's what we will have to figure out in the next step in the facility master plan. We'll have to crunch some numbers. There are variables that we can dial up and dial down for desk size, desk allocation, look at the growth over time. And and what we're gonna do is figure out where is that pinch point that we need to plan for.

I I think when we started to seeing that population of workers we had, I thought the idea at that time was we're gonna be out of space here in years. Maybe maybe it's a little bit longer. I don't know exactly what that time frame is. But the purpose, I thought, of this study was to say, yep. Here's the timing on that.

Here's what you're gonna need at that time. Here's how all this fits together to have employees efficiently working together and not having two offices, one at the landing and one at one here, and and getting everybody together under one roof to the extent we can and still having the outpost and the and the ability to get people out in the field, what whatever we're calling that. North Annex, West Annex, East Annex, whatever those are. That's where you're delivering the the public facing services to to folks. The bill paying, the permit, drop off, pickup, the all of those things that that people would go to city hall for if they even want to go to city hall for.

But but this is still a a business, and it's not efficient to have a business broken up into a bunch of different locations. And so I I thought part of this was to determine what that timing was, figure out what that looked like. Is it this building that is essentially the maybe the the higher city management, the the council chambers, and then a landing like building that has all of the back office staff someplace? Or do we consolidate all that in a central location? Or is it something different from that?

And maybe these are tasked as part of this plan that we're paying for the the whole thing that that we're gonna get to eventually. But but the other side of it was to have an idea of what that looks like and cost. I don't think we wanna go lease space up in Festival or lease space on Tartesso or Terados or wherever that ends up being. The intent is this plan gives us time to save our pennies and bake sales and car washes and everything else until we have enough money to buy property and develop or partner with a developer and build something that is more substantial. Is is that still part of the plan that we're looking at or what?

So maybe I can help them. The the next phase, what we've talked about here is the master the facilities master plan. And that's really gonna go through with what our growth rates are, where where how many employees we add a year, what type of employees, and what type of facilities and what services they provide. The number one outcome we got out of that was and what we were looking at is, do we plan for a big statement piece city hall, one of those that would, you know, be in our five, six year CIP that's a $300,000,000 facility? Or

do we

look at building your standard office type complex to handle what our things are? What we got out of this was the residents and what we hear is we don't want that big statement piece. We want functional, decent facilities at the areas where the services are provided in a manner that we're keeping people together in a way that makes sense. And that's what the next facility's master plan will be. So we're not gonna be looking at building one big massive facility that will accommodate everybody, but we are going to be looking at putting facilities where they belong in a way that makes sense for us as we grow.

Is that what the public is saying though, that they don't want the and it it doesn't have to be the Taj Mahal. Right? It it can just be a consolidated nice building that is city hall. I think what I'm hearing is I I don't think I'm hearing a definite we don't want that. I think it's we don't want city hall to move out of downtown.

I I can say that I

my conversations with people has said not even really been suggested on moving out of downtown. It's been why would

we build something big and new when

we can't even afford to fix the roads? Why would we spend $300,000,000 on x when we can't do y? That's been my personal conversations with constituents.

Right. But there's there's messaging of that also. We're the the finances are there now to build roads, and we're taking care of that over the next few years. We're gonna get five years down the road. We're gonna have or down the down the path. I'll try not to throw out too many roads, but we're gonna get five years ahead. We're gonna have a lot of the transportation infrastructure taken care of. And we'll still be renting space at the landing with no

plan for for well, the the facility master plan is what will be we've got the space at the landing where we have a 10 lease. We're in year two now, so that's eight more years. We can extend it if we wanted to, or we can go and find a location where we build an office building that would be owned by the city, and we would move that the people from the landing into that or some other group of people into those kind of things. So we're looking at planning for what our growth is, planning for what our employee base is, and where does it make the most sense for those for that growth to occur. What we would not be planning for is the idea that one big building would accommodate all of the services of the city.

What if it's not one big building, but it's a complex that that brings everybody together in one central location? Is is that it sounds like we're not contemplating that. We're staying right here and creating efficiencies that we can and then back office is gonna be some other location. I say back office, that's public facing stuff too. Our Correct. It's permits, it's where the business comes to do. Can I

ask a question on that? Yeah. Within your survey and stuff, did you find out what the mix of people, because that's something that we talked about, who comes to City Hall, what was the mix of people that come, residents that come to City Hall versus developers and things that what's what's that? Since I wasn't here, I said I'd be nervous. That's okay.

We found that half of residents either never come or come less than once a year. And in the weekly, there are employees that are also residents as part of that. So that might skew that one a bit. So they don't come frequently. They like to do things virtually. They come for community programs and council meetings. They really want to connect with people when they are coming. Community was very important, which we've talked

about at the need for the

community center. These are things that we thought they might want, just getting to the business owners. Business owners come even less according to the survey. They come for council meetings, community programs, permits. And then developers come a lot, but they don't care where it is. They're willing to go wherever for the meetings, but they prefer in person where residents and business owners prefer to interact digitally.

So that's the proof of concept. That are paying the bill want to do it virtually or where it's convenient and people that are coming to us to develop don't care what

we're doing. Correct.

In a nutshell. Yeah. And we're not what we didn't do a deep study on is if the location of city hall makes it inconvenient. So that's why residents don't come. Or if there's other reasons, they're just busy, they don't care. They prefer to do it. Lack of need. Right.

Is that what you're seeing as well? These came from

the cervix. This is what

we heard. But is that what you're seeing as well?

Yeah. Yeah. That's what rhymes. Yeah.

I mean, I've I've lived to my whole life, I only come to see the hall from counseling.

Yeah. I didn't carry water bill.

I just drop it in the drop box now. Just pay online. So there's there's no need in the residents who are telling us there's no need for this grandiose big huge city hall. They don't wanna pay for it. They don't wanna spend their tax money on it. They want something more like you're saying, where they can gather office meeting meeting places, recreation type type of People would love it. That's what they want. 100,000,000 on a rec center. Put that money on something that they're gonna use and then, you know, it makes the community happy. So,

so then, yeah, I fully understand that and appreciate that. But again, it's still a business. And and right now we're renting space that is separate from where our city hall is. And and I I thought some of the discussion and and it's take away the nice stick it in double wides down the road here or something like that. I mean, it doesn't have to be a $300,000,000 facility.

Mhmm. But we have to we have to create efficiencies in how it work. And so the constant driving back and forth, the the two offices, the the all of that that goes into it. Eventually, we have to have a a common facility where or maybe we don't. Maybe we just have the the the ceremonial, which is the the council chambers separate always from where the back office stuff is.

I don't know if that's the most efficient route. But it I I thought we were gonna be talking about this is what we think works best for our city. Still the satellite stuff. Still we eventually got we're still gonna fix roads and expand roads. We're we still have rec centers and stuff like that.

And and where does that go? That's a whole another conversation that we're not gonna get in right here. But but bringing all that together or or having an an annex or something like that that's separate from here, Are are we saying that's the next phase of this, or wasn't this study supposed to fair it out some of that that idea and that opportunity for us here as a city? And it doesn't matter if it's right here in this location, if it's a mile this way or if it's up at Sun Valley Parkway in I 10 or Miller in I 10 or whatever that wherever the location is, I'm not that concerned about. It's what does that facility look like moving forward, and and what would the public want?

Would they want us leasing space separate from or or maybe we build space that's separate from and it's inefficient getting back and forth to meetings and such? Or or would they want a a complex or or an area that was set aside? This is the the municipal. I know I I see hold on. See you too. Hold on. Or or what is what is that in the future? Mhmm. Yeah. Let me start there.

So so big picture, we we were tasked with a multitask effort. And so this is really this is really just task one that we that were kind of rolls into the next. And so depending on where task one is gonna take us

what we heard? Yeah. What we heard?

That would inform the next task and what that became. And part of this is one one of the task was to potentially look at a brand new city hall if you will. And we're obviously kind of pulling back from that and we're now focusing on the the phased facilities master plan to kind of better guide us moving forward. And that's because of what we

heard from the community, what we heard

from staff, what we heard from council. And so, yeah, yes, that is definitely gonna be part of the the next tasks for us. We're gonna dig in a little deeper on what is gonna happen around the landing in that area. How are we gonna expand? Are we gonna continue to expand the the landing? Are we gonna get into a new building up there? The the updated facility master plan are kinda keeping on that. What what is gonna happen with this building, the city hall? We're gonna grow it. We're gonna keep it the same size. You know, again, the we updated the space facility master plan, and we're kinda keen on that. And the timing of each one of these growth pieces that'll be dialed in as well.

And mayor Osborne, I wanna share a little bit more data that we have collected from the survey and the workshops. In the survey, the residents actually, maybe it

was workshops. I don't think

the residents are concerned if the business is split. What they are concerned about is if they have to go to multiple places. And right now, where the rob is, they might come here for permits, but then they learn that they have to go up to the landing. So that's how it affects the residents. And we asked the employees in the workshops if they had a preference, if we separated this symbolic public facing part of the council chambers and council members from the business or the what do we call it?

Admin office is what we

called it. And they were split. It was fifty fifty. There was not any consensus among the employees about where their synergies, where their benefits. I think it depends who you ask. Certainly, if you ask people who are more senior in the organization, the ones that are going back and forth, they want everyone together. But those that are, you know, doing their job day to day didn't necessarily see a need to be all together. So I think that's why we were seeing that split.

What's most efficient? What as the experts on it all, what do you say? Not based solely on surveys of either residents and because there's more to it. If you ask a resident, do you wanna do you wanna build a new building to do this? No. We don't want our tax dollars going to that. Do you want your tax dollars going to paying people to shuttle back and forth from one office to another or from one meeting at one location to another meeting in a different location and you start breaking up the economies of that, I think they would so we wanted to be as efficient as possible. And that's that's, I think, what we're talking about. So what what do you all recommend? Well,

what I have found, a model I found has worked is when you have your ad it's on the same campus and you have your admin building. You need a lot of flexibility there, right? Sure. Work changes. The way people work changes much more quickly than it does in the symbolic side of things. I've also seen a model where they've had the council chamber paired with the community center. So then you're this becomes this community place, and then you have the Admin office building nearby. So that was also another model I found to be very efficient as well.

The term one stop shop comes up a lot Yeah. With city campuses, college campuses

for the convenience of the the users. Exactly. Yeah. I I think so too. And that's my perspective on it. And and again, separate from the location of it, it seems like that is the most ideal and most efficient. And then you have these folks that are out Mhmm. Bringing the services to different locations, and those are even much smaller single floor of a building or one small building itself that provides those public facing Mhmm. Services that are out there.

Yeah. I will share one one more comment about the one stop shop. Smith here did a project for the city of Sunnyvale, and we created a one stop shop with eight service desks. What they have found is that at most they need one. Yeah. People really are not coming in person. So and I think that those outposts can be a one stop shop in their own way if they are staffed and operated in a certain way that they could fulfill

that function. Else can you use this?

Mister city manager, how many employees do we have now approximately?

About a thousand.

Okay. So a few years down the road, we have 200,000. And unless AI starts replacing an awful lot of people, we need office space. I mean, we do need we're going to this office space. And to the mayor's point, So what is the advice that the experts yourself tell us?

Do we build a building or do we lease a building? What what are you advising us to do, I think, is my question. What do you think you've seen in Orange County, California, you know, in Newark, New Jersey? What have you seen that works for other places? That's what I would like to hear. You know, what have you seen that works considering AI may take the number of employees and cut them in half? I we don't know. And I guess that's where I'm coming from. What is your expertise in telling us what the best way to do it? We've got 640 square miles.

Orange County is, what I figure out, 900 something square miles. So we're two thirds the size of Orange County, California. What do they do? Mhmm. So I guess that's where I'm at right now, mister Harris. Thank you.

And then going back to the questions that we had asked, what would the new city hall look like? Where would it be located? What function would it serve? I don't I don't know what what we're talking about right now. I have real answers to that except for we're gonna we're gonna punt for a little bit.

And I I can understand that because it's there's a lot to to process. But at the same time, I wanna understand what eventually, what that looks like in the future when we're ahead so that we can start planning for we can start saving coming up with a finance plan, saving money for it, or or whatever that looks like moving forward Yeah. So that we can get to what what the future looks like here in the city of Buckeye from a city hall admin complex hub and spoke, whatever that is. Yeah.

Think you have an immediate problem or a near term problem, which is you're gonna run out of administrative workspace. You need to solve that problem. And then you have a longer term problem of where should the city hall be located? And that answer might change depending on how far out you look. Our recommendation is to solve the immediate or near term problem of the administrative space with an eye to the future.

Maybe that isn't a location that you might bring the city hall to at a later time. What we also heard is a lot of resistance. I would say it was split fifty fifty ish in your community about city hall staying here. It might serve the city well to keep the city hall here for some time, work through the the DSAP plan and the revitalization of downtown, and then relocate the city hall. So you're buying yourself some time, I think, with letting the downtown area build up.

Meanwhile, you can start planning for the future by solving for the administrative office and you know, perhaps purchasing land, enough land where you could continue to build on that site

in the future. But if we ultimately wanna bring all that stuff together in the complex, We need to start planning right now for that

or wherever that might be. Right. Yes. And that will be the topic one of the topics of the task too. So we need to understand how how much space you're going to need for the future, for the administrative space. And, you know, the city hall is kind of a known quantity. You probably have a similar number of council members and, you know, the council chamber maybe needs to be larger. But that's something that we can plan for a little bit better and understand what that size would need be for the future. I think there's also opportunities to think about the community gathering opportunities that maybe could still exist in that location as well. You

know, having worked with Smith Group in the past on some big projects, you know, quality effort. So thank you for doing what you're doing. One thing I learned from them was form follows function. So knowing what we want to have in these places and then building an envelope around that rather than building an envelope and trying to stick those services in there. I think the other thing, you know, the the pandemic caused a big change in how people work, and it was literally in the office one day.

The next day, you were working from home. So I was learning how to do that kinda remotely. And as the pandemic eased, you know, big companies were left with a lot of space because employees were working from home. Forced them, we told them we need to come back in the office to fill the space, not necessarily to do their jobs. So I think we need to look at how the jobs that our folks are performing.

Does that require that they have a physical location at this campus or city hall or wherever? So I think we really need to look at how people are working and leverage technology when we can. Our customers are using technology. Our employees can use technology as well. I mean, there's some jobs, I'm looking at our two chiefs here that you guys can't really into, you know, as much as you'd like to Jake, I know you can't really.

Physically showing up. It's really, know, we're making the assumption that somebody needs to be in a physical location to do their job. That may not be accurate right now. So how's that work going to change? We've got a big effort going with our lean projects and how are we creating these efficiencies?

Is efficiency created just by having people co located? Or is it trading information doing things remotely? I don't know. People doing that work are closest to They're in a better position to make that decision than I am. So how are we creating those efficiencies that may or may not, or may not necessitate them being co located?

And to go back to the idea of a one stop shop, and we did that at a Strand Mountain, you guys were very involved with that. Within student services, was one stop That the employee that was across the counter from you, one employee could take care of your registration, take care of your financial aid, take care of your counseling, take care of all of these things. So that one stop is not necessarily for the customer. What is our employee of the future going to look like? Is that employee can, you know, give that basic comment, the next person in line wants a passport, the next person in line wants to pay their water bill.

You need to have three employees that don't want stop. We get one employee that can do those three services. So that, you know, another definition of efficiency. So I think, you know, we need to go through this master planning effort. I don't want to constrain these people by saying it has to be like this or it has to be like that.

But I know through your processes, you're gonna talk about how we work, how we work now, how we hope to work in the future, what changes are are gonna happen, and that's gonna be incorporated into what this master plan means. So I think, you know, we're in a very good position, you know, looking at semi HR, how does HR change, you know, what type of employees that we need to hire, what kind of skill sets do they need, you know, how is technology, you know, our TV screen fails, so AV is not working. You know, how is technology going to facilitate to make this, it doesn't negate the fact that people need to get get together occasionally with the majority of the services that we provide, you know, why constrain that to a physical location? So you got a blank slate as far as, you know, blank slate. Do what you guys do and come back to us with, you know, excellent recommendations, which I know you know.

So I think we need to look at all of those things and not make hard assumptions, but we do need to have some to kind of say, you know, this is what we want to be when we grow up.

To ask a clarifying question on something you said a couple times about the no. Eric, I mean, I'm sorry. The the campus, are you talking more like a like a Gilbert setup where they have everything, multiple buildings in one physical area. Is that what your vision on That's that when you say that

one option. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So

sir, I just want to

say that remember this is just really just task task one. Okay. The task two was looking at the facility's master plan. Maybe we should have brought that in a little sooner than we are recommending right now because that probably would have answered some of the questions that you have, sir. And so now we're asking to go back and revise that and bring that facilities master plan forward by having it be task two. It was actually task two. We wanna bring that now into task one because the next step was for us to go to conceptual and have some kind of concept of I think in order for us to get to the conceptual stage, we need to know how many employees that we're gonna have to bring in into the future for this. And if we even need to do that in in the next step, sir. So I would ask them a little bit more patience. Yeah.

I mean, you got some questions, sir, but I think as as councilor Milton said, looking at the facility's master plan, sitting down with the directors, getting what their future growth is going to be because we want to interview each and every one of them because they're gonna be the best ones that's gonna be able to tell us that information and then come back and say, okay, well, City Of Buckeye is gonna grow by 200,000 as councilman Houston said. I don't know if he was referring to residents, sir, or employees, but whatever that may be, sir, to move this city forward, we're making the best recommendation. Our the survey results was basically coming from the residents, which we were kind of directed to get their input. And that's what we're providing to you this evening, sir.

Appreciate that. And and maybe I'm overanalyzing this on on my side. It seems like we've geared toward well, this is what the residents said, and there's a there's an emotional response to even talking about city hall in in historic downtown. Even just, hey. What if it wasn't right here, but it was a mile that way?

Because this ultimately wasn't the the the city hall. So this is just a a stop in force along the way. And and so what I don't wanna do is have that completely influence and well, we're gonna stay right here. We're gonna continue to red space up there, and we'll do these spokes out there in in the far reaching areas of of Buckeye, and and that's it. That tech can't be the the end of it. I wouldn't be comfortable with that. It's it has to be a more more overall all encompassing approach to what does this look like in in the future. Is it the campus? Is it maybe it is. Can we just sit here?

We rent up there. I'll ultimately buy that and and keep expanding into it and then do these spokes all over the place. But I don't think that's what we want as a community either. And it's it's not only it's sometimes we have to make decisions that the public doesn't appreciate, but they don't have all of the the inputs that we have. One is how efficient are we working right now? Two is what is what does this look like in the future? Where does the growth go in the future? So there's just so much more to it than simply, I don't even think of moving from this building right here. Okay. Any anything else?

Answer So we'll talk about rec center and a location for a rec center.

Just to answer the question, 200,000, 1,666 employees. Yes.

Quick math over there.

Quick math, sir. Quick math.

You're still sharp, sir. Alright.

Okay. Appreciate all the work you're doing with though. Okay. That's all. And it and it really is a a big emotional conversation. It's our going out and talking to the public or even talking to us on the council. Know you'll get seven different thoughts on what you have. So I can't wait for tier two, cast of two. Alright. Thank

you. Thank you, Ben.

Thank you. Nice Nice seeing

you again. Okay. That's all our We're end this way until 05:15. Yes. Look, Summer has no voice, so she can't say that with you, Tosca. I

working. This Yes. Yes. Alright.

So for the council workshop, that's all on our agenda. For I hope it's in German. We are Okay. We are gonna call this meeting order. This is the joint meeting of the Community Facilities District in Puppet, Arizona.

For 05/19/2026, and can we start with the lawful police? Representative Joffer. I am here.

Board member Berry. Here. Board member Kadisbat. Absent. Board member Beard? Absent. Board member Hustis? Here. Vice chair Goodman?

Present. Chair Mueller's vote.

Present. Thank you very much. Item two is public hearings, non consent and new business. Two a board of directors of the Festival Ranch Community Facilities District will hold a public hearing only on the assessment, the completion of the work and the proceedings heretofore, these are big turning points, had taken with respect to the Festival Ranch Community Facilities District and City Of Buckeye, Arizona Assessment District Number 15. Mr. Larry Price,

you may present. Mr. Chairman, members of the board just begin this exercise two weeks ago at your last meeting. And tonight, we get

to complete it with the

two resolutions that are on the consent. Just for review, this is Special Assessment District Number 15 for Sun City Festival Community Facilities District. It's approximately a 191 acres, 546 lots. There'll be assessed 5,000 each and the annual principal and interest payment on the assessment is approximately $427, and that will be collected by the county with the property taxes. And this is tonight, the two actions will, as passed, will allow the finance team and staff to complete the tasks necessary to assess the lands, collect the annual assessment.

Council board will authorize the sale of the bonds. We will receive the bonds once the documentation is received by the finance firm. The district engineer will be able to release the funds to Pophie to help offset or pay part of the cost of the infrastructure, which was approximately 8,000 feet of paving and concrete. And that's all I have, Mr. Chairman.

Okay. Any questions from the board? I'm not seeing any. This is, holding a public hearing. So we'll open a public hearing. Do we have any speaker request cards? Yes.

Hear the missed cards. Okay.

Thank you. We will close the public hearing. That's all for two a. To the board of directors of the Festival Ranch Community Facilities District CFD will hold a public hearing and take action on resolution number 04Dash2 six accepting and approving the feasibility report relating to the acquisition of financing of certain improvements benefiting the district and declaring its preliminary intention to issue not to exceed $8,000,000 principal amount of general obligation bonds to finance the acquisition of certain improvements as described in the feasibility report relating to such improvements pursuant to the provisions of title 48, chapter four, article six, Arizona by statutes and all amendments there too. Price again.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A few slides just hit some outlines of the general obligation authorization. It's twenty year GO bonds estimated rate 5%. The proceeds is to offset the cost of water rail four and water booster pump number four and concrete and paving improvements in the district.

The impact on the district, the debt service tax rate for '27 is estimated at 2.9. It's less than a cent increase over the current rate of '26 and '26 of three point oh And it's a decrease in the debt service tax rate. The combined rate, 3.2 versus 3.3. So they were able to layer the new debt service in with the old and the accident decreased. The outreach Petsville Ranch has an outreach program.

They meet with their folks on a quarterly basis. They go over any bonding improvements in the property tax area that affects their their folks. That's all I have here.

Okay. Thank you. For, item two b, board, any questions? Not seeing any. We'll open a public hearing. Any speaker request cards on item 2B? No speaker. Okay. And we will close the public hearing. Item 2B, board, what is your pleasure?

Mr. Chairman, I make a motion. We approve item 2B as in Warren. I'll second.

I have a motion for approval and a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? The speaker passes unanimous item two c.

Mr. Price again. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is Tartesso West. They're initiating a general obligation bond in '26. Similar terms, twenty year interest rate 5%. The proceeds are for water off-site sewer, storm drain improvements, concrete and paving within the district. The estimated debt service tax rate for '27 will be 2.98.

And it represents an increase of approximately 12¢ from the '26 rate of 2.864% increase in the debt service tax rate. The overall tax rate and debt service with the $0.30 going on tax rate is what these numbers represents. The combined tax rate of 27, 3.28 compared to 3.16, 3% increase. That's all I have, mister chairman. Okay.

Board, any questions on two c? Seeing none, we'll open a public hearing. Any speak request cards on 2 Okay, thank you. We will close the public hearing. Board, what's your pleasure on 2C?

Chairman, I'd to make a motion to approve item two Cs in Charles. Second.

A motion and a second for approval of item two c. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Two c passes unanimous. Thank you. So presentations, we're doing This is For item 3A. Do you have presentations for Mr.

Chairman, members of the board,

this is

just a preview of what's on the consent agenda, the 11 tentative budget adoptions. So we have 11 CFDs, three of them have not issued any debt. They just have a 30¢ property tax rate at the Leon Towing area. These are the ones that have issued debt and the impact. This is the budget and And you

ask

administration operation maintenance tax rate. In addition, six of them have issued general obligation bonds and they have a debt service tax rate. Watson Road has not issued nor do they have any general obligation bonding authority. Florio at Terrevallis, they have geo bonding authority, but they have not issued any geo bonds as today. So this is the impact on the rates compared to 27 compared to 26 in total rates.

There's some decreases. We talked about Torteso. It has approximately 4% increase. That's all I have, Mr. Chairman.

Okay. Thank you. That's the presentations. Any question on the presentations, three a? Yes, sir.

How many did you

say there were there? Sir?

How many did you say there were in the consent?

There's 11. I got 16 if we go above the The the completion of the bonds are the other ones on there. There's Tartesso has a GO bond on there. Festival has a GO bond. Special District 15 has a GO bond, and 15 has two actions, whereas the GO bonds have one each. So there's four four bond actions on the consent agenda.

So we have a total of 16 on consent.

Okay. We'll just go down. Festival Ranch geo authorization. The sale is $4.80. Festival Ranch for Special

Assessment District fifteen. Mayor, if I may clarify the question. So are you asking how many districts there

are or how many items are on the agenda? Okay.

Because I'm showing 16. Okay. And we're literally at say 10. I don't understand what we're making a motion

on that.

So the request of motion is to approve the consent agenda items 4A through 4O. And the reason that I believe that you gave as far as why there are 16 items in 11 districts is because there are multiple items for some of the districts.

For each one.

Yes. Did that address

the question? Yes, addressed that answers

my There's 11 tentative budget adoptions.

Right, the first five. Okay. Yeah. And that's the consent agenda items for approval of items on the consent agenda items with an asterisk on the consent agenda are considered to be routine matters of being acted by one motion of both of the board of directors. We now start for discussion of these items unless the board member requests. The section may include the approval of minutes from previous meetings Board, what is your pleasure and the consent agenda?

Mr. Chairman, I'd like to make a motion that we approve consent agenda items four, through four, goes a motion. Second.

I have a motion for approval and a second on the consent agenda. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? And consent agenda passes unanimous. Okay. Item number five is adjourning for which you're at. Summer, do you have anything else to say? You're good. Okay. We are adjourned.