City Council - Regular Meeting

We have everyone here. We have our presenters here. I would like to call our study session to order. We've got a report tonight from the Great Salt Lake Preservation. Regarding the Great Salt Lake Preservation efforts, we're going to start with our Jordan Valley Water Conservation District, and then we'll talk, hear from the Great Salt Lake Commission. So who we got here? Mike? Jacob Young. Jacob Young. Jacob, go ahead and kick it off.

Great. Where is best to stand? Right up here. Well, good evening. Thank you for having us this evening. We're happy to be here. My name is Jacob Young. I'm the new general manager for Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District. So I wanted to come and introduce myself and then I'll introduce the commissioner's office here as well. So I've been in the role just for since January now. And prior to that, I was the deputy general manager with Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District. And I'm absolutely just honored to serve the community in this capacity. Jordan Valley is truly honored to partner with your public works department and with WaterPro to provide water service to Draper City. For those that may not be familiar, Jordan Valley Waters are regional water providers. We wholesale water to about 12 cities throughout the Salt Lake Valley. service areas about 800,000 people total. And then those cities or like water pro entities like that provide the retail service to residents and businesses throughout the valley. So I'm here tonight to introduce the Great Salt Lake Commissioner's Office. One of the roles that we are happy to play with the community or play for the community is somewhat of a liaison with various state entities, the Great Salt Lake Commissioner's Office being one of those. And so I meet about twice a month with the Commissioner's Office, collaborating on what we can do from the municipal and industrial sector of water use to help support the lake. And I'm very happy to share that because of the conservation that the community is achieving and has achieved over the last several years, including Draper City. We have dedicated on a temporary basis, we've dedicated 21,000 acre feet per year of water to the Great Salt Lake. And that number may not mean much to you all, but that's about 20% of our deliveries are now to the Great Salt Lake. And that is water that we're holding for future use, to meet growth and future demand. And we anticipated that we would have needed to develop that supply at this point, the ability to treat that water. It's water that would otherwise just sit in Utah Lake and evaporate there or get used by other entities that have water rights in Utah Lake. But because we've been able to conserve and not needed to develop that supply, we're able to dedicate that to the Great Salt Lake. And it's a significant number. It ends up being about 30% of all of the water at this point that's been dedicated to the lake. There's about 70,000 acre-feet total that have been dedicated to the lake, and we're 21,000 of that. So thank you to Draper City for being a part of that. I'll just mention one more thank you as well to the community here in Draper. So we're all very well aware that we're in a significant drought right now, lowest snowpack ever. And so we declared a level two water shortage, a critical water shortage for our service area, asking for a 10% reduction in demands. from the service area as a whole. And I'm really happy to share that Draper City, between WaterPro and Public Works, you're right at 11% reduction in demands over last year. So we really appreciate that as well from Draper City. So with that, I will turn it over to Aspen. to talk through some of the Great Salt Lake efforts specifically, and I'll be here for questions to either Aspen or myself when he's done.

Thanks to you. Hello, my name is Aspen Johnston. I'm the strategic coordinator for the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner. I've been with the agency for about two years now. Before that, I was with the Division of Water Rights for a little over five years, so I'm really happy to be able to spend my working time trying to improve conditions on Great Salt Lake. It's such a crucial and essential part of our state's heritage, and it's a really essential part of the unique, broader Great Salt Lake ecosystem that really is unique in the world and is really incredibly crucial for ecological, economic, social, and other reasons. So before I jump in here, my presentation won't take very much time, but I just wanted to echo what Jacob was saying about existing water conservation efforts. Those are really greatly appreciated, and we know that Great Bird has been a huge contributor in that space. And so from the commissioner's office, thank you for your efforts there. I think a lot of what motivates my coming here and speaking with all of you, why I've given a similar presentation to some other municipalities in the Great Salt Lake Basin is because we want to find opportunities to work together to find win-win solutions that benefit the city and also can benefit Great Salt Lake. Working with Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District is a great way to benefit Great Salt Lake. The dedication that they've made is fundamental for the water leasing, water dedication and delivery to Great Salt Lake in general. But we want to also look at opportunities to work directly with the member agencies to see if there are additional opportunities to get more water to Great Salt Lake. That's kind of the overall message or takeaway here, but just know that I'm always available if you have any great Salt Lake-related questions or if you'd like to discuss any ideas. My contact information will be at the end, or we can chat separately, whatever is most convenient. So let's go ahead and go to the next slide here. Oh, perfect.

Is it somewhere else?

This would normally be a video timelapse of how great Salt Lake has changed over the years. It's not as effective when it's a still image, of course, so we'll just skip that. But this is kind of a different representation of the same trend. So this is quite a long time span here from about 1903, 1904 until about 2023. You can see that the lake level fluctuates a great deal over time. But within the past several decades, this sort of shaded contemporary period we've indicated here, the decline is noticeable and steep and then . So there are a lot of different ways to discuss the health of Great Salt Lake. But elevation is a really helpful proxy for a lot of the health indicators of Great Salt Lake. So we don't like talking about lake elevation as the end all, be all. of how we can help the Great Salt Lake and its ecosystems thrive. But this is a really excellent shorthand to convey the severity of the situation. I'll also just mention, it may not come up a whole lot, but you'll see two separate lines here after the mid-1960s. And that's because at that point, the railroad causeway up until then had been positioned upon a wooden trestle bridge. It allowed the water below to freely mix, but after the mid-1960s, an earthen causeway was created to replace that deteriorating structure, and it effectively bisected the lake into a north arm and a south arm, which are these days sort of different separate water bodies from one another, but we still manage them collectively. And the berm is an interesting, really helpful management tool when it comes to things like managing the concentration of salinity in Great Salt Lake's south arm. This is a little bit more brief of a window or view into the condition of Great Salt Lake here. So you can really see the minute fluctuations a bit better And it's helpful for comparing between the record low that we hit in 2022 to where we are today. And it helps us understand if there's risk of us getting another record low. That's been a big question. Ultimately, we will have to wait and find out. But I think we're taking some things as positive signs that we'll be able to avoid that this year.

Aspen can I ask just 2017 why did the north arm drop so much and less consistent than the south arm and is there do you understand the reasoning on that?

I don't think I could speak to that in 2017 to be honest that would be a great question for the because then it obviously spiked back up and was right that's And I'm not sure exactly what conversations were going on surrounding management of the breach in the causeway at that point, but that would be a great question for Forestry Fire and State Lands, and I'll check in with them so that I can answer that question next time it's asked.

You might just touch on why it happened in 2023.

Is everyone aware of that? Yeah, maybe just explain that. Great suggestion. So you'll see a similar difference here. And at this point, you can see how much lower both arms of the lake had gotten at this point. And so the decision was made to limit the amount of freshwater inflow that would reach the north arm. All three tributaries to Great Salt Lake, the Bear River, the Weaver River, and the Jordan River flow into the south arm directly. So the decision was made to limit the amount of water exported into the north arm of the lake in order to ensure that there was sufficient water in the south arm of the lake, that salinity concentrations wouldn't become too high and we wouldn't start to see a collapse of the food web because the smaller organisms that are a source of nutrition for a lot of the migratory waterfowl, their well-being or reproductive success is heavily dependent on the salinity concentration of the water. There's sort of a range that we like to keep it in. And the dire conditions here kind of led to a difficult choice to really motivated by the desire to preserve the health of the South Arm in really extreme conditions. And then, of course, we got an incredible winter the two years after that. So we were really lucky for that. We were able to close that gap considerably. Now they're a bit closer in line. I think it's helpful just to, again, to kind of think of where we are relative to worst case scenario here. You can see at this point in time in the year 2022, we were substantially lower in terms of elevation. So about a foot, give or take, which is substantial for Great Salt Lake. And so, because we are starting at a higher elevation this year, I think we have some reasons to feel confident that we won't see a record low this year. But this year is also different. We received a lot less snowpack and temperatures have been much higher. So we're watching it closely and keeping our fingers crossed. I think one thing that is certain is that if we don't get good snowpack this year, avoiding that record low elevation would be truly a feat. So hopefully we can get some good snow this year, and that'll make everything go a little bit easier. So why does it matter? Great Salt Lake gets a lot of exposure these days, so a lot of this may sound familiar to you. I won't spend too much time on this, although if anybody has any questions, I'm happy to get into the details. They don't want to be creating Great Salt Lake dust. They want a lot of dialogue around what that dust may contain, the potential impacts that it could have for human health. The truth is that the state has a lot that we are looking to understand about Great Salt Lake dust. So we've been making investments in expanding our dust monitoring networks and making that information more freely available to the public. But obviously avoiding the dust in the first place is the best thing that we can do for Great Salt Lake and for human health. So the easiest and most cost effective way to do that is to get more water to the lake. There are engineered solutions, but they are extremely expensive and engineered and would really represent sort of a shift in how we manage Great Salt Lake. There's ecological concerns, again, This factors into habitat availability, security from predators, the salinity concentration in the water to determine the health of smaller organisms like brine flies and brine shrimp. And really, it's not an understatement to say that in terms of its ecological impact, Great Salt Lake has at least a hemispheric relationship to many other water bodies throughout the Western Hemisphere. There is a network of saline terminal saline lakes that migratory waterfowl and shorebirds use to complete their annual migrations, some of which come all the way from Argentina and go all the way up into Canada in one continuous migration. So Grace Salt Lake is sort of this nexus. I don't have a great map of it here, but if you map all of these migration routes, all of these corridors converge at Great Salt Lake and then spread out in all kinds of different directions. And so maintaining this habitat is really critical for the well-being of animals and wildlife that resides all over the hemisphere. Economic losses. Dust mitigation is extremely expensive, even if it's with water, but even more so if it's an engineered solution. If we start to lose our snowpack, that could make that could place pressures upon our hydrologic resources, and it also impairs our ski industry. Mineral extraction is a large source of revenue from the lake, so important to be able to preserve that benefit from Great Salt Lake. When we're talking about artemia and mineral extraction, for that matter, those are great examples of Great Salt Lake's global impacts. The folks who work in the artemia space. Artemia, by the way, are brine shrimp. It's the name for brine shrimp. And there's a robust artemia-assist harvest industry where these fishermen will go out on vessels onto the lake and they'll harvest all of these brine shrimp eggs that are just perfectly suitable for farmed aquaculture. So then they take them and feed them to these farmed forms of aquaculture. So the brine shrimp folks, the artemia folks, love to say that If you've ever eaten farmed aquaculture, there's about a half, 50% chance that it was raised using great salt like artemia cysts. And then recreation, which I think is fairly self-explanatory. And then there's regulatory action that the state is interested in avoiding if we can. We're concerned about the potential for an Endangered Species Act listing. non-compliance with Clean Air Act National Ambient Air Quality Standards and concerns about public trust. So we want to maintain a good standing with all of those as well.

Can you give me an example of an engineered solution?

For the dust? Yes. So one might be going out and digging, basically they call it tillage, where they'll take a really gigantic implement, and dig these long furrows into the exposed lake bed so that as the wind comes across it, the wind speed is brought down and it is less capable of kicking up dust from the lake bed itself. Or placing boulders out or basically anything they can do to reduce the potential for wind to kick dust up.

And do you have an example of an engineered solution for the water loss?

The loss of snowpack?

Well, just getting more water in Salt Lake. Would that be like pumping water in?

So typically we are, a lot of work has gone into making it legal for the state to dedicate water to, or state agencies, water right owners, to dedicate water to Salt Lake. And then once water is dedicated, then the state engineer's office, the Division of Water Rights, we'll work to shepherd that water past other water features down whatever tributary is the most appropriate. So usually we're trying to get it there with as few intervening users as possible, as much measurement as possible, as close to the lake as we can. So usually most of the water, I would say, well, I'll say most of the water that we dedicate to Great Salt Lake is delivered via one of those three

whether it's the Bay, the Weaver, or the Jordan.

But we don't do a ton of pumping because usually when you're talking about pumping, you're talking about groundwater. And we are not interested in depleting groundwater resources to supplement surface water resources. So we're very focused on surface water and water that is available because of precipitation. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

One, most of those solutions are very, very costly. They're being studied right now what other engineered solutions to increase supply could we do. One low hanging fruit that we are currently doing as a state is cloud seeding to try and increase the amount of precipitation that we get from events that are coming across the state. That is one that is happening now, and a number of entities are coming together to increase investments in cloud seed.

And you're finding that to be efficacious?

Yes, it's effective, but in terms of the solving the problem, the scale of the problem is much bigger than we could do with just cloud seeding. So that's why, yeah, investigating lots of other opportunities as well.

So I know we all know that it'll cost a lot of farming, right? And you can feel how we feel about that. But are we actively trying to buy back water rights from some of those farms?

Well, we're engaged in voluntary water leasing. The state is not looking to permanently acquire any water rights. We don't want anybody to feel as though we're coming after their water or their livelihood. But just this past legislative session, the state legislature created the Great Salt Lake Preservation Fund, which is $2.75 million of ongoing annual appropriations in order to specifically focus on agricultural water leasing. From our office, we've had some really excellent sort of initial pilot scale successes working with agricultural producers to take parts of their field out of production and then dedicate the water that they would have used on that field to Great Salt Lake. But we are committed, well, we're committed to preserving and maintaining and improving the health of Great Salt Lake in the long term. We're also committed to supporting the likelihood of Utahns and supporting agricultural production and things like that. So in the same way that cloud seeding is advantageous and effective for being a tool to supplement water supply, we're kind of looking at all of the different opportunities to get water to Great Salt Lake and conserve water as tools in our tool belt. So agriculture is essential for that. They use the majority of the water, so it stands to reason that we would see substantial commitments to a great salt lake of water from agricultural producers. But we're only going to approach that in a way where it's voluntary and it's something that they are excited to participate in. Where we've kind of turned, we've framed it where they can think about their water as a commodity and then compare that against the cost of producing alfalfa or whatever it is that they're growing. kind of do a comparison of the agronomics of both commodities. And maybe they would save a ton of money on labor and equipment costs and fuel if they choose to not farm this field over here. And instead they can make money by leasing that water to us. And maybe they make more money than they would have if they were trying to irrigate sort of a marginal piece of their property. So we're really looking at those examples or those opportunities for water conservation in agriculture. And they've been incredibly receptive, despite a lot of the understandable hesitation that everybody feels when we're talking about water conservation, because there are so many different ways that water is needed. I think his hand was yours.

You mentioned utilizing multiple tools to help the maybe you're going to touch on this later. As part of the Jordan River watershed, are there things that we can do as residents and as a city that would help? Besides just, you know, conserving water, which I think we've done, you know, a pretty decent job of. But I think that our residents, you know, do care about the health of the Salt Lake. So if there's other suggestions that we could give them, you know, water-wise or planning-specific kinds of plans.

Yeah, I don't know if there's... suggestions absolutely i think jacob would have some excellent suggestions as well but i think the easiest one at least that i share with individuals who are concerned about the role that they can play in terms of benefiting gray cell lake is to use less water outdoors however you can whether you're converting your landscape or you're watering your lawn for what it needs as opposed to what you think it may need or pursuing other ways to cut down on how much water is used outdoors. That's the biggest thing an individual can do. And I think that that feeds up into what we're looking for in terms of collaboration opportunities with municipalities. Because the more residents can serve, the more flexibility there is in what can be done with the water supply that is available. And then we can come in and we can say, For this year, let's make a bespoke plan that suits Draper City's needs and also results in some water reaching Great Salt Lake where there's compensation involved and it works out based on the demand that you have on your resources and the wiggle room that may or may not be there. So if there's an opportunity to work together in a really wet year, that's awesome. Let's do it. If it's dry the next year, we'll be on the lookout for opportunities, but it's never going to be compulsory or there's never any pressure. Just the same as with our agricultural producers. We wanted to do a very voluntary and community-driven approach to .

Can I just get real specific on that? on exactly what we can do here to help and how it helps. So that reducing outdoor use is really changing our landscapes from lawn-dominant landscapes to water-efficient landscapes. We call them, at Jordan Valley, localscapes. So it's not xericscape, where it's just rock fields and things. It's actually a really lush look of what you would see in the natural environment here. um that by reducing our outdoor demand like that it allows us to continue to delay those supply improvement projects or development projects so we can continue to dedicate that 21 000 acre feet for more and more years out into the future originally you know back in the early 2000s we estimated that we would need to develop the water that we're currently sending to the lake in by 2022 And so because of how far we've come in conservation, we've dedicated that water to the lake for 10 years because we don't think we'll need it. We're very confident we won't need it for another 10 years. We can push that out another 10 because we feel like we have so much more room where we can reduce our outdoor water use here within our service areas.

Thank you. And thank you for making that connection.

Can you just help give us a point of reference to show what kind of impact does 70,000 acre water feet do to Graysaw Lake? It's a lot of water, but how does it really impact the lake?

In one year, you're probably not going to notice very much of an impact that can be extrapolated from other potential positive impacts. I think that's why In our office, whenever we're talking about Great Salt Lake management, we're talking about it in very long terms. This is gonna be something that we're managing indefinitely. And so we're talking about changing the trajectory of Great Salt Lake on a longer time scale, I think. Yeah, so this does not include 70,000 acre feet on it, but hopefully it will give you some context that's helpful to kind of put some numbers to some outcomes here So this blue line at the bottom is our baseline scenario. This is where we project the lake is most likely to end up in terms of elevation by the year 2055 if we take no action, if we try to, if we don't get any additional water to Graysall Lake. There are two additional scenarios charted here. This middle gray scenario is representative of an additional 250,000 acre feet of dedicated water every year. And you can see the trajectory of the lake improves, but it's still very gradual. And that's why it's hard to think about the benefits or the impact of a delivery like that in one specific year. There are a ton of things that we can do with that. We can improve riparian health as we send it through tributaries and we can benefit our wetlands. Depending on where it's coming from, there might even be opportunities to temporarily get the exposed playa of the lake inundated with water so that it can reform a salt crest and become less of a volatile source of dust. We're talking about enormous volumes of water dedicated consistently year over year to really make an impact. And that orange line is an additional 800,000 acre feet of water every year. And you can see we have 2034 highlighted on here for the Olympics. That's Governor Cox has set some really ambitious goals for what we would like to see from Great Salt Lake by the Olympics as part of the Great Salt Lake Charter. And we're interested in trying to get as close as we can to that, but 70,000 is a huge part of 250,000, but we need to get that every year in perpetuity in order to see these outcomes and hopefully continue to build on that. Is that helpful? So I know I'm running low on time. I'll just breeze through this really quick last slide. I've mentioned the bespoke approach to working with Draper City to find opportunities to get water to Great Salt Lake. The term that we've kind of been using in our office to refer to these collaborative opportunities, it doesn't roll off the tongue very well, but we've been calling them comprehensive municipal conservation strategies. I'm not going to say that again. And basically, we're just looking to create a resource and a platform on which we can collaborate, we can talk about ideas, we can identify opportunities for water to Great Salt Lake and what kind of benefits the city might receive from our office in exchange for those commitments. And again, it's completely non-committal, non-obligatory. It's just a flexible water management option that we want to have there. So if there's an opportunity where Graper has a greater demand than there is supply and it is a suitable year for it, then let's get that water dedicated to Great Salt Lake and have it delivered there, shepherded there by the state engineer. We can help to improve our air quality, preserve Great Salt Lake as a cultural place of heritage and just all do our part. Here's my email address and my phone number. Please feel free to reach out with any additional questions. I know that this is super surface level, so I'm happy to talk about details. We're kind of figuring out this process as we go through it with a number of municipalities, and I think it's going to look different for every single one of them, and we're just eager to start the conversation. To that end, we'd love to invite Draper City City Council members and certain staff out to the Eccles Wildlife Education Center. We don't have a date for it set quite yet, but we're hoping to have some municipalities come join us at Farmington Bay for an airboat tour of Farmington Bay so that you can see some of the beauty that a lot of people never really get to experience on Great Salt Lake. Most people just imagine the marina, but these Farmington Bays incredible and very different. And then I think we'll also take some time to go to where the shore of the lake should be and get an idea of how far it has receded to kind of see some of the good, some of the bad, and then have lunch and talk about what we've seen and just continue to learn, continue to work together and find opportunities for collaboration.

I highly recommend going on that tour. I've been there, done that. It's amazing. Both the education center and the airboats. It's incredible. Thanks for the recommendation.

You seem to be presenting a more rosy picture than we're reading in the New York Times. Less urgent. How would you address that disconnect? You feel like there's time. You feel like this can still be voluntary. We can still do this as a please, would you consider helping? This is urgent and the lake's going to die. Sure. Tough question.

He's trying to be politically correct. Yeah.

Well, I think there is a need for more urgency. And I think that there are There are ideas out there that would certainly, that may potentially result in a quicker turnaround for Graysaw Lake. I think our office is really committed to focusing on solutions that have been found to be politically achievable. And the avenues that we are pursuing, the strategies and solutions that we have in our toolkit are largely determined by what we are empowered to do by the state of Utah. So we're engaged in agricultural water leasing to get as much participation from agricultural users as we can. And we're engaged across the board with a full suite of other municipal users and industrial users. We work regularly with the mineral extraction companies on the lake. I feel as though we are doing what is possible for our agency to do to the best of our ability to result in positive outcomes for Great Salt Lake. And I hope that we can start to see some really positive outcomes for Great Salt Lake, hopefully supported by some really great precipitation.

Thank you.

That's been a great job of giving a very honest and diplomatic answer to that question. And it really an urgent issue um i'm really glad to see the commissioner's office acknowledge that we are making progress towards this very urgent issue and i'd be happy to share a more unfiltered answer maybe after but we don't have time for that so are you saying are you saying for 70 000 acre feet that we've got donated we need to get to 250 000 yes there are those that that actually demand that we get to 800,000. And so if you compare 70 to 800, we're way far off.

But 250 can make a big difference, too.

So the reason 250,000 acre feet is chosen to be represented on these graphs is because that is what Dr. David Tarbodman at Utah State University has determined sort of minimum required additional amount of inflow in order to stabilize the lake. So it will cease its decline, most likely, depending on the precipitation conditions. And then if we can start to build on that 250,000 acre feet, we're just increasing the likelihood that the elevation goes up over time.

Is there 800,000 acre feet out there? That's a good question.

I think it's it's gonna look like a lot of very creative solutions. It's a little nuanced, but fortunately, fire and state land acquisition of US mag resulted in a really substantial dedication of existing water in the lake. But those dedications of existing water that's already in the lake also served to benefit Great Salt Lake over time. And we're interested in Phragmites treatment as well, which could potentially yield tens of thousands of acre feet of conserved water that would then just go straight into Great Salt Lake. And other opportunities were exploring the possibility of reconnecting the hydrology of Newfoundland Basin, into which during the 80s we were pumping excess Great Salt Lake water Now that basin collects somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 acre feet of precipitation annually. So if we can reconnect that hydrology and get that into Great Salt Lake, that would also be a huge thing.

That's 100,000 that's not going into Great Salt Lake?

Yeah, 100,000 on very wet years. Just flip that pump around. It might be cheaper if we can do it for us. So anyway, it's not all going to come from one place or one stakeholder group, but I think those of us who are working to find this patchwork of solutions are confident that over time we can achieve some pretty incredible volumes of dedicated water. But it's going to take time and a willingness to participate and a lot of financial support. So those are key to success.

Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you for letting me take so much of your time and understand each other with any questions. Thanks again.

Our next item is a little education on the reinvestment agencies. Thanks again.

We've got Jason Beringhams here tonight. Is he going to do some education? He's going to educate us.

Well, Jason, come in and do your thing. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Jason Burningham. We're on your regular city council meeting a little later just to present on the RDA, but Tonight I wanted to specifically just go over a few things if we go to the next slide We have been We have been for the last probably 15 years or so been reporting information as required under the state law what your project areas have done and when I was starting to talk to Mike and Kelly and John and others We realized that there are new city council members and one of the initial responses was let's make sure we know what CRA means and what tax increment financing means. Tonight I did want to just kind of outline what I wanted to speak about in this work session. And my ultimate goal at the end of this is to get you to start thinking about programming some of the dollars that we have received within the project areas that are now agency-oriented dollars that need to be spent for project area improvements and infrastructure, etc. So I'm gonna first just go over an overview of CRA and tax increment financings. And then we're gonna talk about the project area funds that you have and the current balances that exist in those funds. And then review with you what is allowable, how you could use these proceeds. to encourage economic development, community development, or other things like that. Now I've got a few examples of what you might consider as an allowable use, and then ultimately, I think, trying to lead towards that direction of, okay, let's talk about maybe next steps. How would we do this as an RDA board? So we go to the next slide. Now you can take off your City Council that you take those off and now you're going to put on your community reinvestment agency So just as some background under Utah law the city Draper City has the ability to create a community reinvestment agency and this agency is really the alter ego of the city council. That's why I said wear one hat as a city council member, wear another hat as a board of trustee for the community reinvestment agency. Unlike other states, Utah is not governed by a separate independent board. It's by the same city council members and mayor that govern your community reinvestment agency. And so it's important to recognize that when we're talking about tonight, these funds are not general fund monies. They're not monies intended to be for the general purposes, operation, or maintenance of your typical government funds, but are very specifically geared towards economic development, trying to encourage that. The main tool, really, that the community agency, and sometimes you'll hear the term redevelopment agency, community development and renewal agency, or CRA. They're really interchangeable, but under the current state law, the acronym is really CRA, which stands for Community Reinvestment Agency. And this body actually did change that name so that it is the CRA. But the main tool that we have are project areas. And you can see very small print, but there are six what we consider active project areas that have monies that have been collected and are in process of being utilized. Some have already been used, some we need to program. Project area, I think is an important term. The boundaries of the CRA are coterminous with the boundaries of the city. So the agency, in essence, can do a project area anywhere within the city. They can't go outside of the city boundaries unless you go through an interlocal agreement or team with another. But it is important that we look at project areas are very specific to a geographic location. So all of these you can kind of look at and depict, oh, okay, I understand they're in that general location.

I'm so sorry to ask the question so early, but are these project areas, are we looking for new growth and development and not necessarily revitalizing an existing area?

That's a great, great question. And I think maybe if I focus on this targeted purposes, they're for all of the above. So they are for new growth, but in a lot of cases they're redevelopment, they're revitalization where you're going into areas within a community that might be considered blighted, run down and need some further investment in order for them to be revitalized. And so not every single project area maybe has the same purpose. But these are the general guidelines for the purpose. So economic, community development, redevelopment, revitalization. And how many of you maybe understand the term tax increment financing? That's really what project areas use is tax increment revenue. Does that make some sense? So let me quickly give an illustration, and then I think it will make more sense. So let's say one of these project areas had 80 acres and you as a CRA decided we're going to create this project area and we're going to freeze whatever that assessed value is, its base level. And let's say right now, 2026, it was a million dollars. That's what the taxable value of everything within that property is. Tax increment then would be applying the tax rate to the future value, assuming that you get more economic redevelopment, community development uses, and let's say that grows to 10 million. So the difference between the 10 million and the 1 million, 9 million, would be that incremental increase in value. And then the tax rates that are associated with property tax rates are what would be incremental taxes. And so when we talk about tax increment financing, that's what it is. It's a portion of property taxes that have increased over a base value that then can be used for agency purposes. Any questions? Let me just make sure.

Yeah, I just want to make sure I understand that. So would it be in your example where it's $1 million to $10 million? So that goes until the value reaches $10 million, and then it Done?

Not quite, but that's a good... So they're also determined by objectives. So one of the objectives might be, well, we're trying to get a minimum increase in what that success value would look like. And so our agreements with other taxing entities may reach that... End of the goal. And then we say, okay, now we're good with that. But that's all driven by agreements that you would have with other interlocal partners, like the school district, water conservancy district the county those are the other partners that would do it but but there are goals and if for instance if that incremental increase never increased then there really is no revenue that comes to the agency and therefore there's no ability to impact or to do anything but I'm going to review these later tonight and I'll give you some specific statistics, metrics, may are well familiar with this, but each one of your project areas has far outpaced what any natural development has been by multiple times. And I look at that as really an IRR, your internal rate of return, what monies you've put into it, which is this money that's been put into it has returned, in some cases, a hundredfold or more. But that's the purpose of talking about this tonight is this tax increment financing that produces revenues, which then you as a board have responsibility to ensure that it's being used for the appropriate uses. Any other questions before I legally use that concept? I'll let that sink in. So if we go to the next one. So as you can imagine, over time, those six projects or so, every year create that difference than, in our example, the $9 million, whatever the taxes were on that, plus whatever percentage participation the school district, county, or others participate. So it's not always 100%. Sometimes it's a lower percent. Sometimes there's no percent. Some taxing entities say, no, that's not my objective. I don't want to participate on that.

So they get their property tax due to them every year if they say we're not... They're not anticipating.

And remember that everybody still receives their portion of that $1 million base taxable value. So that revenue never gets shifted away. That continues to come to the city, the school district, the county, all of that. It's a deferral. Yeah, it's a deferral. And in some cases... We've got a few projects, Sandhills, East Bangor, now that they've actually come out of the RDA pile and have become new growth. Those are huge windfalls for the school district, for canyons, for the county, for the city, et cetera. So they've more than kind of replenished what they used in the interim to help these projects work. What this illustrates under here is just I guess the frequency of the increment. So increment property taxes are paid every year. So just like that, the way the project areas work, tax increment is calculated and then received by you as a CRA. Whatever that portion is, annually it comes to you and it builds up. Now what we try to do, and John and Jared and Mike and everyone are consistently looking at the project area plans, the budgets, and they're ensuring that we're spending what we can in each increment. Now in some cases, we might have a development agreement with a developer where we've incentivized them to go and build a project. And so we've got a commitment to them where a portion of this goes to them. Another scenario is where we've had to build a public infrastructure improvement, widen the roadway, put in a new sewer, put in water. We've similarly used that either bond finance or pay for some of the capital improvements. But over time, we do get, in some of these projects, unspent fund balances. Now when you think of your general fund, unspent balances are actually a good thing to have rainy day funds. That's usually a general policy to keep those monies for rainy day purposes or other things like that. RDAs or CRAs are not managed that way. They're intended to be used for the specific project. plan or the project-oriented improvements that they need to fund. And if not, then they usually go back to the taxing entities on a proportional basis to what they contributed. So what I wanted to talk about tonight is this fund balance, accumulation of fund balance, which is in your fund. So if we go to the next slide. I don't know if you can see that. That's probably small. These are your six areas. I will mention the last three are no longer receiving revenue in. They just have revenue that are set aside. The first three continue to receive tax increment every year. But all six of them are considered active project areas that we have to report on each year because we have fund balances. So this first column I just denoted as funds for project area expenses. So those monies that came into those, these monies that came in and are currently set aside by the RDA are intended to be used for project areas expenses. So within that project area, or in some cases you can spend it outside the project area that benefits the project area. Does that make sense? The second is under statute, when we do project areas, some of these, at the time they were created, the state law was you've also got to mitigate some of the housing issues that we're seeing in communities. And so by mandate, they have certain amounts of funds that you have to set aside for housing. I'm going to talk a little more about what could qualify for uses for housing.

Sorry, can I ask a question really quickly? Is there a specific percentage based on like the CDA, CRA, EDA, and what are those?

Because it looks like the EDA is significantly higher for housing than... Yeah, and again, these are accumulated amounts, so they're over the whole life of the project area, but it's a great question. CDAs right now currently don't have statutory requirement but by interlocal agreement or other agreements you might have some indication for housing needs. Most of them that were RDAs, EDAs, etc. kind of had 20% of the total increment that's received. You had to set 20% aside. Then we went through a wave for a period of projects that only needed 10%. So we are back to 10% if a new project area was created it would be 10%.

So is that $2.6 million from the East Bangor, is that 20% of the total tax increment?

Yes, that's my understanding. The approximate amount is $2.6 million over the life of what has been set aside.

So what that is is every single year we got the gross amount in. Sometimes if we spent things whether it was for consulting or if we had an agreement that came out of the non-housing funds and so we kept getting money in but any money that ever came out for like administrative costs and stuff always came out of the non-housing portion and so that the two-point six the house enforcement was just basically untouched we rarely ever spent it so just like money went in there and we never really had a way to get it out and so that's the sum over the course of like the whole 15 years 10% of the whole amount, which is why, or sorry, 20%, which is why if we hadn't spent anything ever, instead of the 2.3 on the left of the table, that would have been like, you know, 20, you know, millions more.

And I think that answered your question. And I'll just try to re paraphrase what I think you asked, which is, The total amount of tax increment that's been received in that project area is probably about $13 million. This is represented by 20%. These monies just haven't been spent yet, but they were the 80% that's available for project area expenses. Does that address that? Hopefully that made more sense. So as you can see, and then funds for housing, as I mentioned, and then there was an additional one, a third column, which several communities did take advantage of, but it was a unique provision in the statute that allowed for certain additional tax increment to then come back to the RDA for qualified projects. And what the city did was funded the amphitheater, and you funded some other parks, trails, recreation projects. And because of that, in addition to the regular increment, for a period of time, you could capture back some of the county special service districts and other participants for that. So that's an additional increment column. So if you look at these three buckets, and these are our totals, The only figure right here that is prospective in the future is this amount, and it's additional monies that will come out of Crescent for the next six years, and it's about a million dollars a year. That will come back a little more flexible than the other buckets, but it's still intended to be used for capital projects, things that you need to do to improve not only within the Crescent area, but it's more flexible because you can use it throughout the city. if that makes sense. So snapshot of this is there's almost $31 million, give or take, that are in fund balances that have accumulated that haven't been spent yet. There's been some programming, some thoughts of how we might use some of those monies, but these haven't been spent yet. And these specifically are already in the bank, if that makes sense. That's where we're trying to have lead, I guess, a discussion towards, okay, what do we do now as an RDA board?

So I guess the question like with that, couldn't we use some of these funds and like we have some areas where we've got some strip mall area and some tenants that are, it's vacant. Okay. I'm thinking, like, if this is an area, you know, over, I'm trying to remember the name of it, Cross from Smith on 123rd, Pioneer Crossing. Yeah. We've got a lot of vacant spots in that. Is this a place where we could use some of these funds to create some incentives to bring in some good?

Yes and no. I think it's a great question. Let me answer the yes part and the no part. Why I separated those three buckets was there's different guardrails in terms of what you can use those monies for. This first bucket is almost exclusively for the projects that they're already in, meaning I couldn't take $5 million from Frontrunner and go to that project and invest in there. That wouldn't be allowed. Crescent is a little different because that pot actually falls in this additional increment that actually has that flexibility potential. What I want to focus on here, though, is these are not recurring revenues. I'd be very careful about anything that's operationally, maintenance-wise. These are more one-time capital-oriented types of things. But to your point, incentive or storefront or something like that, perfect use. just as long as you're not doing it on an ongoing basis and creating, again, a structural imbalance. Do you create a new type of RDA for that? So if you said, you know what, that's what we really need to do there, you could use some of these money and then create a new CRA and meet that objective. That's one way that you could approach that.

Across the street from that building.

so back to the question of the buckets this is for housing this is more very specific within the project area this can be kind of universally because it's coming back as reimbursement but all of it right now under the statute and this is where i really just wanted to emphasize Some of these projects only have two years left that we can expend the money or we lose it. That is specific to Sandhills, East Bangor, and West Freeway. These others don't have the same provision because they're still in the process of receiving tax increment every year, okay? So there's a little more flexibility in the timing of that.

Is that to spend it or to commit it to be spent?

If it was committed for bond payment, that would probably qualify. If it was committed to a specific purchase order of something tangible, I think that would qualify. If it's just budgeted, I don't think that would qualify.

For the Crescent, is that $7 million, is that before or after our allocation of $3 million for improvement of the infrastructure?

We have an agreement coming in a couple of weeks. So that would probably be after. I think that's just a gross number.

So it's really $3 million less than that?

So you are already doing a great job getting $3 million spent. Wasn't it? 3.3. Yeah. So sorry, I didn't understand that issue. But yes, this is the gross amount. So whatever you're programming to use would reduce that by that amount. This is also money that we know will be coming back into that project.

So Tasha had the question whether or not we could use some of those crescent additional increment if we were to try to straighten Kimball's Junction at 7th East.

Yes, so there's another caveat for all of these funds, but particularly this one. This one has the most flexibility. This one has flexibility, and I'll go through that in just a minute. But again, it's really slated for that housing. So your example of a project that's what I call public infrastructure, so it's ultimately owned or operated by the city, If it's for public infrastructure, you as a board can have a finding that that benefits the project areas, even though it's outside of the project area, it's improving everything.

How strong does that nexus need to be?

I'll do it. And we can make it work. I'm very confident that we've done that in most cases, especially when it's roadway improvements. Anything like that would work.

Sorry. So when do we decide and make recommendations for what we think those funds should be used for?

Great. So that's where I'm leading. No, you're perfect. What I was trying to do is just set the stage, but I think what staff and we need the direction of how do you want to go about setting those priorities and coming up with those. That's something we could go study, come back with specific capital improvements over the next five or seven years and say, what do you think of these? You could add to it, take away from it, or you could come up with another deliberation method to come up with that. But that's my hope is that I'm encouraging you to think about that and let's try to get that programmed.

Well, because I think even the East Bangor that's going to expire soon, which was designed to build Bangor, I think there are a lot of improvements that we could make on Bangor. Some of it we own, some of it we don't. But yeah, my question is just when can we say, can we look at using some of these funds to make maybe additional improvements that we weren't planning on making because we don't have the city funds for those?

And maybe with this, we can shoot a this around electronically to everybody, getting several ideas from council members or the RDA board members of what things that you would even suggest us look at, we could go back and then look at those costs and everything. I think that would be a good way to gather information and start putting together a good plan of how we use those monies. So if we go to the next slide, I did want to talk a little bit about allowable uses I mentioned this one is being really flexible that was that additional tax increment and it really is because it's reimbursement oriented so you could use it anywhere throughout the city but in terms of housing Some communities get kind of focused on it's got to go directly to housing, either directly to an investor, directly to a developer, directly to a first time home buyer, directly to rental subsidy payments, etc. That's more of the direct type of affordable housing programs. And a lot of times cities aren't equipped, they're not sized with a housing authority or an agency that really can manage those. So what we do a lot of times, and it's qualified under the act, is we look at infrastructure that helps us support some of those affordable housing initiatives. Those could be parking structures, roads, expanded sewer, expanded water. So I just like to think of housing as a little broader than just saying, I'm gonna buy your house payment down, or I'm gonna reduce your monthly rent payment by giving you a stipend or And so think of that for housing. Project area can be developer incentives that were mentioned. You could develop arts and education and other types of community benefits that you could actually fund. Most often though, we fund infrastructure. We focus on what's the core need of communities and it's generally infrastructure. Public infrastructure needs to be put in place.

So I have another different question for you. Can you talk about the intersection of these CRAs and HTRZ zones?

Okay. Yay!

Well... Let's pretend we have someone that would like us to change one of these.

To an HTRZ or something like that.

Well, the main difference, I will say a lot of the uses are similar. A lot of the uses are similar and a lot of the ways in which you go about establishing it are somewhat similar in having a plan and a budget. The biggest difference on the HDRZs is governance. When you think of that, you're really taking it from the local CRA, you as the agency, and you become one of many participants on a state or regional level. So it's really driven, right now it's still going, you go to the Governor's Office of Economic Development, they would consider a proposal that would come from the city ultimately use the CRA would be responsible if it's approved to manage it and do all those things but the plan and the budget is very specific to the state initiatives and what the state wants to accomplish now not that those not that those would be disconnect from maybe what local wants, but sometimes they're not the same.

So we have full authority to say no to them at this juncture?

Well at this point, yes. At this point. Now, let's back up. January's coming. Is it March? It might not be in here. Is there an incentive to us to do that fiscally in any way? I always look at the balance of control, local control and governance and what you really want to create as your objective and the benefits that could potentially come and the revenues that would help support that. Obviously a CRA is going to have much more control over that. There is one benefit with the HCRZs is the state does say, In addition to this great tool, which by the way, we're gonna use local resources to implement the tool, but we will throw a sliver of state revenues in it. So sometimes incremental sales tax can be an incentive for that you get with an HTRZ that you wouldn't get from a traditional CRA.

If it's a commercial project.

Yeah, if it's a commercial project. I think the other caveat with the way the state has structured that, and it's really akin to MITA, the Inland Port Authority, is the way those are governed and set up is even if the local taxing entities, school district, county, city, say, well, no, I don't really want to do it, it can still be forced upon them.

Well, that was my understanding. We could approve it, and the school district would be out their money. They don't get the right to say, I don't want it, beyond campaigning with us.

What I've heard from Canyon School District has been just that premise. They've said, we're not opposed to CRAs. If they're the right project for us, we'll certainly consider them and would love to be partners with the community. We don't like HCRZs because we're forced in it anyway.

And they lose some money, right?

Yeah, they take a portion of that money. And then the HCRZs have a much longer lead time. They can go up to 40 years. You can trigger them at different times. You can use up to 80% of the property tax increment. And a lot of these projects aren't funded even at that level. Yes, there's pros and there's cons, but I think the tool was intended more to be regionally significant type of projects, not just community projects. Does that help?

Yeah, I think the developers see it as just a tool.

As a community. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, and I think... I've heard a few of those projects here, even in Draper, and I think that policy has been, you know, if it's community-oriented, we've got community tools. If it's something more than that, maybe we would consider an HDRZ, but it's got to be regionally significant. It's got to be more than just localized here.

Well, I could see the benefit if it were possible to do something like that in the future. I mean, not at this moment could you do that, but where you're bringing in a whole bunch of sales tax revenue down the line, you might want to reinvest some of this money to help get that off the ground, right? But if you're not getting any money out of it long term, I don't see a benefit to the city.

Yeah.

So like high density housing, why would we do that?

Unless it came with, you know, for instance, like working on the sports and entertainment district downtown Salt Lake. So what's being really conceived there is really a regionally statewide significant project. And so, yes, there's a lot of revenues coming into that, but the developer also is committed in order to receive those to invest about 4.6 billion dollars of private investment to get that. So if you look at the risk, yes there's risk, but the return and reward of what's being forgone in terms of tax increment is what I'll go over later tonight in the actual CRA meeting is your returns have been amazing and that's what the premise is for that sports and entertainment district downtown would be so it's those types of projects that i think of that you might consider a bigger regional tool what i don't like about it is the local control is a little bit mitigated and lost there and that that you have to weigh that's where we can have a whole nother lesson on pids yeah i don't want to go to pids So let's go to the next slide. I know you've got to get to your meeting. Okay, so here is my own examples that I said, what could we use some of the funds, the $30 million or so that we haven't programmed? On a public infrastructure perspective, you could fund a public works facility. And we've seen other communities that have actually taken some of the fund balances and applied them to something like a public works facility. There's also several communities that have built other types of public infrastructure, like you talked about tonight. Reshaping roadways, expanding roadways, expanding sewer infrastructure. things that would broadly benefit the residents and so forth. Other things like on the housing side, if you really decided that you wanted to actively be involved in housing assistance, We've got some examples of programs where those dollars are set aside in revolving loan type of situations where you could provide housing assistance. You could provide small rental rebates to bring homeowners from a market rate down to maybe an affordable rate of 80% of what the local economy is. They're larger communities that have done. Weber County has a very successful one, Salt Lake City. The smallest community that I've seen that have had any success is American Fork. And they've done it in conjunction with the school district, Alpine, and Utah County. And they... pool of their funds, essentially, and they target teachers from the school district, law enforcement, public works people from the city, and the same from the county. It's more for their own employment where cost of housing for them, initially when they start in their careers, it's a barrier. They can't get in, and so even though they want to be in that field, it takes them a while before they ever have an income level that provides housing within that community. So that's how they target it. They've been successful. I think that's my, just, so... I guess my leave behind was we addressed what are the current fund balances of those project areas. So let's say $30 million, $31 million. Where have agency funds already been allocated? Until tonight, we didn't know about potential with 3.3 million. There's been some others that in our financial reports we have indicated. They've been mainly public infrastructure-oriented improvements, but they certainly are nowhere near $30 million. Even, I guess, that point of the third item here is there's going to be a lot remaining. And hopefully I've covered somewhat of what projects can we use that remaining fund balance for. And so I know you've got your council meeting come up. And I hope this has been helpful. On the next page is my contact information. And Jack and I, if there's any questions in this presentation, if you go through it and you want to have follow-up questions, you want to ask about a specific project or fund, feel free. Reach out, call us, let us know, and we'll walk you through that. So my hope tonight, I'll give it back to Mike or the mayor, but you've got an enviable situation. And I think you can do a lot of good in the community by thinking through how you want to program those dollars. And that's my presentation.

Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. All right, we've got five more minutes. We'll take a recess and convene in the meetings. We have youth council, a big group pouring in. Lots of parents and lots of kids. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our city council meeting this evening. I would like to get us underway. We're going to start off our meeting with our second item on the agenda, which is the Pledge of Allegiance. We do this every meeting. This evening, it will be led by Jake Sorensen, our network manager. So if you would all please rise for the pledge. Thank you. All right, our next item of business is kind of cool. It's an opportunity to recognize and induct some members of our youth council, and I'm sure a lot of you are parents of them that are here. But if you look around at our fine youth council, they are 110 members strong. which is a large youth council in consideration for the state. I have a bit of a competitive streak in me, and so I always enjoy telling other mayors and city folks that our youth council is larger than theirs, and so I've always enjoyed it. It's been fun. But we do have a lot of kids. And one thing about the youth council that this city council has recognized over the years is that investing in our young people is worth every dollar. And the council has always been gracious in looking for ways to improve and give as many kids. Some cities cap the number of participants, and we do, but we have a high cap, if you'll note. We're fortunate that we have so many youth that want to serve. We use the Youth Council, if you aren't familiar. They participate in very meaningful ways in our community. kind of a volunteer backbone force. If you paid attention this year in the Draper Days celebrations, they brought the flag out on the rodeo grounds. They helped with the youth parade. They helped with Draper Days. They're filling in the gap of places where we need volunteers, these young people, giving back to their community and learning to work together to make this a great place to live and they're just a bunch of fine young people. We are excited for them and they do great work for us and they represent us well and I always tell them when I interview them at the beginning that it's an opportunity for them to make friends maybe outside of their normal friend group. We all have our friend groups growing up and this is an opportunity for for kids to mix from all different religions and groups, and they all come together and learn to be friends. It's been tremendous. So if I could, I'm going to call out the following folks. I'm going to start with our current leadership for the Draper City Youth Council. We have Peyton Johnson, activity council, youth mayor, oversee all of the groups in the council. Peyton, where are you? Raise your hand. All right, there's Peyton over there. Thank you, Peyton. Parker Van de Graaff, Council Pro Tem Mayor Overseas Service. Parker, where are you? He's working. All right. Good kid. He's working. All right. Kimball Jones, council. Kimball, where are you? Pro tem mayor. He oversees the leadership group. Thank you, Kimball. Our executive board. I'm going to have a hard time with a few of these names, so bear with me, but I'm going to try my best. Anna, I'm just going to go with Vargas. Anna Vargas. Activity executive. Anna, where are you? All right. Thank you. Avery Spiel, leadership executive. Drew Dodson, leadership executive. Ethan Vance Comer. Did I get close? No. Egon. Thank you, sir. I apologize. Service executive. Jack Ramsata. All right. Jerry Joseph, activity executive. Julia Wheat, service executive. Nikki Jolly. Nick Jolly. Sorry. Probably not Nikki. Nick. Okay. Ryan Chang. Activity. Executive. And then our advisors. Andrea Page. Andrea, where are you? Okay. Kathy Kimball. Thank you, Kathy. We couldn't do this, of course, without our advisors. Wonderful adults that are willing to also work for this. Joaquin Sagai, where are you at? There you are. And he's been with us a long time. Mindy Van de Graaff. Mindy, are you here? I thought I saw you. Okay. And Ari Van de Graaff. All right. Our youth council advisor, of course, who's been with us a long time and who's the heart and soul of this whole program. She's been tremendous over the years. Carolyn Sagai. Carolyn, give Carolyn a hand, will you, please? She has been tremendous in this program, both her and her husband. They've helped shepherd it along from when it was small to where it is today, and they're really a model for how to run a youth council, and I know that they're well-respected in this space of youth councils and how to make them operate for the good of the city. So that's our group. We're ready to swear them in. How are we doing? Nicole, are you? I'm turning the time over to the oath giver. And these are our new, correct? These are the new kids on the council. Let's all stand up for a photo.

Thank you.

Thank you, parents, as well for submitting your youth to the program. We're very grateful for them. And they're, as you can see, an amazing bunch of young people. We couldn't do almost all of our events without them. So without them, we would be without volunteers. So they're fantastic kids. So thank you, parents, for all your input. When we go to the youth council functions, we usually consume about five tables in the dinner hall. It's always like, oh, there's Draper taking up the whole row. So it's kind of cool in that respect. So anyway, great kids. All right. The next item on our agenda is item number four. It's an opportunity to make general public comment. We have a couple of public hearing items on our agenda later today. down on the agenda. There's 6A, 6B, 6C. If you want to make a comment on the item on the agenda, we ask that you wait for that item. We like to keep our record clear. But if you have a general public comment, something you would generally like the council to hear, we'll open it up for that. Is there anyone here that would like to make a general public comment? I don't let anyone do it, but let me just go over the rules if you haven't done it before. Our rules are pretty simple. The clock is to my right. It's set for three minutes. Everybody gets three minutes, and you don't have to use all three, but you certainly can, but you don't get 3.1. So we're fair, but we enforce the time. It's also an opportunity for you to make a comment to the council. It's not a conversation opportunity with the council, so the council will listen to your Your public comment, they might address it later in the meeting or talk to you later, but it's an opportunity for them to hear you. We don't allow in the engaging of any cheering, applause, or any things like that. We just want orderly opportunity for people to make their comment. I'll let anyone in the audience that wants to make a general public comment speak. The first rule when you come to the podium, give us your name and your address, and that'll actually start the timer once we have that in our record. So who would like to go first? Come on up. Ladies, stand. And she's beating all you folks that are sitting.

Mine's a quick one, and I have to get back to my kids. And we like her.

She comes out every quarter and gives us. Now, go ahead. Give us your name.

I'm Sarah Brinkerhoff from the Draper Library. It's 1136 East Pioneer Road, just up the street. And you guys have probably already heard my announcement, but I wanted to come and give a chance to tell you in person. We're going to be closing for about... Three months starting at the end of august so we'll be closed from august 31st is the first day closed and we're hoping to reopen november 30th So we are getting an update to our hvac system. It's 20 years old like our building and it has You may have heard not worked perfectly this summer. We've had some very hot days and um Really, the system was not designed optimally when it was in there. I mean, it was great, but 20 years ago, we found out that some of the zones don't work and some of the piping and stuff needs to be replaced. So we're doing that. We're also going to be getting a new vestibule entrance to the library. So as you come in, it'll be double sets of doors, which we... We hope we'll keep out all of the pests and the wind and the leaves and the snow and the flies, millions of flies coming into the library. So we're hoping that and also getting some new flooring in the auditorium. So I thought you guys would want to know that we're going to be closed. The staff will be sent out to libraries around us. We anticipate that they will be busier. Holds will be sent to the Sandy Library. in a really fortunate position in the county where there are libraries like Stone's are away from us. So we'll send out a flyer to go out in the Draper email. We will still have librarians out in the community visiting schools. Our senior center book club that we run with the senior center will still continue and we'll still be doing programs assisting at other branches around it. So we're excited to get back open, but we're also excited about having an HVAC that works. more often so that was my quick announcement and if you guys have questions you can email me i'll email out the flyer to send out to everybody but and if you want to come visit before we close we're you know getting slower in there but we're all still there working so thank you guys thank you it's hard to believe it's 20 years old i know it's still the new building seem like it thank you very much for keeping us up to date who'd like to be next come on up sir

Hello, my name is Chase Kimball and I live at 292 West Galena Park Boulevard. Focus of my comment is on the flock cameras here in Draper. I'm asking the council to put flock on the agenda of the next city council meeting to consider canceling the contract. I grew up in Utah and I love this state. I've always felt that Utah is one of the freest states a person can live in. For my remarks, I want to set aside whether flock cameras are effective at solving crime. I also want to disregard any potential they have of being abused by bad actors. I want to focus on the main documented function of flock cameras, which is gathering data on every passing vehicle. I have respect for what the police do, and I'm grateful for them. As a community, we depend on their integrity and judgment to keep us safe. The central issue with flock cameras is that they violate our rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But why is the Fourth Amendment an important right guaranteed under the Constitution? The principle behind it is to prevent policing from being taken to the extreme. Without requiring probable cause, meaning reasonable suspicion that someone has committed a crime, there is the risk of phishing. This is when the police pick the person they want to find guilty of something instead of investigating the crime itself and trying to discover who committed it. This is just one example of the many reasons why citizens have a right not to be searched or surveilled without good reason. Flock cameras violate this principle by collecting data on every single person who happens to drive by them. This also twists the idea of how policing should work. Why should innocent people have their data be collected? What is the probable cause for suspecting every single resident of Draper? I believe that Draper is full of good people. I trust our police to find those few people who violate laws and use probable cause to do it. Using cameras to track ordinary citizens is not part of their job description, and it is not what we signed up for as American citizens. Council, please put Flock on your next agenda and begin the process of ending Draper's contract. With your help, we can deflock Draper.

Thank you. Who would like to be next? Come on up, sir.

Long time no see. Scott Standage. Brilliant. I don't have much more to echo on what he said. That was part of what I was going to say. So I'll move to the second part of what I was going to say is I hope we don't raise taxes in Draper. We don't need more policemen out on the road. When we can put six to eight cops in a one-mile stretch on Suncrest Drive, we don't need more cops on the road. Not at all. They hide down in the little Montreux area with their little guns. I wonder if they're available for hide-and-seek in the neighborhoods with the way that they just hide to try to catch people speeding. They sit illegally when they're driving. doing their lidar or whatever guns they are they said illegally that if you were parked there you would get a ticket i don't think that's right i don't think that's a good example we definitely do not need to raise taxes to add more police officers to draper city have we gone through our budgets every single line item to see if we can cut anywhere I'm old enough to remember the movie Dave. I don't know if you guys watched it, but he invited his friend Murray over to come take a look at the budget of the government and found lots of waste. I believe we have waste, fraud, and abuse in our Draper government, and I would hope that everybody would go through their line items to cut that out before we mandate or vote to raise taxes on us. Thank you, and have a good evening.

Thank you. Who would like to be next?

Hi, my name is Alberto De La Torre. I live at 13889 Standing Oak Drive. I concur with what Chase said here and other people. I don't know how we can run a city government when we only have three minutes to talk at you. Some of these topics do require more dialogue than the time we're allotted here. I agree with the last speaker that there's no reason whatsoever that the city can justify raising taxes when all the citizens are forced to live within their budget. It just shows complete disregard for the citizens and what they have to do. As to Flock, I would like to find out how they got here in the first place. Did all of you vote for it? Because Draper puts out a newsletter at least once a month. I get it in the mail. I didn't see anything in there about you having voted to put in flock cameras or even ask for feedback about them from the citizens that live here. This is supposed to be a representative government, and yet who was represented? The people that were selling flock to the city, certainly not the citizens that are doing it. So let's get this on the agenda. Let's get it out in the open. Please back up your commitment to transparency as the elected officials that you are. And let's get this out in the open and have a dialogue about it. It is against the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Anybody who can read plain English and has an iota of common sense should agree with that position. I'll mail you all in the mail after I get here. Judge Andrew Napolitano, who was a Supreme Court justice, not the Supreme Court, but another one, has just done an excellent essay on why flock cameras, and we're using that term loosely here because it's not just flock. Now there are half a dozen other entities that are selling the surveillance apparatus to municipalities. And it's just completely wrong and un-American. So please put this on the agenda, and let's get some dialogue going about this. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone who would like to be next?

Hello, my name's Gary R. Free, and I live at 13561 Aintree Hill Cove here in Drapery, Utah. And I'm really disappointed to see that Mike Green's still not back from vacation and his military leave. I was going to congratulate him for his service. And I congratulate all of you for everything you do here. I'm so impressed. As you know, we've submitted a memorandum of agreement, and I am in the same boat that you are. I refuse to go ahead with this unless I can see that it will cash flow income for the city. So rather than going through all that boring math, I'm going to have Lyle Beecher, by the way, he's here with me, and he is the architect for Health Center Theater, the aquarium, and an over $100 million project called Liberty Village in Hurricane that's just astounding. I would never have the courage to do something like that. And it's well underway, and it's being opened. So with that, I'm going to skip – my notes are here, so you can read those later. He'll give those to you. And then we have another person who is the CEO of – CEO of CFO International, and I think some of you may know him, and he will be submitting his comments to you, to the recorder regarding this very prominent person in our community. So in short, I've done the details on the cost of this facility. You all know my passion for it. I just can't put it down, but I will put it down if it's not financially feasible in cash flow. So the bottom line is, if this were a private facility, facility it would be subject to commercial real estate taxes which are taxed at a higher rate doesn't have a residential exemption so an estimated value with the land and everything would be about six million dollars that would be thirty one thousand five hundred dollars in taxes Typically, it would have a debt service if you were going to build an event center or something like that. That would be, you know, I've got the details of my amortization of about 6%, 20 years amortization at $2.5 million. That would be about $21,000, $214,000 a year. So a total of $246,000 we have an advantage. by being a public enterprise with no taxation. The taxes I've got here, and you can look through, I mean, the other expenses, they total enough. All we'd have to do is rent out the facility, the event center, 5,000 square foot for one night. It would pay for the whole month. The rest of it's cash flow. So my guess is $200,000 to $1 million cash flow, but it would be used to reinvent itself with experience rooms. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else?

Would you like to get up and speak? Come on up and give us your name and address.

Hi, my name is Chris Ferresta. I live at 11723 Shadowview Lane. here in Draper. So Mayor and Council members, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm actually here tonight as a Draper resident to support moving forward with the proposed Draper Historical Museum and Events Center. So while Draper is moving fast, the growth is exciting, but it also means the physical reminders of what the community was and the stories of what people who built it, the people who built it, can disappear surprisingly quickly. Right now, our historical society is trying to preserve important journals, artifacts, photographs, and even pioneer-era musical instruments in a facility that is simply too small and was never designed for long-term preservation. Some of these materials need better temperature, humidity, fire, and storage protection than the current museum can provide. The proposal being discussed deserves serious consideration because this is not just an idea on a napkin. As I understand, there is already a schematic concept for roughly 10,000 square foot two-level museum and an event center with the interest of an architect. And more importantly, the proposed partnership is unusual in a very good way. So the draft framework contemplates Draper City providing the land while a non-profit foundation and private donors provide the primary construction funding. I think it's approximately $2 million, $2.5 million, with additional grants and philanthropic funding pursued as needed. I don't think this should just be a building full of old objects and sitting behind glass. The concept includes interactive experience rooms, educational programming, and an event center that could turn the museum into a living gathering place for families, schools, longtime Draper residents, and people who have just moved here and want to understand the community that they've just joined. I also understand that there is still questions about the exact site, architecture, utilities, operating costs, maintenance, and final legal structure, but that is precisely why I support moving forward with this process. This is not a request for the city council to write a blank check or approve every detail tonight, obviously. It's just a request to let the city staff, the historical society, the donor group, and the foundation do the due diligence refine the plan, and negotiate an agreement that protects Draper while giving this project a real chance to succeed. So Draper has spent decades building for its future. I think we should be just as intentional about preserving its past. I respectfully ask the Council to continue working toward a formal agreement and help make this museum a reality. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Does anyone else like to make a general public comment?

I'm Kathy Free and 13561 Aintree Hill Cove. And I'm just going to speak to you from a personal point of view. I grew up with museums. My father was into history. And that was back when they didn't have fun things like little videos and you could speak to somebody from the past and ask them questions those are the kind of things that we've been looking at going to everywhere we go now we hit a museum I loved it I grew up with it I was the kid who stopped at every picture and read the card on the side to see what the history was and I grew an appreciation for the history of America I lived in California I lived in New York so we were museums in All the places like that. One that I went to after I was an adult, we found a World War I museum, which is hard to find. They're hard to find. And it opened up my eyes to what happened there and the people who suffered and the kind of things that happened at war. And it makes you appreciate that. striving really hard for peace. It really makes you appreciate America and appreciate the servicemen. I took classes at the U on Native American history and grew a total new appreciation for them and have been looking into the Native American, the indigenous from Draper and they have a rich history that would be lovely to see and know and You know, we all talk about the pioneer history and those who settled here and made this the second city in Salt Lake County in Utah. And we love that. We love all that. We love the train. We love all those things that happened that are unique and different and we don't realize happened right here in Draper. It was a pretty hot spot. for history anyway. But I think there's so much to learn. And I think our kids will love it. We took some eight-year-olds to the museum, the little White House that was built in, what, 1950, it looks like. And they had to be split up in groups because it's such a small place. I was blown away with how excited the kids were about that little house and about the things they were learning about. They pointed out, you know, objects. This is how they iron. This is how they, I mean, just dumb things you wouldn't think were very important. It's important. And the kids were excited. They were excited to see it. One of them got, his eyes went big on one of the objects they talked about. and it made me more excited for Draper Museum. We've got a rich history that is so fun, and it needs to be preserved. I actually am a little worried about that cute building catching on fire, and all those journals are invaluable. Anyway, end.

Thank you. Does anyone else like to make a general public comment? All right, seeing no further general public comment, I'm going to move to item number five. which are items for consent by the council. Item 5A, there's one. It's the approval of the minutes of the August 4th, 2026 city council meeting.

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we approve the consent items.

All right, motion by Bren to approve item 5A. Is there a second?

I'll second.

Second by Tasha. Any further discussion? Hearing none, Brynn, how do you vote?

Yes.

Tasha? Yes. Fred? Yes. Catherine? Yes. Mike? Can you hear me? Yeah. How do you vote?

Could you hear me? Okay.

Yes.

Yes.

All right. Thank you. That item is approved unanimously. Five to zero. Item number six is next, and 6A is a public hearing, and it's Ordinance 1736. It's an ordinance of Draper City amending the text of Chapter 9-11 of the Draper City Municipal Code related to residential units in the town center, known as the City-Initiated Town Center Residential Zoning Text Amendment. I have a staff report by Todd Taylor. Todd, go ahead, sir.

Thank you. So these proposed text amendments are in response to some sort of uh errors in the in the text of the town center zone basically for properties that are smaller than half an acre in size so the town center zone allows for a density of 6 to 25 dwelling units per acre so when you look at those properties that are less than half an acre in size that would be one or two units that would be allowed on those properties Within the town center zone, we do allow multiple family dwelling units with a condition to use permit, but don't allow a single family dwelling unit. And then the definition for a multiple family dwelling unit is three or more units. So there's really a sort of a missing spot there for anything that's less than three units. So our proposal is to correct that, add a single family dwelling as a conditional use permit in the development standards table with a note that it's subject to the provisions of the town center chapter. And then we've added in this text specifying that the multiplied family units can be added to properties greater than half an acre in size subject to the densities in subsection C6. A single family dwelling unit may be added on existing buildings on property of less than half an acre in size that consistent with the town center zone ground floor of the existing building shall be used for the uses listed as commercial, public, or civic, or municipal uses. And then the Planning Commission needs to find that all the other provisions of the chapter can be met. The Planning Commission heard this item on July 30th and forwarded a positive recommendation. That concludes my presentation, and I'm available if you have any questions.

Any questions for Todd?

Just to clarify, this is only for existing structures in Town Center, correct? Correct.

That's the way it's been written, and that's under the redevelopment provisions here in the town center zone.

Any other questions for Todd? All right. Thank you, Todd.

This is a public hearing. Item 6A, Ordinance 1736. Would anyone like to address the council on this item? All right, seeing no public comment, I'll close the public hearing. Bring us back to the council.

Mr. Mayor, I make a motion that we approve Ordinance 1736. All right, motion by Fred to approve Ordinance 1736.

Is there a second?

I'll second.

Second by Brynn. Any further discussion? All right, hearing none, Fred, how do you vote? Yes. Brynn?

Yes.

Tasha? Yes. Catherine?

Yes.

Mike?

Yes.

Items approved unanimously 5 to 0. That takes us to item number 6B. It's also a public hearing. It's resolution 2639. It's a resolution adopting the final Draper City budget, including compensation schedules and adopting the certified tax rate for the fiscal year 2026-2027. We'll have our staff report by Mr. John Byte. Go ahead, sir.

So I have a large slide deck. I'm not planning on showing it all, but I certainly can answer any questions that come from the counselor. What I want to do is just kind of review where we're at and how we got to where we are. As far as the budget adoption tonight, we began this process in October of 2025. We began meeting with Mayor Walker on a biweekly basis and really discussed the challenges that we were facing and the opportunities that existed and how we could be able to create a budget that was balanced and balanced. planned for future growth as well as for the continued success of Draper City. That led into meetings with departments, which we held in January of 2026. Departments brought proposals for changes or for needs that they saw. At the same time, we also asked departments to come prepared to show us what a 5% cut would look like. and how they would be able to accomplish that. As we met with the departments, we gathered that information that was presented to the mayor, and then we established what we thought could be a budget or a goal of where we were going to go. From there, we met with each of you council members individually in small groups and went over the budget and hopefully answered all of your questions. Obviously, more questions were going to come, but at that point in time, we tried to answer those questions that had come to us. to make sure that you really did understand the budget that we were going to present and that hopefully you will adopt tonight. We then began the actual process, the adoption process that we were required to go through, which included adopting the tentative budget on May 19th. We held a public hearing for the budget on June 2nd. And then we adopted the interim budget, which took us from July 1st through the time that this budget is actually adopted. And so that budget is what we are currently operating under, and we will continue to move forward with that budget until the final budget is adopted. Because there was a proposed tax increase, we went through a truth in taxation, which was held on August 12th. We heard comments from the public about that. And tonight, again, we have the adoption of the final budget. We do have a public hearing that will be in conjunction with this. Like I said, I have lots of slides. I can go through anything or whatever you would like. If you have questions, if not, we can go to the public hearing and then address questions afterwards. It's really up to you how you want to go.

Do you have any new slides that you'd like to show us or it's just...

So I have added a couple of slides. So there had been some discussion about sales tax and what that looked like. So I've added this slide in that really kind of shows the graph of where sales tax has been. And you can see that sales tax has been, we've seen some significant growth within sales tax over the years. In 2015, we were just about $10 million. Today, we're at $20 million. almost $22 million. The budget for next fiscal year is over $22 million. So you can see the significant growth that has happened. But one of the things that is also part of why we're here for the budget proposal with a tax increase is, as you look at those growths, the growth was really big from 2018 through 2023. And sales tax really has kind of flattened out a little bit since then and we aren't seeing the growth that we used to see that was able to cover those expenses that continue to grow go up the cost of fuel the cost of build roads the cost of purchase vehicles so that really We were able to cover a lot of those expenses with that sales tax growth that we saw through those years. And because that has flattened out, now we have to find a different source of revenue to be able to cover those continually increasing costs that we're seeing. One other. There were some questions about staffing, and so I put together this slide to show where staffing was and where it's proposed to be within the 2027 budget. We have seen growth, but I think that growth has been kind of along with the growth within Draper City. Like last year, we added a couple of people to help manage the trails and the parks. We've added some people within police and fire, really looking to strengthen those areas that we've seen needs included in this budget. We do have three additional firefighters trying to meet that need that we're seeing on a daily basis and allow the firefighters to have some time off and still be able to meet those staffing initiatives that we have. So up in the upper right-hand corner underneath the talking draper is a little bit of some information about what we actually have, where our staffing is versus some of the other local municipalities. If you have questions on that, I'm happy to talk that through.

I'd love to know what it says under the talking.

So this is the number. Sandy City is 632.

That's employees, right?

Correct. Within their general fund.

And Harriman and Riverton in their general fund do not account for their public safety employees. So that's why it's down. Those are accounted for by special district.

I haven't, I didn't dig in quite that deep. So I'm not, I can't say yes affirmatively to that. I can continue to look at that. I tried to pull these numbers really fast this morning, this afternoon. and didn't really get a chance to dive into that completely to make sure whether we're looking apples to apples.

I just want to clarify, too, on adding these three fire workers to the fire department. This will account to eliminate overtime, correct? Yeah. So really it's not quite as big of an increase as it may appear because it will reduce overtime and also improve the morale of the fire department and give us better coverage with three additional fire departments.

This really is an attempt to allow firefighters the time off that is granted from the city, as well as continue to maintain those staffing levels that we need to meet our four-handed initiatives and the response times that we're trying to meet.

John, on that slide, as you've separated out general fund employees, 258.12. Yep. I've never met that person, but I'm looking forward to it. Then you have some additional employees down. All of those funds that employ those people are funds that cover those costs. Those people are not paid out of the general fund.

That is correct. Those funds are self-sustaining funds. So the water fund revenues from water bills pay for those employees that sit within the water fund. Stormwater bills also cover the employees that sit in the stormwater fund. So those funds are self-sustaining funds. And as we increase there, we either have to raise the rates associated with that, or we look for other means of being able to increase revenues within that fund itself.

So when I started with the Draper City Council, we were understaffed in police and fire for quite a long time. Obviously, the upside of that was it was a smaller portion of the budget. But what we also saw was increasing crime in Draper. We had a real problem with break-ins at parks and trailheads. And what the data shows is as we've come to be what you'd consider fully staffed, we've actually seen a sharp decrease in crime in Draper. And the other point I'd like to make is with our paramedics and our fire department, we've also seen a great increase in... if you have a heart attack in Draper, your chances are much, much higher of surviving that heart attack. Not that we want anyone to have one, but if you're going to get really sick in Draper, we have highly qualified teams that are going to show up at your house in a really quick amount of time, which is what we want for our residents. And public safety does eat a tremendous portion of the budget, but it also has tremendous value. And I think that what people need to realize is that part of the reason why we love living in Draper and why we feel safe raising our families here is because of this incredibly high caliber public safety program that we're offering residents.

I'm going to slide down to this slide. You can see police and fire, the green and the blue, really do represent almost 50, not quite 50, probably 40% of the budget within Draper. And that really is to meet those goals and initiatives that you just mentioned, Tasha.

For a long time, we were losing police and fire to other cities because we just weren't paying competitively. And it is so critical that we keep these people that we've trained. You know, we'd bring them in, which is hard enough to do. We'd train them up. We'd spend all this money on getting them ready to really serve the residents of Draper. And they'd go to Sandy for $2 more an hour. And it was really hard on our chiefs.

Well, and also the turnover, the expense and cost of that turnover costs a lot more than the $2 an hour that we lost out on for that employee.

We want to bring these people in, and we want to keep the really good people that we train up. And it is a benefit to Draper residents to have that kind of public safety.

I think the car accident data is showing as well. So I think that you'll see that the accidents are down all across the city because we have reasonable enforcement happening again. The homicides have stopped on the roads from the vehicles crashing because we're up to the speed limit again. So yeah, our public safety is doing a great job.

Yeah, I echo that. I think it's so much more financially feasible to keep employees than to have to hire and train new ones and onboard them. And I think creating a culture where we value and recognize the importance of having a strong public safety department, I think is really important.

Chiefs, do you have anything you'd like to add? Because we have seen a change over the past eight years since I've been here.

I would agree that's probably the worst business plan we can have is to identify, hire, and train really good people and lose them to our competitors. And it's been refreshing to see the level of support that we have here in Draper and that we are keeping our police officers here in the city. And you're right, when we pass them to another agency, we're handing them literally tens of thousands of dollars in training. that we have trained these people for. So it's a competitive market. We have a puddle of people, not a pool, who want to be police officers today and firefighters. So it's valuable to keep them, and we appreciate your support.

Chief Ferguson did a great job talking about just the staffing challenges that we've seen over the last couple of years. I'll just touch quickly on the The comment that was made about about staffing time off overtime those types of things I would say one of the most prevalent issues we see in public safety these days is poor mental health of our employees and That comes from obviously just one distress and the things that they see on the job, but two that is greatly greatly enhanced on our employees when they're required to work and more than their normal hours in order to help cover shortages or deficits from people taking time off or from vacancies as we lose people to other agencies. And so one of the big pushes that we've had is to again be able to get is to demonstrate, obviously, the need for a few additional bodies to help keep our staffing where it needs to be, to help lower the need for overtime and having people have to work more than they need to because, again, that takes a really heavy toll on our people when they don't have the necessary time away from work to decompress and to deal with the stressors of this job and so in particular for those couple of extra allocations that are in the budget for fire it provides a significant benefit and again cost a reduction in overtime and having to rely on those people to to fill those but it keeps our staffing at a level where we meet national best practices which then enhances response capabilities

Why should we do the public hearing? Would you have a comment?

Go ahead. I appreciate what you're saying. I have been very impressed with our public servants in Draper, our police and fire, and I often refer back to the mayor's state of the city address at the beginning of the year where he showed all sorts of metrics about how crime has gone down and And Draper is really a wonderful, safe place to live and to raise a family. And so I really appreciate the emphasis that has been put on that in recent years, as I'm new. John, would you mind, on the sales tax slide, as you're looking at that, there has been lots of years of growth, and it – continues to grow, albeit at a slower level. I think a concern that I have on this tax increase in the budget for this year is that we are saying it's slowing, and so we need to increase the tax, but I don't really see a plan to make any adjustments or to bring it in So that we are asking for money, but also cutting some of our spending. That's what I've been looking for and in conversations I've had with people. And I think, like you said, there's been some efforts to do that. You talked about at the beginning meeting with the departments and asking for 5% cut and what we would do with that. Did we cut 5% from any of the departments or some of the departments? Or are there cuts in this draft budget?

So there were cuts, particularly in public works. There was a really quite a significant reduction within public works. I'm going to go off this slide really fast in the wrong direction. You can see that public works went from a $5.1 million budget to a $4.8 million budget. So there are cuts. I mean, there's quite a few negatives on there where you can see that some of those departments have actually done some cuts within their budget. There were other places that we looked at that we did not do those cuts because we did not feel like those cuts were going to provide a positive impact that was beneficial. commensurate with what was being cut, meaning that the impact that the residents would see really didn't justify the cuts that were proposed.

The only other question I have before the public hearing is, as we're looking at this, and this I think is on one of your slides, we are, so this budget would be a $2.69 million increase. And what is the – so there is still a budget shortfall. There's still a significant amount that we are asking to use from the fund balance. Is that correct?

That is correct. So within the budget – So this is a picture of the revenue, and you can see that we are still polling to balance the budget $3.2, almost $3.3 million from fund balance. Now, that was done with purpose, knowing that our fund balance is at the maximum, and we had some room to give there. You know, Brent asked a question at Truth in Taxation of what's a healthy fund balance. We certainly have a very healthy fund balance at the state maximum and we feel like dropping some of that is prudent and that it's something that the city can afford to do. But storms like what happened last week cost money and we're always looking at what those possibilities are and aware that the fund balance really does need to cover some of those unforeseen events that can happen. So we've included a use of fund balance in the budget. What does that mean for next year? It means that as we continue to move forward, we're going to continue to look at what those cut scenarios are. The mayor's, you know, Always looking for opportunities for additional growth within other revenue streams. A lot of people at Truth in Taxation talked about user fees. So that's definitely something that's on the agenda. table to look at for next fiscal year as far as how we can balance some of that and then what possibilities do we have for continued sales tax growth and i think we we have some that are in the future um that we can see and we don't want to you know over tax we don't want to continue to tax people so that we can have a large bank account we're really trying to make sure that we have an ongoing revenue stream to cover our ongoing expenses and that we maintain an adequate level of expenses to be able to meet the quality of life that the residents are looking for.

Mr. Mayor, can I just make one other comment? I want a clarification with you, Chief Smith. with those, adding those three employees to basically what you're saying, if we don't add those, it's not sustainable to staff your fire department with the current staff that you have. We would have to, it's not sustainable for them to continue that over time. So you'd have to reduce the number of firefighters that we have on call at each time, which could reduce our ISO fire rating because of the lack of coverage that we'd be able to provide throughout the city. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. Again, they look at, ISO looks at what they call the effective response force, and that is total number of firefighters available to respond. One of the things that we've heard loud and clear from our people is, again, that there are days that we've had to implement what we refer to as mandatory overtime, which means that we have fallen below our minimum staffing, and that forces us to make somebody work overtime on a day that they weren't scheduled to and weren't planning to. And that's really not a fun place to be for us to tell somebody that they literally can't go home today. But that's to meet our minimum staffing requirements. And the trickle-down effect of that is that, again, you get into that mental health space, right, where people really dread that potential of having to be forced back on a mandatory overtime. And then that's when they start to look at other departments that don't have those same requirements or that same need of as much of their free time in order to meet the staffing obligations. And that's really what we want to avoid.

So if you're unable to meet those minimum staffing requirements, that ISO rating drops. Homes in a lot of areas of Draper, particularly in those areas that are close to wildfire areas, insurers will look at that fire rating and we would risk a great potential of a lot of our homeowners in Draper not even qualifying for homeowners insurance, or it would be an increased insurance premium that would probably be a lot higher than what this tax increase would be.

That's correct, Councilman. Again, when ISO looks at that effective response force, they would then have to reduce what has previously been calculated, which negatively affects our overall ISO rating. The ISO score is done on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 basically being the best protection that you can have, 10 being virtually unprotected with no developed water systems. Draper's done a fantastic job. We currently sit at a two, which is outstanding. There's few agencies that get to a two and even fewer that get to a one. And we just actually conducted our review, which happens about every eight to ten years. We conducted that last week. And in visiting with the gentleman that came out to do that, what he you know, there's a lot of agencies out there that really strive to get to a one. But what and we had that conversation of, you know, exactly what would it take for Draper to get to a one? And what he cautioned us on is, is that you have to be able to sustain what you have. And we've done a great job of sustaining because he said what you absolutely do not want to do. is push to get a score that you can't maintain because if you get it and then you regress, that's a significant negative impact to the residents on those things you just talked about with insurance premiums and rates. Thank you.

All right, anybody else comment prior to the public hearing? All right, thanks, John. So public hearing, resolution adopting the final budget, resolution 2639. Is there anyone who'd like to address the council on this item? All right, seeing no public comment, I'll close the public hearing and bring this item back to the council.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to make a motion that we approve Resolution 2639, adopting the final Draper City budget, including compensation schedules, and adopting the certified tax rate for the fiscal year 2026-2027.

We have a motion by Bryn. Is there a second?

I'll second.

Second by Tasha. Is there further discussion?

I appreciate the hard work that goes into this budget and the discussions that we've had. And I know we've had a number of meetings. And I appreciate John sort of documenting how long the discussion has gone for this. And I think we have wonderful people in the city who are bringing this budget together. I have concerns. about the spending pattern. I think it's a wonderfully well-run city, and I really appreciate the role that the mayor has taken in the last 10, 15 years to 16 years, however long it's been. to bring us to where we are today. And I think you lead well and have done an amazing job of doing this without. You often talk about how there haven't been tax increases over a long period of time, and we have had that growth. I do think with inflation, what it is, some tax increases... necessary and because our property tax is inflation proof that we need to do that if we're going to keep up with the costs and we've heard a lot of important things about public safety and keeping that up and and I agree of that or agree with all of that I'm also you know the mom of a young family who we have really faced had financial strain on our budget over the last six years as inflation has gone out of control. And I know and we have heard from a lot of people in Draper who are in the same position, certainly people all over America. And so I do think there needs to be a balance. When I look at the draft budget, especially when we started this conversation or when I was brought into the conversation in April and May, I strongly support. I think that the evidence shows that hiring the three firemen, fire people, is a better use of our funds than continuing to do the overtime, right? But that 165,000 that it says in our documentation here that we've just seen is different than the 2.69 million, right? They're not, even though it's connected as part of that. So those are some of the concerns that I have tried to rectify as we're discussing this and I think that as someone who hasn't had as long on the council to see the importance of, or the benefit of the continuity and the staff, I think all those things are very important points. I do also think it's very important to, when we are asking the residents to, the property owners in Draper to increase their property tax, I think it really is important that we as a city are are also making some hard cuts. And I think that that's a really important part of this conversation. That's all.

Anyone else? We have a motion and a second. I just wanted to make a couple of comments if I could. If you look at that sales tax number, and I don't know, John, if you can find that comparison sales tax number to... how well we do in sales tax. I know there was a slide. I don't know if it's in your deck or not. It may not be.

I do not have a comparison slide to other municipalities.

Go back to that. If you would, go back to our budget. There are revenues. I've been doing this a long time. Like Catherine said, I was a council member for six years, and I've been the mayor for 12.8, 17 days now. And we've done one tax increase in my entire time as an elected official. And there are some cities that raise it every year. They do an inflation index, and they raise it. Because the most important concept for property tax is that although your home value may go up, we do not get the increase in the value of your home. If we did, we would never come in front of you and ask you, for a tax increase because we would just ride the increasing value. What actually happens is as your value goes up, the rate goes down, it's inversed. And so we are stuck with this. We're guaranteed the same amount of money the next year. but we don't get the increase. And some people will talk about, well, we've got a lot of new homes. The percentage amount of the property tax bill, and I wish we had a, do you have that property tax bill slide? It was even, it was actually mine, but I don't have that either. The portion, whose is that one? Oh, well, it's, yeah, it's too small print. But if you look at the portion that you pay Draper City, it's,

Tasha, can you tell me how much Brent's paying for River City?

Because I can't read it. I don't have the most powerful contacts on tonight.

With the tax increase, we would pay $612, and I believe we're currently paying $489.

And I know that the pressure of tax increases, it sucks. This is one of the reasons why we have not raised them over the years, because I don't like doing it, and I've never wanted to do it unless we had to do it. We did it the one time. It was two years ago. We tried last year to do what was effectively a 10% increase, but it was a tax revenue bond that was rolling off. You'll recall that money we wanted to hold that amount, and it was about $900,000-ish. It would have made a big difference, but we screwed up on one slide in the presentation, and the tax commission disallowed our increase. All the citizens kept their money last year. They got their $10 or $8, whatever it was, and it didn't come to us. Yeah, they got a reduction in your taxes all last year. So you got your $9 a month all back last year. This year, had we passed that one, we would probably be going for a little bit less of a tax increase. Now, the key thing, go back to the expenses, if you would. We are not balanced with this tax increase. We are 2.2%. $7 million out of balance still. This just cuts how much money we take out of our fund balance. So this tax increase is not flushing us with cash. It's not balancing the budget. The budget's balanced, but the current revenue stream and the current expenses are not matched by about half of what we're asking for. We need 50% to balance it. But I knew... that those numbers are high, and I don't like that number either. But we're asking for this because it gets us about half. We can spend some fund balance down the next couple of years. We have some good sales tax potential coming. But one of the things that, you know, sales tax is fickle, and it's all about the economy. Despite what you might hear on some news, the economy's not awesome. I mean, the prices of everything have gone up for you and me. I just filled my truck up today. Everything costs more money, especially, and when you talk about inflation, we talk about consumer inflation, whatever it is, depends on who the president is, if it's 4% or 2% or whatever it is. That inflation's cool. But here's the real nasty inflation. The real nasty inflation is when Mr. Cooley tries to buy asphalt. That hasn't done anything. the nice little progressive inflation. That has done this. Or when Chief Smith tries to buy a fire truck, because they've gone up 300%. They got drug in front of Congress, the fire truck manufacturers last year, because their increases are 300%. You're talking a fire truck that we could have bought for $800,000. Now we're paying $2 million for it. And you've got to give them the $2 million of it in cash. and wait two years to get it. And if it goes up during the two years, you're paying the difference. It's not like it was years ago. Police cars, we run them to the right value, and then we sell them. But they've gone up. They've doubled in cost, the vehicles. Fuel, asphalt, concrete, rebar, concrete boxes. I hope as you look at this budget, the expenses, police at $14.3 million. A few years ago, before you were on the council, Catherine Wheat, We implemented a police step system, a pay step system. Chief came to us and said, look, we can't retain officers. We can't even hire officers because we're too low paid and we don't have enough room for officers to make it a career. They get here at a certain wage. There wasn't a way for them to grow. So we couldn't retain. We would train a young officer and they'd go to Salt Lake City for a couple bucks more an hour. Now, with that step system, Rich has implemented a master officer program, which has given officers the ability to grow professionally and a step system and pay. And now our retention of our quality police officers is up. I mean, most of them have been here a decade now. And police officers, you know, more than any public servant entity, interact with the public. And almost always, when they're interacting with the public, It's usually not. Someone in that interaction is not happy, generally speaking. You've either been pulled over or you're dealing with them in a different way. Tough job, but they've done a good job. That step system, when we implemented it, we knew we would have to adjust our performance revenues in our tax revenues to to cover it we were doing like we've always done hoping for the sales tax to continue to do that it's flattened a bit so that's something we knew was coming fires the same with with the equipment and with the firefighters i've had people say to me why don't you just go to emts just just go to emts they're cheaper Well, I don't think that citizens want that. I mean, a paramedic, when you need a paramedic, that's what you really need. We don't do that. We do paramedics on our trucks with the great drugs. I want to focus on this public works for a second. You know, really, before Mr. Cooley took over, and Scott, I'm putting you on the spot a little, we didn't have a comprehensive road improvement program. I mean, I've been here a long time. And our roads, frankly, sucked. And they still aren't perfect. I mean, I'm not going to give you all that good credit, Scott. But to have a comprehensive road improvement program that we've implemented over time is a big deal because we're preserving our roads and we're saving some money. And Scott's got a plan for our system, which is unique and awesome. When Scott took over, I remember he came to me and said, Most people in Draper, if you're not in the flatland, you get your water pumped to you. You can't live without a pump. If our pumps go down, you have no drinking water. So Scott said, hey, Mayor, did you know that we don't have any backup generators for these pumps? And I was like, no, I didn't know that. Well, we didn't. So if the pump went down, you were just out of luck. So we have backup redundant generators. We have backup redundant pumps. These pumps, you know, they're a million bucks each or more. We have pressure-reducing valves in our system, pressure-reducing valves, because as you pump water to the top of the mountain, you create immense pressure. There's areas in the system that's 400 PSI. That's more than the bottom of the Hoover Dam. Crack the valve at the bottom of the Hoover Dam, it ain't 400 PSI. And in our system, there are spots where it's 400 PSI. When that blows a road up, that blows a road up. That's a serious situation. We haven't had it happen. Knock on all the wood. But we have pressure reducing valves in our system that are also each valve more than a million dollars each. So there is a lot of complexity to our city system. For as small a city as we are, 50,000 people, we have a lot of complex things that we have to account for. Now, people that get the water pumped to them, they also pay for it, but they don't pay at all. Some of it still comes out of our general approach because it's really difficult to pass it all on to the whole community, but we've got a lot of things to work on. I think if you look at police, fire, public works, and then I want to hit the last one, parks and rec, $6.9 million in parks and rec. Just opened a brand new park on the west side. Beautiful park. When we survey what our community wants, they want good public safety, they want parks and rec, and it's reflected right in this budget with public works. Other revenue sources. We talked about, people brought that up, and I'm always interested in other revenue sources because The government don't have money revenue sources. It has to tax you to get its money. Or it can do another revenue source, which is called a fee. We can do that too. There are some cities that do fees. They do a park fee. I can think of a couple. Chief, your city, Harriman, they do a park fee. They charge every house, in addition to their property tax, like $5 for parks. And they use it for maintenance. Businesses get $7 or something. Um, they'd use that as another way to reduce their general fund expense. But like, as Tosh and I were talking about this, that just takes, that's a way to take money out of the general fund. Still money we need, still money we're going to spend. We can do that. We can raise fees on those things. We can raise, we can raise fees in those regards. And I think we should look at park fees and, Of course, then the taxpayer people get all bent out of shape about fees, and they go to the legislature, and they don't like fees, but it takes money to run all these things. The other item that we can do as we look to increase our economic opportunity, one of the things we don't have in our community, we don't have a an economic development director we haven't had one for a long time um we don't have someone out there like we used to do i've been doing it most of my time here is elected trying to get business in our community but we've done great with sales tax we we can do more we have some cool stuff coming and that's why i think 25 increases enough to wait and see how that sales tax goes going forward but as you look at what you're going to cut going forward we're pretty much Running at a budget where we're providing the public service that everybody wants as far as public safety goes I think as you as you think about what you know, what would you want to do in a fee? Go to the slide on the other Cities property tax rates because I want to make this final point and I'll shut up the rates the One of the things, and we've talked about this, and we talked about it in that initial meeting when we started talking about the tenant budget. One of the reasons that you can see, like this general fund population of employees, you'll see Riverton with 168 employees in their general fund. They will tell you they don't have a property tax in Riverton. They'll tell you that. They really don't because what they do is they silo their public safety into a special service district. That special service district, it taxes the people for public safety, all of it. We collect $11 million in property tax, $11 million. um there it is there's the there's the there's the rates um when you look at Harriman and Riverton and they're similar size departments not some are a little bigger or smaller but what they've done is they've said hey public we're going to fund all of public safety with a special service district and that's great because it goes in there and then when when they need more taxes that special service district who's the city council by the way They raise the tax on the special service district. And then they tell them, hey, and we don't have any property tax on the other side on the general fund. Well, yeah, if we could take $23 million, $22 million of our public safety budget and put it in another pile, We could live off $22 million in sales tax in spades. There would be no problem at all. And we can do it that way. That's what our sister communities do. Harriman and Riverton, similar to us, that's how they do it. They take all of public safety and they make property tax cover it all. Understand that if we did that, that means instead of raising $11 million in property tax, we've got to raise $22 million. So do the math on that. Our budget is blended, so everybody sees what we're spending the money on, and everybody knows where the money's going. It's not siloed over here. You don't get this security blanket of saying we have low city property tax because we're paying for all of it over here. We've had contract fire before, no police in my time. We are better served with our own fire department. Over time, it's increased. Our staffing is four-handed. Our staffing is excellent. We arrive on a fire. We begin to fight it. We move forward. Those were all decisions we made to provide better service to our community. But I just think it's important, if you're going to look and compare, and I think it's important to compare because even after we raised this 25% increase, like I said, we're still in the hole a couple million bucks. We're still the third lowest tax city in the whole county overall. Some of these other cities have done some tax increases. But we would certainly look at forming a special service district to put public safety in, and if that's what you want to do.

I think, though, Mayor, sorry to interrupt, at some point it becomes a shell game, right? Because you still have the same cost. It's just how are you bringing the money in? What are you calling it, right? Like, are we calling it a public safety fee, or are we just saying we need to raise the overall tax by this month?

Well, that's how we've been doing it, but that's how the other cities do it. So, you know, sometimes people look at it and go, well, why is their rate so high? Because they're reflecting the whole cost of public safety.

But I think what we haven't touched on is that that is in some ways a good way to do it because all of public safety is then paid for with that public safety fee. We're not asking Draper residents to do that. In fact, we're covering at least half, three quarters of it with our general fund money from our sales tax revenue now.

right like if we put all of that expense back onto residents like you said taxes would actually go up tremendously we just wouldn't call it a tax we would call it a fee well people might feel better about it i don't know um i think i like how we do our budget i think the blended budget is fair it's clear it's transparent everybody knows where we're spending our money and where we're getting it from but that's just just just to talk what other cities do and mayor i want to just clarify will be the third lowest tax rate in salt lake county but that's only compared that's comparing

our increased tax rate to the 2025 tax rate of the other cities, that some are also going to have a tax increase. So we may still be the second.

We might very well be. But, I mean, that's all nice to talk. But, I mean, you're trying to provide. And I think you guys as council members, I commend you for getting involved in it like you have. We've done a lot of meetings on it. We've talked about it. You've looked at it. We've come to go through it. no one can tell me we haven't gone through it we've gone through it um all of us have gone through it we've gone through it line by line we've gone through it together we've talked about it in you know smaller groups all those things the real hard cold reality is we're at a spot where we've picked our public safety level and now we gotta we gotta move to where we can long-term fund it and and make it work because it's what people want um it's the parks are amazing our trails are amazing it's a wonderful place to live The amount of money that we pay to live here, you bang for the buck. I personally think it's amazing. Now, I can't help what other taxing entities do. We're one of the smallest portions of the property tax bill. That is what we are. But anyway, all right.

I just wanted to thank you, Mayor, for the explanation that you've been giving at all these public hearings. I was on vacation with my family last week back east, and I banned them to a different room so I could participate in the And afterwards, my son-in-law came up and said I couldn't help listening. He said that was fascinating. I had no idea that that's, you know, what was involved in running a city. And I think that what you've been saying has really helped clarify, you know, the different ways that we receive revenue and how we spend it. And as I met with staff and, you know, talked to different people, I did see them really try to make an effort to reduce costs to cut their budgets because we didn't want to raise taxes. We know that there are a lot of residents in Draper, including my mother, who are on a fixed income. And so we looked at a lot of different ways to reduce our budget, and I think we were successful in doing that. in many areas, and the one thing that I have taken away from this is how impressive it is that Draper, for 17 years, was able to cover those increased costs by using sales tax and other one-time revenue sources, but we don't have that growth as much as we used to. And so I think that this tax increase is specifically designed to cover those increased costs because we haven't done that in the past. And again, I think that is a testament to the staff and the previous council members who were able to do a budget with those increased funds that we had, but now we don't have them, and so unfortunately we had to do a tax raise.

I think it's really important that we have raised our level of public service. I also think it's important to note that we, at least from how it looks, we did it with deficit spending, right? So we have raised the level of service, but we haven't paid for it. And I have real concerns about – I mean, I think the federal government is a mess because they never pay for what they promise. And I don't believe in that, and I think we should pay for what we promise. And so while I will support the budget and the tax increase because I think we need to pay for what we've promised, I think we need to be promising less. I think we need to look at it, and if we can't pay for it – We shouldn't be promising it. We shouldn't have made those increases without paying for it. And I think we need to be really upfront about this is about controlling the deficit spending. We have a huge rainy day fund, which is great, and we can spend some of that. But we've got to be able to pay long term for what our budget is.

Which is what we're trying to do.

Right. After the fact. Yeah.

Well, the expenses are ongoing. It's not one-time money. Personnel is an ongoing expense.

Absolutely. But what was our this year from our general fund that we spent in the 25, 26 year? We are spending large portions from the general fund. So we haven't balanced the budget yet.

Like I said, when we made the leap on the STEP program and some of that stuff, we had no choice. We were not staffing our department. We had to make the move. We had the money and the funds, so we made the move. But it's always been a case where we need to true it up. It might be that we need to add some fees or look at different things. Yeah, we're going to true up the budget after we see how our sales tax does. We might need less next time, but we've got to, over time, get to that point because I don't see us going back and away in public safety from what we've promised. If we do, it won't work out. I mean, we've got to pay for it going forward. But I think we have some room. We have some options. We have sales tax coming. We have still great economic opportunity. Yeah, we got a lot of upside.

There are some cities like West Valley that do a small increase every single year. And I advocated for that for a long time because I thought that would help us keep up with inflation, right? I mean, you spoke to how at your own home inflation has hit you hard. We're like a home except for we have, I don't know, what's the fleet? I mean, how many cars are in the fleet? Do you know off the top of your head, John?

I do not know that number. I know it's a lot. There's probably like 150 vehicles.

I was going to say between 150 and 170. So as gas prices hit you at home with your two vehicles, they hit us with our 170 vehicles. And so inflation is really tough for us. And so I do see why cities do that annual increase. But I've also come to appreciate the mayor's point of view, where if we don't need the money because we're bringing in enough with the sales tax revenue, then it's not really fair to be asking for that increase every year. That's really a philosophical debate. Where are you going to do that? How are you going to make it?

But also, in the example of it's our home and we have a huge fleet here, sometimes you have to get rid of a car. And I agree that we want to maintain this level of public safety, that we have the standard that we've set, the right standard. But there are other cars in our garage, too.

I think we're, you know, I appreciate everybody's input. We do have another presentation, so if you're all ready, I'm ready to call for a vote. I'm ready. All right. On ordinance, I'm sorry, on Resolution 2639, Brynn, how do you vote? Yes. Tasha, how do you vote? Fred? Yes. Catherine?

Yes.

Mike? Yes. All right, that item passes unanimously, five to zero. Thank you all for all your comments and everything. Item 6C is next, and it's an ordinance, 1734, it's an ordinance amending Title III of the city municipal governing structure and procedures for the planning commission as required by state law. Spencer?

Good evening. Usually I have something entertaining, not tonight. We're going to be fast and we're going to be boring. State law has changed the way that planning commissions operate there's been some concerns and allegations and rumblings within the state legislature that planning commissions are going rogue and Certainly our planning commission has never done that they're above reproach But state law is going to require that we follow these these guidelines for a planning commission So this is the mandate we're looking at the bill addresses appointment or removal reasons for removal and reasons for recusal. Our current text, we have a mayoral appointment with consent. The requirement was an appointment by a legislative body as a whole, the exception in the in the statute was that the appointment duty can be delegated. So the way that we've decided to structure our ordinance is not change anything. And by adopting this ordinance, you've delegated the duty to appoint the planning commissioners to the mayor and you retain the consent as the council as a whole. Removal, currently the mayor can remove with council consent. The requirement is removal by the legislative body as a whole. The exception is the removal duty can be delegated by adopting this ordinance. We're delegating that authority to the mayor with the consent of the council, not really changing anything at all. So there are some mandatory reasons for removal that are included in the statute. The statute also requires that we list all the reasons for removal in our planning commission ordinance. What we've done with the ordinance is we've listed those mandatory reasons. reasons for removal in the statute we've added that violation of the planning commission rules and bylaws is reason for removal and misfeasance or malfeasance is a reason for removal that that is if a planning commissioner. uh... is deliberating on an issue and the issue is so administrative in in nature that the planning commissioner should be voting yes or no and for whatever reason the planning commissioner decides to vote against the way that the statute in the ordinance correct That would be an act of misfeasance that would allow the planning commissioner to be removed. Planning commission or the statute requires we list our reasons for recusal. The state statute says that 10% interest in an applicant's business by a planning commissioner requires a conflict of interest recusal. Our city ethics ordinance has a standard of 5%, so to keep things consistent, we're at 5% instead of 10%. Of course, if somebody owns 5% interest in the business of an applicant, they are not owning 10%, and the recusal standard is higher than what the state law requires, we can do that. The city ethics ordinance also has a fourth degree of consanguinity or affinity requirements, so to keep things consistent, we did the same thing there. Consanguinity, what does that mean? That's blood relation between two individuals who share a common ancestor. That includes parents, children, grandparents, siblings, grandchildren, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, a.k.a. niblings for nieces and nephew, great-grandchildren, great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, first cousins, and grandniblings. Those are the people for which the Planning Commission, if they have an item of business before them, they need to recuse themselves. So it'll be up on our Planning Commissioners to know who they're related to. I know that gets a little bit tough in Draper sometimes. Do we have any questions or concerns?

What's a nibbling?

Nibbling? Like, that's the parlance for nephews and nieces as one. So if somebody decides that they're non-binary, we want to include them in the fourth degree of consanguinity, and that's typically what they go by. So somebody decides on their pronouns, is they them? They are a nibbling. And somebody might say, they're not my niece or my nephew. but we want to include them as part of the fourth degree of consanguinity.

All right, any questions? All right, is there a motion?

I'll make a motion that we accept Ordinance 1734.

I have a motion to approve Ordinance 1734 by Catherine. Is there a second? I'll second. Second. Catherine. Okay, sorry. All right, second by Brynn. Any further discussion? Catherine, how do you vote?

Yes.

Brynn? Yes. Tasha? Yes. Fred? Yes. Mike? We lose you? Yes. Sorry, I said it. 5-0. Yes. Do you hear me? Yes. I need a motion to recess to the Community reinvestment agency meeting. So moved. Motion by Fred, second?

I'll second.

Second by Fred. All in favor of moving to, Fred, how do you vote? Yes. Brynn?

Yes.

Tasha?

Yes.

Catherine? Yes. Mike?

Yes.

All right, we are now in the reinvestment agency meeting. Hope I can find the old. I'll call to order the reinvestment agency meeting. We have some items for board consideration. Item 2A is a motion to approve the June 2nd, 2026 and June 9th, 2026 community reinvestment agency meeting minutes. Item 2B is an action on approval of resolution CRA 2604 resolution adopting the 2026 annual report of the community reinvestment agency of Draper City. We'll have a report on that one by Jason Burningham. If you want to approve 2A before that, is there a motion?

I make a motion that we approve item 2A, the minutes from June 2nd and June 9th.

All right. So we've got a motion by Bryn. Is there a second? Second. Second by Catherine. Yeah. All right. Bryn, how do you vote?

Yes. Catherine? Yes. Tasha?

Yes. Fred? Yes. Mike?

Yes.

All right. Well, minutes are approved. Yes. Mr. Burningham, go ahead, sir. Come on up, Jason.

Good evening. Members of the Community Reinvestment Agency Board, I appreciate the opportunity to be here this evening. My name is Jason Burningham. I'm a principal and owner of LRB Public Finance Advisors. And our purpose this evening is to review our June 30th annual CRA report, which has We're going to summarize, but has been posted with the Governor's Office of Economic Development, according to statute. Just quickly, our presentation outline is I wanted to give you a quick overview of the specific report and what elements that we report on and each of the individual project areas, as well as three historic project areas that still have active participation in terms of funding. As a quick summary, I mentioned this in an earlier work session, there are six active project areas. Those project areas are noted in that table below, three of which the collection period of receiving tax increment has ended, but there are still fund balances remaining. Whereas there's also three current project areas that continue to receive tax increment. This is a breakdown of what was received for tax year 2025 received fiscal year 26. The frontrunner CDA, that was the portion of revenue that came to the agency. Then Crescent at $1.9 million, South Mountain $1.4 million, with a total tax increment received of just over $7.1 million. The next column is just a forecast of what we expect to be received over the remaining life of these project areas. Wanted to just focus first on the frontrunner CDA. This has been a really successful project area for the city there are some depictions of what consists of Development in that area this was a community development area just under 300 acres and its primary purpose was commercial development but also some mixed-use development and The base year for this was in 2012 at just over $6 million. That's what the land value was at the time. And as you can see, the current 2025 value is almost $590 million. So that's a significant increase, almost $9,700 million. percent increase over that time and so this prior year we received 3.7 million dollars it does have a useful life so the remaining life or period of this is through fiscal year 2020 excuse me 2035 here's an a map that shows of the 300 acres how much of it has been developed so you know we've got a good chunk of it has been developed there's a little bit still undeveloped And then there's almost 40 acres of residential development that has occurred within this project area. Here's how the actual uses of those funds were a portion of administrative costs, including some professional and technical services that are provided there. But the majority of the money have been used for public infrastructure and contribution to fund balance. We had an earlier conversation about continue to program those dollars, and that will be forthcoming as we have opportunity to meet about that. These are the percentages of each of the tax entities and what percentage they participate on this particular project The remaining budget for the frontrunner as you can see depicted there including next fiscal year through the end period of 2035 is just over 35 million dollars and We do use a net present value calculation just to kind of put it in context of that $35 million comes over seven or eight years. If we had it in today's dollars, what's it really worth? That's what the $27.8 million is depicting. Notable, I think, here is just the idea of, you know, what type of revenues are passing through to the taxing entities above the base. And as you can see here, those additional 20 or 30 percent figures that go back to those taxing entities has produced an increase of almost $1,900. well, 1,907%, so 1,907% increase over what they were getting in that base year of 2012. So they're continuing to get benefit along the way, as well as once this project sunsets in 2035, then they'll get the top level as well, which is that $1,462,000. We'll go back to the taxing entities. Crescent RDA is the next project area. I'm going to try to kind of be brief on the remainder of these slides, but this was an RDA area. It was first triggered back in 2001, and it still has an expiration period that goes through 2032. Crescent... Similarly, started with a very low base year value of just under $780,000, and now almost $3,300 million, 37,000% increase. And this last year, fiscal year 26, it generated $1.9 million of tax increment, and we have six years remaining on this particular project. Of the acreage, the 88, 90 acres, most of it is developed, so the project has met what the objectives of the plan were. There's still 11 acres or so that's undeveloped, and a portion of this is residential. I should mention there is a reason that we're showing residential in each of these, and it's a statutory requirement. One of the initiatives of the state through Governor's Office of Economic Development is to look at whether these projects have also promoted mixed-use residential or housing projects. One of the concerns that the state has, I think it's even more nationally recognized as well, but just the shortage of housing supply, affordable housing product and so forth. And so one of the narratives that they look at in each project is of these redevelopment or economic development areas, are we seeing any residential components in them? And so you'll see in each of these, we have a residential calculation. The uses of funds, interesting on Crescent because the city had outstanding bonds for which it provided parks, recreation, the amphitheater. Those bonds are qualified funds. one-time kind of unique expenditures that the rda excuse me the cra could take advantage of which it did and this goes back to 2009 and 2012 period and because of that almost a million dollars of that annual expense are qualified um resources that we're able to put towards that and the remaining 2026 the table right below gives a depiction of starting in 2001 how much tax increment came to the agency and versus two thousand six that step down to eighty percent two thousand eleven again step down to seventy five percent and so forth but for these last remaining six years a hundred percent of the additional amount which is really haircut monies that would have flown uh... would have would have been captured by the taxing entities except for the school district comes back to the agency to meet these qualified projects going FORWARD, WE ANTICIPATE ANOTHER $6 MILLION IN TOTAL, ABOUT A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR THAT WOULD COME INTO THIS PROJECT AREA THAT COULD THEN BE USED FOR CAPITAL EXPENDITURE PROJECT IMPROVEMENTS WITHIN THE PROJECT AREA OR BECAUSE THERE ARE ADDITIONAL TAX INCREMENT MONIES, THEY ALSO COULD BE USED GLOBALLY THROUGHOUT THE CITY. SO CRESCENT IS A LITTLE DIFFERENT TREATMENT THAN THE OTHERS. This growth of the project, obviously 37,000%. If you put that in terms of, well, what is the compounded annual growth rate? Another way to look at that is, well, if I invested a dollar, what would be my annual percentage increase over this period of time from 2000, in this case, 2012 to 2026? And it would be the equivalent of about a 25.6% average annual return to the city. South Mountain, this was initially intended to be an incubation to bring Pluralsight into Draper City. It's since been reconfigured and changed in a lot of ways. I did want to point out it also has some significant metrics here in terms of the base value was 7.3 million. It's increased 175 plus million dollars. So even there, there's a significant tax base benefit and increase that has occurred. The expiration on this one is 2041. Of the 83 acres, not quite as much is developed, but still the majority of the project is developed. 25 acres is undeveloped, and there is a portion that's dedicated to residential. There's the uses of funds. So that breaks down both uses and sources of funds, and then also the tax increment participation levels relative to that project area. So this one has another 13, 14 years of which we're forecasting another $28 million that would be generated there. And there's the current expenditures for how it's being budgeted. This one actually has even a higher comprehensive, if you will, annual growth rate, which is 48%. So if you kind of think of that as an internal rate of return or a return on investment, that's the annual percentage return. This last slide is just a reminder that there are three, we consider them active project areas. The one I didn't list here is the West Freeway, but of those three project areas, they no longer generate tax increment on an annual basis, but they do have unused fund balances. So one of the things that we're asking for the RDA board to consider is having a discussion in terms of programming those dollars going forward. And with that, if there are any questions, I'm happy to address those. We just wanted to report that this is a summary, obviously a really succinct summary of what has been published and produced. It's been posted on the Governor's Office of Economic Development database. It's available for public inspection. It covers all the elements that that I went through this evening You're in full compliance everything has been updated And really your project areas have been successful. I know I say this every year but Your project areas have been some of the most successful and fruitful project areas that we have in the state relative to RDAs and You don't have to just look at what's happened there, but from a true financial perspective, it's clearly the case. So that's my report. Happy to address any questions the board might have.

I appreciate these presentations that you gave tonight. I think they were really insightful and helpful. I guess my question is, you know, there were some at the bottom of the packet, there were some allocations in, I think, especially the East Bangor project area. If we as a council wanted to make some adjustments to those, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, I think in terms of all of the fund balances discussion that we had in the work session and allocation in terms of the East Bangor, which was specifically almost $5 million, and there was some dedicated for housing and some dedicated for projects. I think the best is to provide input either through staff, John's group, Mike, or directly. I've included my information here. But I think we were also looking for direction from you as a board to say, okay. Our priorities are this. Can you go back and look at what options we have? And then we could come back and have that more kind of guided for the next five or seven, 10 years of listing those of how you want to meet those objectives. And of course, the timing's unique too, because like East Bangor, our window's shorter. So we have to do more with that money earlier. Crescent, we have a longer period of time, but the same with West Freeway and Sandhills. So that might be inappropriate. I think what the RDA has done in the past is by motion or something, you've accepted the report just in compliance. But if there's any direction that you want to give to us to go and then come back with some ideas or give us ideas of what you'd like to see programmed in here, we can certainly do that and come back.

I mean, I have some thoughts about the East Bangor. I think that we have a proposed development that is going in there, and I feel like we could have some infrastructure needs that are not currently funded. Some that might even – we may need to talk to UDOT about if we could contribute to them possibly helping them do some of the improvements that we need. And so I think that would be my suggestion for the funds within East Bangor is to focus on – because that project goal was to build Bangor, which it's built, but I think it needs some improvements, and so I think it would align closely with those project goals if we focused on improving Bangor and more of 138.

I sat in that tonight, so I second what Bryn said. Draper City is doing some wonderful improvements right there, but we need help from UDOT over the bridge.

I still think a lot of that is that light. We have to get that light reset. We just don't have the flow of traffic going across. It's horrible. Bryn's idea is really great, but the very first lowest hanging fruit is that traffic signal.

Well, and I'm wondering, too, we have had some housing development on Third East, you know, some of those homes that have just been built and that some of that housing, you know, that's allocated to housing might be able to go towards improving, you know, that what we're seeing going on on Third East and on Bangor. Yeah. And there's some housing that's come to us in just kind of initial stages, so I think we might see more redevelopment of that area for residential.

Right, and it would certainly be nice to appropriate some of this funding for those infrastructure expenses.

Yeah, and I think we'd be... Mr. Mayor. Oh, sorry.

Go ahead. I'd like to make a motion to adopt the report.

Mr. Green has made a motion to adopt the report. Is there a second?

I'll second.

Second by Ms. Johnson. All right. Any further discussion?

I just think that there are some other areas that I would like for sure that we explore some ideas to use some of this funding, which would then necessitate that we would obviously revise this report if we find something we want to adjust. Use it or lose it, right? Right.

Yeah, and I think that's what we were hoping to accomplish this evening is just we know that you're aware, generally speaking. The earlier session, we hope it was more informative to tell you what kind of qualified projects we could look at. But everything that you've mentioned so far are qualified projects that we think we certainly could look Could do so now I think it's a matter of trying to pull this together So we have a plan before we then make this Second this motion and things mayor.

Can I just ask about another? Idea to make sure to see if it's feasible That we have some of the undeveloped property up by the plural site area We had a public comment today. We've had it more than once about a type of museum or civic center or something, is it feasible that we could use some of that land, this money to purchase some of the land there for that museum to go maybe in that area?

Yeah, possibly. You know, one of the things... And it would still be, then it would be a private... yeah one of the things we'd want to look at there is the is the actual project area plan for that but i think generally speaking as we've talked before if it's public infrastructure that provides a benefit to the project area i think that certainly qualifies it now if we're talking about ultimately purchasing it for a private use i don't think we're concerned about that either provided that the project area plan kind of generally you know mentions that it's a little different because usually we create the project area plans uh... in the budget south mountain was unique in that it was really driven by salt lake county trying to look and see if anyone's still here from that but it was david dobbins would remember but uh... Salt Lake County was the one that took the lead in that, even though that Draper RDA was the primary. Well, it's your under your responsibility. It's your CRA that did it.

But things shifted there, too, right?

Yes. Yeah. And things moved around a little bit. But that one was driven more by the Salt Lake County Regional Economic Group. And it was obviously for the job creation with that. So I'd want to go back and just look at the plan. relative to your specific question. Generally speaking, they're broad enough that it would allow for that. But I would want to make sure that it's permitted in this particular case in the plan.

Well, it might be interesting if it's close to the Canyon's new building, that maybe the school district would be interested in doing some things with some other parts of the school district. District and some of their other programs that aren't necessarily tech, but maybe more like cultural or historical or performative or something All right ready for a vote.

Mr.. Green. How do you vote?

I'm gonna second his motion Mr.. Green how do you vote?

Yes, all right Fred yes No

Catherine?

Yes. How far did I get down like that? All right.

Adam passes four to one. Next item is a motion. We need a motion to adjourn back to our city council. So moved. So moved. All right. Most by Mr. Green. Second. All right. Mr. Green, how do you vote? Yes. Yes. Fred? Yes. Tasha? Yes. Catherine? Yes. All right. We're back. in the city council meeting.

Is there a motion to adjourn? All right, we have a motion to adjourn.

Second? So moved. Second by the board. I second. All right. All in favor of adjourning, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Aye. We stand adjourned. And there's my RDO agenda.