City Council - Regular Meeting

All righty, good evening, everybody. Welcome to our city council meeting, our special council meeting on a Tuesday this week. Appreciate everybody being out here tonight. We do want to recognize former city council member, Raquel DeLucas, who is with us tonight. And in that frame, we are going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance tonight by Raquel.

Everyone please stand, put your head on your heart, repeat after me.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Raquel.

Thank you, Raquel. Okay, we're gonna go to item 4.2 tonight, city council comments and recognitions. Anything from council tonight?

I just want to say that Safety Fest was a big hit. So thanks to Vince and staff. I think the PD took it over and they had too much fun, especially Chief getting dunked several times. So great job on that last night.

I'll echo that. I tried really hard to dunk you. And I want to apologize for the first one, that if it wasn't for the cage, you probably would have had a broken nose. But remember, it had just rained. The ball was really slippery. Oh, boy. Like super, super slippery. So that was... Do we have this one on video? It was accidentally on... It was accident. It was an accident. Um, and then also we've, we've had a theme in this, in this chamber recently of national championships. And I think we need to recognize coach Henderson over there with, with, oh yeah, go ahead. We'll talk about you. You could, you could take care, take care of your business. But, um, He and the Utah Avalanche brought home a national championship from Richmond, Virginia a few weeks ago from the Elite Clubs National League under 17. So congratulations to Coach.

Two players live in here. Nice.

So the national championships just keep rolling in.

Special, special group. It was awesome. Congrats. Thank you. Love it.

OK. Seeing no other comments, we'll move on tonight to our public comments section. At this point, audience members may bring any item within this city's purview to the city council's attention. Comments will be limited to two minutes. State law prohibits the council from acting on items that do not appear on the agenda. Public comments for this meeting will also be conducted electronically. Any person interested in addressing the council may submit a comment by emailing recorder at Harriman.gov or by visiting Harriman.gov slash agendas and minutes where there is a link to fill out an online public comment form. Your statement will be incorporated into the public record. So I'm not sending any forms tonight, but if anybody's here for a public comment, we invite you forward at this time. Okay, seeing none, we will move on to our city council reports. Tonight we'll start with Jared.

Well, we're still working on Wasatch Front waste separation agreement. So hopefully our garbage bills will go down fairly soon. And then fire, I'll just look at Chief Witteson. Is there anything in particular you wanna remind people about? I'm a broken record up here every meeting that please, please, please be careful with your lithium batteries. Don't leave them in a hot garage. I mean, for mine, I actually, my wife's like, why are they in the kitchen? I'm like, because I don't want them to burst into flames in a garage that's 120 degrees. Lithium batteries are a huge, huge problem. With most of the home fires we're seeing, I shouldn't say most, a good number of them, we're seeing a big increase due to those lithium batteries. A lot of them in the garages that are just too hot and they seriously just spontaneously combust. So please be careful with those. And then of course outdoors. A lot of these fires are campfires. Some of them are accidental. I've got a 20 year old that likes to go backpacking and hiking, et cetera, and every time he goes out, No fires, tell your friends. And everybody thinks that they know how to do things safely. We're talking about nature and fire that moves. Please don't take any chances. There's just so much going on where we've got a few months left of this before we really get a reprieve. Do you have anything to add, Chief?

Yeah, I would add that it's been quite busy. Right now, this area is in what's called planning level five, which means there's a lack of resources. It's the highest planning level in the nation. Lots of fires going on, and it's a competition for resources right now. So any new starts, it's very challenging to get the necessary assets we need to help support long-term fires. So we have everything in place for local initial attack response, but when it comes to large complex extended attack incidents, it's very challenging during planning level five. So be very cautious out there. Anything that can ignite will. So be careful. Okay.

Perfect. Okay, ready?

Just an update from last month's Jordan Basin Improvement District since we didn't meet. We have a lot of construction going on. The most stuff that's in the city is our connection through Mountain View Corridor over by Juniper and the other South Hills area. So that's for future development. We're making those crossings connections at the same time that UDOT's doing the road work. So we get in there before them. So it's been beneficial for the Jordan Basin. I think that's it.

Thank you.

Nothing for me.

Thank you, Matt. Tara.

I'll just say that from the mosquito abatement district that there is West Nile virus detected in our area, so just a reminder to wear long sleeves, long pants, the beginning of the day, end of the day, and just to be aware. Also, they do provide a service of coming out and helping you if you have a pond in your yard. They have different ways that they service our area, and it's all on their website.

Perfect. Thank you, Tara. I just want to mention a few things. Maybe I should have mentioned a few of these earlier, too. I wanted to thank EDC Utah for their time out here. We went on to spend an afternoon with them. They are a group that helps bring economic development to the state and to the area. We just were able to give them a tour of all of our commercial areas, industrial possibilities. They were shocked to come out here and see some of the growth that's happening, some of the areas we've highlighted. So I think a lot of good is going to come out of that. So thank you to them for that. I also want to talk about Congressman Owens reached out and invited me to a Purple Heart Ceremony. It was really cool. We invited this recipient, his name's Rich Bockhouse. He's a Harriman resident. We invited him to a council meeting. He's actually didn't feel comfortable doing that. This actually was, I mean, hats off to him. This was something he lived through 50 years ago. He didn't want to come back. He said it brought up a lot of emotions. I don't want to get too much, but he said it brought up a lot of emotions that day when they presented it to him. So he didn't want to go through that again. But I just, publicly, I hope people, if they know Rich in this city, he was just awarded the Purple Heart on 31st from Congressman Owens. It was a really cool, just quick little ceremony with his family. It was really cool. So then speaking of Congressman Owens, he's been fantastic. He's been out here. He spent a couple of hours in the city, visited Bullfrog Spas, and then visited AFS Flooring around the corner here, just supporting them, listening to them. So thanks to his team. Also showed up at the softball game, which we did a little Harriman versus Bluffdale softball game, and he just showed up. So Congressman, thank you. Maddie, I'm on his team. Thank you for... being so present in our community the last month. Pretty cool that your congressman spends a lot of time in your community.

So it's been really cool.

So that is all I have tonight. So we will go to our reports, presentations, appointments. We will start tonight with our parade grand marshal recognition. Lauren, we'll turn to you.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. I'm here with Joe and Charlotte Miller. So Joe, actually we honored him at our rodeo too. He was chosen as one of our veterans for one of our nights that we recognized and then he was our parade grand marshal this year. So I just wanna read you a little bit about him and why he was chosen. Joe is a lifelong resident who was born and raised here in Harriman. He attended Harriman's original schoolhouse, later graduated from Bingham High School in 1965, and has remained deeply connected to the community throughout his life. In 1966, Joe enlisted in the United States Army. During the Vietnam War, he volunteered for jump school and served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. During his service in Vietnam, he demonstrated tremendous courage and dedication, earning two bronze star medals, one for heroism and one for meritorious service. After returning home, Joseph used the GI Bill to continue his education, graduating from Dixie College and later earning his degree from the University of Utah. He met his wife Charlotte during this time, and together they have shared 55 years of marriage and raised a family that now includes three children, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Joe's life is a wonderful example of service, patriotism, and dedication to family and community. His military service and personal experiences have given him a deep appreciation for the freedoms we enjoy and the sacrifices made. by those who protect them. It's our honor to recognize Joe Miller as our 2026 Parade Ground Marshal for his honorable military service, his lifelong connection to Harriman, and his commitment to family, community, and country. We're grateful for his service and proud to celebrate him as an example to future generations. So thank you, Joe, for being here. I'm gonna take a picture with you real quick. If you guys wanna come up here, we can get together.

All right, one, two, three.

Okay, we love these nights with recognition. So we have another recognition tonight. We're going to start with, we're going to do the Hermann High DECA. They're winners of the 2026 DECA International Career Development Conference. And we've got their instructor here is Ricky Stewart. So I'm going to turn the time over to Ricky and she's going to kind of talk about, I was going to read some stuff I had, but she's going to be able to explain a lot better what they've done and brag on these amazing young ladies tonight. So welcome, Ricky. Thanks for being here.

I didn't know I was going to speak, so these amazing three speakers are going to be judging me mercilessly tonight. So it's hard to describe the level that these kids competed at without kind of telling you the story. And these three young ladies are adorable little sophomores walking into high school for the first time. And they walk into a class where we're talking about something called DECA, and most of them had never even heard of what that was. And I started listing out the companies that they had an option to work with, and one of them just happened to be the state of Utah. And these kids just jumped at it. What they didn't realize is that that was the most difficult project that they had as an option. The state of Utah uses our DECA projects as free research for proposed projects that they want to consider. They take the papers, they take the presentations, and they put them in a filing cabinet. And then when the idea bounces around again, the kids' papers start as their starting off point for the next project. So as a result, these projects become very, very serious with the state. give them a mentor that they are required to report to every single week. Their research is based on real data with real humans. And they give them really the world as a possibility to work with. And as you can imagine, the state of Utah is involved in a lot of different things. When the kids came to me, they had narrowed it down, of course, to we want to work with the prison. So they started working with the prison, and the prison, as you know, relocated to a new facility. The facility did not have very many EV car chargers, and their employees were a little disappointed with that. So they started with the kids with the idea of you guys just focus on a couple of EV chargers, adding to the new facility. And the kids, after doing a little bit of research, going on a site inspection at the prison, which they had to have a background check on, and talking to the employees, realized that the project was much bigger. And their project ended up becoming replacing all of the power at the prison to turn it into a solar-powered prison. As you can imagine, that got a little bit bigger. So they had to suddenly start talking to real experts in converting existing technology to solar power, how to actually store excess solar power. So the list of people that they had to speak with continued to grow. They, after doing all of this research and getting more information, they would create a draft. They would send it to the state. And the state would say, no, no, no. You need to talk to our solar guys. And they would get sent to the people that actually create all solar projects in the state of Utah. And they would have meetings upon meetings with new reports and new information to have to actually understand the real cost of this project. They prepared their paper, which in their mind they were preparing solely for a competition and submitted it to the state of Utah the week before we were competing. To say the state of Utah freaked out would be a gentle, gentle way of phrasing it. We were required to have an hour long conference call with the state of Utah to figure out how we could ensure that no one would take this paper and presentation as a serious proposal because it looked so legit. So the kids were required to start their presentation with a disclaimer, which we negotiated with the state of Utah to ensure that it was a student-based project. It was amazing. The kids were great. My favorite moment of this project was watching the kids try to figure out their presentations. Now, mind you, they're adorable little sophomores. When we started this thing, not a single one of them could drive. So watching them figure out how to present some very complicated science data and technology data to judges that could really be anyone was very interesting because they had to make it just make some logical, simple sense. And they walked through a variety of different possibilities. And there gets to be a moment in all of these projects where you know the kids have hit their limit. And I walked into a room and the three of them were sprawled on the floor, none of them talking and looking like they wanted And they had just spent three hours constructing the most beautiful board I've ever seen, with magnets, with posters, with every tool you can imagine. It opens up into this surprise reveal. And I said, it's a trifold. And walked to the closet and provided them with a trifold. That's the level of intensity that the kids put into it. The kids this year, they did such a great job. They won first in the international competition, which is unbelievably difficult to do. It just doesn't really happen They got some state recognition. Governor Cox caught wind of this and posted a nice shout-out to the kids on LinkedIn, to which I had to explain to them what LinkedIn was. They now all have LinkedIn profiles, and I'm certain that Harriman's going to get a nice shout-out tonight, so thank you for having us. In fact, next year, two of the kids are gonna be working with Harriman City to work on creating some fundraising and marketing plans for the proposed sports complex. And another is going to be working with a nuclear company that creates cancer research products. So we're very proud of the kids and if they could come out and we can embarrass them a little bit, they would love that.

Come on up.

We have Olivia Hansen, we have Isla Homer, and Jess Smiley. Would you all mind if we got a picture?

We would love it.

One, two, three.

I'll just say real quick, wow. Thank you so much for that description. I'm just blown away. That's fantastic. Man, I've done this for a while in my regular business for 25 years and coaching highly competitive teams. What you just described, I've never heard it before from some high school kids. That's fantastic.

Yeah, so my wife taught at West Jordan for 15 years and DECA for that as well. So I know what goes into it. I judged up at Layton for several years too. And it's fun to go there and see these young students just outperform anybody. And you're like, oh, I would hire them tomorrow. You can't because they're 14 or 15. But it's impressive on what goes into it and how much to go to nationals and to get to the top recognition, so congrats.

I think the thing that's missing these days, I stopped, I used to run a department and hire and train people, and about 10 years ago, I'm like, I'm done, I'm just gonna go work with my own clients and things. It was too hard to find people who knew how to work, who knew how to problem solve, right, who knew how to do those things. Those are kind of lost skill sets. To go and find a problem, I mean, it's what we talked, it's easy for people to complain about things, but to go and find not just a problem that needs to be solved, but then to go through everything you did and have it,

escalate the way it did most people probably would have walked away and said we need to do something smaller like that's I'm blown away it's just fantastic having participated in DECA in high school a long long time ago and competed at the state and lucky enough to at the national level taking what you guys did versus what like we did. Like mine is like child, like it was like kindergarten stuff. Like it was, I was like, and we thought we were pretty good. I mean, that was just mind blowing. So kudos to you and congratulations. It's just, it's speechless.

Selfishly, Ricky, when you were saying how the state of Utah was so excited to use this stuff, and then we talked about how you're going to be back to help Harriman, I'm pretty excited about what you're going to do for our community right now. I have no doubt we're going to fund and build an athletic complex, yes, in a year. So I have no doubt. That's how excited I am now to work. I mean, I was excited anyways. But hearing what you've done, we're excited to see what this next project brings as well for you. Like everybody said, amazing. Thank you for coming out tonight. Congratulations. You are the cream of the crop. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for being here. And parents, hats off to you guys for, it doesn't happen without your support too. So thank you all for being here tonight. So congratulations. Yep. Very good. And don't feel like you have to stay. I promise you can, but thank you. Congratulations. Okay, we're gonna go on to item 9.1 tonight. This is a public hearing and consideration of a resolution for proposed compensation increases for specific city officers. We'll go to Kyle.

Thank you, Mayor. As you may or may not remember, it's been a few months, the state of Utah requires the city to hold a public hearing and have you specifically approve compensation for certain city officers. The language in the state code is fairly vague. We have interpreted it as manager level or above. During this process, One of the increases that was going to be proposed did get dropped off for our streets and stormwater manager, so I would propose that this be added back in via resolution. Staff is also asking that this be retroactively put back to July 1st. Are there any questions for me before the public hearing tonight? Thank you.

Thank you, Kyle. Okay, at this point we will open the public hearing on this item. Thank you, ladies. In case you see no public comment on this item, I'll look for a motion to close the public hearing.

So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye.

Thank you. Look for a motion.

I make a motion to approve resolution number R31-2026, stating the proposed compensation increase for the specific city officers.

Motion by Teddy, second by Jared. We'll go Jared. Yes. Teddy. Yes. Mapp. Yes. Tara.

Yes.

And I'll vote yes. That motion carries. Thank you, Kyle. Okay, we'll go on to our consent agenda tonight. Look for a motion. Make a motion to approve the consent agenda as written. Motion by Mapp, second by Jared. We'll go Tara.

Yes.

Mapp. Yes. Teddy. Yes. Jared.

Yes.

And I'll vote yes. That motion carries as well. Can I just make a comment? Yes, please. That might be the longest consent.

which I've seen in a while. We got an email recently asking if we were okay with the direction this was going. I think I said, yes, I think it's fantastic.

So I will point out that is two meetings worth of consent because we did not have the second meeting in July. So there are quite a few things that are just built up.

It was funny though.

Half the packet, like three quarters of the packet was. Yes.

Okay, we'll go on to item 11.1. Review and consider a recommendation to amend the Harriman City zoning map from C1 neighborhood commercial development to CF commercial flex for 2.6 acres of property located at 5222 West Harriman Boulevard. Michael.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I have a short presentation for you consistent with the materials in your packet. This is the vicinity map of the area being proposed for a zoning amendment and this kind of odd shaped sort of crescent piece of property on Harriman Boulevard. It's a piece of property that we have seen before in other rezones. We've had some other development proposals and even approvals on this site, but nothing has been constructed. And so in order to potentially attract another commercial development interest on this property, That's the fundamental reason for looking at this rezone. Again, this is a vacant parcel. It is C1 commercial right now. It does have an environmental contamination issue that will need to be addressed as part of the development. Again, the request is for that CF commercial flex zone, which we have discussed mapping this at other locations of the city. But this is the first of this type of the scale. You can see in this short description, we're looking for things that are smaller, that integrate better with the neighborhood. One of the ideas we had here is that we might see shop spaces that are small enough for a potential home occupation who's essentially outgrown their home, find something that might be a little bit more affordable in the commercial sector. It is currently zone, or excuse me, this is our general plan land use designation looking, trying to encourage neighborhood scale commercial, and again, that's what the CF zone is trying to accomplish as well. We had a review with the engineering department, just again to remind the applicant or the potential developer of the site that they will need address that contamination on the property. We did have a public hearing on July 1st with the Planning Commission. We did not receive any comments. The staff recommendation was to recommendation to approve and also the Planning Commission forwarded to you a five to zero vote of recommending approval as well. I mentioned that the applicant of the zoning amendment I believe is participating online tonight, is not here with us in person.

We have some elevations or anything?

No, there's not been any development materials submitted. There's no application with the city at this point in time.

Let me just say, I guess without a plan, I think this is great. But my concern is what if we rezone it and then this developer backs out? Is there a way, I just kind of would like to see, I would like to keep a C1 if this developer doesn't come. Does that make sense? Like how do we do this to make sure if we do this, this developer, because I don't want to rezone it to the CF and then this developer falls through and then we're not stuck with CF but then... I don't know how we go back to C1 at that point because I think I'd like to have it default to C1.

It's kind of where I'm going, right? Usually when there's a request to rezone, there's kind of a plan to go with it.

They have shared a plan. We looked at it to make sure the access is lined up to the site. And it basically lined up on the skinny part of the property. There's an entrance with a building on each side with a parking lot. And then there's a few other buildings on the west side of the property with one more access to get into there. The parking lots are not connected. So I think it's four buildings. And it had varied sizes for users that could come in. So if someone had a wood shop that was outgrowing their space at home, they could move in there and take up anywhere from 500 square feet up to 1,500 square feet. So it had a lot of options. But I don't know if it's the plan that they plan to use on it. But it was a layout that worked with the code when we saw it. We didn't see elevations. We just saw site plan.

Yeah, we looked at some conceptual models, just like Lake had mentioned, just to make sure that economically and from a transportation point of view, we felt like it would work, that the potential developer of the site felt like it would work under our standards. But again, we don't have an actual application. Did they give you any idea of building type or materials? I believe it was, we were looking at some precast and just, you know, metal. They're trying to have a kind of a more community-friendly front facade, but it will be pretty basic, because again, we're trying to find a way to create more affordable commercial space in the city, but it will be a smaller scale. I love the idea. Yeah. Well, that's where I'm at. Are we early, though?

I'm supportive of it. I'm trying to think if this is...

It's tough because it's a difficult property, right? I mean, just the shape and the location. It's surrounded by, I mean, you see on this picture.

Yeah, it's surrounded by residential.

except for Kitty Corner. When it comes to commercial, I think sometimes we get too narrowly focused on retail. Commercial means a lot of things, and for me, some sort of flex space makes sense in this spot, but I kind of need to see and visualize what you just described. Because it's surrounded by residential and because of the road and the curve and the sight lines, I like the idea before I get to rezoning something, I'd like to see.

We don't have something that shows the difference between what's allowed in C2 versus CF. Because that's really the question here. A property owner can ask for a rezone without telling you what their plan is. They're just asking you to change it. Really, your discussion is, what do you think, if there's something that's not allowed in C2 that would be allowed in CF... Are you comfortable with that? Or vice versa. If there's something in C2 you'd rather see that's not in CF. I don't know if we have that. I was trying to pull it up here, but our chart is really long, so it's hard to display.

It's different, right? Because this is different than a residential. Usually when we're seeing a residential rezone, we're seeing some layouts and some plans.

I think you're right, Nathan. We need to see that.

Because this is really just a difference. It's two different types of commercial. What's allowed and one that is not allowed. What is the CF getting them? Because ultimately you have to decide if you're... if it still meets your intent of the neighborhood commercial to say yeah we could do this yeah that that's really the question i just don't know we i don't know that we have a slide it sounds like that kind of shows the primary differences yeah because my next question goes along with what the mayor is saying is okay well if we zone it to this

And as I've said with every one of these that come in, I'm not worried about this one, I'm worried about the next one. If this one doesn't come to fruition, then it's zoned that way or we've approved an MDA or whatever it is, then what's the next one? So it would be good to see kind of that list to compare so we can say, okay, well, yeah, these uses.

But it sounds like that you may be interested in doing a zoning condition. Right. That was not something that came up with the Planning Commission. This is a privately initiated zoning amendment, just so you'll know that they have paid a fee to try to defray our costs as a city.

Mike, is it a zoning condition, or really is the question really what is allowed in CF that's not allowed in C2? Because I think that's really the question. Sorry, I was out of town. I might have brought this up.

The zoning condition would be, well, if they're Our uses that we want will allow in a zone, but there are some of those uses we want to prohibit. That would be the zoning condition is okay, we'll rezone it, but on the condition that it's these uses and not these. But to get there, we need Nathan's comparison.

And I do have that list in front of me. I apologize it wasn't in your materials, but I don't have a comparison between the C1 zone. C1 is very narrow. Obviously, the CF zone is going to expand that, add some additional uses. Again, we talked about how this would bring in some light manufacturing and wholesaling, which is not something that we would typically see in a C1 zone, of course. We could also, with this zoning condition, do some restrictions on size, bulk. We can look at that kind of an issue, if you would like.

Unless there's proximity to the park and the walking paths and the other, I mean, yeah.

I will say, just for a point of reference, in a previous municipality, I had seen a city adopt a rezone conditional upon development. And that rezone would revert. But later on, I was told that that was not a sanctioned practice under Utah law. So you basically have to commit to the rezone, or you could hold the application potentially.

So I guess where I'm at is I think we're all, I mean, I'm not, I think we're all supportive of this. We just want to see the concept.

I just sent the concept to Jonathan. So we'll see if he can open that up. And I just wanted to add this site. There were two sites when we were drafting the CF zone. This was one of the sites that was the one that was contemplated and the one behind redemption. Those were the two sites we, we thought about when we were putting this together and creating that zone.

And I think our concern comes from, like Jared's saying, we're gonna have residents start asking us, with the rezone, what's that gonna look like? So I think before, I think we need to show the public what this is gonna, kind of visually, because I think we're, I love the idea. I don't think any of us are pushing back on the concept.

Yeah, but there's still not an application. There's still not an application as well, so this could be potential.

Okay. And our review was to take one of the accesses away, the one that was, I think, on the far left. It was too close to Solomere, so there would be just two accesses, one for the building four and three, and then one for the other buildings one and two.

And I think we need a, this is just a concept right now. We're not approving this right now. This is just, how tall are these buildings? Michael, do you know? Do we know how tall, Blake? I think the code allows- The code, you say that was in code, right? Yeah. Because it's slower than, I think we talked, it was actually lower than a C1 could be.

The building height is 60 feet on this.

So it's definitely not. I think it was, I think the code said 35 or 30. So I have it up here. 35. In C1, max is 35.

CF, it's 35, up to 45 on accessory uses with Planning Commission approval.

So similar to a C-1.

Correct. There's not a huge, there's a little bit more lot coverage allowed in the CF zone, according to our intern, Madison AI, who just sent me a comparison.

Yes. We're sitting here.

There's a few changes there. Conditional use threshold is... It says 22,000 square feet in C1, CF is 44,000, so I'm.

Right, if the scale of the project is larger, it triggers a conditional use review.

So this allows for larger projects before the conditional use on the CF zone. The rear yard setbacks are higher in the CF zone, it looks like.

Like you're taking away the most far west entrance.

They were gonna, engineering wanted them to reconfigure them, so you'd get two accesses to the entire site instead of three. And again, we're not looking at that though right now. That'd be something they need to look at. It just, this didn't align with our city code, or our engineering standards. It doesn't align with Solomere Avenue. You needed more distance.

I also said that, as I mentioned earlier, that I drive this road every single day. That's not a great place to be having people come in and out on that curve. I mean, I've nearly gotten in several wrecks just with people coming in and out of TerraMare. I call it the garbage.

But it's on the better side than SolarMare. It's better. It's a little bit better coverage, so. I mean, seeing this, I'm okay. I mean, this is a needed product. To me, this is a needed product. We'll fill this overnight. I've got so many people reaching out about this kind of a space in the city. This will fill up overnight, and I think this is... I'm okay with it now.

The thing is, I like the use. What are the unknowns? Are there any uses that we... We list off the uses?

Yep.

That we want to prohibit in this particular area because it's right next to residential.

I wonder if I could send... Jonathan, I've got that.

We can go through all the... Church, school. Regular ones of pawn shops and smoke and vape shops. What about traffic concerns with deliveries? But some of those be ruled out because they're in C1 and they're not a C1 thing.

They'd be similar to what was in C1. So we would already be allowed there on the zone. That's what we anticipate.

This is better than the last concept we saw. Yes.

I didn't see it, I just told them no.

Okay. I just dropped in a land use word doc, John, in the public information folder for the meeting. All right, I put it accidentally in the 812. I apologize. All uses are permitted subject to some of the sizing standards that we mentioned earlier that might trigger a conditional use review, but these would be permitted use.

The storage uses were accessory, and they didn't show any storage use on their site. I think that's the very first thing that I just wrote down.

I don't see, I don't have any concerns with any of the others then.

Mayor, when people talk to you about this kind of space, what kind of uses are they, have they talked to you about?

Small office. you know, small, you know, that next step printing. A lot of people are doing like screen printing t-shirts in their house and want to move out. A little bit of warehouse, small warehousing. A lot of people just want a small warehouse rather than jumping to. That's not mechanic.

I think the biggest advantage, like the flex space is like you have to, you know, you're 1,500, 2,000 feet if you're lucky, and they're more like five. The repair is limited, so it's very small repairs. It's not an auto shop. It's a, you know, 15.

It's just more economic. General retail, that sounds pretty broad. Pawn shops, vape shops.

No, because those are prohibited.

I just always think, if I live in one of those houses next door, right?

You don't have any problem with any of these? I'll bet I've been asked about every single one of these, actually. Except the secondhand store, but everybody's thrifting these days. Well, that's where Kevin Hook goes to get his hand. Yep. I'm good with these. Any concerns from council on these? I'm in.

Motion to approve ordinance 2026-15 amending Harriman zoning map for 2.67 acres of property located at 5222 West Harriman Boulevard from C1 neighborhood commercial to CF commercial flex zone. Second.

OK. We'll go Jerry. Yes. Teddy.

Yes.

Matt. Yes. Kara. Yes. And I'll vote yes. That motion carries. I'm excited about this one. Thank you, Michael. Thank you all for pulling all of that up. Yes. Thanks for being patient with us, Michael. You didn't anticipate all those. That was good. Okay. We'll go to 11.2, consideration of an amendment to the Harriman City Police Department growth silo model for personnel staffing. Chief.

Thanks, Mayor. Um... Just a brief presentation, a summary of what's in the staff report. This is not the first time you've seen this document, but there are some changes to it. So just kind of go over the history. When we went through the truth and taxation process in 2023, in discussions both with the HCC Board of Directors and with the City Council, you all adopted the first version of the HPD growth silo model, which is a unique approach to law enforcement staffing, combining several different industry best practices, but also putting a Harriman twist on those with the goal being to identify really how many officers Harriman should have based on our specific needs and not necessarily based on what we're seeing in other cities or other areas of the country, but how can we utilize some things that have been adopted across our industry in a way that mirrors what Harriman's growth trends are, what our actual public safety needs are, but also has the backing of some empirical data to support those decisions so that we're not necessarily making very expensive staffing decisions blindly, right? We have some information and some data to support the decisions that you all are being asked to consider, so.

I would just add matching those needs with

funding sources yes yeah obviously that was the primary driver right was how do we fund what the staffing needs might be in the future and and the development of the process to segregate the new growth within the taxing district is kind of that was the driving force behind how do we adopt a model that will reasonably predict where these staffing needs might be developed, but then also have funding available for those staffing needs when they arise, as opposed to always kind of playing from behind the eight ball, so to speak, when we have staffing challenges. As the police chief, I'm not standing here saying, I need five officers, and you're left with the wonder of where to, where are you gonna get the money to pay for them, right? We're trying to solve that problem ahead of time. So it is a unique model. It's something that was developed specifically within Harriman. Former Chief Troy Carr obviously driving the majority of that, but certainly a collective effort across the board to try and identify how we can best plan. to the best of our ability plan what our growth trends are going to look like and try and get ahead of some of these staffing challenges as opposed to behind. When you play from behind in public safety usually that means you have some public safety challenges which are something that you don't want to have in our city. The way the growth silo is built There are various disciplines that our police department is engaged in across our three divisions. Every discipline within law enforcement has some unique challenges to it. Patrol is very different than our school resource officers, very different than our detectives, very different than our admin and support staff. And so they all have different drivers of when staffing challenges might arise, what types of what types of assignments or responsibilities they have that differ across those divisions that might drive growth trend needs in different ways. And so the purpose of the silo and the sub silo model was really to get granular into each one of those functions within the police department and try and identify as best we could some statistical data combined with Our experience and knowledge and our best practice recommendations within each of those law enforcement disciplines to give you all a heads up of when we think we might be experiencing a staffing challenge. So every sub-silo within the growth silo model has its own individual metric that's measured at least annually. Most of them are measured very frequently. and then they have triggers associated with those metrics when we reach a certain point that we need to start having a conversation about potentially adding staffing in a particular area when those triggers are met. Some of the challenges that we saw that we, most of these we anticipated and were discussed at the time when we adopted the original version of the growth silo model. Obviously our population estimates are built out. The pace of growth is something that changes rapidly, especially in Harriman. And kudos to Trevor and everything that he's done over the last couple years to help us solidify kind of where those trends are going. We feel like we're in a much better place now than we were even a few years ago as far as being able to reasonably predict what our growth might look like. And then also we knew going into this that the metrics and the triggers associated with them, the data points that we're measuring will have to be adjusted as we gain better and more accurate data. We gain more historical data over the last three years that we've been able to collect that help us kind of fine tune where those triggers ought to be placed. One issue that we talked about with the adoption of the budget is the supervisory span of control. That's something that is primarily driven by liability and risk management. It certainly differs across the varying disciplines within law enforcement. And then capital infrastructure planning is also something that was discussed in 2023, was not included in the original version of the growth silo model, but it's something that we've been talking about consistently and something that we need to continue to talk about as we move forward. So just to highlight real quick some changes in this updated version of the growth silo model as opposed to what was there before. With some leadership management changes within the police department and our third commander allocation that was added with the budget that you approved this year, we've made some operational changes within our police department. We've shifted some responsibilities around within the department to better kind of even out the workload amongst our department leadership. And so some of those silos have had to be or some of the sub-silos have had to be shifted within their respective silo to reflect that. There's been a couple of sub-silos that are no longer needed, for example, court services, where that function's now being contracted out to a private third party, and so we don't need that sub-silo in the growth silo anymore, so that's been removed. Other sub silos have either been rebranded or renamed to kind of reflect some of our changing priorities. I point out specifically our directed enforcement unit. That's something that we talked about with this group before, as well as a renewed emphasis on community policing. Those are things that we're pretty passionate about. So we're going to begin to track those disciplines specifically within their own sub silo. um funding sources uh kyle and his staff done a great job helping us keep on track with how our our various disciplines within the heron police department are funded as you well know we carry five different cost centers four of which come out of the general fund and one that's reimbursed to the city by the hcc so it's it's quite a task to keep all of the pieces in their appropriate lane And so we updated the growth silo model to reflect how everything is being funded as you make those funding decisions and allocate those resources. Another piece that we looked at amending, the original version of the growth silo model talked about these review meetings being held with the city manager in January of every year. And as Nathan and I talked about it, really felt like the intent behind creating the growth silo model was to allow us to be a little bit more reactive to a need that we identified. And so what we've done is left those needs analysis meetings open-ended so that they can really occur at any point throughout the year if we feel that there's a substantial drastic need that needs to be addressed immediately, that we have the latitude to do that and to bring that to you in discussion as opposed to waiting till January to have those meetings. So we've removed those timeline restrictions out of the new version. We talked a little bit about supervisory span of control. I'm happy to go into greater detail if you'd like or any questions about that, but we've identified what we feel are the best measurements of a supervisory span of control for each of the sub-silos contained within the growth silo model. Again, they're going to be different, right? A higher liability unit that's engaged in very proactive law enforcement is going to need greater supervisory attention than perhaps an administrative function or an office-related function. those supervisory span of control triggers will vary across the various disciplines within the PD.

Can you talk about just really quickly, like what, what standards we're going off of for the supervisory? I mean, you don't need to go into great detail, but you can just kind of just highlight a little bit.

Yeah. Um, so it, again, like I talked about, um, policing in and of itself is a very, uh, It's a very risky profession. There's a lot of liability associated with police work. In fact, we carry the unfortunate banner of being the highest liability department in the city. Some of the work that we do is dangerous, right? And so we wanna make sure that number one, we're taking care of our people, we're providing them with the necessary tools and training to do their job. Part of that, involves close supervision, right? And so there are studies that have been done by the International City Managers Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and several other professional organizations over the years about what adequate supervision might look like. Typically it's a ratio. that's based on the number of direct reports that a supervisor has so anything from five to nine depending on the function once you exceed that number of direct reports you start to see certain areas within that discipline that might slip right or the sergeant the supervisor doesn't necessarily have the time or the bandwidth to pay attention to the things that he or she should be paying attention to And that's why there's some variation in there, right? So, for example, our directed enforcement unit or a patrol capacity, which are two very high liability units, have a much smaller supervisory span of control, where if you're getting outside the five to six range, it's something you should be considering versus, for example, like our school resource officers. Most of our school resource officers are very independent. They operate very autonomously. We have great partnerships with our school administrations and they do a great job, but a supervisor in a school resource officer unit might be able to manage You know seven or more direct reports an administrative function with you know officers or civilians working in the office You might have an even greater span of control where that person can manage, you know up to eight or nine So that's kind of how it's built again your higher liability units ones with it create the most dangerous conditions or have the most safety issues and associated with them, that's where you'll typically see a little bit smaller supervisory span of control. Again, all of these are, of course, They're estimates, right? As we look at what the nature of law enforcement as it evolves, the special enforcement team is not something that we had contemplated even five years ago needing. As our city grows, as our department grows, there will be other functions that will need to be added to the department and to the growth silo model as we look at the varying changes and demands for service within law enforcement. and we'll have to evaluate those supervisory Hispanic control metrics as we go. But typically each one of them is built on the number of direct reports. Nathan and I have talked about there are potentially metrics that we could use to measure the supervisory span of control. One of them is the 60% metric when you talk about the amount of time that's being spent on a call. If we start to see, that's one of our 60 metrics, if you start to see that creeping, it could be an indication that the sergeant is overstretched and can't pay attention to how much time the officers are spending on calls. So that's another thing that we're measuring that we'll adjust within the model as we get some good data to support it. Did that answer your question?

Yes, thank you.

Along with the 60-60-60-60 trigger, we made some modifications to that in discussing kind of what the intent was behind that specific metric and trigger. Originally it was built as an increase of 50% in any one year would trigger this personnel needs analysis review. We wanted to account for data spikes, where we have maybe a potential issue or maybe we had a period where we talked about someone's out on FMLA and we see a spike in some of these metrics problem. What we really are trying to identify is a prolonged spike or a prolonged change in that metric. And so what we've shifted it to is kind of a measurement of that metric over time. And so as metric, whichever one of the four we're measuring, if we're starting to see that consistently month to month to month, that's when we want to make sure that we're paying attention to the potential for needs analysis. Also, you know, if you look at, for example, if our officers are busy, you know, if 20% of their time is committed and we have a 50% increase in one year and then 30% of their time is committed, not necessarily indicative that we have an issue, right? If they have only 30% committed time, we're still doing pretty good. So we wanted that metric specifically to reflect a little bit better what the operational driving need might be so that when we bring things to you they actually have a specific need associated with them and not necessarily just a data spike or something that's not tied to the number itself but tied to the actual need for something that we can track over time. And then the growth silo four is a big one, and that's one that's a little bit more subjective. So certainly welcome some feedback and discussion as we look at what capital infrastructure looks like within the police department. Obviously, we're talking about a facility at some point, but we also have things like financial management, are we tracking our debt service, our long-term contracts that we have with specific vendors or service providers that help us provide our law enforcement service. Those types of things need to be considered in the realm of capital planning. Every time I add an officer, we have to add money to the debt service to pay for our contract for body cameras and tasers that we have. So those are things that need to be tracked continually as we move forward so that we don't ever get to a point where we have some debt service obligation that we've expanded and not planned for within the financial models. And then the last piece that is in your packet is, As Nathan and I talked about maybe what the next iteration of the growth silo model might look like, what we wanted to not do is necessarily make staffing decisions in a vacuum. The attempt here and what Nathan tasked us with was to put a goalpost on where we think we might be going. None of this is set in stone. This will definitely change probably within my tenure. It will certainly change after I'm gone. I won't see most of this come to fruition. But we also wanted to make sure that as we start having these conversations about adding staffing within the police department, that we had a box or lanes that we could put it in and say, this belongs here for X reasons. Now, again, like I said before, as law enforcement evolves, some of this might change. We might not necessarily have a need for a specific unit in the future the same way that we have that need today. But as we look at some other cities that have similar populations, populations that are similar to our projected build out a demand for service that's similar to ours, this is kind of our best guess of where that goalpost might be. And so as we start talking about adding allocations or adding staffing to the police department, we can help illustrate that for you as to where we feel it might fit as we look to the future. And we illustrate kind of how the police department evolves. You'll notice in the operations division, and Nathan and I have talked about this several times, but we'll get to a point because of our geography and the demand on our response times that we're gonna look at splitting our patrol unit, for example, where we have officers that work on the north side of the city, officers that work on the south side of the city, and they'll probably have their own supervisor now that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll have two sergeants on duty 24 hours a day right but that's built into the staffing model to be able to predict some of that what's highlighted in yellow are the three allocations that you approved in the fiscal year 2728 budget everything that's in a gray box is what we anticipate might be needed in the future. So again, it gives us a goalpost, it gives us something that we can work towards that helps kind of put all of this into perspective so that we're not just adding officers here and there and really not understanding what the broader impact of that might be on our operation. And that's all I have. Any questions or anything that we would like to discuss further?

First of all, thank you. I really appreciate the long-range planning aspect of it. And I mean, I'm a big fan of metrics. I do a lot of that with my day job. But I'm curious about the extra costs that, or maybe not even, I'm just curious, how much time does it take? Who updates these metrics how frequently? And how long does it take you to do these metrics updates?

That's a great question. Right now, a lot of it is manual process, right? So I do a lot of it. My deputy chief does a lot of it. Karen does a lot of it. We are knee deep right now in a venture with Trevor in attempting to automate some of those processes. We have some tools and technology available to us that are just coming online this year. that will hopefully help us get to a point where we actually have a dashboard with recurring metrics that we can start to plug some of these things in, and we can measure kind of on the fly. Right now we do it, Karen pulls this data for us about once a month, and Nathan and I look at it, you know, try and measure against where the triggers are. We can pull it more frequently than that, but like I said, all these processes right now are manual data extraction, so we're trying to leverage technology to be a little bit more efficient at that.

I think monthly is pretty frequent. I don't know if you want to do it more frequently than that, but thank you.

The hope with the dashboard is it becomes not necessarily real time, but closer so you can start to see the trends. Because outside of hitting it, you may see some hourly trends or seasonal trends, which is where we went with the peaking officers recently and looking at that. Here, we're really busy on some, we're not busy on a Tuesday or something like that, which is really weird, but these other days we are, so we've hired, we have a slot that comes in during the day to cover that busy time. We haven't always been successful in keeping it filled as we pull them, but it's those kind of things. I think that the dashboard will help us just have a better sense, we won't be so dependent, as well as I think one of the key people who does that is planning to retire soon, so we're trying to make sure we bring it in and don't lose that ability.

And she does a great job, but it is a lot of manual labor associated with it, and some of that is just the nature of the programming that exists, but some of it are some new tools that are coming online, that Trevor's been able to kind of throw himself into, probably to his own chagrin sometimes, but he's done a great job and we're on track with that project, hopefully by the end of this year, to have something automated or at least in a testing phase where we can start to plug in some, all right, I want to measure this Particular trigger and the dashboard can generate those reports for us as opposed to us having to go search for it never Program he's creating is proprietary to Harriman, right?

We're Providing we're we're looking at what some other cities have already done and trying to take it put our twist on it, but leveraging some of the interfaces with VersaTerm, which is their computer-aided dispatch, pulling it in. So yes, it will have our twist, but we are trying to see other people who have created the wheel.

We own the rights to it, yeah.

We're not the only city having these discussions, right? How do we better predict staffing models? And so there really is kind of a group effort going on, particularly with our very close partners in the Southwest.

We're measuring the same things. Yeah, what we're doing is unique, but I think at least what I'm hearing is a lot of people are looking at that and wanting to collaborate and copy. And you answer the question, you think by the end of the year it'll at least be semi-automated and have kind of,

That's the goal right now. We're on track for that, and a lot of that will depend on how much information or how much cooperation we can get from our service providers. Right.

That's fantastic. I mean, a couple years ago when we were really just laying out this, I call it a skeleton financial plan. I mean, this is... tens of times more advanced than what we set out at, so it's fantastic. So, I mean, the onus is on us now to match this with the funding sources and really map out that financial side of things, but I couldn't be happier with what you guys have done with this.

And really the intent is, you know, historically, city councils, you have to rely on you know, your hired police chief, I would stand up here and say, I need file officers. And you would say, why? And I would say, because I need them. We would say, we don't have the money. Right. And then I would say, find the money. And that's how we end up in some of these problems, right? What we're trying to do is better illustrate the need and match to your point, Councilman, to match that with a funding source. So that A, we're not spending money unnecessarily. B, we're leveraging technology and other efficiencies where we can to hopefully push off some of those staffing demands. and then C, to not make decisions in a vacuum, right? Understand that every decision we make today has impacts 15 years from now and make sure that we're keeping that in context as we have those discussions.

And all of this helps us plan for how to pay for it rather than being caught with the, we need this, right? You gotta figure out a way to pay for it. You gotta have a tax hearing where you're doing 150% tax increase or something. I heard something about that somewhere. It's probably a made-up number instead of talking about a four or five. But to me, that's the whole thing is if you have a good model that one, it can be adapted to the changes that you talked about and outlive all of us, right? And then we can match that with a predictable way to pay for it. We're gonna be in pretty good shape.

I do want to point out, so the PD, Chief Carr and Chief Tromper have done a great job on this. They're ahead of other departments, but I will say, I know a lot of our public works departments have been working on their own versions of this, and those managers are really looking, how do they, It's not as, they usually aren't in the same kind of realm as law enforcement. So they're, like usual, they're in the background working, but the other departments are working on it. And I'm trying to think how I want to bring that forward to you. They're using it as they're, when they're trying to make decisions, it's, PD had the ability because ICMA and the, Senate for Public Safety and the International Chiefs of Police have come up with kind of some of this early framework on the first 60-60-60. We added another 60. But we are working in other departments trying to come up with some metrics like this to say, well, how are we doing? How are we meeting? If there's a state mandate, what does that look like? So I do want to call out, I think everybody has taken that idea seriously. It's not just, well, we need people because we think, we have a gut feeling that says we need them. We're trying to have data behind, this is why we would need it. And put them in the right places in the right times.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

I would just also say it will be interesting to track it over a few years and maybe see if there's anything that you can simplify. I mean, I'm counting like more than 20 metrics here, right? Probably more than that. And maybe you'll find that there's some of them that aren't as valuable indicators as others so you can simplify your model. But it's nice to be able to track. I mean, it's fun to see all the data and everything. I want to make sure that it's appropriate use of your time, too, and we get the biggest bang for your buck for how much time it's taking to input and collect.

Yeah. Well, to your point, this is what you hired me for, right, to help you make these decisions. And so when you say the time that it takes, yes, but this is why I'm here. I have other people who do the real police work, and they do a great job. It's been interesting over the last three years to watch the model kind of come to life. And to your point, it's been really cool to see, oh yeah, this is what we thought the metric would be. And that's exactly what it was. And in a lot of these cases where we're measuring these metrics and seeing the triggers come to fruition, the model's working exactly as it was designed, right? We always knew that we would have to kind of fine tune and adjust it as we get better data. which is to be expected, and three years from now we'll have a conversation about making it even more refined because of having, again, better data and better tools to measure that.

Thank you. I'm curious, in the three years of working with this model, was there anything that surprised you?

Not really surprised. Again, more of it was a confirmation that we're on the right track. So every decision that we've brought to relative to staffing in the last three years has been backed by empirical data. It fits into the model. And so really, again, more just a confirmation that we're on the right track. We're making small course corrections as we go, but the way that it was set up and designed, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do.

That's great.

Good news. All right, we'll be ready to repeat all this tomorrow night. Chair Greg Musil. Happy to.

Can I just push play? John will have the video. Explain what we're doing.

Chair Greg Musil. Motion to approve the amendment to the Harriman Police Department growth silo model for personnel staffing.

Chair Greg Musil. Motion by Jared. Second by Teddy. Jared. Yes. Chair Greg Musil. Teddy.

Yes.

Chair Greg Musil. Matt. Yes. Chair Greg Musil. Tara. Yes. Chair Greg Musil. And I'll vote yes as well. That motion carries. That brings us to the close of our meeting tonight. Future meetings tomorrow night we have two truth and taxations. one for the police at six, one for fire at seven. Next planning commission meeting will be on the 19th at seven o'clock. Our next city council meeting will be on the 26th at seven o'clock. Hungry Harriman every Monday out front here starting at five o'clock. We do have a senior bingo event coming up on Thursday at 10 a.m. That's at the new community center.

The new old building.

the newly remodeled old building, which is a great space. With that, I'll look for a motion to adjourn.

So moved. All in favor? Aye.

Thank you, everybody.