City Council - Regular Meeting

Special work session time and place is advertised. Our first order of business is the pledge of allegiance. Please stand and join us in rec 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.

Well, welcome one and all. Um, councelor President Clayberg and Councelor Forestman are not able to make it today, so they will uh receive excused absence unless they show up. In the meantime, our next order of business is citizen comments. This is an opportunity for citizens wishing to comment on the agenda or other items. Um except for those scheduled for public hearing as there may not be another opportunity to comment once the agenda item is addressed. You're encouraged to speak at this time. Please bring operational issues in advance of the mayor and consideration of others wishing to speak. Please submit your comments to three minutes. So I will open it up for assistance and comments. We just need your uh town of residence and your name. We don't need your physical address or anything like that. So, Koko, I know you want to say something. So, I might ask you if you could maybe come up from behind the chairs because we have to pick it up on these speakers. I don't know how well they work. So, it's a good spot.

Yeah, I'm not seeing clearly enough. Thank you.

Okay. Um, my name is Nicole Hummicker. I live in Lewon and I own the property just south of um so if you've looked at the agenda in the proposed map of the Elna group um I live my property is kind of between the high school property um and the city county line clear water canyon sellers that farm right there and we we've been kind of keeping track of the the Elna plans because we're right in the crosshairs of it all Um and here a few months ago they at one point had Preston Avenue which was literally our driveway um getting comes through which then we all agreed that that was not a good idea which was I'm grateful to see Preston removed from the map but um but Steuart is still on the map and that's what I'm here to speak on today. So, I'm asking that Steuart Avenue would be removed from the Elma map. And um just as a little history lesson for those of you that are unaware that we um so the history of that property right there, and this is a statement my mom really um wrote and read to um the engineers um on this project. I've kind of modified it a little bit now to be relevant to the current issue, but the history of that property has been it's been owned by my family since 1916 and it was designated by an ID um as an Idaho historical by the Idaho Historical Society as a century farm um in 2016, which is pretty cool. Um we currently own that. We're in the fourth generation of ownership on that land. My grandfather, Ralph Nichols, had many, many offers over the years to sell off chunks of that land um and was unwilling to any really consider any of them, but had a change of heart. When the tri partnership approached him, um that's

city of Lewon, of course, the Lewon School District and the Lewis Clark State College. He expressed an interest in developing that for a common good for the community. and that struck a cord with my grandfather. So, he made a reasonable offer to them. Um, uh, the amount of money that he felt that it would be worth to him. Um, turns out it was way under appraised value. Uh, but that was okay with him. It took the tribe partnership four years to get that money put together and in that time lapse um they were federally obligated to get an appraisal on that land and it um just just the part that was um purchased by the city alone it was appraised for almost $400,000 less than what he was paid for that which grandpa was okay with that. he said, "I'll leave this on the table and give that as a gift um in good faith because he believed in the project." And and actually in addition to that, beyond the money he left on the table to make this land deal go through for something that he believed in, um he also then when when the engineers realized that they needed to kind of make cease landers drive more of a a sloping curve rather than a a hard left, um he went ahead and and gave that land to y'all um to make that a more approachable approach for um buses. He did all of this with one contingency to vacate all the roads and alleyways coming into our property to protect us the future generations knowing that by having sold this to a community development project that it would put our what remained of our farm in the crosshairs of traffic essentially. So he basically said find a better way. There are other ways through and so um upon the sale of that property uh the contingencies to vacate all roads and alleyways

on that would affect our property that was accepted at a public hearing. Um it was recorded as a resolution. It was referenced in the um purchase agreements and the deed. I have a copy of it. I'm sure you guys you have it on record here. Um, of course, we're currently farming that property. It's home to three different families there. All in my It's all still owned by my family, so we have not sold any more of that property. Um, there are alternate options and you guys have some on your map, which is super cool. I think the Nespur Drive um option is one that wasn't on the original version, but now is on there and I think that's a great idea. um punching Stewart, you know, you'd think, oh well, it's right on the edge of our property, maybe not such a big deal. Um but honestly, we ask that you honor that resolution. Um find an alternate site for that access road. Um, and I think the way it's currently drawn, it's hard to tell whether it's really on our property line or slightly offset to the north of our property line. But regardless of whether it truly touches our property line or whether it's slightly offset to the north, um, Stuart was here's the two big reasons why this really does not work, I don't think. Um, and my family is behind this as well and supporting me here. Steuart was promised never to be extended. That was a contingency of the sale of that land. That is why you have that land now. Um my grandpa sold land to the tri partnership. The sale was contingent on vacating the streets and alleyways for Stewart. It was named specifically I think my grandma grandfather realized that by agreeing to sell the land for community use that our farm would be in those

crosshairs. Um, by bringing Steuart in, it's going to bring traffic closer into the heart of our our property. And even if you sidestep to avoid any imminent domain on our property, the difficulty, if you go and stand and look at that, if you go just slightly north, you basically go into our neighbor's property, which is a vista. If you box a Vista in on the north side, if they if not if, but when they choose to expand, the only way they could possibly expand is onto my property. So although by sidest stepping us, you may avoid the eminent domain onto us, but you thereby force a Vista to do it in the future, which is just not in good faith of the original contract. And so I think we have every reason to be objection objecting to this. And in the true spirit of eminent domain and the defense of it, there are three factors. Good faith, upholding promises made in an agreement, which we have that contingency of the sale signed by many. The lack of necessity. I don't I I can see why um the engineers have seen that that would be handy to have an access there, but truly I think many of the things they've come out with elsewhere on that map will help in their um goals and the historical value is the maybe the keystone last piece of that argument. um impacting the historical value of something is also a reason to not um you know do the imminent domain um acquisition of land or force in it. Um and you're an Idaho sentry farm that was designated in 2016. So I encourage you to try harder to find another way. Um thanks.

Thank you. Are there further citizens items? Please note that identifying an item as the next item does not require the city council to vote on that item. First item is item A, emergency management update. This annual program update provided by emergency management coordinator James Quack and James with me county. James, welcome. I will turn it over to you. Okay. I'm James uh the Nespress County Emergency Manager. I asked uh uh Mayor Johnson if we have this meeting moved a little bit closer to uh January at the beginning of the year so we can just have a recap of the previous year. We kind of been doing this previously in the late June July and so it it the information becomes a little less you know relevant at that point. So for uh so what we'd like to do next year is even give it a little bit closer to uh the January time. Um so for uh 2025 uh the I and the county engaged in uh 1 2 3 4 five exercises. Uh one was cyber security tabletop exercise with the um C CISA in the healthc care systems in the local area like St. Joseph. We did a functional exercise with the Bureau of Reclamation for Snake River activity on the Snake River. We did a tabletop exercise for a chlorine release with

pot. We did a functional exercise uh with uh NRC uh and those that Clearwater paper exercise was also a functional one because they notified stay calm. Then we did a full scale exercise with the Lewon airport on June 26 and that was a craftsman airplane and we had fire departments, local medical facilities um join in that. there was probably oh five or six agencies total. So Esper County and Aotan County have uh collaborated and combined to to make a a joint uh local emergency uh planning committee. So it's myself and Nick Bacon as the Sil County uh emergency manager. We have about 35 to 40 agencies in the valley uh that attend this quarterly and it's a great opportunity just to discuss plans and talk about issues that we have and uh it's been going very well so far. In addition to that, we've created a uh local training and exercise group because what we're running into is, you know, throughout the valley, we have, you know, the hospital, we have businesses like paper, we have uh Nick's office, my office that have a need to conduct exercises. Um, what we want to do is combine those as much as possible. That way, we're not doing quite as many if we don't need to. better to do a couple of big ones and involve more people than it is just kind of doing smaller ones more times throughout the year. So, as an emergency manager, I I continually do uh training through uh

FEMA website. 2025, I think I completed 40 plus training classes online. And I really encourage anybody that's in the business of emergency management to take these and uh they they give you a chance to learn what questions to ask along the way when you're writing plans and things of that nature. So for plans update as you know for 2025 we did uh renew and update our emergency operations plan which of course Lewis uh is a part of uh our multi-hazard mitigation plan was approved by FEMA in 2025 and that plan is good till 2030 and that plan in itself provides the the valley with the uh means to apply for grants At a federal level, we also have a continuity of operations and continuity of government plan that we updated in 2025. We have a catastrophic uh disaster response plan uh that we updated in 2025 and that will be good to 2030. And the one I'm currently working on is an emergency action plan for evacuation of the uh building, the courthouse in the event of a fire or an active threat or five or six other things that we identified uh to put in that. So just to kind of go a little further up to this point for 2026, we've had uh three local declarations. One was for the 17th December wind storm in 2025 which turned into a state and a federal declaration vote. That federal declaration was issued on April 10th. We

had a local declaration for the 11 through 13 January rainfall. Um and we did a local and there declaration. There's also a state declaration in place and we're also pursuing a federal declaration for that as well. And then of course, Governor Little did uh sign a state declaration for drought and all 44 counties in Idaho have the opportunity to take part in that. uh there's a a website, a phone number that people can call and what that does is give the county the ability to uh change water rights in some manner. Um we've also done one exercise so far and to this year we did one for cyber security and um we also participated in a uh exercise for elections like in the event of what would take place if an election was sabotaged in some. So um with that I currently have one two eight federal grants that we're currently managing. Some for the 2025 year have still not been funded even though We're pretty sure that they will be as soon as FEMA and DHS, Department of Homeland Security are funded completely and all those people are back through this process and in the declarations that are uh taking place. We are also have submitted requests um

to ELAC for $100,000 for the summit grade project. Um we have submitted a request for $50,000 to be reimbured at 50% rate for uh the flooding event in March. Um, we have made some requests for aggregate for the county to fix the county roads and our biggest one we're asking for 370,000 annual food elact and and state reimbursement in the event that we don't get a presidential declaration for this last. Anybody have any questions?

Thank you. change council questions. Um, when you were talking about your drills, um, did and you were talking about clear water paper, did you say that you also do it with the new owners of the tissue mill? So, on that particular drill, it was the uh um they only participated in the uh call to state. They were invited to the table talk uh portion of it. don't recall anybody uh showing up for it on that particular one. Maybe it was just some I believe their intent is to actively take part in all of them. Mhm.

And that's that's kind of the message that we're getting from folks that I deal with on the so far on the water paper. It's an important one. They they try to do it every year if they can. They're and they're actually getting very efficient at it. They're from where they've started just in 2024 when I first showed up to where they're at now. You know, they have their roles and responsibilities identified. They have their communications ironed out, have a systematic process for going through and and responding to that type of a incident. So, it's pretty encouraging to see that they're continuing to

And they have their own fire department, right? They do. Yes. Question clarification. Council picker says they who is they they have their own fire department, but not soft. As far as I know, there's only one fire department for that entire mill that they share. It's my understanding. as an employee of Clearwater Papers. Clarification for the record, that isn't a true statement. Hospital does not have their own fire department. They rely on Clear Water. The same department that's been there for, right? Same group of guys that's been there,

right? I think they have, you know, they're they're doing they're working towards being more collaborative, I think. So, I hope so. That's all right.

Thank you. on the the state declaration for drought. Does that only cover changing of of water rights or does it cover improvements in our public works area like improving our water storage capabilities? Anything of that nature that we could request money for? So this the drought declarations are one of the declarations that are kind of unlike the rest of them to a certain extent whether it be local or one that's generated by the state. That initial state declaration is to have the ability for local agencies to change the water rights as far as I know only. I can certainly research that out further for you, but at this time there's no real funding opportunities much like every other state declaration. It doesn't really come with a lot of funding sources, but I can certainly uh research that further. We haven't had a lot for the county. I think the last county one that I recall seeing was 2007 maybe uh where the county declared because it met a certain criteria Um, I did talk to our commissioners before this came out about declaring one because we kind of met the criteria and some of that is is how the National Weather Service reports the overall drought of the county. It goes to a D0 through a D5. If you have at least eight consecutive weeks of being in the D2, which is called a severe drought, uh then you certainly can take those actions if there's a need for you to uh change water rights. Um didn't need to do it because this came just a few days later. So is the one we're learning a little bit more about all the time because we just don't see it that often. Well, it seems

to me it could be a little more complex for our community because the the water that the city supplies, maybe Dustin, Director Johnson can speak to better, but what Lewon supplies from the river, so we're not as impacted. I guess that old intake system could get sanded out with the sandbar in theory, but I would think the higher risk is for Lloyd where they're going after potentially wells or springs or leg. I'm not an expert in it, but I and there would have to be some kind if water rights were going to change around, I think we'd have to partner with Lloyd in some way to help them more than our access. But that's probably accurate. They And again, it's just not one I I haven't been a part of a drought kind of exercise or real world declaration. So, um, sometimes it's a matter of working through it when it happens. I don't know that we'll see any changes with this one. I don't know that the county to this point would ask for anything, but you have the potential to do so now that it's

Councelor Forceman, did you have a question? I'm okay right now. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, counselor. I have a quick question, James, on the FEMA independent study. Um, could you just explain that a little bit more detail? Are all these classes that you have listed here? Are these just uh um stealth based type classes or is this something that is offered online? Where where are these happening? So in that interest

Yeah, absolutely. So FEMA does and this these are FEMA sponsored uh um classes and that's exactly right. It's independent study and they range anywhere from you know a couple of hours to maybe six or eight hours of uh credit. Um they do offer uh some certificates like the professional development course. Um for my position in the county, we actually wrote into the uh qualifications for it was the the um passing that professional development course as far as the training. Um anybody can go online. All you have to do is set up a and it's pretty simple to do. you set up a uh student ID number. You go to the website, take whatever course you'd like to. Occasionally, there'll be a prerequisite that kind of build on each other for some of these courses. Um, anything that's offered uh that you cannot do online, such as the um uh level three, 400 uh um you know, emergency response. have to be taught by a certified instructor. You have a certified instructor with you uh with Greg Wright Meer uh and I went through some of these classes with him and I know he's trying to uh continue that. There are agencies like local fire departments that sometimes have requirements for promotions I think even for their people to finish some of these. But anybody can go in and do um the basic courses all the way, you know, at at different levels. And I what I like about it, a it's free. Um I didn't ask for any additional money this last year for training uh for myself. I don't

generally go outside of my office as far as training goes. I try and do them online, conference calls, stuff like that. It's just kind of an additional expense that the county doesn't need. Thank you. Council, any other questions today? If not, James, thank you for coming over. I appreciate the work you're doing. You cover a lot of area. So, thank you. I know that if you need anything else, uh, please feel free to ask anytime. ISS will work with you directly or somebody else to update some of their changes with radio operations.

All right. Thank you, council. Next up, we have item B, East Louis and Transportation Network analysis. Update discussion on the proposed East Lewis and Transportation Network analysis plan. This is a discussion item. We have our city engineer Luke Anton with us here today. Luke, welcome. floor is yours.

Thank you, Mayor Council. Uh I'm just going to do a quick her introduction to our consultant and then let them take the floor from there. So, uh if council remembers, um back in, I think 24, we had some questions about a rightaway out in the Canyon Crest area, um council, uh ultimately elected to vacate that. Part of the um reasoning was well the rightway goes off the edge of a cliff and connects to a road that we're never going to make that connection. And so with that decision uh council also directed staff to go out and seek a consultant and then come back with a plan for how will right ofways be able to go across this area in a actually accomplishable way. And so with that direction uh we selected KDson as our consultant and they came on board and I believe have put together a good plan for that. Uh this plan is primarily to lay out right ofways across a broad spectrum of property. Uh will have a map for you to review. Uh you've also got it in the packets to define that those boundaries. uh and they have sought to I guess the point I'm trying to make is this is right of laying out right ofways across this property. It's not we're going to build this tomorrow. It's not um anything more than trying to help developers out know what they would need to do if they're going to develop and the type of property the city would be looking for. It also gives the city the ability to say, "You really do need to assign us this much right away or we won't be able to get our people into your development and out of your development in a way that makes sense." So, this analysis hopefully accomplishing that. With that, I'm going to turn it over to professionals and uh Lauren is here to

present. Uh she is with KDson and hi uh my name is Lauren Nel. I'm a senior engineer at KDson. Um actually born and raised in Louis Clark Valley and graduated from LHS. Um but then went down to PSU and now um an engineer for KDSON. Um brought along my colleague Wig Scott here from our Spokane office. All right. So just a little bit of an overview um of what Luke is saying about this plan. This is really just a blueprint of what the arterial and the collector roadway could look like out there. It really just establishes the rightway that you would need to reserve. However, this is a highle view plan. So, corridors may shift in the future as um the engineers kind of get out there in the ground and discover um what might work and what might not work. But as long as it still meets that connectivity and the traffic operations need that's needed for this area. Um, again, this is not a plan that's going to go out there and be done today or in 20 years probably. Um, this is a plan that just allows the city to be proactive instead of reactive as developers come to the table wanting to build out this area. So why now Keith corridor um like Bane 21st and Brighten they're already congested and so adding new trips from this development um in this entire area will put more and more strain on the system that we already have today. Um the emergency access is a big deal especially for that canyon crust that's already come up as an issue and so creating these redundancy redundant routes um will help with emergency access in the future as well. Um, we did a an analysis here of what would this property look like at full buildout and just by a medium scenario of assuming

about five uh units per acre, that's about 47 net new trips a day. Um, to give you a a look at that, a Bane Road ADT is 25,000. So, we are adding quite a few net new trips here. And so we're trying to figure out where are those net new trips going to go um and help the system operate safely, efficiently, and in a cost-effective manner. Um other plan advantages of getting this plan out now again is like I said the emergency services evacuation. Um it does help stimulate the economic growth if you have an idea of what that's going to look like out there that's more um amendable to developers coming into the area. it helps the utilities out um and their planning purposes for this area and minimizes the property impacts uh for potential new owners is that if you know that a road's going to go somewhere, you're not trying to destroy a house, a residence, or anything else in the future by laying out this right away now. And so, and realistically, it then makes it cheaper to plan ahead versus trying to um squeeze in a road later. So, who have we talked to? Um, we have had a lot of communication throughout this process. We've had three steering committee meetings with private land owners, private investors, public agencies. In fact, we just had our third one this morning. Um, and so we have been working with them to come up with these alignments to put input to comment. Um, we've also had individual meetings with several stakeholders. Um, we had with the private utility companies, we had it with EMS, we had it with LCSE and Lon School District. Um, we met with the winery as Koker said, um, and, uh, the Canyon Crest uh, HOA. And so we met with all of those individually and talked through their concerns and, um, adjusted our plan accordingly. And then finally, we will be reaching out to the public. Our open house is scheduled for May 12th at uh,

LHS. Um, so we encourage everyone to come by for that. Um so on the evaluation process we did start out with just a map and uh got my pencil out and started drawing some alignments. Uh just trying to draw around those uh ridges in there. Um quickly those map uh lines on drawing became 3D in a software where we are able to see um really that fatal flaw analysis is does it meet the project purpose? Is it impossible to build? What does that fill cut kind of look like? Um those alignments then carried forward into a more detailed evaluation criteria which I'll get into next. And then finally we've ended up with our preferred alignments. Again these aren't set in stone. Um they can shift uh as kind of needed as the engineers kind of get into the ground. So fatal flaw analysis um as Kra said um the Preston Avenue one was taken off. Um we want to be respectful of that and the deal on that. Um it also we took off Brighton Clark and the park connection. Um as well as the straightening out of Gun Club Road just for a couple different uh purposes of like I said not meeting the project purpose impossible to connect to unable uh to make uh uh the construction uh work in that area. So, I'll come back if there's any questions on this one is I think there's a little bit better map here that'll show this. So, one of the challenges that we had is just really the slope and the grade in this area. As we're all aware, this is Lindsy Creek Road. Um, and as you can kind of see, if you want to take that road right off um to connect to Lindsy Creek, there's a huge cliff right in the way. And so, it does make this really difficult to connect down to Lindsy Creek in this area. and um have and so that's why you'll see

that we have kind of a duplicate um redundant road to Lindsy Creek just because there is this big difference in elevation that does make it expensive and hard to get traffic down there. Um here's a little quick uh snippet of that 3D visualization. So again, this visualization we were able to get a lot of numbers out of as well. We were able to look at how long and how big the bridges and the culberts were. We are able to map vertical curves and horizontal curves, look at the earthwork, the cut and the fill um of all of these roads and really get a good estimate on how much this road is going to cost. Is it feasible to actually uh work into this area? The city standard for grade is 10%. Um we were able to keep everything under 12%. Uh to give you an idea, third grade is at 8% right now and eighth and ninth I believe it was is at 14% uh 15%. So we are kind of in that range of some of the grades that we do have today. I believe there's only two alignments that do have that steep of a grade um at that a little over 10%. The rest of them were below 10%. Um quick thing on traffic analysis. So again, probably not surprised, but this is from um a big data source where uh we can track track the origin and destination of trips in the area. And so you can see kind of this area already. They're really using Ryden, Thane, and Gun Club Road to get to the areas that they want to get to at first, which makes the that the critical lanes for this uh traffic is going to be this South Bridge way that I'll show you here in a second, um the 16th Avenue connection and Nesper Drive. Not only are these critical for the area that we are looking at, but it's also critical for the existing um area uh east orchards area. All right, scoring a lot of words. I'm going to briefly go through this. We had

six different categories, operations, land use, floodways, wetlands, um the cost, slope, and the grade. And we uh took those all on like a you can call it a scale of 0 to 5 and assigned it a point based off of how it operated in each of those. Traffic operations was weighted uh a little bit higher than all of the other ones just because we don't want to go out and say build something and predict something that's not even going to work in the end. All right, here's the fun map. This is what we're all looking for. So here's our prioritized alignment. Um the Is there lo? Oh, look at that. All right. Sorry. Um, so this right here is South Ridge Way that runs along up and down road. It connects into here at 14th Avenue um, right by All Saints. Um, and this is what we are seeing as the priority arterial, probably about four lanes um, in the, uh, future is going to be needed. The rest of these connections here are um, um, are collectors. So, we're looking at about two lanes for the rest of these connections. The connections in yellow are what has ranked the highest based of our analysis for priority to be able to get the connection through um and the traffic. And so that is South Ridgeway and the extension of Nespur Drive. Um other critical connections um are is the connection of 16th Avenue and Cecil Anders Way. Um this helps provide the uh connection to uh both LCSSE and LHS and taking out that 10th and uh thing um intersection for right now. So I'm helping release the congestion there. So um I guess from that I will pause for any questions. I know that's a lot of information. Yeah,

I'm just curious. You know, one of our big concerns was the Canyon Crest area um and giving up that Brightiden that we talked about earlier and even the Warner um still even by adding that 17th it puts everybody in Canyon Crest right on Murell right there. So to me it seems like those one of those would be extremely important.

Yeah, of course. Um I think that they would they are definitely important and they're important for a lot more of the Canyon Crest crowd. Um this study really and I don't have the little thing here anywhere. This study encompasses that entire east um orchards one from 8th Avenue on the top of your screen there all the way down to Warner. And so we're talking the study like a lot bigger area. And so when the calculations kind of came through it is not as prioritized. um because it does not have as big of impact on the rest of the area. It just is kind of a smaller area that it really makes a difference for. So um those are a right now a low priority. It does not mean that they won't happen. It does not mean that we're not trying to make it happen or the city not trying to make it happen. It just means in the grand scheme of things um that it's not as um helpful for all of the traffic in this area. question.

Yeah. So, the reasoning of dumping South Ridge into I can't remember what that little street is. Silica. Yeah. I mean,

yes, great question. Um, we don't have a slide on this, I don't think, but there are three alternatives um that go into uh South Ridge Way here that we looked at. This is just one of the alternatives. the actual the other two alternatives is stopping South Ridgeway at Gun Club and having people take Gun Club into Lindsy Creek. Um the other one is slowly getting South Ridge to um go down to uh Lindsy Creek in the area because it's a lot flatter. It scored a little lower just because you do have to cross some flood lanes with the creek. Um but that would put South Creek kind of meeting in with Lindsy Creek and so then we could already use that existing main intersection um that is there today. So that is definitely um an alternative that is in the plan. There's so we just came up with three different look for that. Great point.

Another question. Yeah, go for it. So, you don't happen to have a map that shows how much of that is private property that all those roads go through? Right now, I believe it's all of it. If not, um there might be a little bit on South Ridgeway by 8 it that is already dedicated, but the rest of it is all private property at this time. We are not proposing to go out and build these roads. This is merely just for the city to have a plan so that when and if a developer comes and says, "Hey, I want to build this subdivision right here." the city can say, "Hey, we have this plan. This is how we want you to structure your road network um as that this will be most efficient as we build out." And so instead of the developer for the city, so we're most of the land owners there like

Ber owns a lot of that that you're Yep. We met with them today too. Yep.

Any other questions? another one. So, the citizen comment, that's that section, just that little Stewart Avenue section. Yes. So, we originally had Stewart Avenue going straight across. Um and after our meeting, um we wanted to honor that agreement and so we took Stewart Avenue and we moved it off their land there and put in that curve um and a little bit of a longer bridge over um the um land there and and connect it into the Cecil. So we did avoid the land um just to make sure that we Yeah.

Are you aware of any future um projects the county has along the intersection of Lindsay Kraken Gun Club or Lindsay Kraken Lway.

Yeah. So, they did a safety study few years ago and um they're looking at options for how Gun Clubs turns into Lindsy Creek and how that way turn connect next to Lindsy Creek Road. Um, but this study wasn't, you know, going quite that granular. It was primarily focused on how would we get traffic into and out of this area. This plan would have to um go through both the city and the county there and all of their plans as well. So there would have to be some mitig mitigation in the future to um look at how that plan would interact with any of their future plans. Um I will say fun fact on this too, we did look at both cut and fill slope and bridges in all these locations. Um there's only two locations that we found the bridge to be actually more cost effective than the cut and fill slope and that is on Stewart Avenue as well as South Ridge. um right by 14th uh there. And so those are the only two locations for bridges. Um the rest of them are cut fill on roads. Any other questions on this?

Questions counselor councelorsman question?

All right. So just to kind of wrap up here. So, how this plan will be implemented. Um, all the planning documents will need to be updated to include these corridors for the rideway preservation. Again, not building this. It's just to help uh respond to the demand um of development in the area. So, there will need to be coordination between the city and the county um to get these roads on all of the um according documents. And then finally, we plan to have a draft plan here in May, public open house May 12th at LHS. Um, and then we will have a final plan in June. Um, hoping to ask for city council adoption questions to get away. We got

You got me like I'm not going anywhere. So Thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right. DC. Okay. Okay. Council. Next we have item C. City center standard drawings and modifications to standards for public works construction. Introduction review of the updated city center drawings and modifications to the item of standards for public works construction. an action item and we have our city engineer Luke Anthony here. Luke, welcome. Please introduce yourself for the record.

Thank you, Mayor Council. Luke Anton, city engineer with the Louis. And I don't have a whole presentation um for you. Just going to take you through kind of what we did with the standards and uh show you what the public could see as they were taking a look at these things. So, um, the standards were up for public comment between March 6th and April 6th, and I will show you that website. Um, this was this is a website uh super easy to get to. In fact, let's just uh show you how easy it was to get to. If you type in city of uh the leg, sorry, Leon Standard drawings, do a search. Uh the second link to come up is the update and you can click that and there we are at the website that we set up to deal with that. And so the goal for this update is to establish a set set of standards for the city of Lewon, which we've been actually operating underneath for a while. This would just get it into code is the is the goal. Um, and it also sets up a standard set of specifications, modifications to the Idaho standard for public works construction, the ISPWC. And what that does is it allows us to have a stronger foundation for when we enter conversations with developers who maybe have built a different way somewhere else. And when they come here, we have reasons for why we want to build a certain way. Now, we're able to stand on that. Uh review my notes quick. The overall goal is to improve clarity,

ensure consistency in design and construction, and support efficient project delivery for both capital projects and private development. So with that, let's jump into my favorite part, which is the actual documents. So if you clicked on construction standard drawings on the website I can make this a little

um so one of the documents right at the top is a sideby-side comparison of the current standards with the up standard and already opened that. So here it is and as folks scroll through, they could see all of the changes we made. Um, and I'm just going to highlight a couple of them just because well, unless anyone has did anyone look at it and go, I really want to know why they changed this. You know, I was afraid of that. So, I'm going to um just highlight a couple of these because I feel like if I spent this many months uh in this that you guys should have to feel some of my pain. So, um, right here we've got, so this is a standard drawing with one dashboard, uh, and the old drawing had labeled in here, uh, 3/4 in minus, uh, ITD spec, four or 5/8 wash spec. Uh, and that was great function for a lot of years. Um, as we were looking at it, we went, you know what, it's a lot cleaner just to say ISPWC type one. um and let the consultant use that or the consultant or the contractor. So that spec encompasses both of these specs. It's basically the same gradation curve. It's just now we call it one thing instead. And it makes it feel a little bit more like our own. That was one example I had. Let's see. Let's see if we can get to dash. Almost there. So 2-12 be able to see scrolling a little bit. The drawing not working for me. So the drawing, you can't really see it. This says 4T 6 in. And it calls it out right there.

That's the old drawing. The new drawing shows 5 ft from that same dimension. The reason we had to do that is federal regulation shifted. We are no longer allowed to count the top back of the curve, this 6 in right here as part of our ADA requirement. And so we now instead of having 4' 6 in plus 6 in on the old drawing, we have 5T minimum sidewalk, not including the top of the So this is the type of adjustments we've made. Um there's really not anything more exciting than that. I wish there was. Uh but we've, you know, these these standards have stood Lewon in goodstead for a long time and so we just slightly updated them to match uh new plans, federal guidance, things like that. Um and updated construction practices, I guess you would say. That takes us through the drawings. Um the modifications to the ISPWC. I'm just going to scroll down here. I remember right. And if my notes are right, it was around page 25. So these modifications uh show contractors, developers, engineers kind of what we expect on Lewon project. Uh this is an example of probably our biggest revision. We created a whole new section. So our modifications now create a new section and we put in section 405. So if you went to the ISPWC that's its own document and you flipped through you would not find section 405. No no no section 405 there. We are adding it as part of our documents to that document.

And we added this section a package type PRV station. We've used this spec now on I think two different development projects successfully. It worked really well for us. Uh and so our water division said, "Hey, since this is something we're coming into regularly, Lewon's, as you all know, was pretty much built on a hill." So, uh, a packaged a pressure reducing valve. That's the PRV pressure reducing valve. This makes good sense for us because then everybody knows, okay, if I have to put in a PRV, I'm coming in, I know I've got to build it this way. And so, they can do that calculation on their own without ever having to ask us, what do you guys want? We're telling them Let's see. The last thing I will comment is the standards for development project certification. So these standards are pro are another probably the biggest change that we're making and this is incorporating kind of our our standard practices in how we interact with developers already but we're making it a lot more clear and we're also giving them some requirements as far as their oversight of their own project. A lot of times our staff ends up handholding the developer through the process because they don't have adequate staff hired on their own. And so we are saying, "Okay, it's no longer our responsibility to handhold you. You're going to have your own consultant. They're going to do the bulk of the work and they're just going to tell us, prove to us that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing." And so that's what this document accomplishes. It provides some clarifications, some basic like here's what we need before you do certain things. That's what this list is. requirements for certification if they are let's find a fun putting in

a water man here are things that we expect them to accomplish and so we provided that lined out in a bulleted list just makes it a lot cleaner a lot more straightforward and then I don't have all of you should have had a sheet that looked like this in your packets um this was the public comments log. So, all of the public comments we received, we put into a spreadsheet so that you could see it. Hopefully, you all had an opportunity to read through that. There's nothing shocking in here. My favorite one is uh the top one where someone said, "I think having standards is a good idea, but don't turn us into Spokane." Right? Which I thought that was a great comment. Um and so staff's response was just, you know, noted. Thank you very much for your feedback and uh and for your appreciation for those as it is. Uh these standards aren't designed to put us on on a different path. It's more uh just to streamline the development process and make sure everyone is on the same page. Some of the others weren't really applicable and then as part of this staff had some comments where we kind of had collected comments going, you know, this would be a good time to get them in. So, we changed a few things as well. Uh added a couple of notes. We had missed a 5 foot wide sidewalk change and so we were like, hey, we're going to incorporate that as part of this uh and things like that. So, and then also changing uh from routing the seam inside of manholes to using mastic on the seams. All extremely stimulating stuff, I know, but that's the type of changes that we needed to make just to get ourselves current. Uh, with that, were there any questions on the public comment log or if you guys see anything on here that

all straightforward? Glad to hear it. Uh, the final piece that was in your packet was the standard drawings revisions list. I already highlighted out of uh this document a couple of the this document um the changes that were made. So this list, this spreadsheet just provided you the opportunity to go through and read each of the, you know, which of the standard drawings there were and all of the revisions that we made to them. So a complete comprehensive list. There's no you have interest in them or questions about them. I'd be happy to answer. Not everyone enjoys specs as much as I do. So I'll move on. Uh, with that, I'm open to any questions or other considerations council has as we look at I think uh, currently there there's an ordinance scheduled to be on the agenda for the 27th to bring to council for the first reading where it essentially just adopts uh, the standards that everyone had an opportunity to look through on this website. Uh, as well as Yeah. on this website. Um, and here's those other two documents that I was showing you as well. So, everyone had an opportunity to review and comment. We didn't receive a whole lot. Uh, we even put on a link here to current standards just in case people got confused, they could back the the standards that are we're currently operating under

question. So, I you mentioned a lot of them that you added some requirements. So, how much effort was put into helping the contractor or making the process easier for them or more inviting than more strict? But seems stricter some of the things you put on there.

Uh so it's kind of like uh providing boundaries for in any part of your life, right? Sometimes having clearly defined boundaries helps things be a lot more smooth as you just walk forward. So it might come across as more strict. I'd like to think of it as we are just simply clearly defining here's how we do business and here's what the expectations are. Because what we found is in places where it's vague, they think they can do one thing and we say well actually you have to do it this way and then they're trying to their their mode of doing something mid project. Now we're telling them up front, here's everything you can expect. We're not, you know, we're not concealing anything. Um, and it should be simpler for them because they won't have to be changing tid project.

And I think it might be um one of the I was at a contractor's meeting and one of the biggest things they brought up was it was there was a lot of vague stuff depending on who you talked to, the answer you got. Yeah. Um hopefully this will clarify a lot of that. Another question.

So thanks. Um, as far as you know, keeping us from becoming Spokane to the person's point, the the way that I would think we achieve that is with a good feedback loop on this kind of stuff, which is I mean, I'm not going to give you great feedback on something like this. I don't understand a good deal of it. So I wouldn't know what to where to start if something is overly complicated or just doesn't make sense for the way developers develop or

so what is the feedback loop do when you when your guys go out and they say yeah you're meeting the standard or do you ask them questions? Do you have a card they fill out? like what was the toughest part of of dealing with Lewon? Like how do we get that actively get that feedback?

Yeah. So, well, this was this was one way that we really really hoped to get quality feedback. We sent this as an email out to everyone that we had in our email list as far as developers, contractors, home builders, everyone we could think of, right? Send out a whole bunch of emails saying, "Hey, these standards are up. You guys work with them. give us feedback. You saw what we got. Um we also as part of our um development review committee have begun, this is community development has made us uh outreach. So Shannon's group has uh began sending sending out surveys of hey how did things work? How was it? Uh and the couple we've gotten back uh have been from out of town developers and they've been super pleased with the process. And so it kind of those are the ways we're seeking input. I we also get input from contractors, right? When our inspector shows up on site and says that's not how we do it, we get an earful. But a lot of times that's because they're not doing it the way we've told them to. And so you kind of have to balance that feedback, right? If if there's a constant friction in an area um then some of these standards will help with that because there are a few areas where consistently contractors have misunderstood and some of these documents will clarify those for them into the future. So the engineers will get from our standards into their drawings and say this is how it needs to be done and then hopefully that will help clear up some confusion. And I mean most of them have my number or um my staff's number and we get calls regularly saying really do we have to do it this way and we will have that conversation of variance and in fact that's something else

document those kind of things when there's a contractor developer saying I we should do it this way or those kind of conversations do we put in an incident or things saying you have this concern with this So then we can trend them over time. A lot of concerns with this particular process or we need to rethink. Um I would not say we're actively tracking like we don't have a system if that's your question. Yeah.

Right now it's email interactions or phone call interactions and it's very inner lines. These are the problem. Uh one last highlight uh as we have that conversation with standards the the standards themselves do make allowance for deviations from them. It just has to be a formal process, right? It's not like you can say, "Well, I deviated from it and it's okay." No, no, no, no. Like, you have to tell us in writing, "We're we don't want to use this. Here's why." And then I make a judgment call and make a recommendation to Justin and see what he thinks. And then we'll make a determination on should we deviate or should we not. Is this in is this in the best interest of the public and the developer or is it just in the best interest of the developer and it's going to hurt the public, right? So, we go we'll have that conversation with them and and go through it. So, there is a is a process if because our standards aren't perfect um and they don't cover every scenario. So, if there's a different scenario that comes up, they have the opportunity to inform us this doesn't work for me, here's why. And then we can have that conversation on what to do about it. So question, you updated all these drawings. So if you compare them, if a contractor go here, a Sen County, Moscow, Celane, are everywhere they go, are they completely different standards?

Not completely different. So um I referenced the ISPWC a couple of times. So the ISBWC has all of their own standard drawings in that document. And so our drawings um take those and either call out more specifically what we want um or uh if the if the ISPWC doesn't actually cover it, then we supplement with our stuff to say where the ISPWC is silent, here's how we think you should do it. I'm not intimately familiar with Moscow or Corane or any of those, you know, their their own special modifications. Uh but from conversations with contractors, developers, our own uh field crews who have worked, you know, extensively in the field, um these are the standards that have been developed over time. And I think they're called standard for a reason. They're not they're not anything that's way out there for the most part.

They're common. They're not Louis and special. Well, some of them are Lewon special because I mean if you look at the topography of Lewon versus say Moscow or um lane we're quite a bit different and so our standards have to address our specific location and how our systems developed right so how our transportation network has developed I I don't think anyone else is going to have a 20 foot wide or portrait section in their standard drum. because they don't need to, right? An orchard section isn't something that most people have. Nobody wants a 20 foot standard standard roadway as part of your your network. And so because of the way Leon developed, we have them and we work with them. And so we have a standard section for them. That's a that's one example of something that would be different.

Thanks. Well, I have a couple comments, questions. Um, so I presume you're continuing to accept public comment.

Yeah. So, we'll take public comment anytime. Uh, we're done making revisions unless council specifically requests something from me because I want the document that you have in your packet to be what you're approving next week. So, I'm not unless council saw a red flag and really want something changed, my hope is to present the same document to you next week in the with the ordinance. Um, and so that's that's a a partial answer. The rest of the answer is we always take public comment. If there's something significantly wrong with the drawings, we'll we'll take a comment on that. Uh, I have a file book of past standard drawings, current standard drawings, and proposed standard drawings in my office, and I'm always making notes in there if like there's a good idea for a change in the future. Some of those I've already got written down. I didn't have time to update them with this um update. So, they're they're still in there.

And how many comments did we receive overall? Uh, so from the public, we received four total comments. And uh like I said, only really one of them was super applicable. And then staff provided five comments and I pretty well covered those. And how long did you accept public comment? Uh 30 days. 30 days. So we had four comments.

Um okay. So then um my last question or comment on this is because you went over it quickly, but I think there's real value to it. When you talk about the inspectors and their engineers and if they uh design something or prove it, are you saying then that they're going to be doing the inspection in the field and signing off on those? And if so, that that's a change in operations and there should be some savings for both of us for the contractor and for the city.

Yeah. So currently it's not super clear in our paperwork of who's supposed to inspect and make sure that it's built correctly. Um these standards really make that clear. And yes, the the new inspection regime for any underground construction is that the developer would be pro the developer's engineer would have to provide their own inspector to verify that it's being built for the project. This is important. cut down some of that confusion and cost when there's mistakes made.

Currently, we have currently we have one city inspector for all development projects. Um, and that's not sustainable. It's not functional. We've had experiences where our guy wasn't there and it was in the ground incorrectly and we figure it out later and then the developer has to go it back out and try again because they did it wrong and they didn't know they were doing it wrong at the time. So this should help a lot with that. It will I think it will actually reduce overall cost to the developer even though they have to contract more upfront. I think it will save them in reconstruction cost for doing things wrong.

What about just uh people trying to update their property or doing little projects? Are they still going to have to hire hire outside inspection help? Uh, generally are you talking like a single lot development? You No, if you're just if you're just like building a porch or something, any sort of building Oh, like a like if it was an actual building project. Yeah.

So, these standards cover I'm trying to think before I say this. I don't know that there's any of these standards that address circumstances outside the right so or like a commercial development where they're installing public infrastructure. So these standards are primarily to cover the installation of public infrastructure. So if you're adding a porch onto your house, yeah, I as city engineer do not have a strong care about that. I'm happy for you, but I don't I'm not going to try to regulate it. Um that's more through the building official and you know just safe building practices that community development.

Thank you. So I think councelor Speckleer was getting to this to an extent too and it it's how do we how do we make development more inviting in my opinion. So what's our what's our welcome letter so to speak? What's our hey here's our standards here's the easy way to go through it. you were showing a document earlier it looked like that was that walked them through that a little bit but have we made any improvements in that area or do we think there's any improvements that need to be made with I would say we could probably always make improvements um these these standard updates are a really good step in the right direction um yeah we were talking about that document you just mentioned this one

where uh you know we kind this is this is in a in in effect a letter that says if you're going to develop here's the expectations so it's really clear on what would need to be laid out this document I'm sure I'll pro I may be back next year here's the stuff we learned with it right um but for the moment this is a really good step in the right direction I don't know that we necessarily have like a like a a welcome letter um the city website probably as good as we get, which is where as a consultant I always went if I was going to construction for the design in a city. I'd go to their website and I'd look at their standards and I try to find out what are they doing. So if I

I guess in your opinion with that said, is ours easy to find? Does it flow right with what you would expect?

Um, yes. to council councelor Spickle Meer's point earlier, we're not the exact same as everyone else, but we have all the information here for you to dig into. So, you know, if you went to our current website, you would have access to all of these things. You know, what our inspection checklist looks like, the general standards and such. We're just with some of these documents trying to make it more clear. Thank you. All righty. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that very much. This will come back to us council soon. So, uh, as engineer Antonet uh showed us, it is online. So, if you want to take a look at those and um if you have any questions that are left unanswered and bring those to the council on that Monday hearing otherwise uh first reading should be pretty straightforward for us. Council. Next up, item B, on city properties. Continue discussion of unused city properties as requested by councelor January 26, 2026 and March 2nd, 2026 city council meetings. And so with this, I'm going to turn over to councelor. Um, just as a followup on it, I guess um I think the mayor you had said you would you and park would identify a property or one or two that may be candidates for this discussion. Was there something identified that we could review?

So, the one that I had in mind, come to find out is um right away and that is on 8th um 8th Street up here where no on 17th over there and 11th Avenue on the the northeast corner. I thought it's a full lot there and that's actually right away. The whole thing.

Yeah. And so there's two lots there that is right away. So I was informed by the city surveyor that we can't sell those but we can give them away. So I don't think it's our best interest to do that. So I went to plan B, C, D, and E. And plan B is to talk about credit park up here because we've looked at that previously as a potential for surplus and the adjacent land owner was interested in that. Not a guarantee that that pressure would get that property. Then we have a couple of others that I discussed with our um our direct director who also enters our facilities and we looked at some properties in and around a street, the veterans home in Modi Park and of course we have um some other very properties around the city too. So if you'd like to start with Trevor Park, I'm sure we can talk about that. Can I close on you director to take the lead on this and

share anything that you'd like to share with the council and um ask you to to introduce yourself for the record?

Justin Glenn, parks and recreation director. So, I'll just uh say that Trevor Park was already discussed prior to my arrival here. It went through the parks and recreation commission and they concurred in support of surplusing that property. So if we're looking for something to action on today um that I could take back and and put in the process for surplus that would be my number one recommendation is for Trevor Park. Currently it is just green space that we know small pergola right down on the road there. We don't reserve that or hold that or have any direct revenue associated. It might be a nice piece. So a question on that. That's the one next to the old binger building that was sold. Correct. Um the way it lays there is does it have any um commercial light? Could somebody build something on it that it would end up generating um a tax revenue for the state? I couldn't answer that for you. The only understanding I have is that the current owner of the building was interested in it to help support some additional practice squeeze and slow down. I think um I think for me, you know, the intent of selling new properties is to generate some income for the city. Sure.

And unlike councelor Cleleberg, um these are, you know, we're not making new property anymore. If it isn't going to gain us anything, all we have to do is mow it. I think there would be public uh value in it. Maybe whatever the way forward with some of that area is in that area might bring some value in that regard. But that's more of just a customer service.

It has Sorry, it has a gazebo, right? Or something like right down the middle there. That's one consideration. And the other is about 2acre lot right off of 8th Street on the west side across from Oai Park frontage space there. That would be a property we could probably look at knowing that those adjoining properties might have interest in procuring some of that extra. I think that would take me having to go back and work with a surveyor surveyor maybe look at parallel with that property. Is it the same property? Is it right next to the big church that's that's under the road?

I think it's cross circular church right across from like the vineyard entrance in that would be another property I think might better be here. So I guess for me um the value would be to figure out if it does have a um commercial value or we retail value if it doesn't it might be something that the uh veteran home it joins them correct just across the road just right across the street. So does their sign actually sit on it?

I don't believe it sits on I think we're just north of it. Just for a little history, the city donated the land where the current home is at. So they kept that piece. We have a lot of skin in the game. I don't know. Counselors be interested in looking at that one.

There's one to start. I'll just briefly director Glenn and I looked at the property with the south and west of the Northwest children's home down in the canyon there and that's kind of a tricky piece of property. It's almost like a lot life reserve down there. It pretty much is. Yes, there's acres there.

I don't know if there'd be value to surplusing that or not. Don't know that you'd get a lot of money, but there might be some value in keeping it. And then um there's um other properties of course that in the past but I don't think I don't think that we're looking at talking about those today. So example be I don't think we'll make a decision on that. You know, there's a lot of other questions out there that but this this these were kind of the lowhanging fruit. Um director, did you have any thoughts on um East Main? Yeah, that's I found that the 50-year lease with that about a third acre down there, but we have a current agreement with uh with the LC values resource center. So, I mean, if we were to try to surplus that, I think we'd try to whoever purchases it honors the least. They might have a builtin a renter, I guess.

So, even if they bought it, it's still they're a nonprofit. It wouldn't generate correct, right? We are making a dollar a year off it, aren't we? 100 bucks. It's a hundred bucks. Yeah. So I guess um you councelor Wright are you interested in the property on eight by the veterans home?

Uh I I'm not Is that the one? So when you're you're coming up eighth like you want to get on to is that this is the pine or this piece here parks right there. Veterans. Okay. Drain right now. There's a little bit of standing water in there. Slows down. When you're trying to get up to get on riding on it.

Can we mow it? We currently mow that.

Yeah. I mean the So trying to think about this. um because there there's a couple I guess the pros and cons of it. So we make 3.5 interest when we're when we've got our money sitting in and I could be off 3.5 but when we've got our money sitting in the Idaho investment if when we're holding on to land is that increasing more than 3.5% in value year-over-year? Um, in addition to the cost of keeping that land and not making any taxes off of it, I don't know what would if a business could operate on that land and generate revenue then it would make sense to do that maintain. Is there a way to determine if it's buildable? director, bro. You know,

well, if we're talking about the strip on a uh zoned R2, I'm looking at it on. And so, yes, I mean, we'd be looking at accesses. Um, see what would be allowed from a street. You have an alley behind it abuting all the homes to the west. And I think it has some topography in there as well. And so not sure how buildable that would be, but we can tell you what the um what would or would not be allowed in the R2 zone as is.

I think I guess for me I would like to find that out, you know, before we move on whether to sell or not. Council give more clear definition of it. What parts are the uses? It would take a massive amount of dirt and rock. What was that? It would take a massive amount rock to fill in that soil and pipe around the water so somebody can build on top of it. I'm gonna do that.

Just holds just hold. It's a drain probably never built on anything above the church. Everything along Eth Street was like they built fingerprints. Oh yeah. Bring it up. Build it up. whenever they did the parking lot outside of material looking at it from a dollar cost value return on investment better off in my opinion dispose of it be done with else do that

you get a fraction of the value understandable but don't have don't have the headache of the job either you So it's not generating revenue and it's an R2 now. Yep. How many how many homes can be planted in there? No. I have to go look at the square footage and then you know how many acres that is roughly? Yeah. Almost two and a half. Two and a half. So say you get two homes to the there's 5,000

more than that. Understandable conservative 5,000 with 5,000 repres something something more than what it is now going to buy and build on it. Yes, we do because of the question about So if we were to get a motion to declare it unusable, what would we call it? mean the address or honestly I don't know the answer to that parcel

talking about that piece and others or well that that piece in particular you know we wanted unusable by the city of excess how would you make the motion to identify that piece in particular.

Well, you could pull it out, but um I think um yes, the city owns it. Yes, they can um dispose of that. Um I probably would have some Well, prior to disposal, we'd want to look at the rightway. I presume we have the rightway all through that street, but if we don't, we'd want to dedicate that first and then find out what was left over because that's just a two lane through there and who knows what look like in the future. So there would be some work to do in the background to find out just how much of that ground is actually available and then how do you best present that for sale? You know, do you try to petition that up if you could, you know, so that the land owners if they went to owners to the west of that would have the option to extend their lots, you know, through the alley, pick that up or could be a separate parcel. I don't know. So, does the council then need to ask make a motion for to find out that information that

Well, I can ask I can do that work, but um if you want to move on a piece of property today, I think Trev, it's your best option. We didn't talk about the cemetery, but um don't know didn't bring it up either, but you know, somewhere down the road that's going to come up in the conversation again. Personally think that's a good candidate. I guess for me the river park property is really about it. I don't see a need to sell it. The Sorry, mayor. Councelor,

that's the property that you find to not need to sell is the one right next to Boyer that we just were talking about building. The old Boyer building. Is that right? Old Civic.

Yes. Um, the only value I see that we could have from selling that is I know we didn't, if I remember correctly, we didn't have a huge amount of people jumping down to buy that piece of property. I think partly because of the parking. So, if we were able to, and this this would be whether that person that owns the building or not gets that property to be able to extend into more parking, but it could make it if that building ever went for sale more um appeasing to those looking at it because it has more adequate parking and more possibilities. But again, that's we don't have a crystal ball to guarantee that owner would get that lot. But that's some value. I can see it getting rid of it.

You want a motion to access it? Yeah. I for the Trev park. I maybe a a motion for the city team to assess any risks of surplusing this property and if they don't find any then surplusing it. Then I I mean I would want more than just myself making the decision to surplus this property. Is there any risk or drawback or anything that our city staff concerns?

Mayor. Um so my only concern with that is the uproar the community might have with getting rid of the gazebo part. Um it's kind of a landmark and it's in a lot of pictures from from history. if there would be a way you could you could um divide that piece and maybe not sell that that corner off or make it some make it some way that you could sell it with the condition the gazebo kind of thing

it does so I guess you want to move on. Move on. All righty. No action today. Okay. Thank you, director. Council next we moved to item B, upcoming budget. Discussion about potential budget cuts as requested by councelor Foresman at the April 13, 2026 city council meeting. Councelor Forceman, I'm going to turn the floor over to you.

Uh yeah, I'll do my best. My chest isn't quite doing well with this talk that I have going. Um so if I was and I kind of been discussing just a way to make a more clear budget um and and intentions that we are expecting out of this budget. So, we've really wanted to present to staff on um areas that we can cut effectively uh in the budget and also just being aware of uh current negotiations we have um and how that's really going to affect our budget. Um and I think it's good to highlight that. So, I don't know, Beck Meer, if you have more to add um to this discussion because I know there was it was kind of a twofer us going into this and and negotiating it and my chest is going out. So, if you can add a little more to it, that would be uh great.

Okay. Yeah. Um, and part of it I guess with me is gone through I think this will be my fourth budget process going through and every time we start the budget process the mayor tells us that it's the council's budget. It's kind of finally soaking in that we never talk about it. Only time we talk about it is when we get down we get the displays from the different departments of what they want line items. Um, and then we get down to the the actual reading of, you know, each one, one, two, three. But I, so I looked it up and the council duties is to determine through the annual budget how much money is to be spent and for what and determine what taxes are to be levied. Um, and I think for the mayor and for the finance department and the rest of departments, they should know beforehand before they present us with one what our expectations are in the outcome instead of us sitting at the last or first, second or third reading and trying to hack away and, you know, get rid of a pickup or something that we really don't know what the department's need, what their needs and wants are. is, you know, is a new car more important than this other item? I just think it's grabbing a straws at the last second. So, I think if we let the mayor and the staff know ahead of time what our expectations are. Um, for instance, for myself, I have no expectation of increasing the tax. Um, if anything, decrease it. But it's just me. Um, I think we owe it to taxpayers. Um, every About every day I hear somebody commenting to me that the council and the mayor does nothing to do what the city wants, which is cut taxes or cause any kind of a budget cut. And frankly, in the years I've been here, we never

have. Um, we cut it at the very end to try not to increase it. Last year, we couldn't, but for my opinion, last year I I agreed, I approved it, and we had a significant increase. We had the 3% and we had the orgon tax and my thought was was getting preparing us for that if the bond passed we would be able to pay for the bond and it didn't pass. Um so you know is it fair to keep that money that the expectations will move on or what? That's why I wanted us to keep talking about the budget so maybe the mayor knows where we're coming from instead of the last day. I'm sure you're right.

Yeah. So, I I can tell you where one of my one of my concerns are, and I I don't have the data to back it up, so it's just anecdotal, but with the the public transit, almost every time I see one of those big vans, bus, half van, half bus, driving around, it's empty or it's got one or two people in it. And It just seems like a a big expense if it's not being used. And how do we deal with that? Do we do we just say, you know, try and get agreement to cut the budget 25% for the public transit or try and change routes. But that's a concern to me and I think it's a concern to the public too when they see that empty and we paying for this. There's nobody using it or very few people use it. President.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, part of part of the deal with public transit is once you start taking federal money, which funds most of our public transit, got to play by the rules. And that's why you see buses running by every hour and may have only one or two people on. I mean, I've seen I've seen them both ways. I've seen them, you know, half full. I've seen them with no and I don't know how I get around it. You just get rid of the public transit system, rely on ride share or something. That's that's not your only choices. If you're going to have public transit, you have to offer the service. You have to offer a the dial ride. And it does cost all done, but it does cost a city. So I don't know if this is true or not. I think it is. But when the city started the public transit, it was because there was a company that was no longer handling it. They were bankrupt or I'm not sure. And the city took it over temporarily to build it up. Is that not the case?

No, they were screwing us. That was out of Moscow. And they rotate buses from the Moscow area down to here that needed new tires, needed oil change. in the city of Lewon was on paper that so it was kind of rotating their four broken down children down here so we could fix them and we decided that it was more church. Correct me if I'm wrong. You want me to speak about it?

Yeah. Okay. Jan Gro, community development director. Um, so in 2009, uh, Valley Transit was running the public transportation system and they were the loan contractor and so we were we the city when we became an urbanized area in 2003 from the 20 2000 census, we became the grantee. And so when you are the grantee, that means you get money directly to um your agency and you can either contract that out or you can take it in-house and the contracts kept getting more expensive and more expensive. And so in 2009 it was the decision of the city to take that in-house and I don't believe that we even hit their last contract proposal for 10 more years. And so it was never a temporary thing. Although you could say at any time, well, would we is it less expensive now to contract it and are there available contractors? And so that might be something to look at. The MOS also looked at doing regionalization of transit whereby you would combine the transit agencies. It's complicated because of state lines. Um but this area is the 5307 money that comes into this area is proportioned by um population on the Washington and the Idaho side. That money can be kind of put together and used on the Washington side. They have a sales tax that they're able to do. The Idaho side were not. Yeah. It took a long time for the city to catch up to what was proposed in 2009.

Yeah. Um but certainly so transit's under community development and certainly if if council was looking to um do service or wanted to look at anything uh we can we are happy to come and talk about it more in depth at a work session um and to tell you what kind of um sideboards we have to operate under with the federal funds and um because it's been explored over the years um and we could give you a greater understanding of really what public transportation is when we talk about reducing service let's say by 25% you're not actually getting a 25% savings. You're getting half or less savings because we get at least 50% um payback from the feds. You're just not asking for that much back. That makes sense.

Half of the 25% or more. Okay. Yeah. Mayor, thank you counselor. So, if I remember correctly, a lot of those public transportations are funded by grants. Am I correct in that? Yes. Um, what is the what is the percentage that the city really pays out of I guess the community development funding? 10% or less? I'm guessing it's at least 50%. In some cases, we can do 8020. So, we're paying 20%. What did we pay on that shelter over there?

On that shelter, it was anywhere I think that ended up being around 17%. How much? 17. 17. Capital we can we pay 20%, operating is 50%, some operating is 20%. Thank you. councelor.

Um I guess another issue for me is I would like to see the council or the city identify a project. We have three or four huge project we keep talking about. Um we have the um fire department, fire station, community park. We have still every issue on Main Street. Um we have $10 million supposedly of deferred maintenance on our buildings that I don't believe we finished with that. But when we take money in every year, I think currently we've been putting $2.2 million that goes into transportation fund um arterial something like that. But instead of just being at a fund, a slice fund or whatever you want to call it, I'd like to see it us identify something and achieve something. Um I know councelor Cleleberg would like it to happen for the fire station. Um and we're going to be discussing at another meeting, but um I would like to see that to you know us pick something and get something done. You know, we can put a check mark. We just need to keep kicking everything down the road. It's my thought.

I I think one other big highlight that we're really going to want to know coming into this budget session as a council is um after negotiations, what is our budget really going to look like? And if we did uh possibly go for a a decrease, um what kind of services would we need to cut into in order to even make that feasible? Uh it's I think we're looking at quite a bit of an increase with going through negotiations with different various groups. And so this is something as a council we're really going to have to decide on how we want that to impact our budget. I think that'd be good to have a future discussion to really deep dive into what that's going to look like. Oh, I had

all you had. That's it. So, the message is right. All right. Lean. Let's go. Lean the mayor. Counselor. I I just I guess area that too that I would like to try to go towards either uh staying the same or cutting if if feasible, but I was kind of curious if the rest of the council was kind of on the same thought or maybe they're maybe not at that point yet. Well, you can ask them, counselor.

All right. The rest of the council where you guys feel like your budget you want your budget to be because what's going to happen is that they're going to give us a proposed increase. Um and then when we come to that uh budget session, we can then as a council decide to accept that increase or lower it. And so if we kind of maybe have a better understanding for the staff at the beginning, I think that's going to make a lot of less confusion for the citizens because a lot of times they think that proposed increase is the real number. Um which it's not until the final reading. And so I'm hoping we can create some more clarity coming up on this budget session. Right.

Well, I can tell you from my perspective, um, you know, you never want to I never want to raise taxes, but I can certainly understand the the reason that it would have to be done. That said, the the ratio is what the levy ratio, is that what it is, Mr. Mayor? The levy rate or levy. Yeah, the levy levy rate. Um so that when we looked at that last year that was down we were the lowest since um 15 20 years ago maybe going further back than that if I recall correctly

the rate.

Yeah that rate. So if if we can outgrow the cost of uh you know the the 3% or 3.5% raises, the 10 10% 15% health insurance and liability insurance increases that we get some of the vendor increases. That's, you know, that's the ideal state in my opinion to be in. If we see something growing, you know, out of control in our government, we can try and shrink that down. You can shrink that down, but ideally you just don't want that increased tax impact on your citizens. You can find that happy balance. That's where I'm at.

So, it seems it would be really nice to uh keep the keep the budget the same. Um, but still we still have to increase just to cover the cost put towards the pipes in Main Street because that's what the citizens voted for. They didn't want to bond. It still has to be paid for some way.

Council my new kid on the block. I'm not about to raise taxes. Don't want to raise taxes. Do not want to increase spending. We need to make sure that what we service as a city to the citizens, they're getting a good value on their dollar because alluded to earlier daily. I hear some similar squalts about taxes being too high, not getting anything for the money. So, we're going to have to tighten our belts. We're going to have to make it work. Going to have to find a way forward that we can either have another revenue stream that's in addition to property taxes that can help fund the downtown water main project as council finally spoke to. We're going to have to budget it and do it. If the pipes are broke at the house, they're going to be fixed. Period. We have to spend the money. I got a dishwasher. I got to go. to work on right now a deferred me. So it's there as as as councelor spitmire said earlier at another city council meeting there's not one of us that are sitting here that said we going run on the platform of raising taxes and spending more. So, I've done my best all my life to be a man of the word. I plan on being a man of the word on this.

Thank you, councelor. Council President Claybury. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And we've been down this road. Well, with current council, um, sometimes I mean you you can say we're not going to raise property taxes, but depending on what the accessessibility of housing is, people end up paying more taxes. There's a whole lot we can do about that and that's driven by state via the county and u I don't want to pay any more taxes than anybody else. Um so those are the cars we deal with. I guess we can just we can do what we can and try and keep things at a minimum increases or whatever and see where we end up at in end of June, middle of July. Again, we can pick a we can pick a levy rate and we can always vote to reduce it. can't vote to increase it. Reading of the budget, council professor meer and I guess the response that council right I might agree with you. The only thing is is that this last year um even the county clerk we lucked out. You know, we raised but everything worked out like Cleber said that it didn't raise the taxes and it could be different. Could keep going down. Who knows? You know, I don't know. But to me, that's a real gamble to try to hope for that again. You know,

what what went down for my huh? What went down the property tax reduced a little bit everyone's property taxes mine did this year I saw $4 down

well I know that the levy's gone down about 15 plus years as councelor right talked about so um so I don't want to use the word luck in here we have professional staff that work these numbers very hard. They're very good at what they do. So, I'm going to back them up and I don't know what next year's going to hold. We won't know until customers come through. But, um we can certainly do our best to budget wisely, you know, and um we can cut fat. We start cutting the meat off the bone. It's going to be a different story, but that would be your decision ultimately. So, Thanks for calling me.

Another thing, when you're talking to people about their taxes and they're complaining about how high it is, just remind them that there was a there was a school levy that they voted for and a third of that is because of that. And it's not the city, it's it's the school bond they voted for. All right. Are we good, Council Forceman? Yeah. Thanks, Mayor. Sorry. And my chest is killing me. So I'm doing my best I can. All right, councelor Pickle. Are we good? All right. Thank you.

Thank you, council. Next, we move to Roman number five, unfinished new business. Um, first up is city council comments. Item A, comments should not be related to an item before the council or one that may come before the council in the foreseeable future. Limited comments, not discussion. Counselor's comments. Council right.

Thank you. So on Wednesday, April 22nd, so just a couple days here at 400 PM, the CI cemetery and urban forestry board will be meeting at the cemetery just outside the administrative building. We're going to have our meeting there and we're going to plant a tree as well. So come and see how trees are planted. That's all. Thank you, councelor. Mayor, councelor Horseman,

I just want to apologize again that I couldn't be in there in person. There's some virus going on at work and a couple people have already had to go home for it. So, I didn't really want to share that love with the rest of y'all. So, hopefully you stay healthy. Thank you, counselor, city boards and commission. So, they have some updates. Thank you, councelor Wright. Any other updates today? I do have council right.

Yeah. So, airport uh authority board, we had a meeting on the 15th and we reviewed the budget. There will also be there's going to be multiple meetings uh in this on this subject. The next meeting is tomorrow at 300 p.m. We'll also be going over the budget. Thank you, councelor Rice. Councelor Specmire. Thank you, Mayor. Um update. We had a parks and rec um commission meeting. Um I like the fact in it now we're getting some of the commission members are bringing in their own ideas. We aren't just sitting and reviewing u director Glenn's reports. Um we had one to follow up on that the train park train the condition of it. Um, I didn't get the name of the nonprofit group, but they were going to fund to have the train evaluated, see what it would cost to have it, um, updated, painted, things repaired on it. Um, so once I get that done, they'll bring it forward. I believe he said it was going to cost about $700 to get it evaluated. Um, then another commission member, I didn't write the name down, I'm sorry, brought up an idea of establishing a community gardens. Um, and so the commission's been looking at different areas that that might be feasible at. So I applaud them for stepping off the porch.

Council President Clever.

Um, yeah. So last Wednesday, the mayor and I wandered up to Moscow for the association out of cities meeting and uh actually got quite a bit of information. Reviewed the legislative session at some length in the morning. Uh we learned a lot about little tiny nuclear reactors which may be coming to your neighborhood pretty quick. You never know. Yeah, they're popping out from the nuclear lab down in Idaho Falls and it's kind of a big deal. Keep our eyes on that counselor. Next up, uh, mayor comments. I, um, I do have a question for the city clerk. Do you send out the department reports to all the council members

as well? Okay. So if you haven't seen it, click on that and you can read for each of the departments what's going on and there's pretty good uh summary of activities, you know, monthly and then year to date. So excuse me if you haven't made a practice of opening those up, pull them up and look at them and I think you'll get pretty good background on what's happening in some areas. Also, just a reminder that uh we are accepting applications for our appointment to the Lewon Airport Authority. uh that position we will get filled try to get filled by around the first of June so that person can begin their service probably the end of June I'm guessing um and then uh also just kind of a FYI before I share some information I went to the Lewon uh library board of directors meeting last week and they shared a couple of things that were kind of interesting one of them is that they are in the fax business, which you think you'd ever hear that word again, but um yes, they are in the fax business. So, if you have a fax to send to them or see if they'll do that. Uh then also, they're starting up notary services. So, that'll be good service for the public where they can go in there and certain things they can and can't do with the notary services, but I thought that was kind of interesting and fun to share. So, next item, the agenda topics if we have any. If not, we'll just keep moving. Good. Thank you. Our next order of business is executive session of Roman numeral six. So should I shall I read that all here?

Um one of the councils will make a motion with that language. Make a motion to go into executive session pursuant title code 74-206 brand one brand D to consider records that are exempt from disclosure that provided in check one title 74 ID code and brand F to communicate with legal council for the public agency to discuss the legal ramifications of and legal options for petting litigation or controversies not yet being litigated. imminently likely to be litigated.

Second. Thank you. to move my council president favor accept my council right uh to enter to executive session concern Idaho code 74-206 to consider records that are temper disclosures provided one title 74 code and sub to communicate with legal counsel with the public agency to discuss legal ramifications of legal options for family litigation or controversies not yet been litigated but likely been litigated attorney to know. We'll call vote. Mayor, you going to call that? We're going to call it. I can call it. Councelor, Council President Cleber. Hi. Councelor Strickle. Hi. Councelor Klein.

Hi. Councelor Wright. Hi. Councelor Mory. Hi. Councelor Forceman. Sorry. Hi. We can or

Thank you. Um, we'll now move to Roman numeral 6A, resolution 2026-22, considering approving a fourth amendment reated joint powers agreement establishing Lewon Nespers County Airport Authority. This is an action item. And with that, uh, council, I will throw it up for your questions or comments that you may have who wants to lead us off. Anybody? Okay. If there are no questions or comments, I would entertain a motion. First one, council, right?

I move to approve a fourth amended and restated joint powers agreement establishing the Lewon-SE first county airport authority resolution 2026-22.

It's been moved by councelor Rice, second by council president Clay to approve a fourth amended and restate a joint powers agreement establishing Lewon and Esper County Airport Authority resolution 2026-22. Is there further discussion? Okay. Uh hearing none. Cler Brock, I'm going to ask you to call a roll call on this, please. Council President Clever. Hi. Councelor Klein. Hi. Councelor Wright. Hi. Councelor Mory. Hi. Councelor Splier. Hi. Councelor Forsman. Hi.

Motion carries. Thank you, council. Council, I would uh a motion return. Second move by council president Kber, second by councelor to those in favor, please signify by saying I. Oppos. I. Pardon me. Councelor, we are turn. Thank you.