Municipal Council - Regular Meeting

Rich, before I start reading, do I need to cover this info, the online instructions?

No.

Okay, I didn't think so, but I felt like I should triple check.

It's supposed to be 70 degrees tomorrow.

I know. I know.

We will call to order the Logan Municipal Council Truth in Taxation meeting for August 11th, 2026. The time is six o'clock. We have a couple items on our agenda this morning, both related to the proposed tax increase. And the first one is a public hearing for resolution 26-19. And I'll let Rich Anderson, our finance director, run us through this.

Great. Thank you so much. There are a few items that we're required to cover prior to the public hearing, so I'll try to cover all of those. For those in the audience and online, this is the county provided combined advertisement. It is available on the back table if you'd like. It is also available on our website, on the front page of our website. Scroll down in about midway and you'll see this notes along with others. And what it does is it combines all entities who have proposed to raise their taxes. Some have already held their hearings, some have not. The only one that overlaps and only slightly in certain places is the Cache County School District, which proposed to raise their rate 37.10. All the other entities are separate cities, not overlapping with the city of Logan. The city of Logan, it's advertised to raise taxes by 22.95 proposed at least. So these are some other requirements. Actually, before I get that, I'll give just a little background as to how we got here. We've had several public hearings as we've discussed the budget and how we were going to accomplish all the things that we wanted to accomplish. Cache County passed Ordinance 2026-23, which reduced the Cache County general levy by approximately the same amount that the city is proposing to increase the Logan City general levy. The Cache County levy was for fire protection across all of Cache County. In other words, Logan City residents were paying into this levy, were paying property taxes, but not really seeing the benefit of fire protection because they were providing it to other places in the county. The county recognized this as something that they shouldn't be doing and proposed to reduce their levy by approximately $1.370 million. Logan City is proposing to increase our money by approximately the same amount. I'll go through what the purpose of that levy is for, but it's for fire protection largely. In other words, the net effect of Cache County reducing their levy and Logan City, if we do increase our levy, would be zero on the average homeowner. However, this effect is complicated by the fact that Cache County also increased their general levy in November of 2025, and that is showing up on the property tax notices that went out this year. This net zero effect is further complicated by valuation changes that are performed by the assessor's office. But the end result remains the same, that Cache County effectively reduced their tax rate by approximately the same amount that Logan City is proposing to increase our rate. The total value of the ad valorem tax revenue that would be generated by the proposed tax increase of Logan City is 1.360 million. This revenue will be used to pay for three things specifically. The first is to pay for the new Northwest Fire Station 73. for approximately $1,174,300. Two to hire a police officer one for $131,086. And lastly, to pay for increased street lighting expenses of $54,614 for a total amount of $1,360,000. The property tax increase would be approximately $59 on the average home. And the average home in Logan is $530,000. It would be approximately $59 per year and $108 on the average Logan business of the same valuation. And I believe I've covered all of the required disclosures prior to holding the public hearing. Is there any questions or any comments? Anything that I missed?

Questions for Rich at this time?

You did include the lighting, right? Yes. Thank you. I missed that.

to the controversial life, yes.

Rich, is it worth, I'm not sure there's an easy way to explain, but in terms of our citizens, those who do see an increase relative to what we were discussing a little bit ago, how some, can you explain that? Valuation? The valuation, yeah. Thank you.

Yeah, we talked about Keshe County reducing their levy and then they also increased their levy for other purposes. So they decreased it for fire purposes, but they increased it for other purposes. That was back in November of 2025 and it shows up this year. That's one thing that kind of makes it difficult to see the reduction in taxes and the increase on the Logan City levy. The second thing, and this is probably more important, is valuations. So Cache County reassesses approximately 20% of the properties in Logan every year. The problem, I don't think they have the capability of reassessing every property every year. It's just not physically possible. So they do it in kind of batches or areas or types. The problem with that is when they reassess one part of a city, the property taxes kind of shift to that part of the city. And that part of the city pays significantly more at times. Now, the other part of the city, maybe their taxes remain the same. Or potentially, because these ones went up so much, another part of the city could actually go down. For instance, my home was recessed. And my taxes are going up $300 roughly on my home unit loan. Well, the proportion that pertains to the tax increase is approximately $60 on my house, be it my taxes are going up $300. Why? Because my home was reassessed. Not because anything Logan City is doing, but because my home was reassessed. Now there's another individual, and he's welcome to pack up and get off.

I waved it at him. I brought my tax bill because I maybe had to rub it into Rich a little bit. this increase on my bill would have been $46.90. But my house hasn't been assessed since 2023, and my taxes this year are actually going down $37 less than they were last year. But in a year or two, my house will probably get reassessed. There's a concrete example right there. Yeah, mine is down $37 this year because of that assessment schedule.

Can I ask a tangential question? Sure. Some of the property that is in Logan City is in the cash county school district yes so that those properties will be affected by the large increase that cash county school district proposed and passed but our residents won't uh the logan city school district residents will not that is true and it's it's kind of in areas that are on the

Recently annexed. When we annexed those homes into Logan, they became part of Logan City, entitled All the Benefits of Logan City. However, they remain in the Cache County School District because that is where they were at the time. So that is difficult, and that is absolutely happening, and there are a certain number. It's a small number, but there are a certain number who are subject to both tax increases. So that's why I did want to just highlight They get some overlap there, but most others don't.

Can I ask a question? When they reassess the property, when the county reassesses the property, do they do it in chunks, like it's your whole neighborhood, or is it just random houses throughout? I think it's random. Is it random homes?

I mean, it's not random because they have a schedule for each house, but it's not a street at a time. I've got five properties downtown, and they reassessed one out of those five, and they're right on the same block, but they went up double.

They have other tools they use that I don't understand fully. Factoring is one and how that affects other homes. Periodic reassessment does make our tax law a little difficult to interpret because our tax law is meant to control how much Logan City gets. not necessarily how much individual homeowners pay in relation to one another. And that is difficult. But there's no perfect system. Prop 13 in California has its drawbacks, as I'm sure many other systems across the United States all do.

Any other questions for Rich before we open up for public hearing? OK. This is a public hearing. We're going to take public comment from those in the audience. And then we're going to take public comments from anyone online who would like to comment. And then after that, we will double check our email and see if there are any public comments. Is that an acceptable order to everyone? So this is a public hearing. If you would like to speak on resolution 26-19, which is the certified tax rate increase for Logan City, you're welcome to come to the microphone, state your name and your city of residence. And I will open the microphone.

Hi, my name is Larry Seeley. Did you say you have to be a resident?

No, I just asked if you'd state your city of residence, but you do not have to be a resident.

It's going to be North Logan. Is there a timer?

Yes. There's not. Oh, okay. There's not for...

Okay, so I understand and I appreciate your service, first off. We're all trying to do the best we can. I kind of feel like where the county reduced their taxes, that doesn't necessarily mean, because we weren't getting services for those apparently, or Logan wasn't getting services. And so this is a new tax increase for Logan. I'm curious for the fire department, There are impact fees when people build new housing. It also goes from agricultural use to businesses, to apartments, also to homes. And those bring in substantially more revenue. And so I'm curious how much of that should be being used for some of what this tax increase is. One thought that I had, down in Georgia, I went to an LDS church, and they built half of a church building. And the reason they did that, they built it in such a way that they could expand on that building as the membership increases in the area. And I'm curious if anyone has looked at maybe just tightening our belts a little bit and looking at it outside the box. I'm not sure where the new fire department would be located. I support the fire and the police. I appreciate what you do. I just want to make sure that we're taking metered steps instead of spending a lot. And one of the concerns I have, I saw that some of this money is earmarked for construction and equipping the firehouse. And I'm curious if that's something that could be financed longer term so that the tax increase doesn't have to be there. Or maybe after a few years, we can reduce taxes. But that doesn't seem to ever happen. The next thing I wanted to talk about is over the last 25 years, most years are substantial transfers from the water and the electric departments into the general fund. I'm a little concerned that the increase for the street lighting might end up just in the general fund. I know there's some added expenses for water and that in some years, but going forward, do we really need to increase these taxes if we're generating profits from either the water or the electricity departments? And another thought with the police department, I see off-road bikes, segways, mountain bikes that are purchased by the police department. In the general city of Logan motor pool, I see new cars constantly. Constituents, granted there are quite a few that have new cars. But I just want to make sure that we're being good stewards with the public's property. There are improvements that people want to do on their own homes. And you guys are taking the brunt of my feelings about the Couch County School District and some of these really large increases. And these increases, this is 22.95%. This is in perpetuity. I don't ever see that going down. And so I just hope that we're being good stewards and we're not causing undue burden on some of the community that could use the money. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Larry. Thank you. So here, my plan, if it's OK with the rest of the council, is I've written down your questions you have here. And we'll take all our comment in person and online. And then we'll circle back and answer those questions you had. Is that OK? Yeah, thanks. Thank you for your comments.

My name is Bonnie Hoth. And I do live in Milken in the Addams neighborhood. And I am seeking your support with courage and leadership to truly evaluate asking for increases. I think it's immoral for government entities to continue to raise taxes on citizens. Many citizens are struggling just to afford groceries and gas, housing and utilities, and other utilities, and many are on a fixed income. Particularly, I think we see that in Logan. And they're forced to live within a budget. Government should also try to live within a budget, or even under budget. Is there something wrong with coming in under budget? rather than having to spend every penny and beyond by saying, if we get matching funds, then it's only desirable that we have this additional money for things that we really do need. And so are they really necessary for survival? And do they simply expect taxpayers to pick up the balance for your consideration? So taking the courage to do that. If we look at some monies that are available by way of matching funds, both through state and federal, where did those matching funds come from in the first place? Weren't they paid by the taxpayers in the first place? So this seems like double-dipping on taxpayers to say, oh, yes, we're increasing taxes at this level because in order to get this matching funds, We need to be able to match those funds. So taxpayers are not an unlimited source of revenue. Families and businesses have to live within their means, and government should be expected to do the same. So the courage and leadership that I would like to sincerely, seriously is to evaluate and prioritize what those essential services are, eliminate unnecessary spending, and respect the people who paid the taxes in the first place, both local, state, and federal. Is it worth the cost? Thank you.

Thank you, Bonnie.

Hi, I'm Arlene Hall, and I'm really concerned about education, especially where I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But in my neighborhood, I live in the Adams area and there are, I know of at least 12 or more families that homeschool just because they don't like what's being taught in the schools. And within my little block, four out of five families are homeschooling because they don't like what's going on. So I'm a little concerned about what's going on in our education. I don't know why they don't go back to basics. That would be so important just to go back to basics and these people might send their kids back to school. The ones that aren't homeschooling are sending them to Challenger or somewhere else just because they don't like what's going on. We're spending between $12,000 per student per year. That's crazy, absolutely crazy, and we're not educating them really. Back in 1961, the USA was number one in education in the world. Now since 1962, we've dropped down to 36th or about 37th in education. Doesn't that tell you that something's wrong and it's not really money? Money isn't the problem.

Thank you, Arlene.

Guess I'll just follow behind there. So I'm Brett Roper. I'm from Logan. And again, so I came here to talk about streetlights, but I have five contexts first. And I think Rich talked a little bit about, you know, the budget's a lot more than just property taxes. Logan's budget in 2015 was $123.5 million. Logan's budget last year was $231.4 million. Based on those numbers, Logan's budgets increased almost twice inflation. If it had been an inflation, it would be $168 million that the budget would be instead of 231, so we're far above inflation for the entire budget. Population increased 7.4%, but part of what they get is increased sales tax from that, so that did not really fit in there that well. So most of the increase has been due to increased sales tax and charges for services. That's where most of the increased costs has come, and those are way, way above inflation. Thankfully, property tax isn't. It's below inflation. It's stayed below inflation. And it's the way it should be. The city should recognize that those of us with houses have seen big increases with charges for services. Just last year, 9-1-1, water flat fees, there's a whole bunch of electricity fees in the future. Houses don't just pay property taxes. Also, we are the people that buy the large goods. Last week, I bought a refrigerator. That's where big sales tax comes from. That's all from housing. And as Rich said, Logan City is not the only line in my property tax. You stated up front, and as you read it, it says the increase will basically be a replacement, not an increase. And for a lot of reasons you just discussed here, my bill was not a replacement. The $5 additional that would have come from electricity, which is basically you read the discussion, which is what I should have seen, that's not what I saw in my bill. I wasn't as lucky as Mike does. I understand how it works. Paying taxes are important. Funding for police, fire, parks and recreations are important. That's your job. You know how to do that well. I'll finally get back to the street light. Do a lot of important things, but keeping all the street lights on is not one of them. Safety is pointed to as a reason to drive through Logan now. A third of the houses have bright lights out in front of them. Drive at night to see people wearing reflective clothing and bikes with lights. Things have changed over the last two decades. People provide their own lights and door cameras. So the city can play a lesser role in safety on our streets. Our city has too many lights. You can see that every time you come into the valley. You look across from It's not like it used to be. It's bright, and it's not just the city. I recognize that. In my neighborhood, at least a third of the streetlights are redundant due to churches or other houses. We should keep the lights where we need them. There are certainly places we need streetlights, but we don't need them everywhere. We can get rid of them in some of the neighborhoods like ours. The city should strive for no net increase in streetlights, because if you build more, then you have to pay for the electricity to run it. We should be thinking about where the streetlights go. And again, I think that sort of mimicked what I heard over here. The city wants to really maintain flexibility in public supports for taxes. It needs to spend tax dollars on things that are important, not things that are just nice to have. Thanks.

Thank you, Brett.

Hi, my name is Marianne Clark and I didn't plan to do this. I thought we were coming for a different issue, but this has been on my mind for a long time and I'm a resident born and died in the wolf, Cache Valley girl. I love Cache Valley. I love Logan. We're residents of Logan. My concern is the deterioration of so many properties in Logan. So many properties are a blight and a lot of them are rentals, I know that. We live in what used to be a beautiful neighborhood and it seems like the old people die and then younger people come in and they don't want to keep up their properties and it hurts the whole neighborhood. I wish that there was a minimum standard, at least keep the weeds down below ankle length or something. And if property apartment owners own a property, I think it's prudent that they keep up that property for the sake of our city and how it looks. So that's my issue. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Seeing no one else from the audience, we'll look to online for comments. Do we have, I've been watching, do we have any that popped in online? Okay. Teresa, have there been any emails that have popped in?

I'll pause just one second to make sure.

Yeah, as I say, we're going to give it just a moment. Make sure no one online is jumping to it. And if anyone else in the room does want to speak before we close the comments. Okay. We will close the public hearing for resolution 2619 and we will bring it back to the council for discussion.

Did you want to go over the questions?

I have a list of questions, but I will leave it open to you guys if you have anything that you want to bring up in particular before I start hitting points that I've written down. You guys want me to dive in?

Yeah, I think that will help us.

Okay. Rick, most of these are going to be for you. Is that okay? Sure, of course. Are you okay if I just run through some of the questions that we had here so we make sure we're hitting them?

Absolutely.

And hopefully, I was trying to scribble quickly for some of you. Hopefully I get... some of these most of these um one of the questions larry asked was how much does growth add to our budget annually right when we're looking at annexed property built out property increase in property value because of a development obviously that brings money into the city is it enough to cover operations what does that look like annually can you give us a little bit of information on that so our general fund budget is 72 million that is a really big budget

with this property tax rate included, which is a significant property tax rate increase, with it included, it would be $4.6 million. I'm not great at math in public, but I'm thinking that's... Additional. Yeah, well, 4.6 is the total for property tax of the 72. So, yeah, I'm good at math. I think that's 5%. 5%. A little bit higher than 5%. Oh, 6.3, I was way off. That's 6.3 of our overall revenue. Now, that's not an insignificant source of revenue, but if you look at what 2% of 6% is, because that's where our growth rate is. I mean, we're talking 0.02, 0.001%. So it's clear that growth cannot pay, not from property tax at least, For additional services, now, if you look at sales tax sales taxes, a significant amount, it's 28Million of our overall budget of 72. that is very, very large. 8Million of that pertains to transit. That is a pass through. So, reduce it, but still 20Million dollars to the general fund. That is very significant. Sales tax comes from everybody who's shopping in Logan, not just Logan residents, not just additional Logan residents, but across the entire valley. And we welcome that. That's a significant source of revenue. The increase in sales tax does help us accomplish many of the purposes that we have as a city. It does help us add an occasional police officer. It does help us add wage increases. but it cannot support everything that we're going to do. And certainly not in five years, well, not in several years worth of growth could we pay for a fire station, an additional fire station with that money. Not when we have so many other unfunded needs. Now, most of that pertains to the next hearing that we'll have, but it relates to why we need to increase the tax rate because we have no other way of paying for a fire station. a new fire station in the northwest part of town that doesn't have a fire station. We have no other way of doing it other than through this property tax increase. And it is good timing. that cash county reduced that double taxation and we were able to propose this rate to the council because it's it's felt to a lesser degree on our citizens it certainly felt i recognize it's a property tax increase that's why we're advertising that's why we're going through this process but because of their decrease and our our increase of a slightly lower neighborhood as well

I mean, really, heaven forbid that someone's house went up in flames while that fire was happening because you couldn't, you didn't have the resources or the humans to do all of it.

I'm going to keep them coming for a minute. Is that okay?

Yeah, please.

One of the other questions from Larry was why not bond for the fire department or the fire station instead of raise taxes and pay for it and then sell it, if I understood the question correctly. Yeah. Which I know you and I have discussed a few times through this process.

I get it. Government encourages debt because it does equalize payments over time. However, the problem with that also comes with a 40% increase overall in the cost of that product. I don't love that. I don't advocate for that. I do advocate for some sort of measured and maybe combination of the two, but I would never advocate for strictly debt financing things that we need to do as a city. I think we need to save funds. We need to have that part of our annual budget. I don't want to just pay interest. That's expensive.

The maintenance and staffing and equipment and other things that related to that fire station. It doesn't like... We don't like spend 1.7 and then have 1.7 to play with.

No, that will help. That will help pay for the staffing, which is significant. Now, 1.174, I don't want anybody to believe that's how much a station costs.

No.

That's not. The equipment needs, those are not contemplated either. And we're going to have to, we have plans of how we can accomplish that. But it's dependent upon many things coming together. 1.1 doesn't cover the full cost of the station. It covers our shortfall. And with some belt tightening, we hope we can fully cover the cost of that station, including equipment and equipment replacement over time. We do put money away every year to replace engines on time. Because again, I don't want to pay that 40% after. And I would rather have our money working for us and earning interest for us. We put money away every year. We do not have the budget solidified for that part of the new station, but that's something we're going to grow into over the next several years to where we're contributing the amount annually necessary to replace that into what it comes due.

I don't know if it was explicitly mentioned during the comments or if it was kind of alluded to, but inflation as a factor of everything gets more expensive, people not being able to afford things. Can you tell us how has inflation affected the city? Is it the same effects that people, the average citizen suffers from inflation? Is it more, is it less? And also, how would that affect?

OK, I found this on the web. She'll tell you.

How does that affect building a station in the next year or two versus waiting five, 10 years to build a station?

So station 71 that was built in 2005 cost roughly $600,000. Which is amazing. 2005.

And that's the one on airport, or I mean on golf course roads, right?

No, that's the one in USU.

Okay.

But we didn't have to pay for the land.

We did not. No. And so it was relatively cheap. Station 72 that's down by the golf course cost about $850,000-ish and it was built in 2012-ish. This new station, so that's 2012, that will be built in 2026, 2027, is roughly $5 million. So I think it was Mr. Roper that brought up inflation and the budget going from, was it Mr. Roper? From... Like doubling.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is exactly right. We've got a station, and we're building potentially a station that's similar to one of these stations, but yet the cost is five times. That's the same for the city of Logan. We're facing all the same costs. And I think homeowners and citizens and taxpayers are facing the exact same thing. Many of them don't know it, though, because they already own their home.

Share how much our insurance has gone up in the last decade.

Insurance has gone up on an average. Health insurance. Health insurance for employees. And it's related mostly to the next public hearing. But it's influenced by this one, so we'll answer it here. 23% per year for the last 11 years. And the only reason I know it's 11 and not 10 is because I messed up and got 11 years. Rather than 10. 23% per year. These things are not sustainable. I think much of this was caused by The response to the pandemic, the year after the pandemic, we had inflation of 14%. The year after that was 9%. The year after that was like seven-ish. You compound those, it's significant. Everybody's facing it. It is very, very difficult. I don't want to minimize the pain that our residents are feeling because it's real. But there's no other way to open a station. And I feel like this station, it's time to open the station. It's time to move forward. It's time that those residents who live on the west side who are just as important and significant as those who live on the east side have an adequate response time and this is the way we do it. Not to mention strengthen the rest of the city and the system. Hopefully I answered that question.

Thank you.

You want me to keep going or you got one?

I just wanted to add, I tried to pull up from when we were reviewing this and may considering this area and getting information about like the census information and the growth air growth in this area. So over a 10 year period, We've seen a 33% growth in total structures, and it is a breakdown of residential and living being about 65%-ish, it looks like, and commercial 15%. The population in that area is about 11,000, and some of our largest employers of which are in that area, Gossner's, Costco, Campbell Scientific, Juniper Systems, Bridger Lintec. We also have Bridger Elementary and the Light and Power substation in those areas as well. So I just thought contextually to understand sort of a little bit more detail around what is there beyond driving it and looking at it visually, the growth that has happened in that area, and why there is that concern of ensuring that we can get there and have the response times that we need, not having any fire protection present in that part of the city.

I'm going to keep going through questions. Sorry, you guys are going to say Mike's asking a lot of questions tonight, but that's just my list. I want to make sure we answer those comments. One of the other ones from Larry Rich was, in essence, we raised this to pay for street lights, which obviously is the general fund paying the electric fund. I think the concern was that that money then just to turn around and transfer it back to the general fund with our transfers from the electric fund to the general fund.

It does not. No. So our streetlights, the vast majority of them are not metered. We could meter them, but it's somewhat inefficient to slap a whole bunch of meters out there on these individual streetlights. So instead, our electric department wires these lights up. They all light up. And then instead, we do a study that estimates how much power is used and how much it costs to maintain the streetlights for the city. Well, street lighting is a general fund obligation. It's not an obligation of the electric department. The general fund has to pay for it. Now, that's dictated by various laws and rules that are promulgated by the auditor's office. It's a general fund obligation. So we're raising taxes to pay for our street lighting expense. We do pay it to our electric fund, but we're required to. We can't just take it for free. I wish we could. That'd be awesome.

Mark would appreciate that.

I have a question related to lighting, but I think maybe Craig will be the better person to answer this one.

Give Rich a break for a moment.

Yes, breathe. What would happen if we said, let's go without half of the city lights? What are the intended... Not intended, but unintended risks that come with saying we don't need or we said we don't have the funds for this, so we're just not going to put lights in the service.

There's no state-mandated or statutory-mandated number of lights you've got that have any carry it. However, there's a risk of liability and some exposure there that we wouldn't like. And this isn't unfounded. We've had lawsuits in the past with Logan City where a car accident has happened and a claim has been, you didn't have a street light here, and so you're liable, Logan City. And that costs the city over $300,000 to litigate, even though we had no liability at all in my opinion. So one unintended consequence is that it does expose the city to some liability risk.

what cases of what do you call it, attacks on people, crime, and things also be, would it expose us to that type of liability as well?

Risk exposure, yes. Actual liability, probably no, because there's no mandate that you need to have a street light every X number of feet. However, claims would be made that you didn't light those properly, therefore the crime was committed because of that. And those are not outlandish claims. We see those sorts of things.

I'd also add to that if I can. In my very long two and a half years on council, I've never had anyone ask to have me talk to anyone to get a street light removed. But I've had to have two people, two locations where people have said, hey, we really want a street light on this location. And both times, Light and Power was able to go out and install one in that area. But I think it's... I understand the concern. I have one in my cul-de-sac that maybe I should talk to Light and Power about because it's really bright and bothers me. But... More often than not, I hear requests for more lighting, not less, personally.

It would be awesome from the financial standpoint to be able to reduce if we can. That's fantastic. But we'll do it where it's appropriate.

I'm going to go to my last one from Larry. He asked a few questions, but this is my last one I wrote down. And this one's a little bit towards Chief Simmons as well. It was just talking about the police budget. Obviously, we're trying to add a police officer in this budget. And his question was kind of about funds in the police department, how they're used for vehicles, bikes and segways and and other such items and how does that how is that accounted for are we being judicious and careful with those funds uh yeah if you wouldn't mind please chief and if rich obviously you're welcome to weigh in on this too um but But how do we, how do we pay for new police cars? Why do they always look newer than mine? And, you know, not that I own a police car, but.

Well, I hope they do because our staff really does well to try to maintain them as much as we can. On average, we get about five new cars for a staff of 58 officers and some associated civilians. We actually don't have civilian vehicles, but we get about five new cars every year. So, And so all of our cars are on rotation. Most of our cars are in the seven to eight, nine year range. And obviously police vehicles are driven a whole lot more roughly than an average citizen's car. There are times we have to get someplace quick. We have to train in them very roughly to learn their capabilities. So an average police car, and we have several that are more than 10 years old that we're looking to get rid of, but we can only do them at this very slow pace. So the police cars, yeah, we get about five a year. But we try to take care of them. We do a car per man program. We find that an officer will take care of that vehicle if they know that they have ownership in that for the time that they're a patrolman. They'll take care of that vehicle a whole lot more than if we run a car 24 hours a day. We'd be replacing 10, 15, 20 cars every year if we did that. You can't just run a car 24 hours a day and not have a problem. As far as, a lot of people make comments about our, we have a fleet of F-150 trucks and they all look brand new. They're not all new. Some of them we got on a program here several years ago. We can buy them new on a state bid, much slower than retail. and sell them back to the same business that we bought them from. And it would be a $1,000 turnover. So it was really good. We get a new truck for basically $1,000 a year to help equip some of our admins, some of the other needs that we have, detectives, that sort of thing. Those costs are going up, so we've reduced our purchases of those vehicles and now we just own them outright and we'll just use them until we need to replace them as well. But replacing vehicles for a police department our size at a rate of five a year, it's going to catch up to us a little bit. And Rich can speak to this. Thus far we're doing pretty well. Been in a few years with the cost of everything going up. Every year the cost of the vehicle goes up, but our budget doesn't really change. So I'm getting fewer and fewer vehicles with the same amount of money. Again, we are doing our very best to maintain those vehicles. And when you talk about bikes, our bikes, we haven't bought a new bike in years. Everything that we have, it may look new because we take care of it, but they are I think we started our bike program about 12 years ago. And I think since then, we've bought two new bikes. So bikes are old, actually. We're always trying to repair those things. Segways, we bought. Rich, you'd have to help me on that. They were so long ago that we bought those. We haven't bought any since. I think that company actually went out of business. They still operate, so we still own two Segways and we use those for freight and stuff. But we're in it just for maintenance now. We don't intend to ever replace those. We don't have any dirt bikes. We do have, I want to say, four motor motorcycles that we use for traffic. You've seen traffic on Main Street. It's bumper to bumper, right? We just have so much here. Motorcycles are very effective for traffic enforcement. You can get to where the problem is a whole lot easier than you can in the car. So we do maintain a fleet of four motorcycles and motor officers to help with that, to help with traffic. i can say honestly it's my final word here we uh probably get as much out of our budget which really hasn't changed a whole lot over the years um as as i think any department in the city i think our overall budget with dispatch included is about 13 million dollars out of the general budget for a department our size for 20 dispatchers that's really good value when you compare that against I'd compare it against any place in the state. And I do commend Rich. Rich is very, very, very conservative when it comes to financing. I deal with my personal life. I don't like debt. I don't like spending more than we have. And I certainly apply that to our professional. We understand taxpayer money is sacred. I pay taxes. I hate paying taxes, right? We always do, right? But we know we need necessary services. But we try to be very, very careful with that. We try not to spend money that we just don't need to spend. And we don't have a lot of extra to spend, honestly.

Can we talk afterwards? Is that okay?

Hold on, let me check with legal real quick. We did close the public hearing. You just gave me a look and I just didn't know what it meant, exactly. I'm going to go out on a limb and I'll let you clarify, just try to keep it short, please.

So it's actually not targeting the police department. It sounds like it's being run very well. And that was awesome. But dump trucks, utility vehicles, pickups throughout the city, they're all buried. And so he can't manage that. I think that they are using those funds judiciously, and I appreciate that.

Thanks, Chief. I mean, I'll briefly answer that if I can and Rich jump in. I know that all of our vehicles are maintained by the same mechanic shop that is owned by the city, right? Like we do all our own maintenance on them. My understanding is most of our vehicles are 5 to 10 years old throughout the city and some of our ambulances are getting probably older than we want, but we do try really hard to just stay up. We do. There's so much out of them as well. Right.

8 years, we've done a lot of this vehicle turnover program that the chief talked about where you get a vehicle. We pay the full price and we turn it in and we end up basically paying a 1000 dollars for a new car. In fact, there, there have been probably 10 or 15 situations where we turned the vehicle back in and they paid us 1000. Which is crazy. I don't know how that works.

Does it make any sense?

But it's happened in dealerships. I don't have the numbers. I wish I did. But we're talking probably 40 vehicles across the city per year. And these are the trucks that, what do they call them? They were the Chevy... Whatever. The Colorado. Trail Boss. The Chevy Trail Boss. That was one. If you saw it, it looked really good. It was a truck you'd want to buy yourself. That was the one. If we bought that truck, then we could turn around and give it back to him for $1,000, which was incredible. And we maximized that. Financially, it made no sense to me whatsoever. And sadly, eight years later, it's kind of gone away. So you're going to see older vehicles simply because we can't get that same deal. But man, while we could get that deal, we took advantage of it. So our vehicles looked very, very new. They're going to age a little bit across the whole city. Now, is there waste, fraud, and abuse in the city of Logan? Absolutely. Absolutely, it's happening. However, we're also absolutely vigilant about watching, and departments know that our department, the finance department, is looking for it, and I would love nothing more than to expose that if we ever found it. We're always looking for it. I'm sure it's happening. We just need to remain vigilant and keep doing it.

have zero with a city of 500 employees.

I just wondered if the chief, while you're there, can just speak to the need for this police officer position. I mean, you've explained it to us really well. In particular, I recall the number of police officers we have relative to our population in comparison to other similar sized municipalities and then some competition in terms of retention, et cetera. Could you just briefly?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've had 60 officers at Logan City Police. I think since since when I was nearly a rookie, I think I started it. I was Sierra 56. We, we number ourselves sequentially. And then we grew by about four officers over the course of about 25 years. I hear about a year ago because of inflation, and we all know that that has been very impactful. And with what happened in the police world over the last several years, the cost of police officers is gone and it's skyrocketed. I started at $9.95 an hour in 1997, right? That was a bargain, right? Not anymore. Because of what happened, the George Floyd incident, officers left in droves, there was calls for defunding police. So police officers just quit. And then suddenly crime started to skyrocket, right? Because now we don't have a deterrence out there. So suddenly cities are now scrambling raising their pay for police officers, trying to bring police officers into their cities and protect their cities, right? So that's been happening all over the country. It's no different here. So there's been this officer wage war going on in Logan, or not in Logan, in the state of Utah and everywhere else. for the past few years. So whereas we could get a new officer, a brand new officer, not more than seven, eight years ago in 2019 or so, we could hire a new officer at about $16, $17 an hour, no longer. I can't get a new officer unless I offer them over $30 an hour, which is what we're doing right now. uh so and and we're grateful to get them but uh the wage war that's going on it continues right so brigham city pays far more than we paid in logan and they're a little smaller and i commend the city i'm not going to say the city's really stepped up did whatever they could but as part of that we had to make some sacrifices as a police department so we were 60 officers here two years ago And I took that with the permission of the mayor and rich and the staff here took that pay and gave that to our officers. Why did I do that? Because I was losing our experience. The good experience that we had developed here in this city, they were leaving to go to other places and I couldn't retain them. And as many of you know, there is no true substitute for experience. You get a bunch of rookies in here, you're gonna get a lot of rookie mistakes and you're gonna get a lot of liability. So we made that decision. And so what we're doing with this one officer is we're trying to recoup one of those back. We're actually not increasing. We're still below what we've been for the last several years. We're trying to get back to 58. Now, we did get our 57th officer just through normal budgeting purposes. I was able to save enough money so that we could buy one. But now, in this truth and taxation deal, And what Rich has described, we're trying to get a 58th officer. So we're still two officers down, right? But we've stabilized the force. We're not losing quite as many to outside agencies. We've certainly done our best to improve our culture. I think officers are really pretty happy with Logan. I think they're happy to work here. But the new generation, they care about the money. They don't care about a whole lot more. They care about where the money is, and so if somebody's gonna offer them two or three bucks more, they're jumping, they're going. It's not like when I was, I mean, when I was a rookie, we had agencies that were offering two, three dollars more, and I was like, no, Logan hired me, I'm staying with Logan, right? There was that sense of loyalty and that sense of, this is my home, this is where I wanna work, right? You don't really get that so much in the new generation, and I don't blame them, right? Housing's expensive, everything's expensive across the board because of inflation, so, We're trying to keep up with the Joneses as best we can. We know we can't meet it, but we're just trying to be within striking distance so that we can retain our poor experience. I think Nate would say the same thing about the fire department. We're just trying to keep our experience here, but it takes pay and it takes an increase in wages to make that happen. It's a fight, and it's not the funnest time of the year for any of us, the budget time, especially when we talk about wages. It is a never-ending issue, right? Even when you give a wage increase, they're happy for a few weeks, and then they're like, okay, what's my next wage increase, right? So I feel, and just like Rich was saying, as a taxpayer, as a citizen of Logan, yeah, everybody's squeezed. We're all being squeezed because of inflation, right? The city, we do, Rich does a fantastic job of keeping everything balanced. you know, saving money at the same time. I wish our federal government could figure that out, right? That's our number one reason for inflation because they keep printing money, and your dollars are less. My dollars are less, right? So that's a whole other discussion, but that really is a problem involved here, and that contributes to our inflationary rise in why our city budgets is getting bigger why why it's it's tougher and tougher to manage our departments on the distant budgets so anyway i don't know thank you thank you thank you chief

Maybe in three years, right?

We tease you, but we like you. I'm going to ask Rich two more questions.

Can I ask you one question? You told me I could go after Katie. Just say it.

Yes.

Back to the trucks. And just because I've had some citizens ask, like, why do our employees get trucks? Like, why is that something that we provide? Is it just a tradition thing? Is it something that we could eventually cut out? I mean, what is the reason?

Outside of PD, most of them don't. They don't get them.

Well, that's part of the job. I mean, they're trucks that our city's providing for our street department, you know, things like that. But they don't take those home. No, they don't take them home.

There are very, very few that go home. Paul texted me and said we had 60 on that rollover program, 60 vehicles, which was incredible. It's going to drop down. What should be driving it is the work itself. I'm sure there are specific instances where we bought a truck, like a Trail Boss, because of that incredible deal we were getting when the work wasn't quite driving it. But nine times out of ten, it's because the work is driving it. Whatever they're doing, they're in the water department and they have to have tools in the back of the truck. That is what is typically happening. It goes with the job.

Yeah, it does.

And the number of vehicles going home is very, very few. It's mostly police vehicles. Mostly police. Those are going home. We do have on-call trucks and those are the bigger ones with the utility beds. Very few are going home. There are a few managers who have them, a few department heads who have them who take them home. Other than that, it's very few. We continually review it because We have to charge them through the payroll system for some of the taxes associated with those. But we do review it. We try to keep it to a minimum. Thank you. And we do. HR has a list of where they are.

Two questions that Bonnie asked. Yeah. Can we come in under budget? And I'm going to tie that into just another question, if you want to answer this one at the same time, is have we looked for grants? for this fire station federal grants.

And yes, we understand those are still tax dollars, but... Do we have any fire station grants? I know we have people.

The A of G grant program, but unfortunately, for the last 10 years, we've been unsuccessful. We try almost every year for staffing grants and funding for equipment. It's super competitive federally. So we've been unsuccessful. We try every year.

and if there was one will you repeat some of that to the microphone just yeah we look for those every year we have looked for staffing grants and for capital grants we've been unsuccessful in getting those but if anybody is aware of any other grants we'd be happy to look for them we know that that is also taxpayer money and so we are you know we wouldn't just buy it just because there's a grant i think that would be a terrible reason but if we could get a grant to help us pay for it we would not be opposed to that

Coming under budget was the other question she asked us. Can we come under budget? Why don't we? Except we do every year. But yeah, if you'll just speak to that for a minute.

We require it every single year. So every year since I've been here as finance director, not once have we exceeded our budget. Now we've come in for budget change requests of council periodically, hopefully because of things that are outside our control, but not once have we gone over budget. There are 75 divisions of the general fund, roughly. Every single one of those is required to come under budget and department heads can speak to how often we harp on it. It's not acceptable to exceed our budgets, not even for things like fires on a mountainside. It's not acceptable to exceed our budget. We are required to maintain it and work within it. Now, if after everything we can possibly do, we can't maintain our budget, we will come to council before that budget has succeeded and say, here's the problem. We need more funding. And council will either appropriate it or they'll tell us no, in which case we will go back and trim whatever we can trim to stay under budget. But because we require every division to come under budget, at the end of the year, there is not... There is a substantial amount that goes back to capital every single year. That's where we're going to hopefully build this fire station, is from those funds, from the general fund that are unspent, that we require departments to be under budget. So the fire department, sorry, the police department budget is how big can the general fund be? About 13 million roughly, something like that. If he gets within half a million dollars of his budget, he's freaking out because he knows he cannot exceed his budget even for good things. So we get a substantial amount from that. Public Works, also a very significant budget, knows they cannot exceed their budget. And so they come in under budget. We take those savings and we put it toward one-time projects like this fire station. A million 174 is not going to build a fire station. We need about four more million to do that, and that's going to come from those other areas.

Thank you. I have one other thing written down. It was Marianne's comment about weeds and deterioration of property. We do have weed ordinances. You're welcome to contact any of us or the mayor or community development. And we do have enforcement, code enforcement that can go out and leave a notice on their door that they will have to maintain their weeds to ordinance, which I don't know the exact height, but it's definitely not like knee-high weeds, right? There are ordinances on that. If you want details, feel free to contact any of us so we can... give you that exact information.

There's also on the website a place to report anything and so that's a spot too.

There's a spot on the website where you can leave a report, like a tip on where you want code enforcement to go. Knock on a door and say, mow your lawn.

I was just going to say it is complaint based. It is. So while we don't have enough enforcement officers to go around and be looking at the weeds and yards and so really- Not a lot of people really want that. Right. And so it is really dependent on citizens. I take it upon myself in my neighborhood where I see it's excessive, I send a quick email off and say, hey, can you- You need to know. I do.

I've got one in a few of those emails.

I'm totally, it bugs me. You know, when it's excessive and it's, you know, so they do not share the information of who the complaint, where the complaint is coming from. And there's other code related things that, you know, in terms of things in people's yards that are not allowed permanently that you can submit a complaint for. But my point is that they really depend on people to let them know.

Those are all the questions I had written down. Before anyone makes a motion, I want to make sure that every council member has had a chance to ask any questions, have any discussions, address any concerns. So open to the council.

I would like just for you to share a little bit more about the streetlights in terms of reminding us the amount requested and the Intention it's behind those the use of those funds and needs for the 54,000 specifically included in the property tax increase.

Let me see if I can find it really quickly. It seems like it's about 200,000.

But for like, 8 years, it's never got.

And that's why they did a new study.

They're charging, but it's hot every year. It should be costing more. Because they didn't do the study. It went from $216,000 last year up from I think $210,000 the previous

to 292,242. We updated the study, which we do periodically. We should do it more often, but it's painful and difficult. And so we delay sometimes longer than we should. And so 292, that's an increase of 70,000-ish. and the request is to have the property tax pay the $54,000 of that so that we can pay our full street lighting expenses to the electric department.

So this is to cover existing expenses? Existing expenses, existing street lighting. For street lighting, not for new street lighting? Not for new street lighting.

No new street lighting will come of this. Now some of this was being paid from other areas and we have As other, as other streetlights were being built by contractors and then dedicated to the city, some were metered. And so we tried to pull all of those out and to make it more uniform and have it in one place. So part of that increase, I can't say exactly how much, but let's say 20,000 ish came from assembling that from various areas where it was being paid to one area. And the rest of it was caused by inflation, rate increases, and the increased cost of maintaining those streetlights, which our electric department does for the general fund as well. They replace those lights when they go out.

And this is driven by the audit.

Yes.

Thank you.

Other questions from council members? And we still haven't received any emails, just to confirm, okay. Well, while council members are thinking of questions, I'll tell Rich, thanks for all this hard work, because even Friday night, I was texting Rich again. How many times have I bugged you in the past two months to the point where you were probably very sick of me, even on your weekends?

Not once. When...

I feel like we've worked everything out. And then I text Rich again, come into his office unannounced, interrupt his work, and say, what if we only did 80%? What if we did 83%? And tried to explore every option through this tax increase. I don't know. I think I laugh when Chief Simmons says he hates taxes because we all hate taxes. And then somehow you end up sitting up here talking about how you hate taxes, but also it's sin in your hands. You know, it's not easy. And we talk about the younger generation and trying to afford houses and, you know, inflation and taxes as part of that, right? It's stuck on your bill, stuck on your budget. I feel like I see that very distinctly in my generation of how many of my friends and neighbors and cousins and siblings are all trying to buy their house or make ends meet or start a family or have another kid. It's not easy. And costs just keep going up. So I appreciate the hard work that you guys have put into all of this. Chief, you as well. Both Chiefs. They don't normally sit together over there. They sit on the other side of the room and glare at each other. No, they don't really glare at each other. Council?

I said this last time when we were learning about the budget and discussing it, but I do wish we could give a tax break to our citizens. I do wish that the potential reduction of the county levy could actually be transferred to our citizens and feel good about it. That's the part for me that is hard because I feel like if we don't pass this, or actually not being good stewards of the future funds that will have to be dedicated to this exact same purpose. I feel like it's gonna be more expensive because of interest, it's gonna be more expensive because of inflation, and what could cost $5 million in the next couple years, it'll cost us $10 million in three or five years. So for that reason, I struggle with this because, yes, I wish we could give a tax break to our citizens. I also feel like the fire that happened a couple of weeks ago was very sobering. I was within the radius of of the people that got evacuated. My street, basically, not everybody decided to leave, but we did decide to evacuate our home. I want everybody in the city to feel like they have equal protection against disasters like this. I would never want the west side of the city, the growing part of the city, to feel like they're being neglected. for saving a few dollars. And I know every dollar counts. And for people that we're suffering the effects of inflation, I know that every dollar hurts when you see a cent or a dollar or five dollars or ten dollars go up on everything from milk to eggs to meat. I feel it too. But for those reasons, I feel in favor of passing this resolution.

Is that a motion or is that a comment?

If nobody else has comments, I will move that we pass this.

We have a motion to pass Resolution 2619. Second. We have a second to that. Is there any further discussion? Any further concerns? Any further questions?

I don't think concerns are questions, but I want people to know it weighs on you. I mean, I'm new to city council and I can't believe how much this weighs on you. And I mean, I've been having nightmares about it. But we do take it seriously. But I also feel like from what I've learned in the first, what, seven months or eight months that I've been on city council, that our city is in a good place. I do trust Rich and our finance department and all that they're doing because I mean, I don't understand cities and what they do with their budgets everywhere else, but I know that Logan is in a good place and I trust that. And so, yeah.

I appreciate that. Rich is very trustworthy.

He is very trustworthy.

Especially Fridays when you text him late.

So sorry, I've kind of veered off the motion and the second.

Well, we have a motion and a second. If there's no further comments or discussion, all those in favor of passing Resolution 26-19 for the tax increase, please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Resolution 26-19 passes. I appreciate your comments on that, Alyssa. Even my wife this morning, she woke up and she was like, you didn't sleep well last night, did you? And I'm like, well, nope. Sorry to keep you up too, but it's... You think it's easier until you sit up here and then you're like, well, I have to make that decision. And I think, I don't remember whose comment it was, that it's right, that it's probably not going to go back down. We're not going to undo this tax increase in five years and say, well, we built the fire department. And like I said, you know you're making long-term decisions on people's budgets. But I appreciate your guys' comments and concerns. Hopefully we were able to address most of them. You're always welcome to continue to reach out to us, though, if you have further questions. but a lot of these questions I agree with, and we looked into them, but I appreciate everyone who's come in as well. We do have one more item on our agenda, which is approving the budget, which is tied to this tax increase for the year. And that's resolution 26-20. We're going to run this hearing roughly the same. We'll let Rich give us a little bit of a rundown. We'll see what questions there are from the council. Then we'll do in-person public comment on this. resolution and then we'll do online and then email in the same manner. So Rich, if you could.

So this budget is identical in amount to the one that we passed in June as the tentative budget. The only exception is state law required at that time that we reserve funds That we're dedicated to the property tax increase and the kind of a vote that just happened happened. So, now that that vote has happened, I released those funds in the manner that council specified within the budget and it is 222,136,462. Which is actually a decrease over the last budget, but it's for various reasons. It's not actually a decrease. So as you compare budget year to budget year, sometimes there are one-time expenses that inflate or make it go up or down. And if you eliminate those, then the increase is fairly reasonable. I believe it was 3%, the overall increase, true increase, including the property tax increase that was just passed.

Thank you, Rich. Council? You guys all okay if I open a public hearing? Yep. Okay. This is a public hearing so anyone who would like to speak on resolution 26-20 is welcome to come to the microphone and state your name and city of residence and with that I'll open our microphone for anyone who would like to. I'll look at the two people in the back over there. And I always awkwardly, everyone rolls their eyes at me because I awkwardly give people time to reconsider if they do want to because I want to make sure you have your time. Seeing no one, we'll move to our online comments. Do we have any online comments? Okay, Teresa, do we have any email comments? I'm gonna give those online comments just a moment here to see if anyone wants to comment. I don't normally have to watch myself on the screen, but it's a little... You don't like watching yourself?

I don't. You're behind the camera usually. I know, yeah. I don't.

It creates an infinite loop. You watch yourself watching yourself.

There's like a little bit of delay.

You don't have to watch yourself. We had to watch you.

We had to watch Rich. I'm going to close our public hearing and bring it back to the council for questions and discussion with Rich about the final budget.

I move we approve Resolution 26-20. I'll second.

We have a motion to second. I want to make sure that anyone has any chance to make any comments or ask any questions.

I think we did it all during the budget.

I'm still going to give you your due time.

Two minutes is worth it. If anyone missed out during the month of May, you can .

I understand, Jeannie, but I still want to make sure that all questions are answered because I think this is one of our biggest decisions of the year.

I know.

seeing no other questions or comments from the council we will vote on resolution 2620 all in favor of approving our budget resolution 26-20 please say aye aye any opposed resolution 2620 passes and the mayor has a budget and i'm going to adjourn and stay under budget we're adjourned thank you for coming