City Council - Regular Meeting

Thank you.

Welcome to the City of Maricopa's City Council Meeting. We're glad you're here because your voice matters. If you'd like to speak tonight, please start by filling out a speaker card at the Council Chamber's entrance and turning it in to the City Clerk before the meeting begins. On that card, you can let us know if you want to speak on a planned agenda item or during the general call to the public. Please keep in mind that all comments are limited to three minutes or less, depending on the number of people requesting to speak. Personal attacks and political speeches or threats are inappropriate in this forum and will be grounds for ending a speaker's time at the podium, at the discretion of the mayor. In accordance to state law, city resources and facilities may not be used for election-related activities, including discussions of candidacies, vote solicitation, or campaign events. We also ask that audience members refrain from applauding or showing disapproval of comments shared by fellow community members, as every person who addresses Council has the right to speak and not be intimidated. It's important to note that due to Arizona's open meeting law, council members cannot respond or take action on topics not listed on the agenda, but your comments will be heard and entered into the public record. Can't stick around for the full meeting? You can always catch the replay on Facebook or YouTube, where this meeting is currently being live streamed. Want more details about tonight's agenda items? Scan the QR code on your screen. or visit www.maricopa-az.gov slash agenda. Thank you for joining us and getting involved. As a final reminder, please silence your cell phones and electronic devices. The City Council meeting will begin shortly.

Hello, I'm going to call this meeting to order. Thank you all for being here for the regular City Council meeting on August 4th, 2026. I am going to start with the invocation, and I'm going to invite Pastor Rusty Akers from Community of Hope Church to come up for the invocation, and then we will follow with Council Member Wade for the Pledge of Allegiance. Please rise if you're able.

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

Thank you very much, Pastor Rusty Akers, and thank you, Councilmember Wade. That'll take us to roll call. Vanessa, please. Councilmember Gettle?

Present.

Councilmember Knorr? Present. Councilmember Learman? Here. Councilmember Marsh?

Here.

Councilmember Wade?

Here.

Vice-Mayor Manfredi? Here. Mayor Smith? Here. Madam Mayor, we have a quorum. Thank you very much, Vanessa. That'll take us to proclamations, of which we have two this evening. Council, if you'd like to join us down front, I think people would be delighted to have you there. Okay, I am going to request that Peg Chapados and any of the nonprofits that she invited to this evening for this proclamation, please come forward. We'd love to have you stand with us. Great group of people. All right. I thank Peg Chapitos for bringing this proclamation forward, and I'll proceed to read. Whereas National Nonprofit Day has been observed since 2017 to honor the vital contributions of nonprofit organizations to communities and society. and whereas we celebrate the work of nonprofit organizations that provide essential services, support vulnerable populations, and promote social, environmental, and educational health and cultural causes. And whereas, as of 2026, the city of Maricopa has over 30 incorporated nonprofit organizations dedicated to causes related to senior citizens, substance abuse, domestic violence, public safety, arts, music, history, theater, civics, culture, teens and youth, prevention, and education. We're getting it, we're getting it covered. Whereas the city of Maricopa takes immense pride and offers our individual and collective appreciation to these unsung heroes for their continued dedication, steadfast commitment, and unwavering support to our residents and community. And now, therefore, I, Nancy Smith, Mayor of the City of Maricopa, do hereby proclaim Monday, August 17th, 2026, as National Nonprofit Day in the City of Maricopa and encourage everyone to show their support and appreciation for the incredible and selfless work our nonprofits do every day. Let's give them a hand, please.

Tori.

All right, at this point, we would like to invite up all of the veterans. Please come and join us. All right, I am going to read this proclamation and then I'm going to turn it over to Council Member Lehrman who has some very special guests that she will introduce to you. And so let's get that started. Whereas the origin of the Purple Heart came on August 7, 1782, when George Washington created the badge of military merit, a cloth made of purple with gold trim and a single word, merit. And whereas the Purple Heart signifies the sacrifices made by many generations of America's citizens, soldiers, and is a symbol of their willingness to sacrifice all to protect and defend our great country. And whereas the Purple Heart is awarded to those military personnel who have been wounded or injured by an instrument of war in the hands of the enemy or by terrorist actions or posthumously to the next of kin to those who were killed in action or died from their wounds. And whereas the City of Maricopa has a rich and proud military heritage and it's actively involved in assisting veterans and their family members. and the Purple Heart Medal is one of the most renowned military awards and is the one military honor awarded to many but wanted by few. Now, therefore, I, Nancy Smith, Mayor of the City of Maricopa, do hereby proclaim August 7th, 2026, as Purple Heart Day in the city of Maricopa and proudly acknowledge our designation as Purple Heart City to honor those recipients past and present. And you passed the plaque officially in the entryway when you came in. Take a look at it when you head out. And so I'll turn it over to Council Member Lehrman. As I indicated, she has some presentations.

Thank you Mayor. Please give me a moment as I organize myself here. There are moments as a council member is very humbling and tonight is one of them when you get to stand among heroes. We have heroes in our community and I'm humbled and honored to be here with them and to recognize some of them. The first person I would like to recognize is Master Sergeant Matthew Beattie. He received a Purple Heart in 2005 and 2011, when he was struck by two different IEDs in Iraq. The second person I would like to recognize is Corporal Allen Rivera, who is also a Purple Heart recipient. The next person I would like to recognize is Anita Martin. Anita and her husband, Walter, spearheaded the efforts for Maricopa to become a Purple Heart City in the year 2017 under former Mayor Christian Price. That's why I asked him to come up here. It meant so much to their family under your leadership to do that, and it means so much for them to be here this evening. Armed Special Forces Walter Martin served three tours in Vietnam. Thank you very much for being here, Anita. Thank you. The next person I'd like to recognize is Rachel Luna. Rachel Luna's husband, Master Sergeant Mark Luna, is a Purple Heart recipient. And the last person was not able to be here tonight because they had a death in their family and they're very sad to not be here tonight. And that is Marlene Pierce. Marlene's father, Gunnery Sergeant Richard Hare, was wounded at Iwo Jima during World War II. He served in the Marine Corps 1942 through 1950, and he served two wars in Iwo Jima. At this time, we would like to present Jonelle Sullivan, who's the commander of the Veterans Center with a beautiful plaque.

Could you help me, Mary? 100%. Thank you.

And we'd also like to present the Veterans Center with a Purple Heart flag.

Thank you all. Very much, I love those types of celebrations. That moves us to the report from the mayor. Council, who would like to share some items? Yes, Council Member Lehrman. Thank you, Mayor.

I would like to wish, excuse me, I would like to wish the Coast Guard a 236th happy birthday today. I do want to remind everyone in light of the extreme heat warnings that we're under that Maricopa has three cooling centers. One is at Maricopa Library. The other one is at La Frontera Impact over by Ace Hardware. And the third one is a cool tainter located in Thunderbird Farms. And also, if you need help with heat-related issues, you can also dial 211, and they will make sure that you get to somewhere that is cool. So please pass that information on. There is a Lunch and Learn update on water on August 20th from 11 to 1. So if you're interested in that, please register. I also wanted to share that Youth Council is recruiting new members. And so this is for our high school age students. If you have a high school who's looking for an activity to get involved in, something to learn a lot about, have a lot of fun, and kind of like an internship opportunity because they're learning a lot of skills, a lot of job skills, please see Brenda Campbell. Raise your hand, Brenda. And she will help you get information about Youth Council. I would love to give Broadway Maricopa a big hand of applause. Would you guys join me? Broadway Maricopa is really showing out with an awesome show of Wizard of Oz. They are still playing, I believe, until August 8th. So if you've missed a show so far, please get your tickets through August 8th. I also want to thank Mayor Smith and Council Member Gettle and County Supervisor Vitiello. And we had a meeting with the county regarding an animal shelter here in the city of Maricopa. So I just want to thank all of council, but we were the ones that are there, that we are working hard to get an animal shelter here in Maricopa and improve the welfare of our animals here. So we have a follow-up meeting on August 12th. with the county and will continue to work on that important issue. I also wanted to share that the library is offering anime for teens and Dungeons and Dragons adventures as well as robotics for ages 10 through 13. That class, the robotics class is starting in September and registration is open right now. So if you have a little one 10 to 13 who likes robotics, the registration is open right now. Pardon me. Oh, Maricopa's Got Talent audition show is August 29th at the community center from 5 to 8 p.m. There are different categories. There's a youth category, a senior category, a solo category, and a duo group category. 31 acts, so they're full. So if you want to come out for a free night of fun, they're all local talent. It's mostly all like singers and music instrument people. So it should be a lot of fun. So come on out and enjoy a free night of fun. I think that's it, Mayor.

Thank you so much for the time. Thank you very much, Council Member Lehrman. Council Member Marsh.

It's been 20 days since our last council meeting. And with the primary election, it's been busy. On July 16, we had a lunch and learn at the senior center. Mayor Smith and Vice Mayor Manfredi spoke to a packed house updating us all on the city's transportation progress problems and plans. They did an awesome job, and we gave out several door prizes, including three $100 Visa gift cards. That's better odds of winning than Ak-Chin's casino. On July 20th, I attended the Alma Farrell Academy ribbon-cutting ceremony. Alma Farrell was an education-focused Maricopa pioneer, teacher, superintendent, and Mayor Ed Farrell's mother. This new K-8 Academy is an awesome addition to MUSD, and I hope to see graduates from this innovative program going on to my alma mater, MIT, and to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, and of course ASU, U of A, and NAU. On July 22nd, we hosted the renaming of a street in the historic district. to honor Paul Shirk. Paul was a historic and hysterical figure in Maricopa, heading up the historic society and so many other endeavors. He'll be missed. On July 23rd, I participated in a meeting of the Pinal County Board of Adjustments and Appeals. It was same old, same old, undersized lot. Also on July 23rd, I'm on my subdivisions HOA board, and we were dealing with climate change, potential future flooding, inflation, and a bunch of other issues. On July 29th, Jim Rickards, an internet famous prognosticator, predicted a major awesome disaster on the 29th. I'm here to report that it didn't happen. So you can follow Jim Rickards online and see what excuses he makes. And, Mayor, that's about it.

Thank you very much. Council Member Gettle.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. It is the season to be back in school, and we've had a lot of great events to be able to celebrate that coming back to school, those first day jitters for both teachers especially, but also those young ones as they're coming in. On July 20th, many of us had an opportunity to tour the new Alma Farrell Innovation Center, which has opened its doors for its first class this last week. Phenomenal opportunity. This is a whole new approach to education. And starting even in the kindergarten year, they're already beginning to explore careers and job opportunities and getting them thinking about their future and what they want to be. A great facility. If you haven't had a chance to take a look there, I'm sure they'll welcome you to come on over and see what they're doing a little bit different. I also had a chance to celebrate with the Heritage Academy. They opened their first K-5 school here in Maricopa. I had a chance to be there for their ribbon opening. Enrollment is almost maxed out there at that school. They're planning close to 700 students, and they're just under that right now. And it's an amazing opportunity for education in our city. On July 31st, Mayor and I had the opportunity to attend the Walmart grand reopening, and maybe she'll address a little bit about what she experienced there, but such a fun team to work with and to see. Walmart's been a phenomenal partner for our city for years. They've invested heavily, even as the downturn in the economy and the great recession that we had in 08, 09, Walmart was invested in our community. They were building, and nothing was gonna deter them from coming to our great city They've been great community partners, donating thousands of dollars to many of our nonprofits and other organizations within our city. They're just a phenomenal partner with everything that we're doing. And we're excited for them to be able to offer several thousand new square feet of space for them and their expansion plans. And I'm not sure we're supposed to talk about drones yet or not, but he mentioned it over the line. Yeah. uh... but they're looking at bringing drone service here that the city of maricopa as well so you'll be able to order your groceries and have it dropped off in your front yard via drone pretty exciting news pretty exciting news on uh... august third just yesterday uh... amber learman and i had an opportunity to meet with uh... some senior staff in our fire and medical department The question that we were working on is the communication between first responders and individuals with autism and other communication challenges, whether it be a stroke or whatever nonverbal challenge that they're facing. How do we help interface and make that a much smoother transition for individuals in crisis? And we had a couple of very well renowned and documented individuals that came in with their degrees and expertise in this field. They've served decades among these populations and had a lot of valuable input into what that could look like in our fire and medical staff. So we're excited to see a lot of that being implemented here in the near future. Now, looking forward on our calendars, if you want to take your calendars out, I'd like to invite you to two fun events that are taking place here shortly. Saturday, August 15th, our American Legion has a fundraiser, Barbecue. It's our annual fundraiser. That'll be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the community center, in the Veterans Center there in the community center. So please come and have some hot dogs and hamburgers and meet some of our veterans face-to-face and spend a little bit of money on your ticket and help support this great organization. Additionally, on August 26th, at our Library Arts and Cultural Center, we have Cops and Cones, which will be an opportunity for our families to come in and to meet officers face-to-face, have some conversations with them as they scoop them a couple of different flavors. I don't know if there should be 31 flavors there or not, Chief, but... Maybe two or three, okay. But a great opportunity to have some ice cream with our police department, get to know them on a personal level, and allow our youth and our children to be able to interface with a police officer and see some of the great things that they do for our community. So that's coming up on August 26th, 5 p.m. to 6.30 in our library. And Mayor, I believe that's all I have for this evening. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Council Member Ghetto. Council Member Knorr.

Thank you, Mayor. I also had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Alma Farrell Innovation Academy ribbon cutting and the Paul Shirk Avenue dedication. And those were both in the same week, which I thought was great. It was a wonderful week of honoring those who have really made Maricopa what it is. And I love that we're able to do that now that, you know, we're an older city. We can honor those who came before us and who really laid the groundwork. for what we have today. And so it was an honor and a privilege to be a part of both of those and I'm really excited about the Alma Farrell Innovation Academy and what it's gonna do for our students and their futures and the career focus. It's the first in the state. It's the first K-8 in the state that's focusing on career and technical education. And so I'm really excited how that puts Maricopa on the map and what it does for our amazing students here. And then I was also able to participate in Water Safety Day on July 25th, which is National Drowning Prevention Day. And it was a great opportunity for a lot of different groups to come together and educate the community about water safety. They had hands-on CPR demonstrations available. and a drowning simulation so that they had the helicopter fly in and everything. And so it was really a great opportunity. There was free drowning prevention kits that were donated from Phoenix Children's and free life jackets that were donated from Arizona Game and Fish and the Drowning Prevention Coalition so it was really great resource for our community and it's the second annual and looking forward to many more of those but I highly encourage you to check it out next year and I also just wanted to uh... for councilwoman lehrman and she should get all the credit for this but she forgot to announce this at the very first first friday is scheduled for october second from six to ten p m and the registration link for the vendors opens this week which is really exciting and i'm super excited about first fridays and and it would be possible without all of councilwoman lehrman's work in coordinating everybody and pulling it all together uh... and i'm really excited about it So she asked me if I would announce that, and obviously, happily, I will. And then finally, I just want to recognize our first responders, both our fire and our police. You know, there's a tragic accident that happened over the weekend. It was, you know, we all know what the weather is like right now, and for them to have to respond to that and work in that environment, obviously they do so, and that's what they do because they're heroes, but I just want to acknowledge them and thank them for their service to our community. And that's all I have.

Thank you, Council Member Noor. Vice Mayor.

thank everybody for coming today you know um this recently in the city of maricopa we had our second heat related death um so it's important to understand as council member lehrman mentioned that we do have cooling centers in in and around the city and it's also important to look at the types of heat illnesses that are out there they are heat cramps heat exhaustion heat stroke And there are different levels, of course. So if you have muscle cramps and spasms, that's like heat cramps, right? Stay in a cool place, drink a lot of water, maybe some Gatorade, electrolyte stuff. Heat exhaustion is a little bit different. You start to become cool. and pale and clammy skin, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, weakness, move to a cool place, loosen your clothing, sip some cool water, apply some wet towels, things like that. And then there's heat stroke. Heat stroke is confusion or slurred speech, high body temperature of 103 degrees or more, loss of consciousness, of course that's bad, and of course seizures. With that, call 911 immediately. But don't let it get to that point, right? So if you're facing these temperatures that we have in the city of Maricopa and throughout the state, you know, the bushes can wait. They can wait a couple days, right? And do them when it gets cooler. Do some of the work outside your house at night instead of during the day in the heat. But that's something important. So I attended a meeting for our tech and we got a legislative breakdown of what's happening and what has happened in the state over the last legislative session something we're going to hear tonight from Katie and that's going to be really good because people need to understand what's happening in the state how it impacts the city. Oh, Rural Transportation Advisory. And I serve on that, I've been on that for, I don't know, 10 years or so. But our TAC deals with rural transportation issues. But the legislative process that happens is important to understand what's happening at the state level and how it impacts transportation and everything else within the rest of the state. Let me see, what else was there? Of course, there was the Alma Farrell thing and other things like that that we were attending. I wanna also take a moment, because we're gonna certify an election in a little while. But I want to say, I want to thank James and Adam for running in this election. By bringing seven people to the people of Maricopa, it really gives choices and options. And we have another election coming up in two years, and the mayor's race and three other council members will be running. I hope to see 10 people running at that point. It's good to have as many people and as many different voices out there. Not everybody can make it onto council, but it takes a lot of grit and patience I think our old mayor used to say that, grit, right? It takes a lot of grit. It takes a lot of determination to put yourself out before the people and then see what happens. And it can get bad. It could be good. It could be fun. And it could be miserable at times. But one thing it can be is tiring. And I want to thank those two guys. Although they didn't make it to the general election, I think we're going to see their faces around Maricopa for a long, long time. They're much younger than me. So we'll see them around for a long time. But thank you, guys.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'd like to turn it over to Council Member Wade, who has an item.

Thank you. Thank you. I was just listening to the announcement in reference to the accident or fire that happened this weekend. And one of the things that I haven't heard of officially yet, hasn't been put out, so I'll just suggest, that making sure your fire alarm systems are working properly. They don't last more than five years, so you need to make sure that you check those systems because it's highly unlikely that if someone was up and about at the time of that fire or those systems were working, then those people would have passed. So that's just something I didn't hear mentioned, and I think we should make sure that you go home, check them. You hear them beeping anyway than the other ones, but this whole system itself has to eventually be changed out over a period of time. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Wade. Okay, so I first want to start with this quote that I just heard. Kristen, I heard him call you the old mayor.

The old mayor.

I'm like, okay, I kind of like that.

He used to be young. Now he's getting old.

I just had to taunt him a little bit. All right, so we had the senior lunch and learn, which was a great event. We talked about mostly 347, but a lot of the commuting corridor. If you have any questions on the commuting corridor and what that means and what roads that includes, please feel free to call me, ask me here later on. Send me an email, whatever you'd like. And we can talk about it. But these folks at the Lunch and Learn, many of them hadn't heard any of this information. And it's really important to understand. One of the biggest takeaways was to get signed up for 347 newsletters. I hope you all are signed up for the 347 newsletters. They are staying on top of it. I know when that road is going to be closed or meddled with at all points. So please get signed up for that. Myself and Bill Robertson went to the Arizona State Transportation Board meeting. We expressed our appreciation. They might have been shocked. That was probably the first time we've been there with great appreciation. But it was really just fun to go there and tell them how well it's being coordinated. What a great job the team is doing. So staying in touch with the State Transportation Board meeting. I too also attended the Alma-Ferro Innovation Academy. I just can't say enough positive things, but we have shared much here already. Same with the Paul Shirk Avenue sign. I will share, that's one of my favorite things to do is celebrate people. And when we can celebrate people, it just brings great joy to my heart. I also participated in the Growing Together Business Safety presentation. that was part of our business watch, and I will say that Chief Goodman was there, Chief Patasi was there, and from our economic development, Joshua was there. And they all gave presentations, which I believe the businesses that attended were very appreciative of. And the businesses had already submitted questions, and so these guys worked to answer the questions. If you own a business and you want to be part of the business watch, You can ask me, ask Chief Goodman. It's probably on the Facebook, I would imagine, website. Yeah. So get signed up. There's a lot of good information being shared. I went to the MUSD back to school rally. You want to talk about high energy? They had every single school represented in the MUSD district and the room was packed over at Harris. in their conference center and it was just really great to hear about last year's successes and this year's challenges and their goals and they've got it all figured out and I think it's going to be fantastic I also attended a blaze church testimony service and I want you all know they at one point circled around me they prayed for me they prayed for staff they prayed for the rest of council They prayed for our community. They prayed for you. It was just a sweet, sweet experience. And I love what our churches bring to our community. on the city manager and myself also had a meeting with the canal county n double a c p leadership while what passion there that was really a lot of fun as well to find out what their looking at doing and one of their main goals was improving how the community receives important information specifically focused on health so kinda keep your eyes open in regards to what they bring as well Did the ribbon cutting for Heritage K-5, which was phenomenal. What I say there is lots of kids were there for free ice cream. And when you see the smiles on their faces, you just know our city is doing it right. Our school systems are doing it right. Pretty cool. the wal-mart re grand opening i love because i shared during a couple minutes of speaking how they played a significant part so keep in mind the great recession two thousand seven two two thousand nine wal-mart has to choose somewhere in that time frame whether they're coming or not And we need them to come, because if you remember, every city was challenged with cutbacks during the recession. And we're a brand new city. We're only six years old at that point. We needed them to come. So with a lot of work, a lot of joint partnership, they chose to build in about late 2007 through 2008, and open in 2009, They took the risk on us and really saved us in terms of being able to continue offering critical services. So this expansion for them, their staff was really highly energized, just a lot of energy. And I'm excited too. I did get to see a video of the drone service. It's going to be interesting seeing drones flying around. The drones won't land on your property. They will extend a string or wire or something and drop the package off at your doorstep. It's going to be interesting. So keep posted. As soon as I know that it's moving forward, well, they say they're close, but as soon as I know it's operating, I'll let you know on my mayor Facebook page. let's see okay lastly this is an important subject i've been asked by a couple people if i would just talk about data centers in general and so what i'm going to share tonight is there's a lot of discussions going on in our city regarding the pros and cons of data centers you have people who understand what they do you have people who don't understand what they do So I want to make you aware that the city currently has zero applications. So we don't have any applications for data centers. However, we want to make sure that we're prepared. So in late 2025, early 26, I asked the city manager to begin the process of reviewing what needs to be done, researching what other cities are doing. And so our staff is currently in the process of doing that research now. and how other cities, how other counties handle this type of development. So really good research going on right now. Through this process, we'll learn what options exist, which ones work for our community, which ones don't work for our community, So my message tonight is to let you know that staff is actively researching the subject. And the subject is so important that we'll be discussing it more in the future. And we're committed to having a conversation with our community. I know I'm committed to having that conversation. I would say everybody is committed to having that conversation. But we want to be well-informed, and we want to know what works for the city that doesn't work for other cities, possibly. So just letting you know, it is being researched by the city. And that is the end of our message from the mayor. It will take us to the message from city manager.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of the Council. First, I don't have a slide for this one, but just a FYI. We did initially have a public hearing scheduled for tonight for an annexation. That's been pushed until next meeting, and so I think it's September 1st is the date of the next meeting, but we just had a mix-up on the notification, and so we are moving that until September 1st, so we'll do it at that time. Two slides that I've got for you on the manager's report. The first I think is a really cool summary of a good program that we run here in the in the community and that's the summer reading program if you look at what we did this summer what our library team and and all of our our community came together had the highest participation ever in a summer reading program it's about twenty to thirty percent higher than last year on almost all of these numbers and so when you start to look at how many registrants and the number of kids that completed that program But then the minutes of reading logged, almost 1.6 million, and that's just what's logged, not what's happening. But the prizes earned, the amount of sponsors that participated in this, this is truly a community effort to come together to encourage reading, encourage education, especially during that time of the year when you don't have to. You're not in school and you don't have to do that. And so some really cool... Programming along with that with some some magicians and all around this theme of unearth a story councilmember Learman starred in a commercial so to speak to advertise that on social media on our website we had even a T-Rex dress up and read a book. And so you can see some of those kind of fun things that really got our community engaged in a lot of reading that really promotes not just reading within our community, but also coming together as a community with those sponsors, having notification, and being able to get those kids out to those sponsors' businesses. So great opportunity for everyone to come together. The next one I have, a little bit sad, but we have a farewell to our deputy city manager, Micah Gaudet. His last day is actually this Thursday, going on to a new position with another firm. Micah has meant a lot to our community over the last four years that he's been here. has been a vital cog for us is we needed some assistance and some extra focus with our public safety teams. And so just wanted to thank Micah for his service, for all he's done for our community and all that he's given in time and effort for Maricopa. So if you don't mind, give a round of applause. Thank you, Madam Mayor, that's all I have tonight.

Thank you very much. All right, that'll take us to the call to the public. Tonight I have six cards and so we will start first with Tori Anderson.

Thank you, Mayor Smith. I'm Tori Anderson, in case you didn't know. I'm here tonight on behalf of the Open Arms Vocational Living Center, which is for young men who are eighteen to twenty four who have aged out of the foster care system and my first point is a huge gigantic thank you to you as a city and to our community members that supported our first fundraiser which was in june It's amazing what a small group of people can actually accomplish. So again, I'm humbled by this community. So thank you for letting me be a part of it and helping make tomorrow better. So the exciting announcement tonight is we have started services for the young men. And I want people to know because we see them in our parks, we see them walking around on our streets, we may see them, they may be at our friend's home couch surfing. So if you have a young man who is 18 to 24, maybe they're 17, but they're getting ready to turn 18. We want to make sure that they understand that there is somebody here who will listen and help them navigate the next steps to be successful young men. They don't need to be homeless, and they don't need to be in the parks. So those services are free. We have a huge resource list. We have mental health. We have drug counseling. We have all of the wraparound services that these young men will need. And I'm excited because I know we've been working on this for about three years. So now that we're here, it's super exciting to me. As a mother of sons, I am passionate about our young men. So every Sunday from 3 to 5, We have a clinician who will be there. There will be somebody to talk to so that we can make sure that they're getting the resources and getting registered for maybe the next steps of aging out of foster care. They may not be in foster care. They may just be homeless, but they may have been in foster care previously. So we want to make sure we have that wraparound net to capture what we can. So it's every Sunday from 3 to 5 at Maricopa High School in the boys' locker room. And I know you're thinking, boys' locker room, ugh. But hear me out. The reason it's there right now is because they may need to take a shower. They may need to do some laundry. We provide them with a meal. and then gift cards or whatever they need to get through the rest of the week until they can see us again on Sunday so that they can get food and go get something to eat. So if you have a neighbor or you see a young man They're not scary, I promise you. Please let them know that there are services available and if they just wanna come and talk and get out of the heat, that's okay too. So it's no pressure, it's just let us help you, let us listen. So again, it's every Sunday from three to five at the Maricopa High School Boys Gym, which it's around the back by the athletic fields. You'll be able to notice it when you turn the corner. We do have signs. I do have cards if someone's interested. So thank you.

All right. Our next speaker is Ron Smith.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, Vice Mayor Manfredi, and council members. First, that's a tremendous program, isn't it? I'm truly excited about that one. But I'm here to ask you to save a date. Maricopa Senior Levine is hosting a Fall Prevention Awareness Info Expo event on Saturday, September 26th from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Maricopa Library and Cultural Center. This comprehensive free event will focus entirely on fall prevention awareness. There will be multiple educational presentations, 25 vendors, demonstrations, door prizes, a free resource guide, a light lunch, and many resources to take away. This is not just a one-time event, but a kickoff for additional activities, such as eight-week matter of balance classes, home fit assessment workshops, mobility clinics, and free home assessments that will be announced at the event and delivered over the weeks following the event. Please add this event to your calendar and drop by, meet some new vendors, and learn how to maintain your independence. Unlike chronic diseases, falls are preventable. I've provided you each with an event flyer, and I'm leaving more here for people in the audience should they want them. In case you're interested, by the way, there are some event sponsorships still available. So contact me if you have an interest. Thank you very much for the time.

All right. Our next speaker is Priscilla Minke.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm here tonight because I care deeply about the young people growing up in our city. And I've spent years working alongside families, schools, and the city to build opportunities that keep kids confident, connected, and successful. The CDC now recognizes social connection as a major factor in mental health. Strong relationships reduce the risks of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. Youth who feel connected to their families, schools, and communities have better outcomes in nearly every area of their lives. But Maricopa youth report significantly lower neighborhood attachment than the rest of Pinal County, and it shouldn't surprise anyone. We're one of the fastest growing cities in the state. Thousands of families spend hours each week commuting on the 347, missing critical after school hours when young people are looking to connect. And if they don't find belonging through healthy relationships and positive opportunities, they're going to find it somewhere else. These aren't nonprofit problems. These are community problems. And when communities identify a problem, priorities become visible with what they've built. Yet, as Maricopa builds community events, senior and veteran services, memorials, arts programs, and concerts, youth-specific services are disappearing. We once had an e-sports class, cooking classes, and mobile rec units. And to this day, I'm still asked by community members, where did they go? I want to ask you, where did the financial support for those programs go? They were not replaced. In fact, Be Awesome was recently asked to financially support one of the teen summer programs that's run by the city. The general plan offers a single page for youth services and lists very few community partners, but make sure to include the MVD. For years, organizations like ours invested time and, in some instances, financial support because we believed the city was serious about building partnerships. Recently, an RFP for youth services was issued. Organizations responded to the process presented, invested significant time, and then learned months later that the city's intent had been something completely different all along. That cost is valuable time, planning, and trust. This is just one of many examples where the city has complicated partnerships that serve youth. This is now a years-long pattern, and partnerships should reduce barriers, not create new ones. The city routinely asks organizations to volunteer, support events, and sponsor activities, and yet they do so with a phone call, a text, or an email. Yet when organizations ask the city for support, we're asked to navigate months of process, multiple solicitations, and changing expectations and uncertainty. What message do you believe this is sending organizations willing to invest in Maricopa's kids? Because I know what message we've received. If youth truly are a priority, that should be visible in your investments, your plans, and your partnerships, and the way that you value organizations willing to do this work. This isn't a request to fund my organization. We have and will continue to serve regardless. This is a request to build a city where organizations wanting to invest in youth feel welcomed and are done being discouraged. Every year we delay building opportunities for our young people. Someone else is building an influence that will bring outcomes that we don't want.

Thank you. All right. Our next speaker is Tina Dugan.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Tina Dugan from Glenwild. I want to address the City's handling of the Teen Services RFP and the claim that this is a public-private partnership. The City issued an RFP for Teen Services that was due May 10th. Seven organizations responded. They spent time developing programs, identifying staff, calculating costs, and submitting the budgets the City required. Then the city waited 80 days to tell them they had no intention of providing funding. If the city never intended to provide funding, that should have been clearly stated in the original RFP. Instead, seven organizations invested their time and resources responding to a request that did not accurately explain what the city was offering. This was a waste of their time. It also created one more unnecessary delay in finding a way to help Maricopa's teens. Now we know the city has reissued an RFQ and is pursuing a public-private partnership where the city provides resources but no funding. Marketing has been mentioned as one of those resources. Marketing does not pay for qualified employees, background checks, insurance, training, supplies, equipment, administration or supervision. A city facility and its utilities should also be considered resources. But if an outside organization is expected to provide all staffing, programming, insurance, supplies, and operating expenses, what kind of a partnership is that? If the city provided these programs directly, it would have to hire staff or contractors. It would have to budget for those positions and have operating costs. Using an outside provider may reduce the city's cost, but it does not make that cost disappear. It simply transfers that expense to the organization providing the service. Without city funding, the organization will likely have to charge families. That may put the program out of reach for some of the teenagers who need this the most. We need clarification also about the city's fee schedule. If this outside provider charges for programming in a city facility, would the provider then owe the city rental fees, staffing charges, utility costs, or a percentage of their program revenue? If so, the organization would provide the staff, assume the financial risk, charge families to cover the cost, and then possibly pay that money back to the city? That's not a balanced public-private partnership. The city currently helps support programs and activities benefiting the arts, seniors, and veterans. Every one of those is an important priority, but our teenagers are also an important priority. A city should be willing to invest in the people who live here, not only a select few groups or programs that happen to fit with an existing policy. And I'm not asking the city to write a blank check. I'm asking it to identify the teen services our community needs, calculate what those services would cost if the city provided them, and make a meaningful contribution toward delivering them. Thank you.

All right, the next speaker will be Dr. John and May.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

We are here to talk about Kids Day once again. It is going to be on September 19th at Maricopa Wells Middle School from 10 to 4. It is generally a health, safety, environmental awareness for kids. and we have about a hundred activities for them all education and uh... in addition to that we have uh... a lot of resources and uh... some of the resources that you were talking about some of the speakers that came up uh... such like tori's program we love to have them there as well so that you know the information get out to the community because it became a one-stop shop we have thousands of people there and a nice focused area where they can come and do that. Let me turn it over to May. She can talk a little bit more too.

I just want to thank all of you because all of you have had a huge contribution to Kids Day. This is our 19th year and again Dr. John had mentioned it's Saturday September 19th at Maricopa Wells Middle School from 10 to 4. And we are still in the process, we are still in need of sponsors, anyone who would like to have an educational booth, who would like to share their talents, we welcome you. We do have some exciting programs. I do have some thank you certificates, again, For the city of Maricopa for their 19 years of contribution to Kids Day. We also have one for the Maricopa Police Department. We appreciate you all so much. They are in partnership with Phoenix Children's Hospital and they do a bicycle safety and helmet. And then also, we cannot forget our Maricopa fire department and Sparky and all the creative programs and CERT and all these educational that are so important to all of our families. And they created in a very fun and interactive way, so easy for all the families to understand. And again, we have global water with water conservation, electrical district three and electric safety and

And the event is free to everyone, so we want to let you know the food's free, the drinks are free, toys are free, we give out bicycles and all sorts of things. It's made so that there is all access for everyone. As we were talking about, everyone is there. It's a fun event. The kids learn without realizing that they're learning. We kind of trick them into learning how to make it fun.

And then exciting, we have the Search and Rescue Division of the Sheriff's Department brings in their helicopter. It's very exciting for the kids. And then they get to learn about the cadet programs that we were never aware of for our youth. So we have them with the Maricopa Police and Fire and Sheriff and...

All righty.

I just want to say thank you so much. We're very grateful. Thank you. Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, everyone.

And, May, you could give those certificates to Vanessa.

Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next speaker is Eric Burkett from Global Water.

good afternoon mayor smith council staff my name is eric burkett i joined global water in 2023 i was overseeing the southern arizona operations i came to the company with just under 25 years experience in the water and wastewater industry and more recently in june i just moved to the city of maricopa to become the senior director of operations and my primary primary responsibility is to provide safe reliable operations of our utilities here in the city and the rest of the state. So I just wanted to introduce myself and say that I look forward to working with all of you, getting to know you, and being part of the community. So thank you.

All right, that is the end of our speaker cards. Would anyone else like to approach the podium? Yes, please come forward, state your name.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Julia Gussie. I'm a Sunita resident and a candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives for this city and the cities within Legislative District 16. I'm also one of over 20 veterans that are running for state office. Thank you for recognizing our Purple Heart Medal recipients. My husband's grandfather was a World War II Marine and a recipient of this honor. I have worked with Veterans Services for the last 20 years with NCHP in Casa Grande, with Arizona State University as the Director of Veterans Upward Bound, as a Senior Advisor for the President of the United States of America, as an appointee with the Department of Veteran Affairs, and most recently I retired in the State Service with my position with the Arizona Department of Veterans Services. As you are aware, there are veterans in our community and within LD16 that there are veterans trying to get their life in order after struggling with substance abuse. There are veterans facing homelessness. There are veterans suffering from PTSD and all horrors from their war service. There are women veterans who were sexually assaulted while on active duty. There are deported veterans trying to return to our communities, our country. There are LGBTQ veterans trying to restore an honorable discharge status. There are veterans exposed to burn pits and many with other lifelong ailments attempting to establish and be awarded a disability rating. We have also lost so many veterans to suicide that we all must pay attention to the causes and the prevention of this. I just mentioned a handful of veteran causes and many of our veterans are trying to get their basic services that they earned. I have sat up there where you all sit today discussing these matters for several years. But not much has changed for our local veterans. Still not easy or easier access to local veteran hospitals or any clinics for that matter. No offices with VA representatives here in town. I come to you today not to bum you out, but to highlight the need of veteran services in this city and throughout this district. While there are awesome organizations such as the American Legion and the VFW who attempt to do this outreach, these organizations are not prepared or trained to serve our veterans in the way the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Arizona Department of Veterans Services can do. Just recently, the Arizona Attorney General came down on an organization accused of defrauding our veterans. These same organizations were invited to come here to our Maricopa Veterans Center to speak to our veterans. I met with many of you earlier this year. Thank you again for taking that meeting and discuss these needs of our veterans. So please work on doing better for our veterans. And thank you once again for recognizing our Purple Heart recipients today. Thank you.

anyone else like to approach the podium all right seeing none i'll move us to the consent agenda council i do have a request to pull item seven dot three and seven dot four we will talk about those at the beginning of the regular agenda are there any questions on seven one two five through seven do i have a motion so moved by council member learman seconded by council member nor an additional opportunity to ask a question speak Seeing none, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion carries. All right, that'll take us to the regular agenda item, which we will address, item 7-3 and then 7-4. And they may be all similar, but Vanessa, if the questions are similar based on 7-3 and 7-4, we could handle those together. Yeah, OK. All right, so I'm going to turn it over to Vice Mayor.

Thank you so much. I actually sent a bunch of questions over to our staff and got a ton of answers for them, but I just wanted the people in the audience to know, and Quinn has a couple answers, I believe. My goal by pulling these is to make sure we understand, not understand, make sure that businesses understand that these opportunities are available, that if you have a business in the city of Maricopa and you're interested in serving businesses either alcohol or whatever it is, at our events to please reach out. You know, I was at the July 4th, what do we call it? Great American 4th, right? Yeah. I was at the Great American 4th, and I do enjoy a beer once in a while. And I was at the Great American Fourth, and sadly there was such a huge wait that, you know, because there were so many people. So I'd like to see where, you know, we get the more people involved, more than one tent maybe, more than one business at the same time at these huge events with 10,000 people, maybe bring in two or three different people. uh... folks that are going to be able to do it all local i hope uh... but if there's someone outside the city that can come in and do do the same process and and help us that's good too but i would hope it's all always going to be a local business here in the city of maricopa that's coming out there and serving our our folks one of the questions i had uh... is I had was our outreach history. And how do we find these folks? And if you can just elaborate on that.

Absolutely. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Thank you, members of council. Honestly, we love how much interest there are in events. You guys all do such a great job of supporting those events and honestly asking these types of questions publicly. It's like free advertising to really get that message out there. So that might have been the point. Yes, so absolutely. We do solicit vendors on social media and on vendor emails that we've collected a Rolodex of the people in the community that we know that we work with repeatedly. A lot of times we work out through sponsorships as well. We get to know them and develop relationships. We discover opportunities, specific needs that they have and look for opportunities to plug them into those. but certainly we can always increase the frequency. And again, this is an opportunity. So if you're listening and if you're a business that's interested in staffing a bar and you've got the proper licenses or want to understand that process, if you're someone that wants to get involved more in events, absolutely reach out to the city's cultural services department. We stand ready to always building new relationships. We also look to spread the love, if you will. So as often as we can, if we have multiple interested in one event, then we'll look to do some kind of a circulation that fits their needs. And again, a lot of times that might tie to a sponsorship that they're doing, but I think the more word that we can get out there, the better. So thank you for absolutely bringing that to our attention. And I think we can always, you bring up a good point as well about 4th of July, we continue to grow as a community and it was a big turnout. It's we're always looking to balance the needs of the vendors who are looking at, Hey, we want, healthy lines and we want to sell our products and not too much competition. So it's worth it for us balancing that with, yeah, sometimes we get long lines. We're aware of that. We debrief after every event to kind of gauge and say, do we have enough? Do we have too few? Do we need to adjust? Certainly the 250th anniversary brought out quite a crowd. So we're hoping that that turnout continues. It's, It's a good problem to have, but one that we always do have to keep an eye on. So we appreciate that feedback so we can continue to explore those options if there's... And that's feedback we can also share with the vendors. Hey, is there a way to increase staffing? We're hearing from that community. Is there a way to look for partnering and pairing? I think there's a lot of opportunities, but it starts with getting the word out, as you mentioned. So again, if you're listening, give us a call.

Would this be a possibility for... An RFQ of sorts where people can give us all their information so we have a rolodex of sorts of people who are capable of doing both the alcohol as well as food even. I know we have a bunch of food trucks, but it just seems it's the funniest thing is some events we go overboard with food trucks because we think so many people are coming. And then some events we do a shorter amount of food trucks and then too many people come and you're like, darn it. So, like, on the 4th of July thing, if you bought food and a beer, you might have been online for an hour and a half of the three hours. So, I mean, it's great for the food truck folks because, you know, for that, they had lines the whole entire time. But it's not good for the people who are showing up and just want to grab some food and sit down and watch fireworks instead of still being online when they started. So it's that kind of stuff, and I just wanna be able that, I just wanna ensure that our staff is looking at all of those things and really pulling it together. And I know you do a great job, and Travis, and everybody's out there trying to figure out, Brenda's out, everybody's trying to figure out how to make sure it's perfect. but it's never gonna be perfect, we know that. But how do we get as close to perfect as we can get, right? So that's why I pulled it. I just want to have the conversation so we can have a little bit of discussion and people out there, maybe the press writes a story about it, and the people out there understand that there are these opportunities in the city of Maricopa to really expand on what you're offering in the city.

absolutely and looking at larger cities i think as those events grow out of necessity sometimes it moves into an RFQ or RFP type situation and certainly something that we can explore at the level we're at right now uh... again everything's worth everything's on the table everything's worth exploring uh... know that that process can be a little cumbersome so right now If they're just approaching us, we can immediately get them in. But as you mentioned, we're certainly open to the conversations if that's the most efficient way of doing that. And if we beam in, certainly with your feedback, if there's desire to explore that, we can do it.

Great.

Thank you.

Additional comments, questions? Yes, Council Member Wade.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Quinn, explain to us, if you would, please, as short as you can, the exact process that you go through to notify an event vendor, to actually reach out to select and notify a vendor that they're going to serve the community for a particular event, whether it be Friday, 4th of July, or whether it be Salsa Festival, which we are all glad to hear is coming back to the city of Maricopa. But can you give us kind of a shortened step-by-step process so that people won't be surprised? For instance, in the last RFP they were surprised that there was a funding requirement associated with that. How do we avoid that so that people won't spend their time kind of spinning their wheels before we know that something actually is going to take place?

Thank you, Council Member Wade. So I think your question was if I could describe the process by which we solicit vendors. Is that what you were asking?

Solicit them, select them, and bring them more.

Mayor Quinn, if I can, the agenda item is about a liquor license. So if you can keep it to the vendors for the bar, that would be appreciated. Others might have an interest if they would have known this conversation was coming up for everybody.

Perfect.

So how do we know that liquor licenses are going to be made available? How do we know if liquor licenses are going to be available?

He can answer the liquor license question. I just wanted to make sure he didn't get into food or other vendors that weren't on the agenda.

We're aware of the businesses in town that have liquor licenses, and we proactively reach out to them to gauge their interest in doing that. Some that have interest in the past don't have interest right now. They may have interest in the future. Some that didn't have interest in the past have interest now. But we proactively reach out to them and invite them to reach out to us. And as I said, we try to be equitable with that and spread it around pretty transparently. Right now we have one that's expressed interest in doing that continually. But to the Vice Mayor's point again, if we're missing you, please do contact us and let us know. As I mentioned, if we were doing an RFP process openly for that liquor license, it would be the same end result that they would end up approaching us. So you can approach us today. Does that answer your question?

With the limitations that we have.

other questions below so yeah very specifically the contact nick brooks he's specifically over that with our events if they're interested in that liquor license and vendor opportunities and uh and we take their name down and say great how can we get you involved all right thank you great additional questions yes councilmember noah thank you mayor uh thank you quinn i think that's a

Important point though that we need to clarify is you have to have a liquor license. The city is not providing a liquor license. The person that's serving has to have their own liquor license in order to be qualified to provide this service at the city events. That certainly limits the amount of people who have those in the city. But like you said, if there is somebody out there that's interested that has that liquor license, they should definitely talk to the city.

We're interested in figuring out how to grow to that. That information is readily available online as well. It's state statutes and pretty well spelled out.

City Manager.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Totally agree. We have about 20 to 25 groups or businesses that have the type of liquor license that would be required as a base to be able to provide liquor at a special event. There is a very specific set of state statutes that govern the special event liquor license process. We have a special event process. So going back to the council member Wade's question about how we go through this, part of that is through that special event process where someone is turning in effectively a permit to hold a special event and it is reviewed and then there's the site plan that comes up and that's how it gets onto the agenda on an item like tonight. where we have a full diagram of what that map is going to look like, where the alcohol is going to be contained at that event, and where the security will be aligned with that as well. So all of that comes together through that special event process. But we are limited right now to about 20 to 25 different businesses in our community, some of which just have, for example, cans of beer that they may sell at their establishment. They have a liquor license, but they probably are not going to extend that to a large-scale event because they're not used to you know serving drinks or mixed drinks or those kind of things and so really the the candidate pool that we have within our city limits is pretty limited even if you consider that 20 to 25 amount of people that have that appropriate class of the liquor license under state statute yes council member ghetto thank you madam mayor in reviewing all three of these applicants and maybe it's just in our packet

It appears that all three applicants are a little bit deficient on what their diagrams need to be displaying. And so I just wanted to verify with staff that these applicants have met all of the requirements for their diagrams.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Mayor, Council Member Gettle. These are submitted to the state, so the state is the one that dictates that process. If there are deficiencies, they can send them back, and we can make some of those corrections. But to this date, I don't know that we really have had concerns as it relates to any deficiencies in the application process. Those have been approved by the city council and then sent to the state, and the state reviews those, and we make any corrections following that.

Thank you.

Thank you. Additional comments, questions? Yes, Vice Mayor.

And to clarify, I didn't pull 7.7 because for that, that's an individual event outside the city's purview. What I was looking at really was 7.3 and 7.4 because they're city events and how that we as a city, as an organization, pick the folks who are going to be presenting at these events that we have, the big events we have. So I just wanted to get that out there and get people to understand that there are opportunities. Just get your name in the hat, really, and reach out to Nick and tell Nick, hey, I want to do this one day. And maybe there's an opportunity for them at a... What is this? The movies in the park or something like that. And then we can see how they go. And then, as I said, at these large events, more than one. So maybe two or three different vendors having small booths would be better off for the community. Anyway, thanks.

Should stipulate that congratulations, Nick. He's out on baby leave. There you go. So you can email me until he's back.

Yeah. So with that, if you'll accept.

Yes, I'll accept a motion.

With that, I'd like to move to approve 7.3 and 7.4.

Seconded by council member Lehrman and one last chance for comment question seeing none all in favor say aye aye all opposed that motion carries Very good. Thank you, and that takes us to item 8.1 Which is a presentation on? Economic development strategic plan I do have one speaker card Tina. Would you like to speak now? or after the presentation Okay, then why don't you come forward now? That's all right.

Hello, Mayor, Vice Mayor and Council. I'm Tina Dugan, and I'd just like to talk. I reviewed the uh... strategic plan as presented with the agenda i support a focused economic development strategy that brings quality jobs health care access in a stronger tax base to maricopa i don't think anyone here disagrees with that goal my question tonight is simpler is this plan as written ready to guide real decisions on zoning incentives land and infrastructure spending Let's start with housing. This report gives two different multifamily counts in the same document. The main analysis says 211 units, and by the way, it's 2024 numbers that are quoted in here, which to me seems odd. We're in 2026 that we didn't have some updated numbers. The appendix says 3,106. That's a big enough gap that it deserves a closer look. One of the report's tables also appears to need correcting. It's titled Occupied Housing Units, but its total lines up with our overall housing stock. Numbers nerd. Not our occupied units. And neither number reflects the roughly 1,200 multifamily permits issued in 2024 alone. Before we use this data for zoning decisions, I'd like one number that we can trust. Second, the report's own appendix shows our commercial and retail development fee at over $15,000, while every peer city listed runs $2,000 to $6,000. I didn't see that comparison reflected in the recommendations, and the report itself notes that fees like this can affect where businesses choose to locate. I think it's worth a closer look. Third, in 2024, we were told we were leaving META, which would save us more than $650,000 a year. Two years later, I haven't seen anything that compares what the Office of Economic Opportunity costs today against what we used to spend. And I'm not saying the number's wrong. It's just transparency. I haven't seen it, and I'd really like to. Here's what I'd ask for. Before this plan supports any zoning change, incentive packages, land purchases, or infrastructure commitments, I'd like staff to bring back one reconciled housing pipeline, an actual cost comparison for the MATA transition, and an implementation plan for all 10 recommendations, each with an owner, a timeline, a cost, and a way to measure those results. I think we can measure success by more than the number of forms received or acres in a study. I'd like to see it measured by businesses that actually open, permanent jobs that actually go to Maricopa residents, and the benefit to the people who already live here. I just want us to get it right. Thank you.

All right, that'll take us to the presentation. Joshua, are you providing that presentation?

So you get me for just a second for an introduction. So Council Member's Mayor just wanted to introduce. Oh, he was hiding over there. He is. So Jim Rounds with Rounds Consulting will be doing the presentation. I'm thankful for all their work in putting this together. Jim was here a few months ago, and since that time has talked to many community members, businesses, and so excited to be able to have this shared with you. So with that, Jim.

Thank you, and welcome.

Mayor, members of the council, I was looking forward to being back here for many months. We had a great opening discussion. And for the comments that were just made, we'll double check any of the data. The reason that there is 2024 data in some cases is that We ended up expanding our scope with no additional fee because there was a lot that needed to be covered, and so the timeframe was a little bit longer than anticipated. But we think that the product as a whole came out well. I do feel like we cover how you are going to pay for things. You can't pay for things if you don't have economic growth that produces a positive return on investment. If it costs you more than you're going to be collecting, then it's going to be a burden on current taxpayers. Our focus was on how can you increase the quality within the community because that creates the revenue. You also have a lot of not just retail leakage but economic development leakage. A lot of businesses that would normally be here are located elsewhere. And the final thing that we wanted to bring is we didn't want to just do a typical strategic plan. A typical strategic plan is one that says, you need to create higher wage jobs. How do you do that? Work hard. Another one is, all right, you don't really have a lot of health care facilities. We talked to three different hospitals at this point, and we have two of them that are going to be talking to you shortly about potentially locating here. We looked at what are the high tech opportunities in the area because what was happening at U of A related to the tech park that we also analyzed for you and we identified that that wasn't going to work without U of A's participation. They had a major fiscal issue at the time. Well, in two days, I'm having a happy hour with a good friend of mine that's an executive over at U of A. And we're going to be talking about an opportunity where there was somebody that was on the tech council that is partnering with a high up executive, former executive at Intel, who just happened to be a neighbor that lives three houses down from me. And I didn't know him. And so we were brainstorming. And we have some ideas. So what we're actually trying to do is give you a snapshot of what the community looks like. give you some perspective on some items to focus on and then give you some low-hanging fruit on some things that are real opportunities coming up in the next several weeks so i'm very proud of what we put together but we will double check all the data there was some confusion between certain data at OEO which we have been since been hired to help them correct some of their economic data so we're now an advisor to the governor's office and OEL on some of their stats. And there was confusion over definitions with some of the city data, so I can see how there could have been a little bit of a hangover on that. But that is the vast minority. If we have about 100,000 numbers in the report, we just talked about three. But I do appreciate that, and I would even be willing to talk with the individual that had some concerns if that would be helpful. I'm all for making our reports better. People sometimes say, well, I'm sorry, but we have a couple of concerns. If it makes our report better and my name's on it, I'm happy, so I'm willing to take any criticism. But this is basically a PowerPoint of the executive summary. We're fine-tuning a few things in the report, including some data points, a couple of minor typos, things like that. But the meeting came up quickly on us, and so we're going to hit the big items. we wanted to look at diversifying the uh... the city's economy and we can't just do this overnight you're gonna have to be looking at short-term opportunities midterm and long-term opportunities it's gonna take a while to do that you're gonna have to create more jobs and more economic diversity which is going to then create more businesses locating here you need the tax revenue in order to put the amenities in place to then get the businesses to want to locate here, which then generate more tax revenues. You either go on an upward spiral or a downward spiral, depending on how you do. But again, we'd like to at least leave you with some immediate opportunities. But the key is we're not dictating how you implement everything. We're giving you some best practice suggestions. It's a strategic plan. We even called it a to-do list when we were here the first time. But it's not a to-do list, and here's every single thing that your staff need to do. If you wanted us to do that, our fee actually would have gone up quite a bit because we would have been here every day for the next year. But I did something before the meeting that I've never done before. When I worked down at the state capitol, every day I'm down there, I age two days, it feels like. Working on this has actually been invigorating because everybody has been very interested in participating. So I made some nice commentary on LinkedIn if you want to look at it later. And I was sincere about it. And for the record, I am considered to be pretty salty in my comments. So this isn't the norm. We're typically not the brown noser. We're the ones that are called salty. But then they'll come back to us and say, well, we like your idea. So we'll go ahead and put up with you. Quality growth, again, is a central theme, and you have a range of local amenities for residents, and it's great. When I come through here, it's a nice, clean community. I enjoy it. But we still need to reduce that economic leakage. That economic leakage, and again, jobs and just the tax revenue, is enough to completely change how you invest in the community, and that includes infrastructure. It includes a lot of things that will help the community grow. We think that the community's been managed well. It's just been an unusual start to a community. It happened during the economic boom before we had the Great Recession. And then the community has been, it hasn't been following the typical pattern where a community like Buckeye can say, okay, the growth ring's about to hit us. We need to start putting in infrastructure. And even then it doesn't go perfectly. And so it's been a little bit different here. But I remember years and years ago, Before you all were here, we did an analysis. And I thought that we did something wrong. We had to do a survey of the workers. And we found that the workers were fairly skilled and had higher wages. And they ended up working at the Intels and along the Price Road corridor and in Tempe at some of the tech places. Having a quality workforce is one of the most difficult things to establish. Other stuff can be managed, but getting that quality workforce is difficult. You have a lot of high quality workers, or workers with a lot of different skill sets, where if you can get some of these businesses here, If you take 10% of the traffic, if you get 10% more businesses here, you take 10% of the traffic off the road, that's like adding 10% more lane miles. So there's ways of doing this. But you have to be careful to not put too much effort on just focusing on jobs. So even though there's a fairly high jobs-to-population ratio, a fairly low jobs-to-population ratio here, you're not going to get to the statewide average or the Greater Phoenix average. But you can move towards creating jobs and adequate housing opportunities and keep housing more affordable. Now, it's not necessarily affordable, but it's more affordable here than a lot of other places. But I think the key right now is I feel like Arizona and Maricopa are at a crossroads, not quite the same as when we went through the Great Recession, when we had to completely revamp everything that we did in the state. We had to change tax policies. We had to create economic development programs, create the Commerce Authority. I'm very familiar with that because I wrote the bill. We had to do a lot, and it was hard to get everybody on board. But we had Democrats agreeing on tax changes and Republicans agreeing on economic development programs because it was looking out for the taxpayer. It was for the betterment of the taxpayer, and everybody came together. Now, how can you be more proactive going forward? You don't want government taking the place of how the private sector operates. You want to set the proper foundation. But then on occasion, you might need to push them a little bit. I used to give a presentation, and every once in a while you have to refresh your slides because they get stale. But my favorite was I purposely found a picture of a dad teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. And I found, I searched and searched, and I had to find a picture where his hand was no longer on the seat. And my point was, the government had to get that bike going. But at some point, you let go. If you let go too late, which I found out, then the kid will fall over. If you hang on too long, or if you do it too early, then they'll fall over. You have to do it just right. But I think that now is the time to be thinking about these things. And the enthusiasm that you all showed during this research phase, if that continues, I'm very, very optimistic of what you can do here.

Jim, before you proceed, do you have an example of what that would look like? A simple example? Go back to your last slide. Workforce leaders, policymakers in business, be even more proactive moving forward. Just a simple example.

Okay. Mayor, Councilmember, so for example, one of the ideas was you have a very skilled workforce and they all drive to the Price Road Corridor. Not all, but a lot of them. I went ahead and had lunch with the city manager in Chandler and the economic development director has been a long-term friend of mine. He used to work here, Micah Miranda. And my question was, you're getting pretty short on land. You're having to be careful with your policies. You have to still maintain some mega sites for some really large locations. What are you gonna do when some of the supplier businesses wanna locate on vacant land? You're gonna have to send them somewhere. How would you feel about sending them to the city of Maricopa? And they said, That'd be great. We'd be happy to meet with them. And how do you get that done? I got that started just by having lunch with a couple of friends. You all get that done by having coffee. And it doesn't have to be something formal. It just has to be something where they say, hey, Intel is bringing this extra semi-division in. It's going to be in two locations. We'd like to put it there because we have a lot of our workers that would be working in that already located in the community. It's just asking questions and it's coming up with ideas. It's almost like running a business. You're running a business and how I run a business and how I get projects is I'll meet with people and I'll find out what their needs are, and I'll figure out if we can provide services that match those, and then we do the work, and then we move on to the next project. I feel like that's what you need to do here. Another example is the hospital issue. Years ago, when we were doing economic advising directly for dignity, for the executives, we were this close to getting them to do their micro hospital on their site. And then COVID came in and it messed everything up. But it was that close. I feel like that could still happen. But when we did an analysis for Anvita that's in Yuma, so it's in a more isolated area, and they have to supply a lot of their, a normal hospital would have other suppliers come in, supporting businesses. Their spinoff businesses were much lower than we expected. It was because they're providing their, as part of their direct operations, they're providing these additional businesses too. So they would be able to bring in the supplier businesses as part of their operation. And so, I talked to the CEO and we visited several times and I recommended that they, and they talked to Maricopa a while ago when there was an assembly land issue that was brought up. And with the exception of a particular internal issue that caused them to have to deal with another expansion in southern Arizona, they were going to come up and visit with you all. And so even though we're going to be done with this project after we do our final review of the numbers and basically have the final version in PDF format. I still want to be helping you all do that. I was offering to be the Uber driver for the CEO and come up here and then let you do what you need to do. And then I want to then sell it on the way back. So participating in these things really does matter. It doesn't mean doing the job of the economic development people. It means supporting what they're doing and being a leader and showing that enthusiasm. That makes a lot of difference.

those are two great examples on speaking of which in terms of the final document uh... on page three of the larger document talks about moving forward the primary focus will need to shift to securing more businesses to locate within the local community I would like to just put an emphasis on high-paying job businesses because I think for us that's one of the most important aspects. And so if we could somehow tweak that sentence, it's a simple change, but just to make sure that anyone who reads this document knows that that's a high of interest to us. Okay, thank you.

And if your staff could make a note of that, we'll change that. Ben's shaking his head, yes. And there's other sections where Aaliyah is talking about the higher wage jobs generating the higher revenues, but you get the higher wage jobs by it's chicken and the egg unless you come up with some clever ways of inducing additional business activity. You already had the 347 funding. We volunteered time. I ran into your staff up in Sedona at a conference, and they were telling me about it. And I said, would it help if we did an economic impact analysis for you? And they're like, well, we don't know if we have time to get that through. I said, no, no, we'll do it for free. And we just put it together to show the positive ROI of that particular investment. It's amazing what you can get done by just making friends and talking to people and it really helps the community.

Completely agree. Thank you, Jim.

So, a victim of its own success, lots of business, lots of residential activity, we need more business activity, that will come. Again, in fact, I think it might be the next slide. So, over the years, over the many years that I've been doing this, I always like to look at site selection magazine just to see how the primary categories of what the survey indicates from the people bringing the businesses in. And in 2018, one and two, workforce and transportation, if you go back over multiple decades, it's always one and two, workforce transportation. Now recently, utilities and regulatory procedures jumped up because data centers and energy demands. And so all of a sudden, those were the ones that were brought up the most in the survey. But the fundamental ones are still transportation, infrastructure, and workforce. And so as you work on transportation, I think one of the keys is figure out how you can get some additional funding. So with 347, I believe there was state, county, and then taxpayer support. There'll be other opportunities to connect with the roads, but the key is going to be not just expanding the roads, but making it so the people here don't have to drive there. I took a call on the way here, and they said, oh, it sounds like you're in your normal car, because I got a short car, and I get little chips in the windshield. And they asked me about that, and I said, oh, no, I'm only going two miles an hour, so I think I'm safe right now. But that's going to be fixed. And the more that the local businesses and the base sector businesses come in, those people aren't going to be driving to Chandler anymore. It's going to take a lot of pressure off the current infrastructure.

uh... on that slide the top item utilities availability cost reliability i read that i'd like to know how you and meant for that i read that as in order to bring businesses here that want to invest our community we need to have the utilities uh... close by does the city need to invest in that ahead of time and then get reimbursed by the company or what do you mean by that

So this survey is more like a statewide type comment, but it can be used at the local level as well. And so, for example, when Dignity was originally going to be locating in that particular site, there were a couple of questions about the reliability of the utilities nearby. And our suggestion was split the cost with the community for a second generator. and then you don't have a problem. You have that double redundancy. And so there's always a solution. But you were talking about data centers. We've been doing a lot of work on data center analysis, a lot of work on energy issues. So just like a report that we're gonna be releasing that's gonna be showing that the state's gonna be 10,000 workers a year short in terms of qualified employees compared to our current economic trajectory, We did that for the Board of Regents, and it'll be presented at the League Conference. But we also had recommendations on how to close it, and I'm optimistic because we did a lot of work to help advance the state's economy, and now we're playing catch up. And how do you play catch up? You try to figure out ways of closing that 10,000 worker a year gap. In fact, the woman that was talking about running for the legislature and being interested in veterans affairs, and this kind of was a veterans-themed meeting, that was one of our suggestions. And we weren't asked to put suggestions, but I don't like to complain about something and then not maybe put a solution. So one of it was going to be work with the veterans, figure out ways of getting them higher levels of education, extra skills. Because in every case when we deal with workforce, the cost of helping those individuals is far less than the extra taxes that they pay within a very short period of time. It's a positive ROI. If it was a business, they would have invested in that in a heartbeat. So it's not a Democrat or Republican issue. Same thing with childcare and all sorts of things. There's neat opportunities and there's clever ways of doing what you would like to do. And as one example that I didn't include in this, but it's worth noting because I didn't include in it, one of our ideas was brought up, I brought up at a conference when they were talking about the $10 million that the state spent for childcare support, and it was helping 900 parents. well i wanted to use the kindergarten first and second grade classrooms in the vacant schools and allow those to be a daycare and i wanted the school to be able to collect rent but below market rent so the school would be collecting a little extra money the below market rent would be passed along for a discount child care program for those individuals that would qualify so we would be helping many times more than when the state spent the $10 million. And it would cost taxpayers nothing. It would actually be generating revenue. And somebody said, well, you can't do that. There's a law that says that you can't have below market rent even for a government building. And I said, OK. And I was quiet for a minute. took me five minutes to draft the legislation that would be needed for it just because something doesn't fit right now doesn't mean we can't change it and there's a lot of stuff that's going to be going on with the state with workforce and energy and everything else i'm looking forward as long as you're still interested in brainstorming with you all finding out how you know maybe a handful of cities finding out how they would respond to different things related to new requirements. And I also told Josh that I'll share all the information that we've already done on the data centers with you all. It's several reports and some other things. And we're working on it with our buddy, Andy Tobin, who I started calling the godfather of rural economic development in Arizona. And a week ago, somebody said, I heard you're working with Andy Tobin. Isn't his nickname like the godfather of rural economic development? I said, I didn't hear that. That's interesting. That's pretty good.

Thank you.

uh... so employment median household income use me one last question also sorry i just it's listening to you talking about pretty easy are you seeing or you please consider that there might be a slight shift in the way people are looking at that as soon as it at this time because it's a lot of negative energy before but this year uh... i'll take the example of The Mayor Chandler, he has proposed some positive issues as opposed to negative. Have you seen that shift take place?

It's been, the Council Member, Mayor, it's been, there hasn't been a clear campaign on explaining how it works. And with data centers on the positive side, no they don't have a ton of employees. They're not the end product. You don't just produce data capacity for no reason. You produce data capacity so you have the high tech business located next to it so that your phone has access to extra storage capacity. And so there's a connection between our high tech advancement in the state and data centers. However, a big reason that we're going to have massive additional energy needs going forward is the data centers. And water was an issue for a while until the closed loop systems became more affordable and now it's almost standard for the new ones coming in to have the closed loop water system so it's not just wasting water. But the push now is going to be if the data center doesn't come, the business itself doesn't come and provide its own power, it has to partner with somebody. And that argument that the state removed that economic incentive for three years, it's not going to be three years. That was just to get it passed. It's going to be permanent. But there's a way of doing it right, and that's the key. And so for me, it's not so much data centers are good or bad. It's how are they being implemented? Are they being implemented in the right locations? Is it cost effective? Are we putting extra burden on the current rate payers? If we are, then what do we do in housing when new housing used to come in and put additional burden on current residents? We added development fees. Are we going to have to do something similar? I don't know. I brought that up, and oh my goodness, that stirred up a data center group. And I was just brainstorming with, hey, if it's fair for one area, it's fair for another. But the key is we have to be more thoughtful and we have to have more discussions because I can tell you they are all over the place right now, and we have to consolidate it. And I was actually hoping a little bit more from the governor's office on providing guidance on that, which I have yet to see.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'll go through this a little bit more quickly so everybody's not here too late. Employment, household income is higher here than many other areas. This is the challenge. Typically you have one job for every two people. There's one job for every 11 people here. If you were to get to the one job for every two people, you'd have to create 41,000 jobs just like that. You're not going to get there, but you can move towards that by creating the business opportunities, focusing on the higher paying base sector businesses, which will then create the local market businesses. But you're still going to have to be adding housing. It can't just be you're adding jobs. If you're adding jobs, again, what will happen is the people from outside of Maricopa are then going to be driving into Maricopa instead, congesting the roads further. And so what we want to do is get a little bit more balance in the area And I feel like, much like the state is at a crossroads, like I said earlier, going forward. So after the Great Recession, we had to change things. Right now, we got water, energy, and workforce. If we don't correct for that workforce shortage that we calculated, it's a $6 billion tax revenue loss for the state and local government entities over the next decade. $6 billion. That's enormous. That, I hope, is enough to light a fire under lawmakers at the state to provide the right support And that's another area where lawmakers like yourselves can have a bigger role is have that stronger voice. I get frustrated because a lot of my colleagues can't go down and bang their fists on the podiums and say, this legislation is terrible because they have a board to report to. I might anger a client. I'll lose a client, but I'm not going to lose the business. So I end up being the one down there, and I'm running this small consulting firm. I'd love to bang my fist on a podium and then see one of you get up there and bang your fist right after me. It'd be great. I'll look for an opportunity and then maybe send a challenge out.

I can bang.

Good. Uh, let me skip a couple of these. Um, I was going to reduce it, but in case anybody had a question about a particular slide, this is just where the residents work and you can see that they're going into the tech areas of the Phoenix area. And that's what we want to bring back. And that's why I think it's incredibly important to have that outreach plan not just talking with, not just that Chandler example, but you all in staff, not literally knocking on the doors, but almost knocking on the doors. Go to each of the businesses along the entire corridor, not just Intel, go to all of them and talk to them and present some of the statistics. Show that you're the low... the workers live here, it would be great if maybe some of their expansions could be in this area and we'd have this neat little kind of tech city being built and that would allow for more revenue for even more transportation infrastructure. You either take tax revenue from taxpayers or you convert government inefficiencies into tax revenue. I think there's a lot of opportunities to convert government inefficiencies into tax revenue. Let me skip that one. I talked about that. I put in a SWOT analysis because you kind of have to. This is how every economic development plan starts and what I don't like is that it doesn't get into How? What are you going to do with it? What's the point? So the strengths, you still had good population growth, affordable housing compared to a lot of other areas, land availability. but there are issues related to the assembly of land. How is it going to develop? How is it going to develop going farther south where you get out of the city boundaries and you get into the county again? How are you going to be connecting with Casa Grande longer term? Are we going to be able to develop that high-tech corridor, the AI and optics corridor between here and U of A going through this whole region? So I feel like there's a lot of strengths, but the weaknesses are really things that... were the result of how the community originally evolved, but now I feel like is the best time that I've ever seen for you to make that shift to diversify. but it's going to take a lot of commitment and it's going to take a lot of walking around. It's going to be a lot of getting in your car when it's 110 out but it's 140 in your car because you were parking in the sun because you had a great meeting with that Intel executive and you didn't want to leave for an hour. That's just part of it. But isn't that part of running a business? I have to do that all the time. I would expect my council members, if I lived here, to do the same thing for me. The threats, same road congestion. We have to keep an eye out for the macroeconomic threats. Right now, we're not predicting a recession at the state level. Right now, economists love letters when they describe a recession. It's a letter U. It's a V if it's going to be quick and out. It's a W if it's a double dip. They just love letters. The latest was a K. And when I first heard that, I thought... What the heck's a K? Well, a K is the upper arm is higher income people that have more in terms of their property values and more wealth in the stock market are probably not going to have a recession. Lower income people will be more at risk of losing their jobs, but then they'll be the ones that are hired back earlier. So it'll be a little bit more of a recession for lower income households. That was a K. I view it more as kids skipping a stone across a lake. And if you look at the data, it's been bouncing up and down like this for the last year. We may already be in our downturn, but I'm hoping that if that kid skipped that rock just right, when it hits the other side, it jumps back up. So expect to see some data look good and bad. Last quarter for the state, we were number three in the country in terms of job growth. I'm going to tell you that this next quarter is going to be a lot lower. But you know why it's going to be lower? Not because we did anything wrong. It's because we had this strong growth, and then it flattens out. And then you have strong growth again, then it flattens out. Whenever we flatten out and the rest of the country is still growing to catch up, our ranking drops. So we can go from 3 to 49, and we're still whooping the nation's butt in terms of growth, in terms of jobs and quality growth. But we have to be real careful looking at those numbers. And so that's another thing to pay attention to is sometimes statistics lie. Sometimes statistics about the community might lie. In fact, part of the reason that the household income is higher is that there's more working individuals per household. But it's also that you have a lot of individuals with higher levels of academic achievement. So it's a little bit of both. So this isn't going to be easy. But I think it could be fun if you look at this as a challenge and you all over the next handful of years, and this is for the state too, once we get through whatever this downturn is going to look like, I think we're going to have the strongest expansion in our history at the state level. And I think you could have your strongest expansion in Maricopa and not just be housing growth, but getting those jobs here, getting the high wage jobs here, getting that infrastructure put in. And I would love to come and brainstorm with you all on a topic in a couple of years on data centers or whatever and not ever hit two miles an hour on the road. I'd like it, you know, just to be a smooth process. And I think that's in your future. And again, this is coming from the salty guy that usually finds a lot of problems. I am very optimistic about this community. And so it was a real pleasure to be.

um covering it jim on that list for um challenges was it threats did in your interviews was there any conversation about land preparedness and how much of our land is ready for this type of an investment versus how much work do they have to do any INSIGHT THERE?

MAYOR, COUNCIL MEMBERS, ONLY FROM THOSE INDIVIDUALS THAT WERE TRYING TO HIRE US TO DO AN EVALUATION OF WHETHER OR NOT THEIR PROJECT WOULD WORK. I DIDN'T WANT TO TAKE ON ANY OF THOSE PROJECTS WHILE WE WERE STILL WORKING ON YOUR ASSIGNMENT. GOT IT. BUT THERE WERE SOME LEGITIMATE QUESTIONS ABOUT A COUPLE OF PROJECTS AND YOU'LL PROBABLY HEAR ABOUT THOSE LATER. OKAY. BUT THE BIGGEST ONE WAS A LACK OF KNOWLEDGE. NINE OUT OF TEN INDIVIDUALS WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE COMMUNITY That's the place where it takes a long time to drive to, right? That was the number one thing. That's a great place to live and raise a family, and I feel like they're going to be adding extra jobs. This is a great time to get in, maybe before housing prices go up, because we're going to be adding all these high-wage jobs, and you're going to have some additional inflation for a little while until it stabilizes. It was we got to get rid of that, which to me means a little bit of marketing as well. But the marketing documents that you use for, you know, talking to businesses outside the area are the same ones that you can use when you're going around and knocking on the door and ringing the doorbell of the Intels and the other tech businesses. bring some things that are very favorable, and you have good staff. You have a former mayor on your economic development team. You have members of the economic development team.

Not an old mayor?

Well, I don't know. I might be older than him, so I don't want to say that. I'm sorry.

I had to come back to it. It's a good joke.

He's pretty buff, too. One of my favorite mayors.

Got it.

Second favorite mayor in the room.

Oh, there you go. All right, thank you.

I'll go through these really quickly. So healthcare access was the number one because you're already working pretty aggressively on the transportation. But I do feel like approaching Dignity about their current location and having a micro can coexist with what I was talking to Anvita about. And so whenever we can get that started, I'm hoping to just hand that off. And you all will just nail it based on my experience with you and how you've been promoting and talking very positive about the community. But that'll help tremendously. Transportation, we talked about. I think that there's going to be opportunities for federal monies. We actually had the Secretary of Transportation out here recently to talk about federal funding for I-11, and it ended up being awkward because I feel like there were too many cooks in the kitchen, but it was still, it showed me that there are still some opportunities, and we have to follow up on those. Now, it doesn't just mean we have a Maricopa-specific federal program, but it may be the BNSF project we're working on in the North Valley What if we get a little bit of support for that to close a small gap? And we get some for here, and we get some for north-south, and we solve some of the I-11 problems just to get some things kicked off, at least get the commission fully funded so they can do what they need to do. There's opportunities for that, and it's not just filling out a grant. It's talking to the congressional delegation. It's talking to the different people. And what I worry, though, is in the past, We had a very strong congressional delegation where I felt like we could talk to their staff and it would filter its way up and we would be able to do okay. Now I feel like a lot of it falls on us. Why was it that we had a meeting without any congressmen in the meeting at talking as business individuals to the Secretary of Transportation? This is where you all can help as well. What helps the state and Greater Phoenix in terms of this funding also helps you.

uh... one question on your chart with ten items listed uh... we have some mining industries close by and i didn't see anything in here regarding if there is a good connection for the city of maricopa to any of the mining any suppliers are you familiar with that industry and and is there a connection with the city of maricopa do you feel or what's your thought on that

Mayor, council members, we've done 30 or 40 different mining analyses in the past. We work with the industry quite closely. Yes, there are some opportunities here, but I'm thinking of a slight twist for what an opportunity could be here. So when talking with the individuals that have been bringing us into projects to help solve some financial problems, I was bringing up how I think the state needs an environmental tech sector. And I always have to say I'm not talking about hugging trees. I'm talking about growing money trees. I'm talking about developing these different projects. doing the R&D, the high-paid Bing jobs, doing the manufacturing, but in talking with them just, gosh, it was a week ago, We had to respond to a survey that was poorly constructed to criticize a particular mine. It wasn't here, but it was still in Arizona. And we took it apart because it was terrible. And the person that I talked to that represents the mine and also some other areas said, we actually care about the environment. We want to do what's right, but how do we respond to these things? And I said, I heard that in another conference on a panel. Would you be interested in being one of the supporters of putting together with a small group an environmental tech industry plan? Because we tried to get the governor's office to implement it, gave them ideas, nothing happened. I think we might be able to get something through the House, but I would rather it be more private sector driven. And so right now, I have a call, hopefully we'll have it tomorrow. It's very timely that you brought that up. I'd like to find out, okay, if these are the steps we need to do to make mining more environmentally friendly but productive and profitable, we're going to have to create this tech industry, this environmental tech industry. The connection that I originally designed when we were trying to push it on the governor's office, it went from U of A to Yuma, so through here, up to the Prescott Valley area and Flagstaff and then back. Because economic developers will not support anything that doesn't say triangle in it. It has to be the economic triangle of whatever. And I'm not joking that much. There's like 10 different, if you look up economic development triangles, you'll have a lot of hits. but it made sense doing that connection. Well, if we can get the mining industry to fund maybe half of whatever effort is needed, we get the utilities to fund it as well, and we maybe get a couple of other clever funders, and we put together a group that creates the program for the state Then we explain that why aren't we doing the extra work? Why can't the mining activity happen, the raw mining activity, but why can't we be developing the more advanced machinery here? $150,000 a year jobs. That's what I'm hoping for is all these things that we focused on that are more at the raw level. We go up the value chain and we figure out how we can locate those here. And I think there's a real possibility of it. And that gets back to the connection with U of A and having that strong relationship. And then lots of neat opportunities.

A lot of ties. Very good. Okay. Thank you.

We talked about marketing. We talked about in-person outreach. We talked about the partnerships. One thing that I really like is it's always nice to know how you compare to others. It's nice to know what your tax rate is compared to others. It's nice to know what your development fees are. It's nice to know there's dozens of different things that you can track. And one thing that we always recommend is that staff start tracking key measures and maybe give you a report every quarter just in case something changes. Because if you're thinking about changing your fees and then you look at the document and you realize you're already higher than everybody by 20%, you might want to rethink it. or you might have unique economic characteristics where it's worthwhile. But knowing what your competition looks like, having that knowledge, and it's so easy to collect that data. And so even though this is pretty far down on the list and it seems simple, I think this will be tremendously productive for you because you'll have, I guarantee, discussions in future meetings saying, why are we so high in this category? If we lower it, we're going to lose this revenue, but what are we going to gain? What's the ROI for that particular project? And then your staff go and they conduct an ROI analysis or they bring in a consultant, whatever it ends up being, and then you figure out whether or not that change is worthwhile. But it's like every other business decision. boost healthcare industry employment. And so this is beyond just the hospitals, but you have a lot of healthcare, social services, employees that then leave the area. And so if you added 3,800 additional workers in the area, you'd bridge the gap between the broader Greater Phoenix area and here. And that number, you're not going to be getting that overnight. It's just to provide some perspective. It's maybe a longer-term goal, but it's a target that's high enough where it is high up on your to-do list. So all of you probably have a marker board or you use Post-it notes of things that are important for you to look at. Things like this are what I put on mine, which is I need to improve in this area by December if I'm going to get this legislative project. And then I see it every single day. I love those tasks where you see one of your main goals every single day because that's how you get it done. regulatory clarity, just real quick, in doing some interviews with some businesses and chatting with other people in the community. There was a desire for a little bit more, I don't want to say consistency. I probably would have used a word more like, I don't want to say published, but a well-known organization pattern in terms of how businesses might be impacted. And so with other communities, This is a really big deal. Most of the big development agreements that we put together has to do with the business pays for part, the government pays for their part, and sometimes you need the business to pay for a little more and you reimburse them later if revenue is short. Sometimes you can do the opposite if revenue is good and it's an amenity that's going to yield positive dividends. So you still have some flexibility. But, and I've heard that you've already been working on it. And I think on one example, you came up with a solution. I can't remember what it was called, scalloped or something like that. So you've already been, so you already started thinking about these just from recent, you know, issues that come up. And so I was impressed with that because it wasn't even our recommendation. I heard it, you know, secondhand that you were already implementing that. And I thought that's fantastic. I thought that was great. And then we talked about participating in the marketing of the community. And again, I'm really hoping to see some of you bang your fist on occasion with me. And then keep in mind, so when you have staff look at these different topics, if you try to do too much all at once, you're not going to be able to do it well. There are certain things that you'll be able to do right away, that hospital issue, that tech issue that I brought up, doing some of the outreach. These are easy things to do. It's better to do when it's cooler. So maybe you implement that plan in September or October, and then it's cooler when you're cruising around. And I'm not kidding, because that's when people would be more likely to want to meet with you anyways. A lot of the executives aren't even in Arizona right now. They're in someplace cooler for at least the next month. But you're not going to change all these statistics overnight. You're not going to get that one job for every two people, jobs population ratio. But you can move towards it. And any movement towards it helps. Tracking the jobs and the industries that they're in, which was brought up before I came up, that's spot on. You have to figure out where you're adding the jobs, where's the shortage, but the beautiful thing is you don't even know fully yet because what if the mining issue, it was going to be, well, we have a mine and there's going to be some activity, but what if that issue that we brought up turns into something and you can put together an incentive package where it pays for itself ten times over and work with the mining industry and have some kind of a hub for additional research. And that's part of your U of A tech park. All right. We just had the private sector pay for a third of the tech park. Now it's viable, even with limited U of A participation. All right. We just created a tech park for you. That's how easy some things are, but they don't always come up. I'm making it sound like it's super easy. It's not. These are just things that I've been thinking about for the last what, eight months now? But you have a lot of opportunities. And I was sincere when you looked at that LinkedIn comment. I was sincere in everything I said. This was really fun to work on. There's lots of opportunities. This was a very positive group. And I love the fact that people care about their community as much as they do.

Very good. All right, council. I'm sorry, what? Council, do you have any comments or questions? Council Member Knorr.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor and Councilman Wayne. Thank you, Jim. You know I'm a nerd and I love this report. I've been dying to read it. And so I really appreciate all the work that went into it. there's a lot to digest in this report and there's a lot for us to do. And like you said, some of it's not going to happen overnight. And some of these things that we're going to have to just continue to work at, uh, over years, but as council members specifically, what, what can we do immediately? Like what, what can we take from this report immediately that will, will help our community, uh, create economic development and jobs?

I would reach out to Dignity immediately and find out what they need in order to build. If the economics supported them building back before COVID, it certainly supports it now. And I do think that it could exist with maybe OnVita or banner, it depends, but Anvita is the one that was willing to come here. I'd write a letter to the CEO of Anvita, have all of you sign it, and invite them down here and to examine the area and see the commitment. I would also, and this goes against me saying do it when it's cool, I would start maybe talking, I would talk to Chandler like I mentioned, and have the real conversation, not just the passing conversation that I had. I would talk to some of the executives at maybe just a portion of the businesses to express interest and find out which ones might be interested later, which ones might be interested now. And then you could... kind of market the area. Make sure you have some limited marketing materials, at least at first, if you don't have a more robust one. But marketing material is kind of like a document where it keeps improving over time. It's always going to be changing. And so you can start off with something slim just to get it done, but then make sure you have a leave behind. Every time we have to work on a major project and we give a presentation, there's always a leave behind. And sometimes it's just a memorandum, two pages, nothing more. Sometimes it's something real fancy. But I think a marketing document would be fantastic. The different organizations in the community, you know, the chambers and the ones that we discussed and we chatted with early on, there's, if you had event diagrams where those circles overlap, They're overlapping, but not as much as they could be. I think it'd be great where every quarter somebody, and maybe you already do, but I would have you all and or maybe somebody that's designated as a lead of a subcommittee or whatever, work with these individuals and talk about some of these big picture items, but then also appreciate that within the big picture items, they'll have specific things that they want to work on. But in order to work on the specific things, you need to have the bigger picture item solved, which is the bringing in the higher paying jobs issues and things like that. How can you coordinate? Do they know somebody at the capital that might be able to help get an appropriation, do a pilot program on veterans or something else in this community? There's all sorts of neat things that could be done. So a lot of what I'm saying is the immediate stuff is really communicating. Infrastructure and other things will come. But it'll be a lot easier when you're collecting enough tax revenue to pay for it without going into debt. You have to find that right balance. And we even looked at your budget. That wasn't even part of our scope. But looking at the budget, I think you've done a really good job with some of the constraints. You have a lot of revenue leaving. If you got that revenue back, so much more could happen. But it's going to take a while to do. I'm rambling a little bit because it's not a simple answer. It's kind of like a potluck where it's a whole bunch of things put together makes the meal. No, stew. I think stew is the right word.

Thank you. And to follow up on that. From this presentation, one of the themes that I'm hearing from you, and I just want to make sure that I'm hearing this correctly, is that we're not necessarily going to solve this problem sitting in Maricopa. That we need to be out there in Chandler talking to those businesses. We need to be out in Phoenix and in the larger metropolitan areas talking to people about Maricopa. and what we have here and what is available here so that we can change the narrative of we're just that really hard place to get to that you drive two miles an hour to get there. But talk to them about the improvements that we're making in the transportation system to change that dynamic. And then I would also like to note, so is that correct? Like we need to be out talking to people outside of Maricopa about Maricopa.

For example, this is top of mind because I have to prepare a couple of presentations for the lead conference in a couple of weeks. but you can propose different activities. We're an economic advisor for the league, so in some cases we just passed along some good ideas ourselves and then some of them came up. But wouldn't it be neat if at next year's conference we had something on how communities took advantage of the unique economic opportunities that began to present themselves and started realizing certain benefits, and you all were one of the panelists. You were one of the three cities. That would be an example of getting the message out to other communities, but also it's not just people that work at the cities that go to those. It's others. It's members of the business community. So, yeah, the extent that you get out there, it's great, but you can't forget your home community, you still have to, all the things that we were talking about, like the kids programs and everything else, I think those are just as valuable as all the economic stuff I talked about. I loved hearing about those and especially the enthusiasms, the doctor and the gentleman in the white, that enthusiasm, I had a big smile on my face until I was told I messed up some numbers and then it was like, ah, shoot, but still. You still have to focus on the little things as well. It's challenging. It's hard to be a policymaker. I used to think I wanted to be one. Now I'm thinking there's no way. Very good questions.

Thank you, Council Member Noor. Council Member Wade, and then I'll go to Council Member Lehrman.

You just answered my question. I was going to ask you if you were going to be presenting at the League of Cities and kind of maybe give us a hint as to what your strategy might be so we can make sure that we participate in your presentation.

So on the 19th, I think it's 2 o'clock, 2.30, we have a tourism panel. So it'll be talking about the TIA that passed and the need to continue to push tourism because it's a high ROI industry in the state. And then there's a 4 o'clock... happy hour presentation where we're revealing our ABOR report on the workforce shortage. So there's going to be a fireside chat with myself and the ABOR director, and then we're going to have a, I'll have a little presentation that goes along with it, but it's an open bar, so it's going to be pretty popular, I think. But it'll be a good one. And then the next day, my friend Annie Tobin helped set up in the morning, so I'm going to go back the next morning and energy one where they're going to be talking about some of these issues. I hope they're going to be talking about them honestly and maybe challenge each other. Oftentimes with some of the panel discussions, everybody's just too polite with one another. It's okay to say, I appreciate what you're saying, but here's five reasons why you're wrong, and then you explain it. But you tell them ahead of time, and then it's kind of fun, and you don't have an enemy afterwards, and then you just have to buy the beer after. But those are the two that I'm formally doing.

Thank you.

Council Member Learman.

Thank you so much for the report. It was awesome. I really enjoyed reading it. I have two questions for you. The first one is you mentioned the city improving its relationship with our chambers, and I would like to hear you share maybe some ways that we can do that. And along with that question, you mentioned that this recommended the city do some type of needs assessment with the chambers to see what their needs are and how we can support them. That's my first question.

So with it with the chambers the first step will be to formalize some kind of a meeting but Court communicate ahead of time and make sure everybody has buy-in into it. So it's not just people showing up and and maybe being a little defensive if they feel like they weren't participating enough in the past. Communicate ahead of time and let everybody know you're on the same team. And then have a particular agenda item, which might be how can we coordinate with you all, but what's even more important is if you all can help coordinate the different groups, the business groups, then they'll be able to see and tell each other where they're duplicating their own efforts because somebody has to convene a meeting and then conversations happen. And I guarantee each of the groups that are out there they probably, a third of what they do is probably duplicating what the next one does. But imagine how much more efficient it would be if those limited resources were used on maybe supplementing and doing some assistance with what you're doing on your outreach. So you could be helping them, but they could be helping you. I think they would be a great I guess the proper term would be wingman, where if you're going to take a lead on a certain item, it would be great to have the business community behind you. There's a reason that when we put out our major reports, we get the business community to put quotes in it and support it and maybe participate in a panel where we present it. They go together. You need the business community and you need the government working together, or none of this is going to work.

Thank you. I just have one more question. Can you describe a little bit of what our business, how unique our business community is? You talked about the yet developed industrial, you talked about the leakage, you talked about the employee to employer relationship. Maricopa has really a unique small business community. And I just was interested in your perspective, if you're a small business owner in Maricopa, how it's different than maybe other communities that have those different dynamics.

So the small businesses in Maricopa, and you need all different types of businesses. You need the restaurants, you need the entertainment, you need all sorts of things that makes a place worth working in, living in, raising a family, retiring. but they tend to not be spinoffs of the larger base sector businesses. So you tend to not see that spinoff businesses that's working on advanced optics research and everybody's making $200,000 a year and then spending it in the community and their multipliers of four. So you're creating four jobs for every one that you create there. So they tend to be the local market spinoff businesses for the workers that leave earn their income, bring a lot of it back but not all of it back, and that spending creates it. So it's dampened. But in fact, that one executive that I mentioned from Intel had the idea of he thinks that this whole idea, if there is some momentum on getting the supplier businesses here, and the higher wage and the executive level people, you're going to have to increase the quality of the amenities. And I'm not saying they're lower quality. He was just saying, I'd like to have an opportunity to go to a pizza place, but I'd also like an opportunity to go to a really nice place, too, for my anniversary. There's only been two times where I've recommended an economic development plan subsidizing a retail project and they reached grocery stores. One of them was in Buckeye because Buckeye was losing all of its money headed east and they needed to collect enough money to put in infrastructure or they weren't going to move forward. So we recommended that they incentivize a little bit of infrastructure to get that grocery store in. The other one was the Fry's in downtown Phoenix because that was not going to work without it. But it ended up being a catalyst for some other things that happened. So they're very unique. But in your case, I think that you already have the higher household incomes. If you have competitive fees, you have a very well-known structure in terms of how, you know, like the utilities and the roadways and the turn lanes and everything work, if it's fair, the businesses will respond. You don't have to give away things, it just has to be fair. So again, a lot of these are just very easy. A lot of these things are things that you can implement in the next six months. I'm hoping the healthcare and the hospital stuff will be that quick, but that might be a little longer, but that's the one thing that I really, really wanted to get.

Thank you. Very good. All right, Council Member Marsh.

I've got a couple. All products that go to market need to be test marketed. Maricopa's insular nature makes it a natural. There are rumors that Walmart here does test marketing in their local store here and have been doing it since they've opened. I think if we could do a turn the crank test market machine here, we could attract some pretty heavy hitters and some interesting employees, too. And second, in addition to the 347, we have negotiations going with Gila River to do a west loop, an east loop. And we have progress toward the Sonoran Desert Parkway connection to I-10 on the north side of Casa Grande. I propose that we open negotiations with ADOT and GRIC to use Indian Route 3 as a path for a Santa Cruz Parkway connecting SR 238 to Loop 202 at the west end of South Mountain. If you look on a state highway map, On the 238, the route starts at North Rio Bravo Road, just west of Heaton. continues along the Santa Cruz Road, joins Indian Route 3 that connects to 51st Avenue at the Gila Crossing, and then Loop 202 at Exit 68. This provides access to I-10 West and to the west side of Phoenix. It's a no-brainer. It opens up new land for GRIC development northwest of Maricopa, so it's a win-win for GRIC and Maricopa. And I urge the business development operation and staff to move this forward. It takes 10 years or more to build a road. Let's not wait on doing this.

I love what you said because you're now converting from me giving a presentation on just some ideas. into what about this specific idea, and then you talk to transportation people. One thing that you have going for you is we did the forecasting for Pinal for the maintenance extension and the net new, and we did it for Pima, but we didn't do it for MAG because they said we don't need economists to calculate what our revenues are. I think they're understated by about 20%. And so you were talking about some areas that are kind of moving up into that region. But there's going to be lots of opportunities. We do a lot of work with Penel. I'm so optimistic about what's going on. One of my favorite people to work with is Andy Smith, the transportation person in Florence, who's as good as any economic development director I've met. And he has just some of the best ideas. In fact, when we work on projects with him, usually we end up having to change our scope three or four times because the idea evolves and gets better and better. And we try to keep up with them. But that's what you need. And enabling staff to come up with ideas I think is very productive. I encourage my staff, if they think I'm wrong about something, now within reason, as usual I'm right, but within reason, if they think that something's wrong, I'll say, let me know why. I'd like to know, and then we have a great brainstorming session. What you just talked about is exactly what's needed. I love that. You've already started.

He's writing a book.

Yeah. What was that?

We're trying to challenge him to write a book. Yeah.

Thank you, Council Member Marsh. Council Member Gatto.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Mr. Rounds, thank you. We had this report available to us this weekend. It's been a very eventful weekend as I've dug into a lot of the suggestions and comments here in your report. I'm very excited to be able to begin immediately in implementing a lot of these ideas and suggestions, and so thank you again for you and your staff in putting this together. If you'd allow me just a couple of minutes, Mayor, I'd love just to hit some of the highlights that were important to me, and many of which have already been brought up by our colleagues. But on page 8, and Mr. Rounds, I heard you say multiple times this evening that it appears to be that face-to-face that makes all of the difference. It's the connection. It's the humanness of what we're trying to build here that we can't do really any other way. and on page eight uh... one of your recommendations and i quote is recommended that one of our one or more staff members be designated to lead this expanded outreach focusing on advancing business attraction expansion opportunities particularly among high-tech suppliers large base sector firms again just re-hitting that point of how key it is not only to have council engaged in that process But we do need some designated members of staff, that that is their full-time job, to be at these conferences, to be in these places, to be with GPAC and other locations, to be with us as we knock on some of the doors and ring the doorbells to Intel. And so I just want to bring that as a very important point that you brought to light that I would like to echo. Also on page eight, you recommend again, tracking our economic competitiveness. This is something I think would be highly valuable to us as council to be able to see where we are performing, where we can quickly make some small pivots and maybe do better at. I WOULD LIKE TO RECOMMEND THAT WE INVITE STAFF, MAYOR, AND I KNOW THIS ISN'T NECESSARILY FOR ACTION TONIGHT, BUT I'D LOVE TO BE ABLE TO SEE THAT DOCUMENT, WHAT THAT WOULD LOOK LIKE AND WHAT WOULD BE SOME OF THOSE KEY INDICATORS THAT WE AS COUNCIL WOULD LIKE TO SEE MONITORED AND REPORTED ON ON A QUARTERLY BASIS. is brought up already are our relationship with our chambers knows under the additional policy economic considerations just to form a better partnership between our various chambers of commerce in the city uh... i know many of our art all of our members of com commerce uh... chamber they are they are so invested heavily already into this community and they have a lot of solutions they're business owners they they understand some of the the headaches and the nightmares and the roadblocks that that exist in pulling a business out of the ground here in maricopa and if we're not engaged as staff or whereas we're not engaged as counsel with that body we're missing the experts in the room and they're not engaged and and so i feel like we really need to improve that relationship uh... one other point to other points if i may mayor the other one is the point on our workforce development as i'm glad to see that even though they've dropped down to maybe three or four on that that that priority list uh... for uh... for site planning it's still among the most important and we have a tremendous uh... leap forward i think with our alma feral innovation academy coming online uh... the fact that we have a cabot campus that that's coming here to maricopa uh... we have the expansion of the ct programs here in mhs all of this is going to help that next generation come to be prepared to be that workforce what i think our cities also lacking though is the adult component to that uh... you know i appreciate you bring in the veteran component in and retooling in allowing individuals to go back into to get another additional certificate or maybe even another degree that allows them into that uh... new career hyping more high-paying job and so I'd love to see some partnership from the city and in our Chamber of Commerce and I know miss Anderson has done tremendous work in this area of what can we do in our workforce development and and what other resources can we start to provide to our community so I'm anxious to explore that idea my final thought is on page five and I love this quote The fact that the city may already have a program that addresses a particular item is irrelevant if that particular area is not producing satisfactory results. The recommendations in this report are not solely about identifying new programs. In some cases there may be programs that are similar to the recommendations contained in this report. However, if the desired results are not being achieved then improvements in those areas will be required. Having a program that addresses a particular area in economic development versus having a program that produces results are very different things. And I want to echo that. I strongly feel that this is our community's Achilles heel. If we don't figure out how to develop economically, we are dead in the water. there's so much that is riding on us being very successful in this area and we have tried a number of ideas and this is not a not a you know slammer disprovement of anything that's been tried in the past but we're ready for some new ideas and we're ready for some new approaches and i would hope that and i feel strongly i think our staff is nimble enough to start thinking uh... continue thinking outside of that box and being open to new ideas and And I won't speak for everybody here on this dais, but I feel like we are in that same boat, that we are eager and hungry for suggestions and ideas, things that we can do to really move this needle forward. So I appreciate that, and I just want to just drop that there, that we have to not, we can no longer be hesitant, we can no longer be afraid to be different and to be out there and to make some things happen for the residents of this great community. And if we continue or want to continue to survive and thrive as we have in the past. So I'm very excited, and Mayor, I would hope that we would have a plan for our next step. I don't know if that looks like a work session, if this is a... uh... maybe staff comes prepared with their first uh... report on on where we stand in our in our readiness to move forward or maybe they come forward with some concrete suggestions that they would like to move forward and i mean is next week too early to ask that of staff i don't know i know i know mister bowman loves working uh... into the evenings and so he might stretch it out to two weeks if we give him five days he can probably get ten out of there to get ready for it but i would love to have some concrete plan some low-hanging fruit things that we can work on this month next month things that we want to have in place by the end of this year and the end of next fiscal year so we can continue to move this ball forward as quickly as we can so thank you mayor thank you uh yes quickly vice mayor i mean on that note councilmember ghetto um in your report you wrote that the city lacks a core downtown a place making initiative

And Council Member Gatto, we will be starting First Fridays in the Heritage District on October 2nd. So I appreciate you saying that because I really feel our community is craving a downtown, a place where we can come together as a community and be our authentic self, have a place to express ourselves, and have vendors and food and music and entertainment that's all local. And so we're really excited for that. It's a grassroots effort. We're just getting together and making it happen. There's the first one, Council Member Gatto.

Love it. Send me the date when you have whatever event it is, and I'll come.

Oh, that'd be great to have you. Yeah. Vice Mayor.

I'm last. Oh, I'm last. Well, that's true. But you're, like, first.

I could go first and take all of your ideas.

We don't let that happen. Cause then we'd all be saying ditto at the end. Um, thanks so much for the presentation. It's been, you know, we've been waiting for it and we want to hear it. Um, you'll notice in this council, in this city, we are a progressive city and that we want to improve what we're doing all the time. We want to be able to pivot when we need to, just like Ross and friends pivot. Um, When you hear it, it's like, you know, it becomes more of what it used to be to what it is today. And just 2018 to 2025, workforce skills changed a little bit. The number one thing became utilities and cost now, when that was six in 2018. Seven and permitting was seven in 2018. It's two now, right? So the world pivots around, and if we don't work with it, We're going to have problems. And that's what happens. So it sounds more and more like this becomes more of a lobbying job than anything else. It's talking to not only lobbying to local governments and state government, but this is lobbying to businesses. It's talking to them. As a business owner myself, I preach the same thing as you. I do sales for a living. That's what I do. I go out and I talk to people and I get them to invest in the city of Maricopa. through my business, right? And I do the same thing for Buckeye now, because I have a secondary business in Buckeye. And I talk to my staff and I say, you can't do that over the phone. You could. It helps a little, but you got to get there. You can't do it in email. That's just a waste of time. Even mail sometimes is like, eh, right? The real opportunity comes in talking to people face to face and understanding their needs and what they want out of you, right? And it's simple, right? You would think. But it's hard because you have to get those people to sit down and have those conversations. Here in the city of Maricopa, we have MPPA. It's Maricopa Public-Private Alliance. And a lot of people don't know about it because it's kind of like... hush hush here in the city not hush hush but we don't talk about it enough here in the city but outside the city it's well known we had GPEC here last week and we had a full discussion where they presented to us and they said they were sitting in our conference room upstairs and they said this is the ideal of what should happen when it comes to economic development and what that means is we have a table full of folks from K-12 education to secondary education to the utilities uh... both global water eighty three uh... sitting down at the same table having conversations about businesses that might want to locate here we can talk about their names cuz privacy and all that stuff businesses i want to come here and how that how we meet those needs that they have uh... we we have elected officials on that at that table as well as city staff at that table we all sit there we talk about businesses i want to come here And how do we get that over the hump, the next hump that happens, right? How do we get there? Ron from Global Water made a great comment the other day when we were sitting there and he was talking to JPEC and he said, look, I'm trying to paraphrase it. I don't want to say it the wrong way. But basically he said, tell us what you need. And as the company that does the water and sewer for the city, for all of us, we'll make it happen. Just tell us what you need, and we'll make it happen. And we'll figure it out. And that's what we have here in the city. We just got to get in front of more people. Right. So how do we do that? It's the knocking on doors. You know, I was talking to the mayor about this last week and the week prior and the week prior and the month prior and the six months prior. And we've been talking about it like crazy is how do we get to the position within the city that we have it organized so that we can get out and talk to more people? Right. And just knock on the doors and shake the hands and. And conferences are great, right? They're great. You get in front of some people. But you don't get in front of the CEO at a conference, right? You get in front of the site selectors and things like that. But how do you get in front of the CEO? That's what I do, right? I get in front of people. It's the only way you're going to make sales in life, right?

So being a salesperson, if I might add, you have a person's attention yes the most of their attention when they're at the conclusion of a meeting that they really enjoyed that's when you end up i i don't i don't like to let any of our meetings that we're leading i never let it end with Great discussion. It's who's doing what? Why are we doing it? Are we in agreement? And like with GPEC, I love that you said, what is it that we need? Or what is it that you need? And then you follow up the next week. You follow up the next week, and you say, they'll get tired of you eventually, and they'll say, would you like some help putting together a specialized marketing program that we can also utilize? And it's like, yeah, sure, OK. But sometimes you've got to push. But I love it when you have those meetings with people and you're brainstorming, because we have to do that all the time with public policy. But once they leave the room, a lot of people just forget about it. And so if you really care about it, that's when you put a lot of pressure on them, because that's when you have their attention. And that's when you get them to commit, OK, we have to have one more meeting to resolve these other issues. Everybody get their calendars out.

Yeah, I call it being next step obsessed, right? You have to be obsessed with the next step in the progress or else it doesn't happen, right? And you have to be doing it. So as us, as a city, we have to be obsessed with the next step in everything that we do, regardless of what it is, whether it's a small retailer or the large multinational corporation that's interested in a piece of land we might have, right? So it has to be, the discussion has to happen within the city, within our folks, It has to happen with the private organizations that are all part of the city, including our utilities and our education facilities and all of that. And it has to happen with our staff, which our staff and our policymakers have to be next step obsessed with what's going to happen. And if you're not there and you're not following up, you're not talking to people, don't ever say following up, but you know, if you're not out there talking to folks and finishing the next step, It just fades away. And things like Dignity Health, where we were so close right before COVID. I was like, I was so happy. And it was quiet. You had to be quiet about it because nobody wanted it out yet. But we were so close and then COVID hit and then poof, it disappeared. So how do we get back? And that's the next step that we have to be at. So I love all the information we got. I pour over the information. Just reading it makes me happy. I did notice a few little small things that we'll bring back to you. But for me, it's a starting point and it's a progress in how do we change what we've been doing to change what the city has available to it? And how do we do all that? And the city manager and I had a discussion a week or two ago with the mayor, and just figuring all that out, this is just basically a stepping stone to that point, and it brings us to the next step. So thank you.

Councilman Renaud, did you have a follow-up?

Yes, and Vice Mayor Manfredi really led into it with his next step. What do you call it? Next step obsessed. Obsessed.

Next step obsessed.

Because that's what I am right now. Next step obsessed in terms of I want to... make sure that this report doesn't just like it put in a file and not only that but to further that in terms of what councilmember Gettle said I want to make sure that we're having consistent conversations about the next steps and how we're implementing this and when it's being implemented and you know who's being charged with implementing it and I do feel that it's important that we are having those conversations publicly and Because I think that, obviously, look at all of the residents who are still here at 8.40 p.m. listening to this and shaking their heads. They're all really into it, which I love. So I want to make sure that the follow-up and that we continue to have this conversation so that we can continue to ensure that we're able to achieve all of the great recommendations in this.

very good all right so uh... first of all page eight council regatta on page five as soon as you brought it up i had to go to my document it's heavily marked up and i had i feel about those statements they're solidly underlined they're very very important in terms of one or more staff members be designated to lead this expanded outreach focusing on advancing business attraction and expansion opportunities particularly in the high-tech suppliers I mean to me that just says it all in regards to what we need to do and your statement on page five as well I think we're all pretty much in sync in regards to all right let's get going I know that I didn't have to run in this election, but if you were to ask me what my priority would be, this is my priority. It used to be transportation 347, we're well on our way, we're moving down, I'm keeping my eye on it. But this is such a high priority that I feel like we have to seriously look at making some changes. What I heard is, let's get on it. Let's start having the conversations with dignity. Let's start having the conversations with the Price Road corridor. that chamber uh... we do currently have two council members as liaisons to the chamber but i think we need a staff member as a liaison to the chamber as well uh... i love the conversation about small business uh... and there's so many opportunities that i get and we all get them but as an example of the g pack opportunity that i have to interact with businesses at GPEC and the DC trips that I took with GPEC and having connections there, brought them back to our economic development team and they're working on taking advantage of some of those connections. But the site selectors, I had a great time with this last meeting and this last site selector And it's funny because I was surprised how they had questions for an elected official, for the mayor. And so it was fun because I could provide different insight than what the staff does. And so I think it was a great Great conversation with them and hopefully things proceed. The lobbying term, I love that because when I hear about all of this, I'm thinking lobbying because that's really what it is. Like lobbyists, well, you know, Council Member Knorr, you're never not in their face. You're like constantly on it, not in, you know... annoying way, but you're just constantly on it. And so I look forward to really understanding our next plans. I did a little bit, I do have some information on being concerned, are we well enough funded? for advancing our desires here and for this additional. And what I found is that we are well-funded in the Economic Development Department. We have funds to use, and by golly, I want to start using them. I like being conservative. I like the city being conservative. But I feel like we are conservative so that we can fund important aspects like this, and I think we're well-funded. And so I do look forward to what the next steps are. And I think all the conversation has been great. City Manager, do you have any comments?

If I could just close out real quick. Yes. Oh, do you want to leave? We were primarily just doing a final proof. I actually thought it was going to be next month, so we're putting stuff together pretty quickly. Okay. So the technical things like typos and stuff, don't worry about those. But if you have any questions, if you feel like you heard something that maybe isn't emphasized enough, and I think there was that wording issue from earlier, to clarify. We still have time to clarify if you got our intent, but maybe we didn't use the right words. So if you all want to pass that to staff, I mean, we really enjoyed this project. Again, new ideas, we just kept throwing into the scope. I'd like to close it out, be in a really good document, and then After we're done, after we walk away, we're not really going to walk away. I'm still hoping that we can help you with some of the, you know, I'd still love to get Anvita over here and we could talk to, we could dig up our old dignity files and look at the analysis we did on that site, how it was already going to be a good investment. So we'll still work with your team. We enjoy working with them.

yeah great yeah we really appreciate your effort very much yeah and the conversations like he was available anytime I had a question I know anytime you guys had a question he was available for answering that question city manager

Yeah, thanks, Madam Mayor. You know, economic development is, a lot of times you think of it as a buckshot approach, and I think the history in Maricopa has kind of been throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And I think this gives us a great opportunity to be a lot more focused. And it gives us some of those first steps to say, here's where we can start on making a difference. You know, when we look at our community, we don't see large employers. There really aren't many. We have the school district is our largest employer. We're the second largest employer at the city. And then you start getting into Walmart and those kind of things. And those are all great and necessary, but wouldn't it be great if we had a large commercial business as our number one employer, number two employer? And so how do we kind of switch that to something that hasn't been successful in the course of the past 23 years to bring those large employers, to widen that base, to broaden the base. And I think this is a great opportunity for us to take some good research, some good marketing, and start leveraging that to try to attract some of those. And so that, I think, is the purpose for us, is give us this opportunity. Head start give us a running start to to really start to address these large gaps that we have to start to address that leakage that we have and now take that asset that we have of the 347 that now it's going to be a new roadway with widened lanes and Truly market that and say hey, you know what? We've been really successful over the last 10 years about telling you how bad it is and And that was really good and necessary to get the funding and to get the roadway improved. But now we've had so much success at that, that we need to get out there and say, hey, now we're ready. We're growing up as a city and we want you here. And so we've got a great team on board with Josh and Christian and... joshua and and don and and so many people that participate through this process that aren't necessarily even in the economic development department but as we touch our our development services team and as our our staff and public works team all participate all of that is part of economic development i think as jim mentioned that You know, whether it's our infrastructure, whether it's our programming, whether it's our community feel, we want everyone to be a part of economic development moving forward. And so excited for the groundwork that Jim has laid for us and excited to take off here moving forward. Thank you.

Very good. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jim. Yeah. Safe travels. They are working on that road out there. All right, that takes us to our next and final presentation, which is 8.2, presentation on the state legislative by Katie Proctor, our NRGA.

Good evening, Mayor and members of the council. I'm here tonight to just go over some of the successes of our legislative session. so here it is in a nutshell we had a hundred fifty days of session this year hundred fifty three days that's actually ten days shorter than last year despite the fact that we had three hundred thirty six more bills this year introduced and actually for the first time in arizona history went into the four thousands in the bill series in the house uh... that was exciting Being here for a little less time, having way more bills, the legislature actually sent 24 fewer bills to the governor this year. And she vetoed 36% of the bills that they sent up. So despite the fact that we had more bills introduced, we still basically have the same number this year that we're working with for implementation. We tend to be in that 30 to 40 range each year for implementation. It is important to note that there were seven new ballot measures, and I'm going to hit those in just a second as well. We did track over 260 pieces of legislation this year, which is again pretty consistent from prior years, and took an official position on 30, which is also consistent with prior years. When it comes to the state budget this year, there were two real competing factors at play. One was the Prop 123 education continuation. And the other one was HR1, the big beautiful bill tax enactment. One, two, three did not end up happening, but the budget did conform to most of the components of HR1. In fact, all in the previous tax year and then going forward, it's a little bit modified. What you'll see up there are a few things that are most interesting to us in particular. The top one is that there were no reductions to prior appropriations for the 347 projects. All of those monies were kept intact. I do want to note that the fourth bullet down talks about funding for the statewide 911 system. There is a gap right now between the needs of that system and ongoing funding that has been provided. The legislature did step in and provide a $4 million kind of fill in the gap for this year. And then we are working with various stakeholders right now to assess the overall needs of the system and determine what the next steps are to provide PERMANENT FUNDING IN THAT SPACE. THAT IS A VERY IMPORTANT PROGRAM. I WOULD ALSO NOTE THAT YOU MAY REMEMBER THE PREVIOUS PENALT REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY TAX REFUNDS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED ON THAT PROCESS NOW. THE LEGISLATURE CHOSE TO STICK A PIN IN IT AND REVISIT IN THE FUTURE WHAT THEY WOULD LIKE TO DO WITH THOSE FUNDS. WE ESTIMATE THAT'S ABOUT $45 MILLION RIGHT NOW. So that will be subject to future legislative appropriation. And then also the new data center tax credits are frozen until 2029, and that was a budget decision. Let's talk about some of the legislative referendums. There's quite a few, and I'm not gonna go through what each of these do, because we're gonna see a lot about them, I'm sure, in the next few months. It is important to note, though, that they sent seven more referendums to the ballot, joining three, so that is 10 legislative referrals directly to the ballot in November of 2026. Of the ones you see up here, you may have heard about HCR 2040, also Prop 143. This one was recently kicked off the ballot by the trial court. Every indication right now is that it will not go through an appeal process and it will stay off the ballot. HCR 2048, Prop 145 was also challenged in court and kicked off the ballot by the lower court. It does appear that that will go to an appeal. So that one could still show up, but might not show up. But these are all of the items right now that are in line. You may remember from 2025, we do have that food tax one on there that will not have an impact on the city of Maricopa at this time. Going forward, I do love to talk about the housing bills because as you recall at the beginning of session, you pass a legislative platform for us that is focused on protecting local control and preserving local control. And many of the housing bills that we see at the legislature would not do that. So I do want to just go through a few of these and talk about kind of where we came out with these. Whenever we see these housing bills, what we are trying to do is seek to understand where they're coming from and what the goals are. When we talk with sponsors, often we find that we can work together to come up with something that we can be okay with. The first bill is a good example of that. If you looked at what was originally introduced, it was not something we were okay with. In fact, I had to testify against it in committee. We were able to work with the sponsor, Representative Powell, and we got it to a place where it is much more workable, it achieves his goals, and also does not trample local control, to be quite blunt. The second bill there, malicious delay, was another example of a bill that needed a lot of work. That work was put in, and it did get to a place where most folks were not excited about it, but not really super concerned. 2999 is another example of that. This is the state housing affordability districts. You may have heard about this. It's a new financing mechanism that would create essentially a state-sponsored district for infrastructure supporting a new housing development. Um, this went through a lot of negotiation because there were a lot of concerns initially about what the liability might look like for a community after one of these ended. Um, also for what the process was to start it, would there be input from a community about it? Um, so it did get a lot of amendments throughout the process and it was something that, that at the end of the day we were able to say, okay, this is something we've worked on. We appreciate that effort in good faith and, Let's see what happens with it and where it goes. What we hear right now is there will be at least three communities that will see potentially applications for this starting in September. So that's interesting to note. These are the other housing bills, and these are not bills that we were able to really get to a good place on. And as you can see, they didn't move forward. The first one is one that I just want to call out your support and help on. This was the starter. They call it a starter home bill, but it's really not. A STARTER HOME BILL. THERE'S NOTHING IN THE BILL ABOUT AFFORDABILITY. WHAT IT WOULD DO THOUGH IS LIMIT HOW THE CITY CAN CONTROL DEVELOPMENT. AND SO THIS WAS SOMETHING THAT WE WERE VERY MUCH OPPOSED TO. I ALSO WANT TO CALL OUT THAT OUR LEGISLATORS WERE VERY HELPFUL ON THIS BILL. OUR HOUSE LEGISLATORS WERE VERY HELPFUL ON THIS BILL IN PARTICULAR. THIS BILL DID NOT MOVE FORWARD IN THE HOUSE. THEY DID NOT HAVE THE VOTES TO GET IT ON TO THE BOARD AT THE END OF THE DAY. HOUSE BILL 4028 DIED IN COMMITTEE. Lots of issues with that bill and 1241 is another bill that just it didn't make sense given some of the stuff we did last year on this already. Water legislation. I do want to note that this is a bill that we will be continuing to converse about. Senate Bill 1200 deals with how you move water through lakes, essentially. And you may be familiar with this because this does impact a community in the city of Maricopa. This is something that we will continue to work towards. We actually thought we were in a good place with it and then at the end of the session it just wasn't something that was able to move forward. So we will continue working on this and it will be revisited next session. Transportation bills, I do just want to highlight these. None of these did move forward ultimately. I-11 bill failed. The Rural Transportation Fund Bill, this is the annual bill that has projects sought by the Rural Transportation Association, was held after it received a hearing, which is what we expected. Those usually go through the budget process, and there was no extra money this year. And then also the Smart Fund Bill was held, again, after having a hearing about why it was an important piece of legislation. Public safety bills. I do just want to point out the firefighters occupational disease bill that did go through, cleaned up some of the language there. The drone bill is important. You can't have a drone within one mile of a ticketed entertainment event. And that's a one mile that way and a one mile that way. So that will be interesting as well. And we're already working on implementing the THE TOP BILL RIGHT UP THERE. BILLS IMPACTING LOCAL CONTROL, I DO WANT TO HIT ON 4030. THIS ONE ACTUALLY HAD MULTIPLE NUMBERS THIS YEAR BECAUSE IT JUST WOULDN'T GO AWAY. KEPT COMING UP AND COMING UP AND COMING UP. THIS IS THE BILL THAT WOULD HAVE FLAT OUT PREVENTED ANYBODY FROM MAKING ANY REVENUE CHANGES REALLY FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS. We did take a strong opposition position to this because if you recall last year, if this bill had been in place, we would not have been able to accomplish 347 funding. So this was a case that we took to the legislature and explained why local control is so important. It did not move forward ultimately, and they kept trying, as you can tell. When it comes to the short-term rentals, I point this out because it is an ongoing resolution from our partners at the League of Arizona Cities and Towns. It's not something that we see as important in this community right now, but it is very important to some of our partner cities. A few more I just want to mention really quickly. Exactions, this was not a good bill. This was vetoed at the end of the day. It would have made it very complicated to work through some of these issues with development. The shopping cart bill also vetoed. And then the small nuclear reactors, this is something that has continued to come up. Our concerns with this had to do with providing services. This actually would have been a preemption on our friends at the county, but that didn't really give us an opportunity to have a say also in how we might provide services. And so that was something we also opposed. I do expect that to continue to come up. We don't see much movement towards actually building those right now, but it is an ongoing conversation and will be something that needs to be considered in terms of how you do that with a municipal planning system. These are just a few more that are interesting. The very top one, you can actually now post on a newspaper's website instead of posting in a print media. Public bodies, executive sessions, you can't take tax or fee increase through the consent agenda. And if it was heard in executive session, it has to come back for a regular agenda item. State Land Department, you probably heard a lot about this during session. The State Land Department was up for continuation this year. They had a less than optimal audit and there was a great amount of conversation about how we could put some more reforms and oversight into that agency that was accomplished at the end of session and that agency will continue and then the mandatory rounding method this is that Swedish rounding method for anybody who does cash and doesn't have pennies anymore so if you're wondering why am I seeing this rounding method that's it's law now that's why Moving forward, we are in the implementation phase right now of legislation. So we divvy up all the bills that pass that have an impact to the city. We sit down if it's an interdisciplinary approach that requires more than one division. We sit down with those divisions and go through the bills and talk about what needs to change in policy or procedure. And all of that work will be completed before the general effective date in September. We will next move into our evaluation of potential legislation for next session and be talking to folks about what that might look like. And then we will also be doing our continued outreach to our policymakers, especially as we have an election coming up this year. I was just at NCSL last week talking with several legislators about coming down and learning more about some of our housing. And there's a lot of real interest in some of the stuff we're doing down here, which is really exciting. And there would be no end of session without being able to say thank you to all the people that make it possible. This is a very successful session for the city of Maricopa. It doesn't happen without you, our council members, being advocates. Our staff is amazing, and our LD16 legislators have been wonderful. I also want to call out our state lobbying partner, Policy Development Group, specifically Todd Bowman. He is amazing, and our success comes from this entire network, and we couldn't do it without the team. And with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Council, questions, comments? Oh, oh, oh, looks like Council Member Gatto.

No questions, but comment. Katie, thank you. It's a tremendous year. I know that was a little taxing for you in the amount of hours. probably years at this point that you spent there on the capitol helping out with these various issues and thank you for the input to that you the detailed analysis the the reports the information that you had to us also on council find it very very informative and so thank you again for your efforts this season and look forward to many more with you thank you sir i would know it was my twenty fifth legislative session this year which does mean i started when i was ten just so we're all clear

Very good. Any additional comments, questions?

Sure.

Yes, Vice Mayor.

Katie, thank you so much. I give you praise all the time, as we all do, but it's probably never enough, actually, for the hard work you do for us. I don't know if the 347 and the construction on 347 happens today the way it's happening and over the next three years if you were not hired by the city of Maricopa. You are a godsend to us, and I thank you for that. Also, when you look at all these bills that you've just talked about, the development preemption, all these stuff that they're working on, trying to take away local control from the city of Maricopa and other municipalities, of course. We're not targeted, it's all municipalities. When you look at that, the fight that we put up, it really does impact this city. And a lot of people say, you guys just approve every house that people come. We don't. And we have a lot of conversations with developers before it gets to a city council meeting or to a planning and zoning meeting. People don't understand that. If some of these bills pass, we have no choice. And they'll just be able to, at right, build what they want, when they want, whatever it looks like, and we have nothing. So the fight that we put on every year really does come down to these things. I just got an email last week on the 17th regarding... It's funny, because I serve on... I serve on, you just mentioned the RTAC bill, and the RTAC bill is funny in that it's never gonna pass as a bill, but we push the bill and we go up there and we speak on the bill and we push the bill, because everything in the RTAC bill winds up being a budget item. So then we just basically used the RTAC bill as a vessel to preach what we want done. And for years, the 347 wasn't in it until last year. We put the 347 in it, and we were able to use that to get some of our funding that we needed. And then, of course, we just talked about PRTA, and I sit on that board, too, for the PRTA. And just so everyone here knows, of all of the money that was collected, what was it, $80 million or so, and then we had interest, it came to about $90 million, $42,800,000 has been refunded to the businesses that collected it from us. all of us, and gave it to the government, and the government brought it back as people who bought stuff in the city of Maricopa. Those businesses got that money back, $42,800,000. I don't remember if we got checks for it individually. We didn't. But they got their money back. There's about $45 million that will be sitting there, and it's great to see people at the legislature try and say how we should spend that money. And for me, next year is going to be very important because we, I don't want to say killed, but we pushed back the attempts this year to tell us how we should spend the remaining $45 million when we didn't even know how much was going to be remaining until this past month. But they were trying. So next year is going to be very important because we have to figure out how we're going to spend that $45 million here in Pinal County, not on transportation throughout the state. And a good portion of the money has to be spent in the city of Maricopa or close to the city of Maricopa because we paid that money to the government, all of us when we bought something, whether it's a pen or a book or whatever it was here in the city of Maricopa, we paid that money in. So that's gonna be a fight next year and I hope we're all up for it because everybody's gonna have different ideas of how we should be allowed to spend our money. So it's gonna be fun. But thank you so much again. And you said 25 years, I'm hoping for 35, thank you.

uh... i can certainly agree it was successful year in regard to how we were able to manage legislators bills uh... i do want to say some of the scariest bills that we always talk about year after year after year are the bills regarding housing and year after year i try to engage people to get involved like we have a pretty good community that's connected to our legislators and so i need this community to speak out to our legislators about the housing bills trying to take away local control trying to uh... constantly make it easier and easier without any aesthetic considerations regarding housing uh... but i will say i want to compliment our ld sixteen folks because this year uh... we had some serious conversations about these bills and needing to be transparent within our community regarding them And I think those conversations helped significantly with them to determine how they were going to vote on those bills. And they voted in the favor of the city. And so big kudos. I really appreciate that type of interaction. but it doesn't hurt for our residents are to interact with our legislators as well and keep an eye out open for those housing bills because they can be tremendously dangerous in my opinion basically putting up anything anywhere so we have to be diligent and stay very alive and on top of it but we did a good good job this year. Thank you, Katie. Thank you, city council. Thank you, staff. And thank you to our legislators for sure, because they really did listen really hard this year. So thank you. Great presentation. All right. That brings us to the end of our agenda today. I will close this meeting. Thank you all for attending.