City Council - Regular Meeting

We're hoping to get all of our books. We're hoping to get all of our books out of the boxes. Absolutely. The library, the police department, the community rec center. Oh, I'm sure we could have. We should afford to. I won't be personal. I always happen to go to the women's college. Yes. Yes. And then the next week, I'll be Those are some of my favorite bags. I've got Elijah and some paper bags. And I've never seen a lot of them. Double H, yeah.

If there's enough light, you can see. Down here, it's like, oh, there's light. It's within a mile. Seven miles, so I'll shut it down. Oh, yeah, there are a lot of them. I mean, dark blue.

It's like an annoying little brother, but, you know, when he's gone. No, he's in my personal space again. Trying to touch my computer.

Okay. It is six o'clock. So I'm going to call this meeting of the Syracuse city council work session and joint session with the RDA board. Uh, tonight we have lots of issues to deal with there. Our first item of business is public comment. And since we have some public comment or public here, is there anyone who would like to make comment at this time? Seeing none, I will forego reading the rules of that and move us on. Close public comment. Oh, we do have a written public comment. So go ahead. Please read that into the record.

Dear Mayor Mon and members of the Syracuse City Council, I would like to submit the following public comment regarding the May 26, 2026 work session packet, specifically the proposed general plan water element update and town center discussions. First, I appreciate the amount of planning and analysis that has clearly gone into Syracuse's long-term infrastructure and water planning efforts. It is encouraging to see the city proactively addressing state water planning requirements and investing in both culinary and secondary water infrastructure. However, after reviewing the packet, I have several concerns as a Syracuse resident. The projected growth numbers are extremely significant. The general plan projects Syracuse growing from approximately 40,000 residents today to nearly 90,000 residents by 2050. That level of growth would dramatically change the character, density, traffic patterns, and infrastructure demands of our community. While the report expresses confidence regarding future water availability, the data itself appears to show that the current supplies may only meet projected demand through approximately 2042 without conservation measures and potentially through 2049 with conservation. Additional future water sources will still be required. That raises important questions regarding long-term sustainability, future utility costs, drought, and whether gross assumptions are realistic. I was also concerned to see that Syracuse per capita water usage currently exceeds both Davis County and Weber County averages. This suggests there may still be substantial opportunities for additional conservation efforts before continuing aggressive expansion. Additionally, the packet appears to play significant reliance on continued development and future conservation of agricultural water rights to sustain growth. I hope the city carefully evaluates the long-term financial and environmental risks associated with those assumptions. I would also encourage the city to continue preserving open space, agricultural land, and the suburban character that many residents value. There appears to be tension between preserving Syracuse's identity and planning for a population that could more than double in the next 25 years. Finally, while I appreciate the vision behind the town center overlay discussions, I hope the city carefully balances aesthetic goals with affordability, traffic realities, parking demands, and the needs of existing residents and businesses. Thank you for your time, service, and consideration of these concerns. Eric Wilson.

Okay, if that's the last one, we will close public comment. And item C is a report from our Disaster Preparedness Committee. Are you prepared? Sure. Excellent. Please tell us about our exercise that we had in April.

Okay, each year, the Disaster Preparedness Committee, one of our charters is to make sure that we can get out and assess the public in the time of emergency so that we give you a good picture of what's available where the needs are so you can then deploy your resources. In 25, the average that we had was around 83%. You want me to stand up?

Let me stop you there. You're welcome to join us at the table, which would make it easier for the recording, since we do have to make a record of this meeting. Sorry. No, you're just fine. I was also going to say, if you're really comfortable, if you can stay there, just speak up.

My name is Scott Vaughn. I'm the chairman of the committee. And as I indicated that... Each year we do this exercise and our objective this year was threefold. Number one was to get more people involved and registered under Everbridge so they get the Davis County emergency notifications. Go ahead and practice the RDAP down at the area levels so that those neighborhoods then can see how well they do. And to provide the opportunity for the citizens that are in those areas, be familiar with who their leaders are and where their rally points might be. In 2025, we averaged about 83% participation. It was a little different type of an exercise. We were just basically going out and searching for needs that might be there. Once again, this year, we were more focused on getting people registered for Everbridge so they get that notification. We felt that was a plus. More people were registered. It seemed to flow a lot better. and the communication went out in a timely manner. So on the RDAP side, it's hard to execute the RDAP without having a full fledged emergency, but I feel like we did a great job with what we did have. The only downside to this year, we were around 70% participation. We had one district choose not to participate, and that was the Fremont area. And that was because they did not have a district a person in charge. So we're going to go back and reassess and try to get some people involved so that next time they'll be more prepared. And that's basically what I have for you. Do you have any questions about what we're doing on the committee or what does VARD have? Rapid Disaster Assessment Program. In a lot of people's areas, it used to be called a block captain. This is more aligned with what we're really going to do, and that's go out and assess where the needs are and then report that back.

Any questions at all for even not related to this exercise?

Anything for our committee to take on? Is there anything more you need to do what you've been asked to do?

Well, next year, we are... Great. Emergency preparedness fair. Instead of doing the exercise, we will actually do a fair. And I'm inviting the areas to take on that exercise and conduct those in the middle districts.

Well, as long as I'm in town, I will commit to coming. And I hope the rest of the council also comes to support. And it will be on April 17th.

Okay. We're hoping that we'll get a good turnout. And... It hasn't been done for several years, so we can take it on and see what we can do. Sounds great. Thank you for your work. Okay. Thank you.

Appreciate you. Can I add a comment there? I'm Dan Merkling. I'm also on the committee. One of the things that our safety fair next year will require is a lot of cooperation from the businesses and organizations in the city to provide volunteers, donations, prizes, in order to give the draw to the citizens to come to the fair.

Okay. So noted. All right. I'm going to move us on from that to a discussion regarding the proposed Forge Fiber franchise agreement. Just so everybody knows, when a provider comes into the city, they do have to have an agreement with the city, but we have HAB-Jacques Juilland, Traditionally, made sure that it's open to everybody. So we'll discuss their proposed agreement. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Who's handling the outline of this one you Brody. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Steve. Great. CoB, Steve Armstead, So if you remember counsel.

We did this a few months back with women to the very similar contract same type of setup template. It's 10 year CoB, Steve Armstead, Agreement is we allow them to PB, Harmon Zuckerman, install fiber in our city in exchange for some of the things that we expect we think we charge them a franchise tax with a 6% 8% 3.5% used to be 6% years ago. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, And so yeah, it's a 10 year term. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Questions on the

Is this a utopia fiber backbone or is it new fiber?

It would be their own. But the way that we've managed this in the past, we're open to everybody. It's their own expense, their own promotion, but we have not denied anybody the opportunity to operate.

If I may, my name is Devin Kurth and I'm the permitting manager for Porsche Fiber.

Does anybody have a concern that they have not reached an answer to?

No, I just was curious if they were an ISP or if they were putting in their own backbone.

And it's a great question. We are putting in, Forge Fiber is owned by AT&T, and we're putting in our own fiber lines, but it is going to be available for future internet service providers. Currently, it's only AT&T that is going to be using that technology. They're going to make it available for ABC internet service provider may decide to lease part of that fiber in the future, which it would be available to do.

Okay, thank you. So seeing none, this will be on discussion or up for a vote on our business meeting. whichever way you decide to go, but we traditionally have always accepted business possibilities. I'm gonna move us on to item number E. Proposed general plan, item one under E is proposed general plan text amendment to water use conservation element in compliance with Senate Bill SB 110 and 76. now just some I some basics here uh we already have a water conservation plan that the cities put together it didn't meet all the requirements for what the new bills were so we have to adjust to that um I'm going to let Noah cover the adjustments and where it is. When I just want to kind of point out those who are making comment on this, the comments are based on the plan that we had. This is not that wasn't part of. complying with these requirements. We just already had that passed. And some of the public comments that were made about the future growth of the city, that is very much yet to be determined. Those numbers come out of our general plan. It's a possibility. The decisions you make over the next two years and future council make will really determine where they are We are not targeting getting to 90,000 people. That is by no way, shape, or form. That is just a part of the plan that is a what if. And I don't ever see us getting to 90,000 people, but it could happen depending on what people approve in the future. Anyway, as far as the water conservation plan is required, Noah, go ahead and update us on what we need to add and cover.

Sure. No, I think that was a really good summary. As far as what we're adding, so this is adding to the general plan, obviously, the general plan deals with with. land use and population projections and things like that, like the mayor summarize those those are all individual decisions will take as we come, but we do want to have a vision, and we do want to meet. the state law that they're asking us to implement this and they want the cities to be proactive in thinking about our growth and if we have enough water to service that growth. Our public works department has done a really good job in setting us up and planning ahead. We're confident that we do have the resources to accommodate the growth that we've been through. And so that is what's needed is to

adopt this into our into our general plan um that's it no what does it need to go to the planning commission it does yeah is there anybody have any particular concerns with just the overall structure of it i mean we can tweak this we can change it we probably do need to make some updates to our general plan in eventually but at the moment it's serving us fine and it has been to the planning commission already right

Yes.

Last off the work.

Well, yes, thank you. I can't remember the history of so many meetings. But yeah, I went to Planning Commission and they're recommending approval. We actually hired JV to help us with some specific numbers and calculations for the state was asking, but what the Planning Commission saw

any other questions or comments if not we will see this it won't be for consent but it will be for just general discussion and we can set this for our june voting meeting okay moving on we will have uh item two is consideration of potential amendments to section 10.100 for the Syracuse municipal code pertaining to town center overlay zone. We are getting more interest in our town center and we've made a couple of observations. And so one of these observations I thought was important for us to bring forward at the time. And that is that we allowed CVS to come into the town center and provide a drive-through that separates the sidewalk from their business and it's proven to be a bit of a safety concern so one of the possibilities of addressing that in the future would be to outlaw a drive aisle that goes between the business and the sidewalk because in our town center we ask all of our businesses to move up close to the road because that's kind of the structure of what we do but There might be other ways to identify this or solve this problem, and I'm open to any, but that was one of the primary concerns is safety and walkability. We push the walkability part of our bike and walk through. Plus, it's a real big concern because we have two schools where kids walk from school to neighborhoods on the south next to our busiest intersection at current in town. so anything that would make that less safe is a concern for me so we want to put this in front of you see what your thoughts were um no would you have some other thoughts on that or no that was a good summary i'll i'll just add that we have a lot of properties in the town center but only there's only a select few that are corner properties and when you're looking at urban design

creating a place those corner properties have extra importance to we just want to make sure we get it right and get our regulations right while we can now before we have development applications that are that are subject to the ordinances that may not be as strong as what we want to promote that safety for pedestrians and also just good architecture on the corner that keeps property values. There's some examples in there of kind of what we're going for that makes a difference. I've had a lot of compliments about our town center and about our, you know, the feel that you get when you visit Syracuse is a little bit different than, compared to any old suburban strip mall.

I mean, it is our most active intersection when school lets out. We have crossing guards on all four streets individually. We have a lot of kids that cross there. We want to do this safe. We thought that when Maverick applied to move across the street, that we were actually going to make that corner safer because they suggested they were going to sell it. They didn't end up selling it. There's nothing we can do about that one. But again, moving the kids a little bit away from the drive aisles of the driving space is a big part of us being safe.

What's the safety? So I'm looking at the picture of CVS and they've got like some flower beds and steps towards that. So it seems like it's pretty insulated from where kids would be.

It is separated. The issue is that to get to the CVS from the corner, you have to go up the steps and drive through and walk through their drive aisle. It's not a logical path, walking path. So If kids were all smart and safe and had their best interest in mind, they would walk to the side and then cross, but they do have to cross traffic no matter what. So that's one of the things that I'm bringing forward with that. And the other part of this that Noah's emphasized is There is a look and feel when you get your big traffic, high traffic safety areas that he's shown in some of the pictures and part of the staff briefing that it does look more of a professional look when you bring the business up and hide the parking behind.

Because we've only got one corner left in that major intersection. So whatever goes there would have to follow traffic. HAB-Jacques Juilland, If i'm reading it right they'd have to essentially have that same front facing thing that CVS does, but they would not be allowed to drive. HAB-Jacques Juilland, So that would limit so that would limit nothing fast food there well.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, it's interesting you bring that up and i'm glad you did, because if you look at seppi's. They have complied with this design, but they also have a drive-thru. They just put it to the side, which I think is much safer because you're not asking kids to cross that.

There's just a conflict point with the drive-thru and the car. You have you know, pedestrians. So the least amount, least number of conflict points as possible.

When you force them to cross the drive aisle, that, I mean, we had this concern when we talked about the area over there with the double drive through it where Jersey Mike's and Jet Pizza is, but what's different there is people are not crossing sidewalk to get to the business. They're generally parking it behind. Whereas we'd like on this similarly to park behind and not try to cross the drive aisle.

The reason I'm talking about it is I know that vacant corner has been vacant for a long time and I don't want to discourage development of that

It's a very good point.

This would apply if it's in town center, it would apply at 2500 West. On the east side of the intersection only. Okay. And then it would also apply to Banbury and Antelope. There's also in there and also a corner lot. There's another undeveloped corner there as well.

Yeah, there's a few of them, but we certainly don't want to limit economic development. We, you know, we We're trying to total line. You can still have a drive-through. Some cities say like, we don't want to deal with drive-throughs when we're trying to be in the town center area. So we're not saying you can't have a drive-through. We're just saying that you're going to do it, design it in a way. And there's lots of examples out there. If you start paying attention to that sort of thing, like a lot of cities are requiring that the parking and the drive-through are behind the building now. It's pretty common. Okay.

HAB-Masyn Moyer- Very much so down Riverdale road. HAB-Masyn Moyer- With all those restaurants there you know they turn they move it to the side of the back.

HAB-Terry Palmos- I mean, I don't have objection, as long as there's that looks like there's reasonable ways for people to still. HAB-Terry Palmos- I think.

HAB-Terry Palmos- They'll open almost any business. HAB-Terry Palmos- You just have to reroute the drive through so that it doesn't take the traditional route and go between the sidewalk and building. HAB-Terry Palmos- Any other thoughts. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Hey, PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Um, do we have a general acceptance or do we want to PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Is if you're all in agreement, I'll put it on consent. If not, I will put it up for discussion.

I'm in agreement.

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, This has this one. PB, Harmon Zuckerman, Can happen between our next meeting. So if they agree. HAB-Jacques Juilland, New pencil do June 2 me there were no answer.

We're no agenda items. And so we canceled it.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, Better HAB-Jacques Juilland, Luckily, there's, it's not like a pressing issue.

We want to get through this quickly. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Okay.

All right. Well, it'll still go to planning commission first Um, all right. So let's see item number F discussion regarding road utility fee. We've actually talked about this for a couple of years because the state legislature suggested that this is a path that cities could take to take care of the absence of considerable road funds. Um, and because of safety. So I'm going to invite Robert and Steve to the table to discuss where we are with this. Again, this is really up to you, Council.

So a couple of years ago, 2024, Council wanted to just explore what transportation utility fee, well, first of all, what's the condition of our roads at that time? And then and then what a fee could look at, just options or ideas. It was really just kind of a bring some ideas and where we sit at that time. So a study was done in just last year, it was completed and presented to council. We're just bringing it back to you. So the study is in there in the packet. It talks about the evaluation rating. They call it a pavement surface evaluation rating, PASER. rated on a scale of 1 to 10. 10 being best, 1 being worst. Most of our roads, the majority of our roads are in kind of a middle ground in between 4 to 7 rating. Which means they're not in bad shape, but they are due for surface treatments. So this is where we're at as of last year, and Um, in order, and then the next document talks about how to fund that, to keep our roads from, uh, going back, you know, going into the red, into the, the lower rating. So, um, some options were, uh, brought forward for ideas of, uh, of, uh, uh, from option one, doing nothing and going status quo. Uh, and there were three other options of. HAB-Jacques Juilland, If if we in considered. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Adding the road utility fee and what that amount of money we would collect and how much of the roads could be completed and that's where these. HAB-Jacques Juilland, graphs that show. HAB-Jacques Juilland, The. HAB-Jacques Juilland, It still kind of a level one to 10 is once you're on right now. But there's a line across which shows the percentage of roads that you are willing to just allow as your threshold to keep your roads from going from average to worse. And there's thresholds from 75% HAB-Jacques Juilland, She's 75% up to like it's like 90% HAB-Jacques Juilland, And, and as you get to where there's fewer roads sick in that in that red zone. HAB-Jacques Juilland, The fee would have to just go up a little bit each time. So those were scenarios. It doesn't mean these that you would have these are the only things the council can certainly consider doing something different. or not doing it at all. It's just the study that was put together for you to look over and decide if it's something that you're interested in exploring. But probably one good thing out of this discussion would be is just knowing at what level are you comfortable with allowing that threshold of pavement to be maintained?

So let me jump in here and just say this. When I first started on council, one of our problems was we were way far behind on roads because previous councils had not allocated sufficient money to keep the roads up. One of the biggest obstacles we faced was we had two distinct areas of the city, almost a third, that had not been touched in over 40 years. Those roads took as much money to repair because they had to go all the way back down to subsurface and rebuild because it ate up so much of our budget to get those back to manageable. We weren't able to do a lot of other things in the city that we wanted to. So Keep in mind that if we keep up on our surface treatments, which is a very small cost compared to rebuilding roads completely, we can extend road life seven to 10 years each time we do one of those. So I've had people ask me before and say, oh, there's worse roads in the city, but you did a surface treatment in that one neighborhood. That surface treatment at a tenth of the cost could extend 10 years of, you know, it costs millions to build a mile of road now. It is unbelievable. You just don't want to take it down to that level where you have to really go down and tear it down to the base again. And we did have that, but we've managed to rebuild that part of the city. And so right now we want to keep up on the surface treatments so that we don't end up having the huge costs again. We're still always going to have road maintenance costs. That's always going to be a thing. And one of the things that over time that I've pushed for is, you know, when we have major construction go through a new neighborhood, that they be held accountable to maintenance. to surface coat what they destroyed with the huge trucks that go through there. And that's helped as well, but we still have to keep on top of it. So this is one idea. You can take it or leave it, but it is very powerful on the budget to stay ahead of the curve instead of going back to the extensive costs that are millions of dollars to tear down the road and have to go back to the substructure.

good point thank you those are awesome uh our amount of money going to surface treatments have been uh reducing uh significantly every year so we we don't have that amount of money that we used to to go to surface treatments so we are getting into that the the good roads the best roads are kind of getting into that good and fair category and if we keep them there you know if we don't really do much surface treatments they're going to end up in your lower level to really need the full reconstruction. And that's where 17 times the money. 17 times.

Will you remind us where those road funds are coming from currently?

Yeah. So they are class C. Okay. And there's... quarter cent from the county.

From sales tax. Yeah, the county charges a percent fee that they pass on.

So then this would supplement those funds. Class C is your gas tax.

Yeah, the majority of our money is going towards the rebuild.

So it builds tax only on gasoline. No, Class C is gas tax from the pump. Yeah. And then the 0.25 is an optional sales tax that the county enacted on behalf of all the cities.

And for those citizens who are concerned that we put a lot of money into roads, it's better that we put money into roads than you have to put money into car repairs and be without new cars because bad roads do tear cars apart.

A lot of our road money has gone into, yes, some of these older neighborhoods, but also the, we call them the main roads. They're the roads that are kind of 35 miles an hour and greater. They get a lot more traffic volumes, a lot heavier vehicles. A lot of it's from, you know, construction, the highway construction beat up our roads quite a bit. And so we reinvested into those roads. The tough thing is, is that a lot of the little local roads get overlooked and they still need the treatment. You know, they are showing cracking and some cracks are, are like six inches wide in some areas. It's, And we'd love to keep, I'd love to be able to go into those neighborhoods and do some surface treatments to prevent them. Yeah, I'll give some examples that are great examples of serious concerns that calls and fix-its have come in from Bridgeway Island saying, you know, Simpson Springs got their treatment, where's ours? And ours are looking bad. Theirs were in just the good, the average good. But yeah, it's only a matter of time. Those local roads are going to start falling apart. And the reason that this is like Simpson Springs got some was because before we accept a new road, we require the developer to pay for that first surface seal treatment before we accept it. So all new roads automatically get that first seal. seal coat to preserve them so that it automatically kind of lengthens their life. It really does lengthen their life. But we put that on them to do it first. And so it saves us costs right off the bat. And it's certainly an inconvenience. Some people hate it because it's inconvenient, but it saves them money. Saves us all money.

So council, what are your thoughts? Should we consider a John Potter, Transportation fee it's a. John Potter, Our road utility fee it's, it is something that's becoming popular in utah but we certainly do not have to do it.

So are these. i'm looking at the table it's on page 57 of the packet table to example monthly fees, do we know what do we know what those would it be similar to what we're looking at here, do we know those. these will look like to maintain our roads at an acceptable level and not have to worry about spending millions to take them down to base and rebuild them all.

Yeah, so this example coincides with, I think, like an option three. I think it's option three. So option three in the... What page is that?

55 shows the table of what would generate an additional masturbation utility fee. So it's going through scenario three, which is around your $7 per single family home. $1.2 million if you did all the basic seal, you could do an extra 12 miles of road. We did some overlay, three to four miles of road. In addition to what we're already doing, the other thing I wanted to say is keep in mind that over half the city in the last 15 or 20 years has developed. So a lot of these new roads are from the inception when they were built. So this chart shows you their average life and their condition. I would venture to guess a third of these roads were built in the last 15, 20 years. So they're still in the good or fair category. But over time, if we don't put more money to the roads, these categories start to slip into the poor.

That's my question. Do we have any roads currently in the poor category in Syracuse?

We do. We always do.

Yeah. Those are the ones shown in the red bar graphs. And I could include it on that.

19 pages down.

Anyway. Page 45 shows you what categories are which.

I do have a map of which roads those correlate to, but just wondering how many miles.

Do you know, like, rough estimate how many miles we have in the poor category?

Or page 42. So how many miles of road do we have? 136. Okay, so 27% are in categories one through four. So about a fourth of those. So you're about 30 miles of road in that condition, 30 to 35.

Will you please go back to page 55?

Also keep in mind as you get into those categories one through four, the surface treatments at that point in time don't do any good on those type of roads because they've already gone past the point of repaired or going in that direction.

The 1.5 million under scenario one, that's an annual amount, is that right?

That's how much we are currently putting in right now. That's our current condition.

So just so I understand, so for scenario two, we're bumping at 500. Yes. For scenario three, a million to five. Where does that difference in the money come from?

That would be the utility fees you would charge. This would be if you collected it monthly.

So if you go to page 58 in your packet, it shows the scenarios and then the potential fee you would charge for each of those levels. So for an extra $500,000, you'd charge $3 for the single family.

Without the utility fee, there is no more money. Is that correct? It's $1.5. regardless yes so so there has to be that in order to keep up will you please go to 47 page 47 so this is a as i understand that this is a running chart that shows where things are at at the 1.5 is that right yeah and so and i'm assuming that these numbers are not inflation adjusted, like for 2035? Is that an inflation adjusted number? Do we know? No, because we don't have an inflation rate. No, no. So that 1.5 is paying for dollars in 2035 that are probably going to increase due to increased costs and inflation. Is that fair?

Yes, that's probably a fair assumption. That's right.

So we don't have a choice but to do this or the roads deteriorate. Is that right? The question is how much.

We will not be able to keep up.

Yeah, the road. We're not keeping up. We're just going to cost more down the road. And it will cost more. Unintended.

And that happened to us 10 years ago when we had gone through about four years and very little to no road improvements. Yeah.

My opinion is this is one of the areas that cities are responsible for. Citizens totally depend on us to be managing and taking and being good stewards. I don't think that this is a flexible, negotiable thing. I think we are responsible for it. My opinion is I like a fee better than a tax increase because a fee goes to everyone. We're going to be able to capture all of the residents that live within the city and that don't pay property taxes. All the renters will be responsible for this. So I am in favor of adding a fee to make sure we're maintaining roads and protecting our residents' assets when they're driving down the road or even their kids riding bikes down the road to not wipe out and have injury and damage. Now, what we decide on, I'm flexible with which scenario we decide on, but I am in favor of we probably need to explore doing one of the three options with our upcoming budget.

I'll highlight this one other detail, and this doesn't really help, but it's good knowledge for anyone listening that is wrestling with this decision. And that is that we have gone to great efforts to make sure that whenever development is involved or near, that they do bear their fair share, meaning if they're going to widen the road or if they're going to cross an intersection a million times during building a whole bunch, we require them to fix it to the situation they had left when it started. That's something that didn't used to happen, but we've gone to great lengths. We also go to great lengths, and I have to applaud staff here, There are lots of transportation grants out there and we apply every year for some of these. Anything that can fit that criteria, whether it's through Wasatch Front Regional Development or whether it's the third quarter grant at the county. We just submitted another one today that was accepted. And we've done all we can to supplement this. And it's still, we are absolutely aware it is not enough. And so we have got to either Do something like this or figure another way to keep the roads up to date or we will fall behind. So I'm just saying we've done every, and there are a lot out there, but we have really tried every other way to get money on this one.

And grants don't pay for maintenance. They do not. That's on your own. Grants pay for widenings. Expansions.

Connectors. And I mean, I was on the council when we wanted to do this study to take a look at it for that exact reason. Because these assets that we have, these roads, if we do not properly maintain them, they're going to cost billions upon billions more to rebuild. I think our public works department has done a very good job of handling it and doing it cost effectively, but we just don't have the funds to keep up and maintain them properly. And so we've got my preferences to implement some level of feeds where we're maintaining those roads so they're not dipping into those red categories. I want to look at it as a full picture though as well to see what other utility fees we're looking at implementing to see what it is. But I would say we're probably going to be in that scenario three.

Well, the other thing to point out is that when the Utah legislature creates a structure like this, They're kind of saying, cities, this is one of the few ways we're going to let you pay for something. So, I mean, to say no, then we've got to find another way. We don't have very many options. They've taken away a lot of options.

It comes with accountability. They require us to submit a report every year on how the fees are being used, how we're tracking it.

I believe it's every 10 years. Just send in a one-page report that says roads.

I believe every 10 years, this has to be... How many hours does that say this?

It either has to go away or be renewed.

Correct. So there's a 10-year life on an ordinance for road utility. And at 10 years, you can either renew it or do a new study.

What did the study cost us? I can't remember.

HAB-Terry Palmos- More than 10,000 less than.

HAB-Terry Palmos- 20 or 25. HAB-Terry Palmos- One mile of road.

HAB-Terry Palmos- Yeah, unfortunately, I wish we could get a mile. HAB-Terry Palmos- I'm not sure we could go all the way across the road for that much money these days.

HAB-Terry Palmos- Here are the quick points just on the council's aware, I think you saw us in your packet is based on land use. So there would be six different categories, three of which are commercial with those are based on size of the commercial building. Institutional, multifamily, and a single family.

State law required it to go into different categories.

And the key with the different business commercial categories is some businesses operate primarily on heavy vehicles and they are harder on roads and should be expected to take care of some of that responsibility.

Sorry, what are those commercial categories? What is that measuring? Square feet of building space. Square feet of building space, yeah.

When the companies come in to do this work, are all those companies created equal or do sometimes you get what you pay for?

Well, we go out to bid and then we have a standard. The thing that I like about the way Syracuse does it. is we have engineering standards that say exactly what their methodology has to be. So they can't cut corners and say, oh, I'm going to use this cheapo stuff. It doesn't work. We tell them what they have to do in the RFP. So the only real variable for the companies is labor because we have a standard. Subsidies don't, and they get what they pay for. We actually have engineering standards. Robert's been really good about that, and I have to commend him for that.

This does not, this isn't parking lots for commercial. This is the public streets that's in front of commercials. I don't know if that.

Well, I just feel like sometimes from neighborhood to neighborhood, the workmanship varies. And sometimes I think, why is that already coming up after two years? What crappy, I was going to come back to council and say, never hire whatever company to do that because that work was proud.

Some of it was materials. So back in the 90s and early 2000s, recycled asphalt was the way to go because it's recycling, right? And although that was saving earth in some respects, it also made it hard for the new asphalt binder to actually bind together. And so these large cracks are from that old recycled asphalt. We've changed our standard back since I started. We changed it to a different kind of higher level of asphalt binder now for our roads. And we will accept less recycled asphalt in the mix. And so our mix has actually improved now. from that time. But yeah, that was.

Because I mean, because we want to get that seven to 10 years out of it. Sometimes, well, that just depends on who's doing it and what's in it.

It depends on the technology at the time. And we see that in cities all over the place. Some city sections, maybe they said, hey, this appears to be a great new pipe technology. And we don't have any experience other than say it's cheaper and it seems to do the same job. 10 years in, we realize it fails faster. And so then we outlaw those things and say, you can't use that anymore. It may be cheaper, but it's not good. And So, technologies change all the time and Rhodes is one of those technologies that people are trying to use because asphalt, like Robert said, deals with binders and chemicals and some of them work, some of them don't. Right now, we've been trying a lot of mineral treatments on our surfaces. We believe that it works. But we could find out down the road that it doesn't. But right now, it seems to be extending the life 10 years. So we keep doing them.

Another improvement we've made over time was inspectors. So we just started getting public works inspectors in the 20s. Yeah. Five, six years ago. But before that, we didn't have public works inspectors. And we relied on building inspectors. And that's nothing against building inspectors. They did a great job. That just wasn't their specialty. And so they saw the road is done. The top go looks good. But they didn't get into it because they didn't have this knowledge of what asphalt was. Our inspectors do. They do density tests on them. They do compaction tests on concrete. And they read the tests. They reject them. So processes have improved, too, for that, which has helped with getting a full life of road.

Thank you for answering that. Yeah, that helps. Huge help, yeah.

We're trying to keep getting better and make it last longer. And yeah. But we also are...

victims of choices that were made 40 years ago and we have to live with how do you fix something that didn't have a good substrate in the increased growth of syracuse this is this is one of the big pain points of having the massive growth that we have is you bring a bunch of cars in and half of those cars are evs that are heavy they're like commercial trucks and well there you go right you know and technology is improving in cars in that way too and

John Potter, parent roads part and harder on roads yeah couple of really quick points on page 43 as an average of comparative all the cities that we have in our study. John Potter, shows you the average about $8 you don't have to stick to one scenario or another, you don't have to say we're going to go a scenario three you could do in between these are just like placeholders and cross sections of where you could be. But you don't have to say scenario three, $7.

So on these monthly fees or these potential monthly fees, so on our proposal, I'm looking at page 58. So I'm looking at that potential monthly fees. We're going from single family from seven to five. And we've got this huge jump to commercial. And I'm seeing a discrepancy. I mean, Provo is kind of similar, but Kaysville has a much more mild. Highland has an across the board. Why are we seeing such a huge jump from single family to commercial?

So this is all based on the trip generation guide from the national standards from AASHTO. This doesn't mean that you have to follow that. You don't have to follow that, but just that's why those were shown that way as they were using the trip generation.

They use the same type of model for our transportation impact fee plan when we charge new businesses to come in. It's based on average trips of the business. So it's marrying something similar.

Is there anything in legislation that restricts us like how Fruit Heights is all eight, Highland is all 19? Like, do we have to charge multifamily less than single family or do we just have to call it out different?

State law just says you have to have a study to justify at least what you're charging, right? You can certainly charge less if you can charge nothing, right? You can't charge more than what the study says. So this is kind of like your high threshold. You can't charge more than based on the study from the trip generation.

I think the fee could be challenged more. You're more likely to be challenged if you're charging a flat fee across the table because businesses and institutions have different traffic counts than single family. That's why multifamily is less than single family because it's,

Janet Callahan- Units together or units per square foot so So the first question is, is there an appetite among the Council to institute a fee. This will be not for this current budget, but in the future. Janet Callahan- Because it's going to take us more than to June to to do this. So it's probably going to be not talk about doing this in the budget. We have roughly, but we did have all the studies completed and presented. I mean, there's steps we have to take. So we're probably at least two or three months down the road before we can get finished.

A lot of it's up to you how you want to deal with it. A lot of it, I think, is it's important to make sure the public is aware of what it is you're doing, whether it's just public meeting or if you want to do...

So the first question is, are you... It's up to you. Interested in doing a fee at all, or we just, because we shut the conversation off if you're not.

Yeah, I feel like it would be irresponsible to not be open to doing a fee. Okay.

I'm interested in considering a fee. I'd like to take a closer look at that huge jump between residential and commercial.

Okay.

I think it's necessary.

Okay.

We have to be interested, unfortunately.

Okay. All right. So from there, what we'll do is we will schedule another work session discussion to go deeper into what that fee looks like and how it applies to the different categories and even how many categories we should have, because there's no set thing that says you have to have six. You could say we're going to do it limited to four or even say we're going to go to 12 if that made sense, but you have to justify it based on the work that we've done. So we'll schedule one more work session to discuss what it looks like on the presumption that we are going to have to implement a transportation and roads utility fee.

In the meantime, if you'd like to reach out to me or Steve to say, hey, can you run a scenario like XYZ or this or this?

Because right now it's all on the road.

We're open to ideas for sure.

It's not just scenario two, three, or four. Anything is on the table. We'll figure that out in the next month.

Are we limited to these categories, single family, multifamily? We are not. We are not. Potentially doing that up.

That's what I was saying. We could limit it to four. We could expand it to 12. As long as you can justify it by the study that was conducted. So if you were to say, hey, I want 30 categories, we may have to expand the study to figure out some way to justify that. I don't think that makes any sense. That's a hypothetical. I think probably somewhere between four and eight categories are probably doable within the study work that we've done.

I can pull the state law and see if you want to see it.

For me, and just my initial thoughts, the commercial, full disclosure, I have no commercial space in this city, and we're a very small business. We're less than 1,500 square feet.

And don't generate a lot of traffic.

And so to lump all commercial businesses into the same categories, I would want to potentially look at type of commercial business and Because a, an office space like mine is going to jet who I have three or four people come to my office every day. And those are my employees versus a, you know, a Costco. Well, even under 5,000, there's, you know, a restaurant, uh, uh, uh, HAB-Jacques Juilland, Yes, food restaurant is less than 5000 square feet and they're going to generate a. HAB-Jacques Juilland, they're going to have a semi truck every.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, yeah I never have one so yeah I think you're you're on. HAB-Jacques Juilland, That yeah we should we should separate it according to the type of traffic generated by the business.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, will look at that that's great idea.

HAB-Jacques Juilland, I think one of the. HAB-Jacques Juilland, reasons we. HAB-Jacques Juilland, dissecting these categories, because it went with the business licensing and it was easy to. categorize the businesses without going any more in depth. But we certainly try to do that.

I think it would be fair and responsible because some people's businesses, while technically are commercial, they are not much different traffic-wise than another home. And I think that we should be fair to those businesses and not try to treat them like they are a shopping center with 20 trucks a day dropping off goods.

We'll give you that. That's good input. Thank you.

Okay. I'm going to summarize that we will continue with this, as I noted. And let's move on to item G, which is discussion regarding Syracuse City administrative hours of operation. The reason that this came up is we've been noticing that City Hall is basically only has employees in its Friday afternoon. We are not visited by the public hardly ever. And so the question is, is that really a good use of having employees here when we are not frequented very often? Most cities around us actually close for part of the day on Friday. It's very common. We are one of the bigger cities, but we're still not seeing walk-in traffic or people scheduling things. So it's up for discussion. There's no predetermined direction on this. We could stay open. We could minimize staff. We could cut our hours on Fridays. We could sort things out another way. I'm open to all your discussion. Do you have anything to add?

Yeah, just the, you know, over the last couple of years, we've been able to put a lot of things online for people to interact and get their services. The next phase of that is like a chat bot on the website so people can find information. And then the phase after that will be like a chat bot over the phone to cut down on answering phone calls and things like that. But because of these things that have happened, We're seeing fewer and fewer people coming into the building. And we've noticed Friday afternoons, it's like a library in here. It's pretty quiet.

10 years ago, you had to come in personally to pay your utility bill. Now, almost nobody does. And the few people that still pay it by paper mail it. So we don't really see people walk in here.

Yeah, the current, the proposal in the packet, we didn't want to do anything too drastic. So if people do need to come in on a Friday, they still could, right? It just, it's that Friday afternoon. This would not apply to the community center. It would not apply to the post office. So the post office would still have normal postal service hours. And then just our regular operations, obviously, with, you know, Police, fire, all that stuff, that's obviously not applicable. These are for administrative actors.

We just find in this building less traffic. Now, personally, I find that across the entire county, more of us semi-volunteer staff have time on Friday. And so there may be a possibility that there would be some meetings still, but we were talking about really shutting down the front desk to public walk-ins.

Talking about the hourly employees? Yes. Yes. Not the salaried.

Well, yeah. So so we're talking front desk employees. So administrative employees, either either hourly or salary, they still have their full hours administratively and they're more flexible anyway because they don't have to be specifically at the front desk when the hours are open. So right now we're just talking those the employees that are at the counter.

There would still be city services taking place just without an open door to the public in this building. There would still be other places that are fully functional.

And there are still hourly employees that are not front desk employees. They may do Friday afternoons, like building inspectors. They're hourly employees, but they may still schedule inspections in the afternoon if that's when the business is I imagine the fire marshal still schedules on Friday if that's when it's best I don't really have a feeling one way or the other I would defer to what you guys do and one of the one of the funny things about this whole thing is we didn't realize this until we dug into it that the hours of city hall are actually legislated into our ordinance and so one of the One of the things we were thinking is maybe we should rethink that. Does something like that need to be legislated in an ordinance? Or can that be an administrative decision where we communicate and in coordination with the council just make it happen? Or do you want to vote on it? As it sits right now, you have to vote on it.

I think giving that back to the people that we hired to run the office, I think makes way more sense. I don't know why the council put it into code. There's a lot of old things that went into code. They didn't have enough things to talk about. And so like, well, we're going to be open, dang it.

Make sure you come to work. So is this cutting hours for employees?

No, it's reallocating for the most part. There may be some very minor adjustments, but mostly it's readjusting them, which is actually a benefit when you have everybody working at the same time. There's more coordination and actually more productivity. Something doesn't have to wait until Monday because they're not here on Friday or whatever, vice versa. And so a lot of it, the cost savings, I would say, is minimal. I wouldn't make this decision. It's not going to change our financial situation by any means. But there might be a little bit.

Well, I'm wondering, well, hourly employees, they may lose work, but you're saying not. They'll make it up somewhere else.

Yeah, we're open more than eight hours a day, so they're already free to... work maybe every other Friday because they're making up their hours in other places. We have some people on 10 hour days. We're allowing some flexibility in when you can get the most work done and how you work best. So we're not necessarily cutting somebody's hours. We're just reallocating when you can get them in.

Yeah, the way we're staffed right now, nobody that's full time would have any reduction in hours. If there's a chance in the future, depending on how the volume of traffic and phone calls happens, the part-time staff might be reduced. But that's yet to be seen. We've got to see how things play out.

I feel like I would be open to write up a change to the city code just to turn everything over to the department head to make that decision. We don't tell our public works, what to do. We don't tell the fire department when to have operation of hours. We don't tell the police department how to operate hours. I don't see why we're telling the city office how to operate hours. I mean, you guys are open and serving the community. That's my opinion. I think we just turn it back over to the department head and take the council out of making that decision at all of when we're open and when we're closed.

I have a final thought.

I concur.

And obviously you have the power that if there was an issue where you disagreed in the future, you can take it back.

That is true. So I guess what I'm hearing is maybe we- Maybe we take it out of our city ordinance so that it falls upon the city manager to manage. And then we could test it and just see if it is more effective. Because he could also shut it down again or instigate it again if we take it out of city.

Brody will be at work.

All right, so...

Hearing agreement on that, I'm going to put that on our consent agenda that we will remove the hours of operation from city code and let that duty fall to the city manager to manage. The next is item H, discussion review draft amendments for Syracuse City recruiting and retention policy. And I'm going to turn this one right over to Brody. This is...

So review, why do we even have this policy? We want to make sure we can try to attract and retain the best talent that we can in a competitive market. There's inefficiency, both from turnover, because you have supervisors constantly training new people, which instead of being productive, And then you also have lack of knowledge. If you have a lot of turnover and that turns into service levels to the community that are some subpar if it goes too far. On the employee side, it's also good to communicate to people who were trying to recruit. We can easily communicate to them. What is the deal when you hire on with Syracuse City? What can I expect? Um, you know, when someone, when someone wants to join any organization, whether it's a company, government, whatever they'd like to know, what is it that I can see myself doing in five years with this organization? So we want to be able to communicate that. Um, we want to re reward performance over tenure. We don't want just, it's been in the seat for so long that, you know, you can get, uh, better rewards. We want to actually focus on performance. And then we just want to be competitive in the market. So in the previous discussion, we talked about what our benchmark was. And in the draft, made some adjustments to that based on our comments with, you know, if we don't have enough to find an average for the wage range, we bring in like the second level of cities, which are all Davidson-Weber counties. But if you still couldn't find it, instead of going into Salt Lake and Box Elder County, we decided we would combine it with the closest position that we have. And now I think that was a good option to take. So that's all been incorporated into the draft. What we'll talk about today then is, so we've decided who the benchmark is, who are we comparing against? Now we need to decide what is competitive within that benchmark, okay? As it sits in our current policy, it's average of the top three. So what we do is we look at those cities and we say, what is your minimum for this position? And what is your maximum that you'll pay for this position? And we look at all those cities and what they're doing. And then we say, well, we'll put ours at the average of the top three on the minimum and the maximum. So that's how the current policy that we have defines competitive. So... If we can walk out of here today with understanding how we're going to define competitive, I think that's a good step. This policy, we're going to have to put together brick by brick. So it may take another discussion. We have 15 minutes to discuss tonight, it looks like, unless you want to grant more time. So we'll get as far as we can, and then we can bring it back. I'll grant more time as long as it's productive. So, you know, there's the draft and there's the outline in the packet. I'm not going to go through all of that in the interest of time. But if we wanted to start there and have discussions on what questions or concerns you have on setting those wage scales for each position so that we can decide what is a competitive wage, because that has to be defined in order to compete.

So in the difference, because you did that, I'm looking at, sorry, I'm probably jumping ahead to a bigger picture. Okay. Because we're looking at, on page 66, we've got the budgetary perspective, hypothetical historical analysis. Yes. And with the different scenarios you've laid out, we're seeing it in the different, it would have resulted in a $210,000 reduction. Per year. Per year. Four out of five years. Yes. Right. So remind me, what is our annual employee compensation? What are we spending annually on employees throughout the city? 13? I want to say...

I've seen the number. I can't. 13 to 15 million.

Okay. So the chart that we looked at a few years ago, I think two years ago, was showing that divergence between employee compensation and revenue. And it just, we had this huge gap that will widen it. And so still my major concern with where we're heading, even with our adjustments that we're hypothetically looking at, we're still making just a minor, minor dent in that divergence between those two numbers. Well, keep in mind, so...

Dave Kuntz, Let's make sure we're talking the same language here. So in that analysis. This is if we were if we were to apply the draft policy as it's drafted right now to the last five years. Dave Kuntz, Because of the situation. The city's been in the last five years. Dave Kuntz, Right four out of those five years would have been considered severely constrained budget here. Okay. Right. So the, the, the benchmark. wage adjustments and and to some extent even the merit adjustments would have been about two hundred thousand dollars of less um than the the the we'll call it the normal yeah right and so those are compounded savings so you're looking at an eight hundred and forty thousand dollar

difference over the last five years well right but if i but it's compounded salary wise too so 15 million times five years it's going to be the same percentage right Yeah. Like on a per year basis. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying. It's still a very small, it's a very small dent.

The biggest impact that we can make and what we are actively pursuing is increasing the revenue. I mean, it's, there's no way around it. We have to find ways to increase the revenue, um,

and i think that we're very aggressive in doing that and we're i think in the next three years we are going to see a significant difference with all the work that we did the previous four years what would that three years amount to i don't think we have a let's back up the way the way i'm seeing it though is you would you would have well you would have the eight hundred thousand dollars in your budget that you normally wouldn't wouldn't HAB-Jacques Juilland. : And calm, however, I will say it probably wouldn't be $800,000 because some of those tax increases in in in the past years. HAB-Jacques Juilland. : were to to fund the program they were they were actually to add employees, we were expanding the fire department things like that, but some of it so so, for example in in fiscal year 22 instead of a 16.7. 4% increase, it may have been like 13. You know, so some of that money wouldn't have been in the city budget anyway, right? Just so we understand that.

So, so I guess, I guess my, I guess my question is, are we getting HAB-Jacques Juilland, As aggressive as we feel comfortable with what we can do on that are we should we be taking the top the average of the top four cities, should we be looking at HAB-Jacques Juilland, Smaller incremental increases on the, you know, promotion versus advanced advancement, because there were some, you know, it will bump to the next tier, but at least a 10% or at least a 5%.

So I think that you make a couple of good points. And to take the first one, yes, we probably need to look at, you know, what are we doing there? So it makes sense. When we talk about the The increases between raises, I mean, I think that went through a high inflation period. We probably adjusted those up. Maybe we don't need to have them that high. I think the first point, though, is probably the bigger one, and that is we are, population-wise, the third largest city. We are not the third largest city in revenue generation, which is something we're trying to rectify. But when you average the top three, 90% of the time you get two and we're not even third in revenue generation. So when we look at that, we have to kind of factor this in, are we overshooting, making sure that we're in the top two by averaging the top three? Maybe we should be averaging the top four, which would put us at two or three, probably. I mean, we don't have 100% accurate data to call it one way or the other, but that's where we land. So that's certainly an option. Do we have to be the second highest all the time or third at worst?

And keep in mind on a timing perspective, when we do our study, we're looking back, right, on what cities are paying. And they're all looking to increase as well, keep up. We're a year behind anyway. And so with the average of the top three, the way it is currently, it's the average of the top three this last year. Yeah. Once the new year happens, we're probably not averaging.

But we're looking at benchmarking annually now. Yeah.

Yeah. It'll still be historical. Right. It's because. But every city is looking historical. But you can't be speculative. Right. On what they're going to do. Yeah. Because we really don't know.

But every city is doing the same thing. Everybody's looking at the last year. Yeah. Historically. So.

Yeah.

I don't know that. That would be what I'd want to look at is I'd want to look at maybe increasing how many cities we're averaging against, maybe bump it another tier and also look at maybe reducing those increases for promotions and for advancements.

There was a period when inflation was really high that a lot of the arguments were Will people make it to the top? Will everyone make it as a topped out, maxed out by retirement? And I'm thinking that that probably accelerated growth. And yeah, and I know everybody wants to top out, but I just don't know if that's logical.

Yeah, and the career progression, advancements, promotions, yeah, that is a topic of discussion that we want to get to anyway. So we'll definitely get there. As far as where to set wage scales, it is, you know, and it is attractive on a spreadsheet to see the savings from reducing the wages, right? The practical implications have to be considered as well. You know, in this historical analysis, in a severely constrained year the way it's written right now, those benchmarks would have been limited to the URS index, which have historically in those years typically been 2 to 3%. So if wages are going up in Syracuse at 2 to 3%, and then in the market they're going up 4, 6, 7% in a year, it doesn't take very long over those five years for us to just be dropping out of contention. And we're not going to get any or decent employees. So that's a practicality that we have to try to balance here. Because at the end of the day, it comes out in the wash, right? And the wash is how we provide services to our citizens. And so that's the practical side of trying to balance our budget with the resources we have.

And I completely understand that, but from the citizen's side, what we hear, at least what I hear a lot is, is, okay, if we're going to ask them unless, right, we've got sales tax that we're trying to generate. We've got things that we're trying to do to increase the revenue. But at least a portion of that revenue increase is coming from their property taxes. And we're asking them, we've got to increase it. Are we doing everything on our side that we can to reduce that impact to our citizens' property taxes because there's a lot of citizens who are, I realize Syracuse City is just a piece of the pie, but every piece of that pie almost every year is increasing property taxes and the citizens are feeling it. So that's why I'm posing the question, when we've got that divergence of wages versus revenue, Okay, we're going to consider property tax increase. What are we considering on the wage side to help narrow that gap as well?

Yeah. And what is it? I mean, you either increase property tax, you bring in sales tax, or you cut services and wages. That's what it is. I mean, that's where it gets to. So We know how much property tax is coming in. We've got a decent idea of what the revenue looks like. We should have a decent idea of what a sales tax should look like over the next two or three years. You can look at what a Costco does. You can look at what Olive Garden does and get an idea of what the average is of that and put the numbers in. And then we either have enough or we don't. And if we're going to go along with the status quo, that's great. But we're going to either have to raise property tax, we're going to have to get some more sales tax, which isn't enough right now, or we're going to have to cut wages and services. So that's what we get to decide.

Yeah, that's what I just said. Yeah.

That is the question. Yeah, that's the question. So what are you going to do, though? I mean, what do you want to do with it? Because that's really what I'm not trying to put you on the spot.

I just said what I'd like to do. I'd like to examine looking at how we bring that wage discrepancy down a little bit. Cut wages. Well, I'm not saying cut wages, but I'm saying look at how we evaluate our benchmarks and increases.

I think what Paul's getting at is that maybe we're careful that we don't have to escalate as fast as we've been escalating. So we're not actually talking about cutting a wage, But we are talking about being more conservative at how fast we escalate the wage.

Yeah, one thing about this proposal that has not been in the past and to get to the sensitivity of the citizens in dealing with tax increases. One thing about the current proposal is during years where the city may be asking for the citizens for additional resources. The employees being a stakeholder in this whole city operation, this policy allows them to not necessarily agree to, but they would receive a below market wage increase during those years. And that is their piece of helping out. in a competitive market. Now, if the market were such that, you know, if we had a million applicants for police officers every time we went out, those wages wouldn't increase very much. It's a supply and demand issue, really. Now, if that didn't go up, neither would the wages. And that's just how it is. But the idea is we're trying to pay market wages, but in a rough year, what this policy does, it says, the staff and the employees would take a below market wage increase during those years. So there is some sensitivity built into this draft for the citizens. And now that was the intent is to try to find a balance between we've got to actually have good people to provide this service versus how do we get the money to pay them? So it's trying to find a balance.

And to me, not paying a market wage is a cut in wages well that would be the way that you explain it i'm not sure i would call that a cut in wages so so if you're making x amount of dollars in a year and the next year everything has gone up and you're making the same amount of money so you can't buy what you could before you're telling me that that's the same welcome to the private sector exactly almost

Experiences that every year. And in fact, they experience it very specifically because my property tax goes up and my wage does not.

I understand private sector. I have an understanding of private sector. Okay. And I doubt that there's very many people in here who are making the same amount of money today That they're making the same amount of money today as they did five years ago, whether in the private sector or not.

I think most are, actually.

I think so. I think so, too. You haven't had a raise in five years? No.

It all depends on companies that you work for. It really depends on who you work for.

I'm glad that everybody else thinks that they're all making money in the private sector. We don't get what's called a cost of living raise. We don't get a cost of living raise.

I didn't say cost of living. I asked if you're making the same amount of money.

Yeah, and I'm saying yes. People do.

A lot of people in our city.

People stay in their jobs because they like their job.

But we're not even saying don't do, I'm not even proposing don't do any increase. I'm just saying, let's look at making the increase be slightly less.

Yeah, which is what Brody's saying. Just bring it, give them the increase below the benchmark level.

Right, during those constrained years.

And people stay in their jobs because they like their job.

On a normal year, you would do whatever we've decided is competitive. Whatever that is.

Honestly, I could make a lot more money as a nurse working somewhere else than where I do. But I stay where I'm at. And I cannot make any more money than I have now. There's no increase. And it's not a lot. So, yeah. So it's hard. It's hard. It's government and state. It's just the way they work. You know, you get this level and you get this level and this level. And we don't have that in the private sector.

Well, and I think private sector is a broad sector.

It's very broad. Like I say, I mean, right. And so people jump around, right? And people jump around. And so same as here, somebody in the city would say, well, I could get more money working the same job in this city. Or some will say, but I'm staying here because I like my coworkers and I like where I work.

And they treat me fair. And that's a good point. And the research that I've done, the wage... Tends to be about 33% of your decision of where to work. Your workload or working conditions is about another 33%. And then the rest is like, do you like your coworkers? Do you like your boss? So the death knell is, when you are paying below market wages and you're understaffed and your working conditions are terrible, at that point, you've made 66% of the employee's decision to run away. And so what you don't want, and that's what I would say is a hard warning, is what we don't want is we don't want to have below market wages and understaffing.

You're just going to drive people away that way.

You can have some, you know, you don't have to be like top pay. You can kind of be average on your pay if you have enough employees to make it to where people can enjoy their job. That's still okay. That is okay. But what you don't want is both.

I think that there's some things that we've established. And these are not changing. I'm just saying that, you know, for perspective. We've established that we're not never going to be the highest paying position because there are cities who go out and say, I will be the highest in the County or in the half of the County or, We even have one city in our county who for one particular job said we will be the highest in the state to pay this particular position. And they're proud of that. And that's okay that we've decided we can't be that. It's not financially responsible of us. However, deciding where we fall between highest in the county, or between not highest in the county, because we've established that, and being where everybody runs away is the flexibility we're talking about. And I think there's a lot of room. We don't have to be right on the heels of the highest paid, and we don't have to be, and we don't want to be rock bottom, but I think that there's a lot of flexibility in this. We have to consider that there's more appeal to the job than just how much you take home on your paycheck. So we have to be responsible and figure out how much can we afford before we start losing all of the quality people. And the reality is, is you lose people on the front line fast because they don't have much invested. But you don't lose... your supervisory people very often because they can't just walk into a supervisory position anywhere. They've earned one here, and it means something to them. I'm not saying we shouldn't pay them. We should pay them as much as we can responsibly. But that's the question is, what can we do responsibly?

Yeah, and we've separated that before. We did that. We're doing that in the proposed budget as well this year where we're doing You know, when we look at the benchmarks, an average of the top three for frontline non-supervisory, but average of the top four for supervisory. And so you can do things like that in deciding what's, you know, what's a competitive level of pay when you go out and do benchmarks. So I guess for today, and there's a lot of steps that we need to still go through to, you know, understand this and flesh it out and make sure we get it right, but... HAB-Jacques Juilland, It, it would be good to have some indication as to where do we want to at least start with, you know, what is a competitive level of pay. Are we good where we are now. HAB-Jacques Juilland, As a as a default proposal people where it is. HAB-Jacques Juilland, Which is average of the top three right

Well, I would say we should at least examine looking at the top four.

Okay.

We can do that.

I also think we're running out of time.

Well, no, because this does not have to be done by this budget. Let's keep that in mind. What we've agreed upon for this budget is not what we're talking about now. What we agreed upon this budget was we would continue with the top three and top four for the upper level supervisory staff. That's going forward on our next meeting, no matter how we decide to play this out. We are going to talk about this for a couple more meetings because this talks about how we play it out for the next five years and what we will do next year and the year after. And maybe at that point, Things will change again. Who knows? I don't know. But what we established was at the beginning of this year is we could not afford to stay on the plan we were on. Something has to change. And we're figuring that out. Tonight, I feel like we have beat this horse about as far as he can bear and still stand. So we are going to move on.

Did I make sure? Yes, go ahead. So we'll come back. Maybe we'll do a financial analysis of what's the difference between looking at average of top three and average of top four.

Probably not a really big number, but probably worth considering.

At least for me, I'd want to couple that with looking at perhaps smaller increases for advancements and promotions. Yeah, we'll get to that anyway. Okay.

So we'll look at that too. And we will look at other things as well. But I think that we're kind of to a point where we're not making a lot of progress. So I'm going to move us on since this was not expected to be the final discussion on that point. We'll move on to item I, which is fiscal year 2026-2027 budget discussion review. And we will start with general budget discussion. We've talked about this many times. Are there any particular points that you would like to update, review? Because we are going to vote in the next meeting on passing an official budget or moving to a truth and taxation hearing in August. So one way or another, we're making that decision in our next meeting. Are there any general budget items anybody wants to bring forward and rehash for just the next fiscal year? Okay, seeing none, I will move us on to point number two, which is review proposed amendments to FY2027 consolidated fee schedule. Steve, can you go over the fees that would change that we will be voting on in the change of the consolidated fee schedule?

Certainly. So there are several in here. We've talked about them throughout the budget process. A quick rundown, $3.09 for emergency dispatch fee, $1.91 for the parking fee, which would include three new positions, culinary water increase of $1.91. Which is a pass-through. It's partly a pass-through. It's also reallocation of two employees from secondary fund culinary. Secondary is $0.38, so that fee is greatly reduced because of what I just talked about. But that's mainly passed through as well of irrigation water costs. Stormwater and sewer, $0.30 for benchmark and employee benefits. So the total of that is $7.89. In addition to that, in addition to those, we're proposing a $2 paper utility bill fee or trying to get people to go to electronic billing.

Which would only apply to those continuing to force that expense.

And that would be effective till October 1st. And then we just had some items in the fee schedule we haven't used since I've been here. And so those items are crossed out. I think there's three or four of them in there throughout the fee schedule.

Did you mention those first?

So one is a building investigation fee and a billing permit. Which will go away. So that would go away. Let's see. Bottom of our utility fee, there's some secondary water open land in a residential subdivision. Also some public works fees. I actually had those moved over to our public works tab. Okay. And then there was one other one. It's optional. and the top slide most. Thank you on our sundry last page.

Right. So this is stuff that we are doing away with because it's not being used. I just want to be clear that we are working on that. Does anybody have any questions about those fee adjustments? We have gone through them in multiple meetings.

So the 789 on the utility fee adjustments That's total adjustment.

Total. The pass-through from other things that we have to charge for and the adjustments that we have to make.

So any consideration of a road utility fee would be in addition. In addition, correct.

But would not be in place at this time, but it would be a later addition. Yeah, you don't have to do them all at the same time.

But like deciding on taxes, these can be adjusted.

Any other questions about fees? It gets voted on at the next meeting, so it's still up for review. All right, moving on to the next point would be review proposed FY2027 wage scale. I'm not going to have him go over this exactly because there's just too many positions to talk about. Is there anything from the packet on the wage scale that you would like to review or a particular position or a particular policy? Thank you.

What is this based on? The top three?

It depends. At the entry level, non-supervisor, we average the top three. Supervisory and above, we average the top four. That's, yeah.

Any other questions? Okay, I'm going to move us on to now review and discussion in participation rates in Syracuse City in the public employees retirement system and public safety retirement system for FY2026-2027. In the past, we have taken care of this and many cities have. I feel obligated to share with you that about half the cities have decided They can't afford to continue adopting this. I'm not suggesting that we do not. I'm just telling you that when it was reviewed amongst all cities in COG, many, as many as half, suggested that they felt like they were tapped out. So it's not unheard of, but... Can I clarify one point? Yeah.

So this is all the rates of retirement that the state does mandate that we pay for some employees. I think what the mayor is referencing is the tier two pickup. The tier two program, yeah. Which is built into these rates if- So far we opted to take it, yeah.

And I'm not against that. I'm just, I think that it does, it's one of those things when you can't afford to pay Everybody at a top tier, sometimes these covering the retirement benefits is a separator for you from those who don't. So maybe in some of these other cities, they're saying, well, I'll pay you a dollar more an hour, but you're going to have to pay your own retirement. And at least the tier two, the part that is optional. I'm just giving you information. I am not trying to sway you one way or the other. I was surprised to learn how many chose that rather than the wage.

But we had already considered that in our budget number.

Yes, that is correct. It is in our budget number. That is not, and I'm not trying to dissuade you from it. I'm just trying to give you accurate updates.

This is the third increase over, I think, five years, four or five years.

I... I mean, I don't have any reservation of what we had already discussed to pick that up for this next fiscal year.

That's a retention program.

Yeah, it is part of the retention program. Okay, I'm seeing agreement that we move forward as suggested. Any other things you want to bring up about the budget to review before we enter into the meeting? Again, you can discuss it in January, but in before we move into the June voting session. This is our last work session before that. Okay, seeing none, I will move us on to the next item on our schedule. And I think this is an important one. Brett KenCairn, We intend to go a little deeper than we have before we're going to talk about various redevelopment agency funds and strategic planning for what we might do with those funds, so we have six tiff. effectively TIF programs of various natures according to what the state allowed the year that it was invoked. And so our oldest ones, can you pull that up on the screen for us? Because I want to talk about these one at a time. Age 97. Our oldest one retires in three years, of which we are pretty close to have paying all of the obligations that we have on that one. So the one that says EDA, SR-193 EDA retires in three years, mandatory. So it goes away. It's not a bad thing. We're happy to retire these. There is some money in that. And we need to talk about what we do with the remaining balance that is there and what we can do. There's money in there that was originally proposed to help incentivize that area to establish and grow. And we offered that money in some of the upgrades, but it didn't turn out to be needed. And so that's why we have a little bit more than we Dave Kuntz, projected that we needed so now that it's well established and all of the land is built out with these new business buildings. Dave Kuntz, That is a possibility of what we could do with the last remaining budget that would be collected over the next three years, but it's not a long term solution, because the money goes away in three years, but we could offer some. Dave Kuntz, rent equalization to try and lure people over to those buildings, it has not been asked for, and we have not suggested other than that. Dave Kuntz, There are some other things that we could build out I had a radical idea, a couple hours ago, and we have researched it to find out that it is possible, so I really. Dave Kuntz, guess we'll hear this one. The only land that isn't built out in this EDA is under the power corridor. Other cities have made a negotiation where they have like a 50-year agreement with the power company to do something non-permanent under the power corridor. Where we have road access, we could use the money to build some park space. And that would be the money that has to be spent within the area that's there It wouldn't be a lot, but we think we might be able to get two extra play fields out of that if we use the overflow there. Does anybody have an appetite for considering that?

I do. Totally.

I mean, it's not the most ideal space. It's not like we're saying we need to build that particular space. It's just something that we could do.

What do we know about long-term effects from the electromagnetic systems from the power line?

I know that if you only play soccer once a week under them, it's probably negligible.

I don't like soccer anyways.

All of Barlow Park is under the power corridor. Clinton too. Yeah, Clinton too built a park under the power corridor. We would not be the first.

There's some horses under those power lines.

Yes, but there's also some just completely undeveloped parcels there. I mean, between the horses and- They only walk there. Okay, so the options really there are we could try to incentivize something, then that money goes away and it's used for nothing. I kind of like the second idea of we maybe build some fields, just some turf and parking. And we actually get to, I mean, we've talked about how tough it is to get money for parks. This would come from just leftover money we did not use to incentivize business in this area.

I think open green space is paramount. I think that's a great use of that.

There are other options.

Come up with them.

I mean, because we could be spent in this area.

It HAB-Jacques Juilland- In the EDA really kind of does. I mean, you'd have to justify that it had a direct impact on that landmass.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- Are there any roads in there that need a HAB-Jacques Juilland- That is a possibility will take them. HAB-Jacques Juilland- Road and we could water systems that need to be moved from the backyard to the front yard. No.

HAB-Jacques Juilland- In that area. It's all industrial. So there's no water systems we could repave the one access road, but that wouldn't take up all the money.

As a general rule of thumb, if I could just insert myself. So you'll see all of the project areas will have annual revenues and then revenues that have already been accrued and the spending on them is limited to being able to justify that it improves the area for like infrastructure, attracting business, increasing property values. Remember, we've essentially... invent the other taxing entities to let us utilize their portion of the property taxes in good faith that we will generate more tax at the end of the project area. So that's the goal is to be able to be good stewards of that money and tell the other taxing entities that, hey, we used this money good and in a good way and we didn't abuse it. So we weren't even sure are used sometimes, but we have never

We've never done this before, but we did check and Colin did some brilliant research. And in code, state code, we could actually do this. And since we've struggled in that area, I'm kind of in favor of that one. But you tell me. We're not deciding at this moment. Is it something you're open to? Because this is the one that will retire whether we like it or not in three years.

What happens to the money when it retires?

When it retires, nobody collects any of that portion anymore. And 100% of the money goes back to all the taxing entities. So will it collect more tax from this property? And so will everybody else. So there is a possibility that we could pay off our last debt, which would leave us with a little bit of extra money, and we could retire this early and collect no money from it.

It's actually important to show the other tax entities that we did utilize the money that we've been taking from them. So it's good to utilize it if you don't want to return it. Most cities, surprisingly, do not return it because you can spend it on the important infrastructure things.

But if there is money left over that you don't spend, you do have to return it.

Have you talked to Cresta about a park in that area?

No, this just came up a couple hours ago and she is online. At least she was. Maybe she's not anymore.

Oh, I think that's a wonderful idea.

Again, this wouldn't be a primary spot or a big spot. It's just something that we came up with as a possibility because it has to be within the area and that's the only unbuilt portion left in the area that is not already privately owned because we have successfully sold all this off to somebody.

If you see the two cul-de-sacs along there, there's no sidewalk along the south edge of 193. And so we do need to provide some sort of continuity for sidewalks. So there could be some open space along with the sidewalk. It'd be a nice little project.

But we don't have to do that either. We can. These are all the options. Anyway, if you have any thoughts or something you lean towards, we would start to investigate that. We are to that point where we have to start thinking about that particular one.

So I'm going to... There's no utility need in that area.

There's not. It's all been updated. And it's all pretty much the responsibility of the businesses that are there and established.

The secondary water is the Lowell West.

But that's all industrial. There's some residential.

Yeah, this corner.

This corner here is residential.

Okay. We have... That's right.

That was the Monterey West. I would be more interested in making sure we're protecting infrastructure doing that than building a new park that is going to require more maintenance.

We already have wait lists for all of our programs. That's why I lean towards the park. The more we can keep kids off wait lists and in our programs, the happier our citizens are.

I'm in favor of finding something in that area that would benefit that area.

Okay. All right. I'm going to move. This doesn't have to be decision made now, but I wanted to go through all the areas. So let's move on to the next area. Can you scale over to the, let's see. Yeah, scroll up one. So the spreadsheet. Yeah, I want to show the spreadsheet. So the next one is the town. Let's go to the town center. Scroll back up to the map. All right. Now, the town center over our area still has five years left on it. That money is the town center is mostly built out. So there's not a lot of needs there at this point in time. There is a little bit of money left in that. Not a lot. Over the next five years, we'll generate possibly up to a million dollars, but we don't have a current obligation on that. We'll talk about options for that a little bit later, because I want to move on from that one, because we have an idea, but that would have to be discussed separately. All right, so let's move on to the next one. Let's talk the Antelope Drive CDA. This is one of our newest ones. So this has a long time left on it. We just barely triggered this. This is where all the apartments are mostly in that. This was formed before anybody applied for the density housing that's in there. And what it was applied for, it was assumed that we would need some incentives to help businesses because UDOT had recently taken money to widen or land to widen the road. So they became more shallow lots. And we thought we might need some kind of incentive to help land commercial businesses. And then later, city councils opted to go with dense housing. And so this is generating money, but it doesn't really have an obligation to use that money. But it has a long time left on it, so we're not saying that we're done by any means. Just need to talk about future planning. Is there something that would come up that would benefit that area that we would need to provide? So the next one is the 750 RDA. This is also one of our older ones. This one retires the same year as the town center RDA. So we have five years left on that one. We do have an obligation in the RDA, the 750 RDA. We have committed to a road widening project on 1,000 in antelope. I think we all know that's needed. We can use the RDA funds for that, and we have applied for some grant money to augment that. So I think that eats up most of what's there and definitely affects the economic viability of that area. So I think that's one that we don't have to talk much about. Now, the other ones that you need to know about are the Gateway CRA we just established last year or two years ago. And this one has not been triggered yet. So it's not collecting money yet. We weren't going to trigger this until Costco opens because that is a major, we want to collect every year of Costco. We don't want to have a year that Costco wasn't included. But the money in that one is very specifically committed to paying back the PID infrastructure. So we don't expect any money to be left over from that. We only asked for enough to take care of the PID infrastructure, and that wasn't set up as an economic incentive. It was just to establish the area. So that one's probably nothing for us to do except for let it happen. The last one, and you'll need to scroll up on the map, is the 2500 West CRA. It's a very large area that Noah and I went and established I think four years ago on the option that we were going to bring in some industrial uses there around 2500 up on 193. We also got a grant to create the intersection at 2500 and 193, which will start this year. That has not been triggered yet. So it's collected nothing. But there is a lot of potential in that area to help develop a commercial that we could possibly work on. I don't know that we need to make any decisions on this one until we trigger it because we really don't know what the situation is. So I'm just kind of giving you the overview of where we are. The one thing that I forgot to mention on the Antelope CDA, the Antelope Drive, where all the apartments are, we did commit some funds as an RDA board to two projects. One was the business building in the Arlo Apartments. that they needed to build a three-story business building. They opted to build one floor business and the other floors they opted to go with apartments. So that commitment is no longer valid and they don't qualify to get any of the incentive we offered them to make more business space. The other one was for the EOS. We offered them a large incentive to get that open earlier. You can tell that it took longer, but They also had a couple of conditions that were unmet, one of which was at least an Olympic lap pool. They did put in a lap pool. They built it too short. And city council voted that we didn't need to honor that because they didn't fulfill their commitment. So that is no longer a commitment as well. So that's why we have extra money in the Antelope Drive CEA that is not being used for the things that we set out to use it for because they didn't fill their part of the commitment. All right. That's a lot of information I really wanted to get in your brains. Any questions about that? Dave Kuntz, hey we will continue to talk about our da da da da da da in the future, but at this point in time, I will conclude that con or that discussion and. Dave Kuntz, I have one other mentioned before we adjourn from that meeting, and that is, please, please City Council. Dave Kuntz, Part of the job of City Council is being in the public, when you can. And we have become a council that sometimes we're there, sometimes we're not. When these key functions like banquets and awards for city employees, if you can please put that in your schedule, we need to be there. That's something council members should be too.

I did not see the fire department's Does that come up yet, or is that past?

It happened just past, just this last week.

The fire department?

It was Thursday. Sorry. We'll work on this and just make sure everybody's aware. Yeah, so these things have happened, but the other thing is, please work with your local neighbors, churches, youth groups. And promote the youth brigade for the parade. We really need to get kids. Kids are not signing up as fast as we'd hoped. And the Freedom Run. Again, we need people to sign up for those. We've had a lot of state presidents reach out and say they believe this is a good thing and they want to support it. But we need people to actually sign up. So encourage them. If you see your state president, if you see another state president, if you see other youth group leaders, encourage them to get people signed up. All right, now I'm going to, having said those couple of reminders, I'm going to adjourn us from this meeting, or no, first ask that we make, I need a motion for us to go into closed session. We do have a closed session item that needs to be discussed amongst the council. So moved.

Second.

All in favor? Aye.