City Council - Regular Meeting

11th, 2026. This is the City of Prescott City Council voting meeting. Roll call, please.

Mayor Ruesing? Here. Mayor Pro Tempreworth? Here. Councilwoman Fredrickson? Here. Councilman Gamboge?

I am here.

Councilman Gehring?

Here.

Councilman Grady?

Here.

And Councilman Ruby?

Here.

All are present. Introductions and announcements, Mayor Pro Temp? Sorry, I did not.

Okay, announcements. Good afternoon. Lots of things going on. First, Rodeo Master Plan. The final draft of the Rodeo Fay Grounds Master Plan is ready for community review. The presentation used last week at the forum, the final draft of the Master Plan and comment form is available online. And the 45-day public comment period is open now through September 22nd. Community members may also provide comments during the city council public hearings, which will occur part of council meetings on August 25th and September 22nd, beginning at 3. If you have not had a chance to review the plan yet or you'd like to see how your feedback helps shape the final draft, we encourage you to go and take a look and share your recent thoughts. These treatments will help improve clarity and overall quality, reduce excess nutrients, and help control aquatic weeds and algae. Treatment dates and times are weather dependent and will take place as conditions allow. The lake will remain open throughout the treatment process. No restrictions on recreational use. If you have questions, contact Public Works at 928-777-1130. Prescott Public Library has launched a new website. Residents are encouraged to update their bookmarks to library.prescott-az.gov to access the library's online resources, events, services, and information. We encourage everyone to take a few minutes to explore the new sites and discover all the resources available. Speaking of the library, did you know the Prescott Public Library was the very first Carnegie Library in the state of Arizona? So you can learn more about Prescott's history and the story of our library by a new book authored by one of our own librarians, Kristen Kaufman, and the book is available for purchase at the library. New mountain biking lessons and clinics. Recreation Services is excited to announce a new mountain biking program with lessons and clinics beginning this fall. Registration is now open for technical clinics, private and semi-private lessons, and small group lessons. If you're looking to build your skills or gain confidence on the trails, there are several options available. More information and registration are available through... Prescott Recreation Services. Paint and Mingle. Seats are filling up quickly for the next Paint and Mingle. The next? I didn't even know there was one. All right, this time it's taking place on Sunday, August 23rd, with Old Soul Prescott at the Old Armory, now the Gray Sparks Activity Center on Gurley Street. Join us for an evening of painting, painting, creativity and fun space is limited register in advance you can contact parks programming staff if questions and finally prop 478 town hall city council will host a public safety and prop 478 town hall on Thursday, August 26th at 4 p.m. at the Federal on 101 West Goodwin Street. The town hall will provide an opportunity for the community to learn about the current status of Prop 478, including a reconciliation of the current costs compared with the original plan and estimates. So community members are encouraged to attend, ask questions, and learn more. Light refreshments will be provided. Thank you.

Thank you, Lois.

Next up, we'll have an invocation from Pastor Crystal Noland with One Church, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance led by Mayor Ruesing. Please stand.

Hello. Lord, I thank you for this day. I thank you for these people who have gathered here, who serve this great city of Prescott. I ask that you would endow them with wisdom to lead this community well. I ask for unity within this council, that you would bless them with your peace to navigate these challenging times. Lord, remind them what a great privilege it is to serve others and enable them to steward this responsibility with uprightness and character. So on behalf of this council, we commit and submit our ways to you in Jesus name.

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

Next, we'll have proclamations. Our first proclamation will be presented by Councilman Ruby to the Prescott Jazz Summit for their 25th anniversary, August 27th through 30th, 2026.

Whereas, for 25 years, Mike Vax has tirelessly promoted the city of Prescott through his leadership and dedication to the Prescott Jazz Summit, helping establish it as one of the region's premier cultural events. And whereas through the years, Mike Vax has brought many of the world's finest jazz musicians to Prescott, presenting exceptional performances that have enriched our community's cultural life and appreciation of America's unique jazz heritage. And whereas these concerts have represented far more than entertainment, showcasing the highest level of artistry while celebrating jazz as a truly American art form. And whereas every Prescott Jazz Summit has included educational outreach, providing young musicians with invaluable instructions from accomplished professionals, inspiring future generations and raising funds to support music education in our local schools. And whereas Mike Vax's vision, passion, and unwavering commitment have made a lasting impact on the city of Prescott, its residents, and countless visitors who have experienced the joy of world-class jazz in our community. Now, therefore, Kathy Ruesing, Mayor of the City of Prescott, does hereby recognize Mike Fax for his outstanding contributions to the arts and proclaim 27th through 30th of August as the 25th anniversary of the Prescott Jazz Summit. We extend our sincere gratitude for his continued dedication to enriching our community through music and encourage all residents to join in celebrating his remarkable legacy and ongoing vision for bringing the very best of jazz to Prescott.

Is he here?

first of all thank you for this honor and it has uh it has been an honor to uh present music in this wonderful community all these years and uh we hope to keep going for many years more but 25 years but you know The jazz festival has become a very, very popular thing amongst very famous jazz musicians because they know how well they get treated in Prescott. So the joke amongst the jazz guys has always been, how does Vax keep a jazz festival going for 25 years in a cowboy town? But it's been because of the support of the community and over the years we've sold, I think, more than 22,000 tickets to our concerts. Our educational outreach has reached more than 5,000 students throughout the state of Arizona, we bring musicians into the schools at no cost to the schools. We raise money to pay the musicians to go into the schools. And so we hope to continue. We hope that you will go to the website, which is Prescott.gov, jazzsummit.net, because the festival's coming up the 27th through the 30th of this month, and we hope to have a great crowd for the festival again. So thank you very, very much, and it's very much appreciated. Oh, okay.

And next we'll have Mayor Roussaint presenting the proclamation for the 2026 International Mountain Bicycling Association at Trail Town.

And we're gonna keep that cowboy Western spirit alive, except now they're riding mountain bikes instead of horses. So would anyone from the mountain bike community like to come up? I know we have Jimena and Chris. Anyone else riding mountain bikes, please come up and join us. And I was actually riding a mountain bike in Colorado in my vacation, so.

All ages. Yes. But you will if you take some of those lessons, yeah. We also have the Forest Service here.

Whereas trails provide important opportunities for outdoor recreation, physical activity, and connection to nature for residents and visitors, and whereas the community of Prescott has demonstrated leadership in developing and stewarding a high-quality trail system supported by volunteers, local organizations, and public partners. And whereas trails contribute to local economic vitality by attracting visitors, supporting outdoor recreation businesses, and enhancing the quality of life that makes communities vibrant places to live and work. Whereas the International Mountain Biking Association, IMBA, has recognized Prescott as a 2026 IMBA Trail Town for its commitment to trail stewardship, community engagement, and outdoor recreation. Now, therefore, I, Kathy Ruesing, Mayor of the City of Prescott, do hereby recognize and proclaim the City of Prescott as a 2026 IMBA Trail Town. And I encourage residents and visitors alike to enjoy and help steward our community trails. And I would also like to compliment the U.S. Forest Service for their collaboration and cooperation with the City of Prescott and with... PIMBA. So with that, and I know Ximena would love to say a few words.

Good afternoon. Thank you so much. This is such an honor and something that we have worked very hard for many, many years. I am just the last one here with Bean Peaks, but Chris and the Over the Hill Gang and the City of Prescott has been working very hard on trails for many years. The Forest Service as well. We have the Circle Trail, which started back in 2020. somewhere around there. And just, it's a great honor to have something like that. It will bring so many more people into Prescott to enjoy the trails and the economic development that that brings is really great. I don't know if Chris would like to say something as well.

Yeah, I'd just like to say thank you to all the people over the years. Yesterday was my 20th anniversary working for the city. And since then, thank you. Since then, we've added 150 miles of trail to the city, and we've helped with the Forest Service with a lot of their trails. I really want to thank the Over the Hill Gang. They've really helped me. I guess if I did anything right, it was getting the Over the Hill Gang together. And now we get 10,000-plus hours of volunteer time from those guys every year, and we built all these trails, and we manage all 5,000 acres-plus of natural open space. So thank you to all past board members of PIMBA who have made this town a trail town. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

All right, now we'll have a presentation from staff regarding the updated water quality report.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Council. I'm Steve Olfers, I'm the Utilities Manager for the City of Prescott. We're gonna talk a little bit about water quality. You spent an hour talking about quantity and where it is, let's talk about what's in it. So every year, the EPA and ADEQ, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality require that each public water system put together what they call a consumer confidence report. This essentially is a yearly thing that reflects back to 2025. So we have until July of the following year to put this out and make it available for all of our customers to see what kind of things are going on with their water.

So the first thing we have going on

This is, as I said, required by ADEQ, published by July 1 of each year. And it is available online at that lengthy address. And we also have them in print at Prescott Library, at the Public Works Department. We have them in utilities departments at our desks. And they're available for anybody and everybody to take a look at. And we invite you to. We really want you to know what's in your water, because we really want to know as well. There's a lot of regulations that go along with water and wastewater, and we spend a lot of our time attempting to reach those goals. So first off, we start off talking about our drinking water process. As you may or may not know, we are a strictly groundwater system, which means that we pump all of our water out of the ground, and really when we say we treat it, we add chlorine. That's the treatment that we add. If you were down in Phoenix, surface water is a whole different story. But here it's groundwater, well water, so it's a protected aquifer. We talked a little bit about that during the study session and how we go about keeping that type of quality at status quo or even better. We also talk a little bit about our water sampling process and what's required of us. We do hundreds of tests every month just to check to make sure that the water that we're delivering is still meeting all the requirements associated with ADEQ and EPA. We talk a little bit about our consumer resources and additional information. We have a number of different pieces of information that are available on our website, and that's the best place to find information about water quality. Moving through the CCR, we're in the midst of a water meter replacement program. If you haven't heard, we're replacing our old mechanical meters with cellular-based water meters that allow you to see on our app, which is called Ion Water. Ion Water allows you to go into your water usage and compare to you. You can see how well you're doing, you can set goals. And one of the biggest things that really made us really like this product was that you can set alarms so if you're out of town and you have a continuously running water meter that indicates something's going on you're wasting water if you're not there not using it it's going somewhere this can send you an alarm and you can have either the city can go take a look or some neighbors We'll be happy to help out because we want to save water too. So if you have not heard of the ion water program or the cellular meter replacement program, it'll be coming to a neighborhood near you. We're about halfway through and we're continuing to roll out the awareness on this ion water program. We'd really love to have everybody in the city on this program. Excuse me, Steve, Mary has a comment. Yes, ma'am.

Steve, is there a way for the public, I know I'd be curious for my own household, as to when they might expect their neighborhood to get the new meters?

If they were to call Main Utilities, 928-777-1118, we have our work plan as to where we're gonna go and where we're gonna go next. Right now, I'm kind of lost as to where we are. We're out there somewhere. It's out there somewhere, yes. Thank you. But our workers are out there. It takes about 10 minutes to change a meter out. They have badges and identification. They're usually in and out, and you don't even know they were there.

And you get a door hanger with extensive instructions on how to sign up.

In general, the process is we send you a letter about 60 days before we're going to be in your neighborhood, and then when your meter is changed out, we leave you a door hanger. two-sided that has all the instructions on how to get onto the ion water program. And if you have questions or concerns, please call our main number. I'll say it again, 928-777-1118, and we'll be happy to help you get to where you need to be and how you want it set up. So just some application screens, just some things that are out there. This is the most important portion of the CCR, which is the contaminant table. This is a table that tells you what contaminants we have detected and what levels from 2025. So it's from January to December of 2025. So these results are then, there's a number of different columns on here that give you the, what's the requirement, where we are, and some other details, as you can see. There's some text along the side of the contaminant table that talks a little bit more about why we're looking at those. Then, on that next page there, we have the, I'm trying to get that, there we go. We have the list of all the contaminants and why EPA is so worried about them. So these are only the ones that we've detected within our water system. So if you're looking for a complete list, you're welcome to go to epa.gov and have a nice long read, because there's a lot of them out there. But these are the ones that are in your water, in our water, and what their concentrations are and how they relate to the EPA regulations. So a lot of good information, a lot of good reading there. If you're a water geek like me, it's wonderful.

So what's the bottom line on our water?

Our water is perfectly fine. Thank you. The EPA and the ADEQ. Thank you. We meet all regulatory requirements. And again, we check hundreds of times every month to make sure we're still staying there. Because water is so intense with abbreviations and definitions, we give you a little key there so that you can figure out what all those long words mean. And then at the bottom, one of my favorites is what a part per million is and what a part per billion is. I think next year we're going to have to put a part per trillion because now we're down into that for one of our contaminants. And then lastly, we have a little discussion on what's called the lead and copper rule revision. This is something that a program that we're starting, we actually did a pilot and we're gonna continue that pilot and go into full production, which is identifying which, if any service lines within the city have lead in them. And that's gonna require us not only to look at the city side, but also the public side or your house side. just on the inside of the meter. We have to physically check and see what the pipe material is. And so that will be starting off here in the fall. So look for us to be back out there doing other things. And lastly, this is the team that serves you as a water treatment and water production group, a group of dedicated individuals who are out there every single day. If you saw them on Whipple last night, they were out there all night trying to fix that leak. We 24-7, 365. And these are the ladies and gentlemen that make that happen. So thank you.

And I just wanted to comment there was online a while back there was a report that lumped in municipalities such as Prescott with these smaller water companies that are pretty much unregulated and kind of lumped us all together and kind of announced that all of our water was contaminated. So be careful what you see online, analyze it, and just go to our website if you want to get the data and the facts. Any other comments?

Lois? Yeah, Dallin, are we back online for those that are trying to follow us and listening in?

Yeah, so all of the online streaming methods are working, but there is a little bit of an echo. It's kind of spacey sounding. So we're going to keep working on the sound, but the streams are working and you should be able to follow along. Thank you.

All right, we will move on now to our open call to the public. The City of Prescott welcomes public engagement. Residents may comment and address the council regarding matters that are not included on the posted agenda during the call to the public. If you wish to speak, please complete a green speaker card and submit it to me prior to the meeting being convened. As a reminder, speakers are limited to four minutes and the call to the public will be limited to 40 minutes in total with the following stipulations. Citizens will be limited to addressing the council on the same topic only four times in total. If a topic has been addressed more than five times by different speakers, the mayor may limit future discussion on this topic. Topics of a primarily national concern may be limited at the discretion of the mayor, and the call to the public shall not be used to address the council on current or pending legal matters by a party or their representative. I do have one comment card today. It is from Stacy Brown.

Excuse me, there was another gentleman here in the green. Did you fill out a card? You didn't know? Well, in the back is a card to fill out and give to our city clerk so she can keep track of your name for the record. Thank you.

Good afternoon. On July 14th, the council agenda included routine items to award contracts for construction managers. What occurred during those items, however, went well beyond the actions described on the agenda. During those discussions, the mayor raised a concern about the lack of council oversight of these construction projects. That's a legitimate issue and one that I believe council should address. But the way it was handled on July 14th is a serious governance problem. The discussion evolved into an improvised consideration of whether to pause the project and change the design. Those are significant implementation decisions, yet there was no established process for considering them and no agenda notice informing the public that design decisions might be discussed. That's not what good governance looks like. Council should absolutely ask these questions, but significant project decisions need to be considered through a defined governance process, not improvised within an unrelated agenda item. Council's role is to establish policy, accountability standards, and expectations for oversight. Management's role is to execute the projects within that framework. When those roles become blurred, council can become involved in operational decisions that belong to management without the information or process needed to make those decisions responsibly. That shifts council from governing to managing and diminishes effective oversight. A sound governance framework should establish what information council receives, how often it receives it, what decisions remain within staff's authority, what circumstances require council action, and how significant changes are brought before the public and the full council. That framework would also strengthen Council's decision-making by providing every Council member the same rules, the same information, and the same opportunity to participate when significant decisions are required. I can appreciate the Mayor's dissatisfaction with the level of Council oversight, but that dissatisfaction points directly to the governance gap. Council has yet to establish what information it expects to receive and how it will exercise oversight as these projects move forward. The Mayor campaigned on the promise that she will work for the people of this community. That promise carries a responsibility to govern transparently, predictably, and with accountability to the public. The July 14th discussion did not reflect that responsibility. It left the public blindsided by a significant project change they had no reason to expect would be considered. My ask is of council is to establish the framework that allows council to govern and management to manage. Governance is a foundation of accountability. Once that foundation is in place, decisions that follow will be more transparent, more consistent, and more defensible to the community. Thank you for your attention, and as always, thank you for your service.

Thank you, Stacy.

Sir, did you wish to address the council? Okay, I need you to give me your card, please. Robert Brown.

Are we ready to go here? Mayor, City Council members, my name is Bob Brown and I have been living on Hillcrest Drive here in Prescott for the last 18 years. I am confused and distressed with the street repaving priorities of the Public Works Department. Hillcrest Drive has been increasingly rutted and potholed. The street has a steep curve, which makes these hazards dangerous to vehicles and pedestrians. In recent years, Public Works has repeatedly told us that they would completely repave our street, Hillcrest Drive, as they had done to the adjacent Eastwood Drive and Penn Avenue. Yet no substantial action has been taken. The 2027 pavement preservation project, set to begin next week, listed 13 roadways due for renovation. I am familiar with all of these streets, which are near Hillcrest Drive. Has the mayor or council members recently driven on these roadways? I ask this question because if not, I would urge you all to do so. And drive down Hillcrest. You will find that Hillcrest has more ruts, more potholes, more broken pavements than any of the other streets and drives that have been included in this project. This constitutes a travesty of safe pavement maintenance. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Brown. And I'd like to direct city staff to look into Hillcrest. Thank you.

All right, our next item is the consent agenda. I did receive a request from Mayor Ruesing and Councilman Ruby to pull item B for further discussion, but no other requests have been made. If there are no other items to be pulled, the council can make a motion on the balance of the consent agenda.

I move to approve consent agenda items 9A through 9I, excluding 9B.

Second.

Please vote.

Pat passes seven zero.

Thank you. I'd like to start off and then Mr. Ruby can join in. Every year we come up with a legislative platform with our ask for appropriations from our state legislators. And this year we're doing something a little different. We've narrowed it down to two pages. Easy to understand and I completely support this. I do have some amendments to this. under funding priorities at the bottom. I support number one, number two, number three. I think we need to keep this simple and just focus on infrastructure projects. Number four, the Phippen Low Water Crossing, I think is something that we can fund with debt. and also the purchase of the 400 acres to expand the Granite Dells Regional Park. That's not a priority right now, and we do have a different strategy on acquiring that land that doesn't involve the state legislature. On the backside of the page, we talk about dynamic economy, reliable infrastructure, water and natural resources. I think we do a good job. Our whole point is to make this easy to understand and not too burdensome. But I think that on the under-reliable infrastructure, I think we should say instead of all vehicles, ensure all vehicles, we should say ensure all EVs are contributing to state and local state and local highway support, what am I trying to say? Contributions to maintain the highways because EVs, even though they aren't buying gas, they are using our roads. And then the last one, I think we should have something that says thank you for your support in helping Prescott and Yavapai County to thrive. But those are basically, then there's a few other changes like my, I like to have my direct line in there, 777-1439. And just a few minor changes, but overall, I think this has been a wonderful effort by the council and the staff to get our appropriations in front of our representatives. Mr. Ruby?

Yeah, I would like, I believe this was in the previous one that we voted on, but underwater and natural resources, I would like to see added support the wild and scenic river designation for the upper Verde River.

I agree with that since we sent a letter in about two years ago supporting it.

Do we need to make a motion to add these things, Sarah?

You can make the motion to approve with amendments.

Do we have any other comments?

Any comments from the public? We do not have any cards.

Okay, do I hear a motion?

I'd like to make a motion to amend the document with what was stated. That sounds real general. Can you give me clear language, Sarah?

approve the submission of the legislative platforms with amendments.

I would like to make a motion to approve the legislative agenda with amendments.

Second. Please vote.

Passes 6-1. Next item is public hearing and consideration for a new series 12 restaurant liquor license application from Jose Manuel Gutierrez Hernandez, applicant for El Tapatio, location 547 Miller Valley Road. The application fee has been paid and the sign has been posted for the required 20 days. Staff has reviewed the application and determined that it is in compliance and no public comments have been received.

If the applicant is here, they're welcome to come up and say a few words. No takers. Okay. I move to close the public hearing.

Second.

Please vote. I move... Hold on. That passes 7-0. Okay, thank you. And I move to approve Liquor license application number 400-566 for a new series 12 restaurant liquor license for El Tapatio, location 547 Miller Valley Road. Second. Please vote.

That also passed the 7-0. Our next item is presentation and discussion regarding approval of city contract number 2027-046 for tourism destination marketing execution, economic development initiatives, and campaign support.

Mayor, Council, this is my first presentation as the Economic Development Director. My name is Steve Prokopec, and I'm excited to be here. And I wish I was talking about something as exciting as water, and I know we've talked a lot about that, but as Sarah stated, we're here to talk about a contract for tourism. And this is going to be a contract for our destination marketing organization agency with a company called Destination IQ. So for economic development, and in this community, tourism has really dominated the conversation with economic development. But as this council is very aware that economic development, there's been a larger ask. And so with that ask, you can see all the other things that we've been asked to do as part of the overall economic development pie. And tourism is a piece of that. When we start having these kinds of conversations, one of the criticisms is you're going to start diminishing the rule for tourism. And that is not the case. And so I just wanted to make sure that as I started to hear these things, especially as we've had a gap in turnover and employment within the economic development organization, those those questions start to arise. And so I just wanted to assure everybody that tourism, while it's going to be a part of a larger piece of the pie, tourism is still going to be something that's just as important. All we're going to be doing is taking the same vigor that we put towards tourism into these other economic development components, which include business attraction, retention and expansion, retail development, and investment and reinvestment, in particular in areas like the downtown. And so when we start talking about tourism, tourism itself is vetted in the strategic plan for the council. And really it's regarding the strategic priorities that have been outlined for creating a dynamic economic environment and the goal of $288 million in direct tourism spending. And what that goes towards is, in a lot of cases, is destination stays, which increases our bed tax. And the bed tax is the tax that was approved by the voters, which has a 3% surcharge on top of all the rooms that are rented within Prescott. And that money then has certain buckets that it can go into. It can only be utilized for certain things that are tourism related, and that includes advertising for tourism, as well as recreational amenities that are included into that. And so we fund events and activities, recreational activities, and a big part of that is making sure that we are adequately marketing the community for tourism. And what you see here in the fiscal year 2027 budget is this is all the things that have been included as far as what is to be attributed towards this tourism marketing campaign. And When you see in this, it says tourism and economic development, where economic development, you can interchange that with general fund. And one of the things that the council has asked is that because we're taking tourism and embedding it into economic development, there's going to be some crossover and bleed. And what we wanted to use is make sure that when we engage a tourism agency or an agency that's going to help us with the marketing and advertising, because there's been part of the budget process to include some general fund money for economic development, that it gets embedded into that as well. And so what you see here is that there's been $200,000 assigned from the bed tax towards tourism advertising campaign plus $60,000 that we're utilizing from the general fund that's going to go towards tourism marketing campaign as well. And the expectation when we talked with the agency that's been selected is that they're going to be working on campaigns and activities that everything's going to be starting to incorporate other economic development goals and objectives that we have for that established through the strategic plan and the economic development plan. And so what you're seeing here is the total amount of money that is allocated towards tourism itself and the promotion of tourism. What we're going to see in the contract today isn't the spending of all of this money, but I just wanted to let you know, show that there is a budget that's established for that and that these funds are through the bed tax to be applied towards these types of activities. And that, again, economic development and tourism are going to be starting to blend a little bit more together. I've only been here for a few weeks. And so when I asked the staff about what's the critical item that we needed to address, actually adding this agency on and making sure that we move forward was one of the things that was a critical path and it has to do with timing with Arizona Office of Tourism. There's grants that are available and those grants, the applications were due at the end of July. And so what we wanted to do is make sure that we could bring on this agency to help us make the selections that allow us to be able to get that grant through the Arizona Office of Tourism. And so it is kind of a critical path moment that we're here today. We would particularly like to have maybe discussed this with ATT&CK a little before this. We will be meeting with ATT&CK tomorrow to discuss this a little bit further. But they have been involved in all of the selection processes for this agency, and it has gone through a robust process. And so in the absence of, before I got here, and as there was transition in the organization, Tricia Lewis, our economic development manager, and Mike Kelly, our tourism manager, really, really stepped up And they took the bull by the horns and made sure that this critical piece, which is very complicated and is the largest spend we'll make as an economic development agency, they really brought it forward and did all the things that were necessary for us to be able to get here to make this decision. So I just wanted to... They're going to be involved in making the next presentation part of the presentation because they're more intimately involved with what's been going on. I've been... working really hard just to learn the budget and the processes and everything else. But all the staff's been great within the city to help me understand and learn that. It's been a crash course. And I've actually had the opportunity to engage with this particular consultant, and I find them extremely, I think they're gonna be a very great partner for us as we advance the tourism ball moving forward.

So Steve, let me interrupt. So you've worked with Destination IQ before?

Mayor, no, I have not worked with them, but I did have conversations with them as we negotiated out this contract. And so as we negotiated the contract, they had a whole list of things that we could potentially do.

But my question is here, let me finish. It's kind of unusual for them not to be here pitching themselves. Why is it that they're not here?

Yeah, so, Mayor, that's a great question. And so when we asked them to be a part of this presentation, because of the timing of this particular council meeting, they actually had already been in transit or were scheduled to be in transit because they're going to the Governor's Conference for Tourism, so they're actually traveling to that conference at this time right now. But Trish Lewis has worked extensively with this particular agency, and so they did send us their slides. And so I want to introduce Trish so she can talk a little bit more about tourism, her experience with this group, and provide you with any questions that you may have regarding them.

Yeah, and I see they're out of Buena Vista, Colorado, because I was just up there last week, and Buena Vista was packed. There were so many tourists there, so maybe that's why.

And Mayor, just to say, you know, in economic development, we're a small organization and we're going to be asked to do a lot of things. And so to do that, you have to leverage resources, whether you're working with stakeholders that are internal, whether you're working with regional partnerships like the ACA and economic development, or whether we're bringing in consultants like this to be able to help. who have an extensive reach nationally and regionally. And so just for the public's purpose of understanding, this is why we bring on consultants like this, because they are an extension of the staff, and they do have a reach into markets that we just don't have a reach. I also wanted to say that one of the things that we have the capacity to do with economic development is there is additional advertising money. that we have in economic development and we're gonna hold that back and start working with discussions with the airport and other local stakeholders to see how potentially we could expand the relationship with Destination IQ as we move forward to have more specific economic development tourism campaigns, maybe add an additional campaign that could be done in concert with the airport and their goals of maybe looking at where they currently are having service or when they potentially may have service. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Trish. Thank you.

good afternoon madam mayor members of council yes i'm trisha lewis economic development manager and it's great to be here thank you to steve i just want to give him accolades too because he literally has been here maybe this is your fourth week and he came in and he was like what are we doing and what is important and he's just been like jumping around he runs up and down the hallway and asks questions and engages and he's plugged in and where he started and where he's at today i just have to say he's come a long way You know, he really has, because tourism was like, what? And it's just been a great conversation between the three of us. We get a lot done. And I think our stakeholders will be pleased to hear about this, especially when we go to TAC tomorrow and explain kind of what's happening with the DMO. So I just wanted to get a little bit of background on what a DMO is. I think this is the right time to explain that and just where we're going. So as we all know, Prescott is a tourism community, and tourism is an important part of our local economy. As we look at the future of Experience Prescott, which is the DMO, I want to briefly talk about what the role is, what the city's investment in tourism, and Steve touched on that briefly, but also why I believe Destination IQ, which is the chosen agency, is the right partner for this next chapter. A destination marketing organization, it's also been called a destination management organization. It just depends on who's saying what. It promotes the destination year-round with a clear economic purpose, attracting visitors, increasing overnight stays and visitor spending, and it supports the local tourism economy. To remain active and recognized by the Arizona Office of Tourism, which is our tourism state agency, the DMO must annually demonstrate a dedicated tourism marketing budget, so the DMO is wherever the funding source is, so it's within the city. We must have an official tourism website or microsite, and then an active social media presence. So we will get that up and running again. It's been kind of dormant for the last couple months just because we didn't have anybody to manage that. But Experience Prescott is obviously the city's designated DMO. It's been in place for 15 years. We have stakeholders that are in this room that are here today that have helped start that. Thank you, Margo. and establish through the council-approved affidavit with the Arizona Office of Tourism. It has to be an affidavit that is done by the council and the members, so it's on file and I verified it, so we're good to go. It's been active for many years. The city funds this work primarily through, and Steve said it, through the 3% transient occupancy or bed tax collected on short-term lodging. That makes tourism marketing more than marketing expenses. It is also economic development investment. Our responsibility is to make sure those dollars are used strategically, efficiently, and in a way that produces measurable results. And Mayor, you were asking about Destination IQ. Through the city's art, we did a request for statement of qualifications and this was when, I think it was June, it went out and we got 15 proposals and then we had a stakeholder that's on TAC review it with us and the three anonymously and independently reviewed the 15 proposals and Destination IQ was at the top. So it wasn't just because I worked with them and we have familiarity, it was chosen between all three just unanimously. So I want to emphasize that because this went through the procurement process and we did meet with finance many times and reviewed this, vetted the process to serve as the agency for experienced Prescott. I have firsthand experience with their work. When I was with the city of Cottonwood, I worked with them directly and had questions exactly what you said, Mayor, is when we were going through and getting a new agency because who is taking over this position was Heather Herman with Front Burger Media. She moved to Branson. She's a good friend of mine. She moved from Cottonwood and Prescott. Excuse me. And we were looking for a new agency to handle the DMO in Cottonwood. And I remember going through and doing an interview process. And my concern was they were in Colorado, and we need somebody who's local. Because Heather was very good at engaging with the media. She was hosting them. She did it. She would do something in Cottonwood, do something in Prescott, and then all over the place. But she was fantastic. And so I was worried about that, because that investment is important for us to engage. And they also have a lot of opportunities for added value with media. When we had the interviews, Destination IQ stood out to me so clearly back then because they understand what a DMO is supposed to do. They understand what the role is and how to interact with the public and the stakeholders by not even being in that same community. It was obvious to me in the interview. So that was very refreshing. And then we hired them and they started last year in January. And it was an absolutely fantastic process. We brought them in, which they're gonna do here, to answer your question, yeah, they're in Tucson right now. But they're gonna be here next month, hopefully, with a full long week immersion trip. So they brought five people last year, and we met with council, we met with TAC, we met with all of our major stakeholders, and by the end of the week, they were exhausted, but they were so refreshed and revived about what the destination was, what actually it had. And it was amazing to me because their quality of work that they had from that beginning of that time until even today has been tremendous. Like they had not skipped a beat. And I just want to give you a couple of ideas about... what they actually did. And they did provide some slides. It's kind of hard to read. And Mike's going to go into more detail about what their scope is. But the takeaways and the metrics, because we all want to know this is government spending and this is bed tax. So our hospitality partners always want to know where the money is being spent. So I'm just going to go off of Cottonwood because of their, you know, they had a report. We didn't have any metrics when I started with this agency. We didn't really have anything in terms of managing the analytics. So over the last year, they've had a good, a year and a half, they've had a good amount of metrics to report. $3.2 million in additional visitor spending in the first 10 months following the brand launch. They did a 52 to 1 return on investment for every $1 invested generated, approximately $52 in additional visitor spending, 20% year-over-year growth in visitor spending in first quarter, and then more than a million marketing impressions in January, which is usually Cottonwood's slowest month. So these are just some things that we have to look forward to in terms of Prescott because I will tell you this. Prescott is a much bigger destination. We obviously know that. We have a story. We have a lot of events here. We have historical components. We have old Prescott and outdoor recreation, arts and culture. There's just so much more to talk about here. And we took Cottonwood from a destination that was just a drive-through. People are going from Sedona to Jerome or to, you know, they weren't really doing anything in Cottonwood, and they are now. So this tourism campaign, it does matter. A destination means something, and you tell the story, and they're going to do a fantastic job. Ultimately, these are just slides that are up here. They're in your packet, too. They provided them for us so that if you could see just basically what they're going to be doing. But in terms of the actual campaigns that they're going to work on, destination strategy, creative, media, and performance measurements. Mike is going to go into more detail just about what the actual dollars are going to be spent on. So I don't want to overwhelm, you know, take his time. But I am very pleased to say that I think this is going to be a great new addition for the tourism department and for experienced Prescott. And I think we're going to have some even better results than I just reported for what Cottonwood's seen. Yes. Okay, Mr. Grady.

Thank you, Mayor. And Mike may be able to address this too, but you referenced the fact that you didn't think Cottonwood was kind of set up for the analytics side. Are we?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes. much more advanced in terms of what is out there and who's been managing it before. So yes. And another thing I want to mention is that we had several contracts in place last year. So we're going to reduce the amount of people working on it. And our goal was to spend more on creative and to put more towards campaigns. So we're going to have less people, but more campaigns, if that makes sense. I just want to highlight their team is... We went from one person with Heather and then we, for about the same exact dollar amount, I ended up getting five people. It was so beautiful. It's like, wow, they're so awesome and talented and they know who to talk to and we did all these great things. So I'm just pleased to say Brian Jordan is the owner and then his team is great and they will be here next month to meet you. So I'm gonna pass it on to Mike unless anybody has any questions. He's got probably a little bit more excitement.

Madam Mayor, I have a question.

Yes, Ted.

Trish, you said for every buck you spend, you get 52 additional bucks. Can you approximate from that how many more people come to Prescott?

That's kind of, I mean, that was Cottonwood's numbers, and so it's hard to say, like, you're comparing the tourism over there with here. I don't know. I mean, we see millions of people in Prescott a year for tourism.

I guess I'm asking a capacity question.

Okay.

If the return on investment is 52 to 1, do we have enough hotel rooms? Yes. We do.

We will see the number go up. I imagine that that ROI is going to be a little bit different. This was just from Cottonwood, so yes.

I can't hear you.

What's our current, Mike, or Tricia, our current occupancy? It's around 62-ish? So we have lots of rooms. And we're building more hotels. And they'll be open.

And the goal of this, let me just say too, is not to produce over-tourism. I mean, I was really cautious with that in Cottonwood because Sedona is always overwhelmed. And this group is very conscientious about trying to understand how do we promote the destination without over-saturating the market. And so you're going to be very, hopefully very, pleased. And as Steve said, we're going to be touching on economic development and tourism because that was a focus from the city manager, is to make sure that the two of those support each other. And in a way, they're very much, they support one another. So does anyone have any other questions? I'll let Mike come up and speak. Okay. Thank you.

Okay.

Hello, Mayor and Council. I'm Mike Kelly, the Tourism Manager, and I just wanted to kind of run through the agency's targeted projects, deliverables, and costs for you. Let's get it down here. We can start on the left here with category and project highlights from the agency. Destination management services, that consists a little bit of what Trish was telling you about, the immersion trip. and what we're projecting to be like in September to kind of coordinate around our TAC meeting then when the agency comes for an entire week to meet with TAC, council, local stakeholders, and many more associations and groups that we have here to just get, you know, as much as they can about Prescott that they don't already know. Also, we'll go down into brand strategy and development and content marketing. They're going to come in and totally revamp our photography catalogs, predominantly what are on our websites and for all our stakeholders to use as well. Also our video and ad development. These are where we're going to work on our targeted campaigns with content marketing. A lot of them are going to be with, as Trish and Steve mentioned, airports and all our direct flights, outdoor space and trails, bike trails and walking trails, and lakes and other attractions as well. We're also going to have a dedicated social media person through the agency, as well as digital advertising with Google Search and meta ads, as well as more content marketing in those targeted campaigns. Also, we're going to have our website development and updates through the agency. They will be handling all the experience Prescott. And then a couple more down at the bottom that were in yellow, those are going to be subscriptions that we're going to bring on. That Yodel Calendar program is going to be great in content marketing. It's going to help us with all the problems we kind of have with one localized calendar. to let everybody know about all our special events, everything throughout the city. It's going to help with the chamber and our other local stakeholders to try and bring one shared calendar that can be disseminated to everybody. So that subscription is going to help there, as well as visitor research and insights, which is Placer AI. We currently use that platform getting all our geofence numbers for all our signature events. and other smaller events that the TAC grants help out. So that will allow our agency to plug in and really give us dedicated info on all our digital advertisement, all our geofencing of people coming to the city to make better decisions going forward with all our campaigns. And then over on the right, we've got our pie chart there with our FY27 contract number, which is 306,500. As you can see, it's a lot less than what we spent in these current areas last year. And like Trish said, With the agency, we're going to have one entity working with and directly with us and with our office. As opposed to last year, we had about four or five different entities between our previous agency, our website platform and creator, and then our digital marketing consultants and people that were doing our consultants. So taking it from four or five different entities down to one is just going to streamline everything and just make it that much more effective. Now, a couple problems we had with our website last year was just we put in a simple ticket to get something fixed or an event updated. It would take a week plus. And with our website creator here in town working with our agency, we'll get it done in an hour, maybe even less. So it's really streamlining that process. And the different colors you see on the right and left are where the different object codes come from our bed tax and economic development funds. Prominently, as Steve said, it's marketing and promotions. The yellow there is from subscriptions and membership. And of course, software systems and maintenance. And all of these items are at budget or under when it comes to the FY27 approved budget. So really doing good things there. And as far as next steps, like Trish said, we're going to be engaging TAC. We have our monthly TAC meeting tomorrow after recess from our summer break. We're going to lay this all out for them. And next from there, we're going to have maybe a roundtable with the agency at the end of August to really get to know TAC and talk to them about all the things that they're going to offer as far as their deliverables. And then the immersion trip. uh... in september set it around uh... attack meeting that week and like i said they'll talk to everybody that week so on this also there are some great add-ons that the agency are capable of uh... they're gonna offer a tourism tourism strategic plan outline and were were uh... you know needing to revamp that now and we're gonna take that on and fractions of the costs and you know those add-ons will be brought by the agency in probably about a month to come. That'll be a topic of our next TAC meeting as well as economic and other tourism campaigns. There's also going to be a economic development retail strategy available through the co-op with Arizona Office of Tourism. So that's going to be some other useful data too. And that's about it if you guys have any other questions for me and my team any comments

Lois.

Yeah, I have a comment.

Lois, you're the liaison.

I'm the council liaison to TAC. And explain what TAC stands for. Tourism Advisory Committee. And we have a bunch of businesses that are either centric with hotels and food or businesses that are based, surviving off of downtown, of tourism. So I'm excited about approving this contract today. We need to get going. I felt like last year I was looking at social media and I was like, wow, I want to get in the car and go visit Cottonwood because they were doing an amazing job and we weren't stepping up like that. So when I found out this is who helped Cottonwood, who I didn't used to pay attention to and suddenly I started paying attention to, I was glad to hear that we're going to be getting into business with them, hopefully with everyone's approval today. So we've got lots to do, and we've got the right team, and we've got a great TAC board to work with, so I'm excited for this coming year.

I like this strategy they have kind of making people aware of our airport because a lot of tourists fly into Phoenix and then rent a car and go up to Sedona when they could just fly into Prescott, visit Prescott, and then fly in and out of Prescott and visit Sedona. So I think people don't realize all the non-stops that we have and that we're quite a hub. So anyway, do I hear a motion?

Yes, I move to approve city contract number 2027-046. Second. Please vote. Passes 7-0.

Congratulations.

Next item, presentation, discussion, and possible action regarding the adoption of resolution number 2026-1999, approving an elected fire deterrent system policy.

Mayor, Mayor Pretem, Council. Yes, so we're going to be talking about elected fire deterrence systems. So I'll give a little bit of a background on why we're talking about these systems, how this came to light, talk a little bit about the policy itself, some of the highlights. And then I'm going to give an example, which is up on the screen right now. per Mayor Pretemperworth's request, just to kind of give the community an idea of what it would cost to permit one of these systems through the city if an HOA or a community group was interested in having a fire deterrent system installed. And then ultimately, we'll move into the discussion of whether we should adopt this policy today. So spoiler alert, I'm going to recommend that we postpone adopting the policy. Just based on some of the feedback and the questions I've received from council, I think there's some clarifications that we need to add to the policy. We're close, but I'll go into that in more detail later. So going back almost to 2023, the Cathedral Pines Community Association reached out to the city on how to permit a system of this type. This came from their fire wising committee. And as you know, we have a very active fire wising community. A lot of the HOAs have designated committees who are creating defensible space through contracts or just volunteering their own time to go out and trim weeds and create these safe spaces in our community. So they provide a lot of value, so I just want to acknowledge them right now. And this was a innovative idea that they had to give themselves one more tool to create defensible space in their community.

Let me interrupt here and start at the beginning. Cathedral Pines uh... lost i think about seven homes in the indian fire in the year two thousand and two and this was a fire that didn't begin ten or twenty miles out of town in in the prescott national forest it was started by a pyromaniac right on the edge of town at the indian campground and it jumped highway eighty nine and headed right into cathedral pines So I think this is one reason why they are so adamant at developing some sort of a system. And this is also not about saving property, but it's about saving lives because Cathedral Pines only has one way in and one way out. And I spoke to, I remember speaking to Dottie Morris, who had to evacuate for that Indian fire. And she said, emergency vehicles were trying to get out, all the residents were trying to, you know, emergency vehicles were trying to get in, residents were trying to get out. If we had something that could delay the fire or something like that, this is, I think, a good idea. And plus, then there were all the looky-loos trying to get in and out. So I think this is a little background to give people, to show what the point of view is of the Cathedral Pine residence. Thank you.

No, thank you, Mayor. I appreciate that background. And yeah, and if you've gone to the Cathedral Pines neighborhood yourself and you see the terrain, I was surprised when I went out there and heavily forested on steeper than one-to-one grades, it would be very difficult to create these kind of buffer zones in that environment. So like I said, they reached out to us on how to permit one of these systems. And so the question came up is, do we have any of these systems in the city currently? And the answer is no. Have we ever permitted a system like this before? No. So we were kind of just adapting on the fly on how we would receive their submittal, how we would permit it, what kind of fees we would charge. And they were kind of caught in their own loop of trying to find funding to do the system itself. So that's what started the conversation. And so various versions of this policy have been developed over the last couple years. And then it's finally coming back to light because CBCA, the Cathedral Pines Community Association, is moving forward with installing the system here. So we as a staff knew that once this system was in place, they would be wanting to highlight it and other community associations would probably follow suit, especially the ones that border the National Forest. So I think it's important that we get this policy in place So I'll be honest, when these first came forward to me, I was skeptical of their effectiveness and why we would even allow these on our system. But I reached out to fire and Conrad Jackson actually provided me an article how that if you raise the relative humidity in the region, you can help the firefighting efforts during a wildfire event. So he was supportive of it. He kind of got me supportive of the concept. And so we just started developing this policy. So I do think that these systems do come with challenges. And so I'm going to jump into the policy right now and explain why we put each of these elements in the policy. So let's start with definitions. They were calling this a fire suppression system. I'm calling these elected fire deterrence systems, and there's a reason. So a fire suppression system is a public or private system that is mandated by city code for residential, commercial, or industrial development. These systems are regulated by the adopted fire code and are intended to extinguish fires and may include, but are not limited to, automatic fire extinguishing systems like a sprinkler system, fire hydrant networks, or other fire protection infrastructure required by building, fire, plumbing, or engineering codes. So there are clear definitions in our code for what a fire suppression system is. This is not one of those. An elected fire deterrence system is a privately owned and maintained system that is not required by city code and is voluntarily installed to provide additional fire deterrence. So we're not saying that these don't help. We're just saying that there hasn't been enough research or cases where they've determined that these are something that we would codify and require for communities, all right? So moving into permitting. So I think those definitions are important for how we're permitting and charging fees for these systems. So first of all, Each of these systems is going to require an ENG permit through the Public Works Department. This system will need to show a site plan of the proposed system. They'll also need to provide a water technical memorandum analyzing the hydraulics of the system, the frictional losses and minor losses that will be incurred when the system is running so that the system is appropriately sized. So what is the city's review authority? We're gonna be looking at sizing, demand characterization, conformance with city standards for service connections. The approval of this permit does not constitute city endorsement of the system's effectiveness, performance, or suitability for fire protection purposes. Alright, so moving into operation and maintenance, the policy talks about each system requiring to have their own account. So as Steve will first talked about the ion water accounts, the HOAs of the communities that utilize these systems will have their own ion water account. One of the concerns that staff had was that these systems, because they would really only be used in the case of a fire, are gonna sit there and be forgotten and fall into disrepair, and you're gonna create leaks, and that would be kind of counter to what we're trying to do with our water conservation efforts. So they'll be required to have an ion water portal, and they'll have to have a designated person checking that. We're also encouraging annual testing of the system, preferably before the fire system starts, to make sure that there are no leaks and that the...

Excuse me, Mary has a question. Go ahead.

Hey there. Actually, just exactly on these points as far as the designation of an individual and the annual testing, which I think are great ideas, both of them, but I didn't see anything in here that indicated an obligation on the owner of the system to confirm that this is being done to the city. A lot of times it seems like we have uh... policies or contracts that get initiated there's obligations on the other party not the city but the other party to do things uh... but no feedback to the city that these things are being done and as was just mentioned uh... the system could be put in place and then the monitoring and the oversight falls away and if the city is never told, no, here's the individual, or that individual has passed or moved away, okay, now here is the other who has stepped up, so that we have within our records who we can reach out to if we had any questions or concerns, and the same way with the annual testing. It's not much of an ask to say, just send us notification once a year confirming who the designated individual is, and that the testing was done on date such and such. So I would like to see something within the policy that indicated that the owner of this system is obligated to notify the city once a year on those two points, who's the designated individual and that the testing has been done.

Thank you, that's a great suggestion. We do have other programs in the city. For example, our backflow prevention team that requires annual testing of backflow preventers that are installed throughout the city. So we can kind of model this system after that program. So thank you.

And with that backflow program, are we requiring them to provide us with that notification?

They have to provide an annual test report, yes.

Okay, then something similar here I think would be a good idea.

Okay, thank you. So the last item on maintenance and operations is that we're reserving the right both as the utility provider and for the fire department to turn these systems off as we see fit. So one of the concerns is that some of these smaller communities have limited fire storage capacity in the storage tanks or limited pumping capacity to keep up with the demand. So I think the last thing that we would want to see is that You get an alert from a fire in the region, the system goes on and it's pumping, it's draining tanks, and then the fire's moving quickly to a specific spot. We go to hook up our fire hoses and there's not as much water in the tank as we thought there was gonna be. So we have a pressure issue, we have a quantity issue, and so we want to give the discretion to the fire department to say, yes, turn it on, no, don't turn it on, or if it's on, and they need the maximum amount of pressure at a certain spot, they're going to send out a team member and they're going to turn that system off. So we're getting all the pressure and all the demand where we want it when we're connected with our trucks.

Isn't that called fire flow?

Correct. Mary? Go ahead.

Sorry, before we get off this, and maybe this is more something for legal, but I'll ask you and maybe chime in, Elaine, if you think that's more appropriate. But as far as this emergency shutdown goes, do you think we would need some language in here since we're talking about the judgment of the fire department and potentially shutting down for potential depletion and if we shut it down, the elected system, we shut it down and the fire comes through and damages any of the homes that arguably could have been protected if we had not shut it down, would that liability come back on the city to say that judgment was poor judgment and the potential really wasn't there, you guys were just nervous Nellies and you shut us down anyway? So I don't know, do we need to have some kind of a line item in this policy that indicates that if, in best judgment, we need to shut it down, that the city is not liable for any subsequent damage to any of the properties?

Yes, I agree that that would be a great addition to the policy.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Grady?

This is a little bit different than the policy, but I appreciate that we're getting feedback from Conrad or our wildfire risk management manager. It's respected throughout the community, but do we have any specific examples of best practice where this has occurred anywhere else in our country, other communities?

Yeah, these do exist in other places. In the article that I was given by Conrad, it gave examples of other communities. I don't remember those off the top of my head, but I can get that information for you.

If you could get those two, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Mr. Gamboge?

With all due respect, I'd like to move to Randy's recommendation because I don't think this is ready for prime time. The concerns I have here is, okay, if we do one, how many more do we do it? How many tanks do we put together? I mean, this looks like a massive undertaking to resolve one HOA's concern, but I think it opens Pandora's box, so I think we ought to table this and table it now in the interest of time.

Mr. Ruby.

I will not further blow V8.

Blow V8? I have to look, blow V8?

It's a Rush Limbaugh term.

What Patrick and Ted said addressed my concerns, so we can move forward.

Is there anyone from the public to address, anyone from the HOA to address this? No public comment, okay. So our engineer, Randy, thank you very much for working with the HOA and the community about this. I just wanted to stress that I was living on Copper Basin at the time when the Indian Fire occurred and had to evacuate. And I'm just wondering if a system like this would help slow the fire because we were downwind in something like from Cathedral Pines. And if something like this would help adjacent communities like Timber Ridge, Lower Copper Basin, Upper Copper Basin, Los Pinos, The Village,

on and on. It probably would if the fire would cooperate and be where the hose is, but fires don't tend to cooperate.

So if the council's consensus is to table adoption of this, I need a motion on that.

Wait, I would like to, should we say table, which means it's pretty much dead, or should we postpone it till we have further information?

Yeah, I think we should postpone.

Postpone it. Okay.

Madam Mayor, may I make a motion?

Of course.

I move to postpone city contract 2027-046. Do I need to give you a date?

That's not the item that we're voting on. It's resolution number 2026-1999.

Oh, 2026-1999. I'm sorry, yes.

You can give me a date certain or you can not.

I'm not giving you a date. Second.

Thank you.

Let me ask... Passes 7-0. Sarah, let me ask, was there a reason why the representatives of the HOA weren't here? Were they not aware of the discussion or... I don't know.

Oh, yes, Lois knows. One of the reasons they weren't here is because they are still looking to get secure funding. You saw the Elijah Crane. So that's what they were looking for. They already came here last year and gave the presentation, so it would have been a duplicative presentation of the concept, and they weren't ready to sit here and say they need a policy. So this was our work. We initiated it.

Okay.

Okay, the next item is presentation, discussion, and possible action regarding an update on the police substation and property and evidence facility project, as well as site development options.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Gwen Rowich, Public Works Director. So I'm gonna kick off this conversation, but Chief Brambilla's in the room with us today to help me with this conversation. As you know, we've been, we kicked off the Police Property and Evidence Facility Project. Let me just get myself together, sorry. Nope, this is the wrong, I need the presentation up on the screen, please, IT. Thank you. As you know, we kicked off this project in October of 2025 when we hired Arrington Watkins. We entered into a design contract with them. I'm just going to give you a brief overview here first of where we're at in the process. We started we entered into a design contract with errington watkins last year and then in december we started having programming meetings with the police department about what their needs were they started attending various uh... conferences and visiting other police locations around the state in order to get some ideas of what other communities experience what their uh... what they built and why. And then in the last several months leading into May, the staff and the police department were working on the site laid out, the interior floor plans, and the exterior elevations. So that's kind of the very beginning stages of the process. I know I've talked in this room before about kind of the progression of a project. As we move through the 15% design concept, we go into 30% design, 60% design, 90% design. So as of July, we're at about the 30% design on the police station facility. which in the architectural world, I'm told, is called a schematic design. And as we roll into the 60% design, then that's design development. They have different terms. But it's the same process. There's a process that we go through at each stage and work that we perform at each stage of the process. So in the schematic design process, the consultant and the police department worked on what we call programming. And programming is where they describe the various needs that they have for the facility. They discuss the sizes of the rooms, the different components of the rooms, why they need them, what they should be next to, how the layout of the building is going to look. And the same process happens with the site. As we know from our meeting on July 14th, the site is not a flat site. We have some topographical things to work through and we've been working on that. What we're going to do today is talk a little bit about a decision that we need to make that's related to the site development. and we can talk a little bit more to also about the uh... potential cost that we see coming and things like that so as you also know on july fourteenth we entered into a uh... contract with will make and fan they did a joint venture for the CMAR or the construction manager at risk for this project and we entered into a what's called our first GMP or guaranteed maximum price for pre-construction services and so the CMAR has been very helpful in helping us look at what things might cost on this particular site for the project in addition to that Errington Watkins, the consultant, hired what they call an estimator. Their name is APCOR. And I put their estimates in here as well so that you could see the difference between the consultants. I'm sorry, they're called abacus. I put their estimate in here alongside the CMAR estimate so that you could see the difference between the consultant's estimator of what the cost of things might be and what the CMAR's estimate of what things might be, okay? So we start at a very high level and through the CMAR process, and we kind of explained this to you in July, we try to work toward a more refined number and a more number that we would expect to see through the construction bidding process. So today we're here to talk about, we've hit kind of a juncture in the design process for the site development. And as you know, the site is very steep. It is a city-owned property. We purchased the approximately eight acres from Yavapai County to build the police property and evidence facility. And as we worked through it with Arrington Watkins, this is the eight acre this is the eight acre site and we were able to fit on it the uh... this is the main building this is the main building that's approximately forty thousand square feet and then here we have uh... a yard we have a canine yard and then over here we have what we call large vehicle storage so there's actually two buildings on the site uh... for police in july the police chief came and he talked about uh... the police department's desire to move some of their operations from our downtown headquarters to this location and the reasons for that decision which centered around the ability to uh... not be trapped in downtown where you know we when we have these wildly successful uh... events that tourism was just talking about the police department has the same constraints everybody else does they can't get their vehicles and they can't get their private vehicles in to get to work the streets are blocked off There's no parking for them. These are constraints that they have at the downtown facility. And Chief Brambilla explained that it was the police department's desire to move the functions of the police department that are not related to downtown to this location, like their patrol cars, their canine units, their special tactical teams, like their SWAT team. uh... things like that they want to move to this substation when they originally uh... talked about this facility it was going to be a property and evidence facility and a small substation but as they worked through it with the errington watkins and they said what are your needs what are your long-term needs they're trying to plan for the future of the police department not just what they need today And part of that is getting the people who don't need to be downtown out of downtown so that they can more easily get to where they need to be. This particular location is minutes from SR 69, SR 89, and SR 89A. That puts them anywhere in the city that they need to go within minutes from this location. So these things that you see here on the site plan, this is their long-term future build-out wish list. We're probably not gonna have enough funding to build all of these things today, but what we do intend to do is do the site development so that we have pad-ready sites for the large vehicle storage potentially in the future. The main building we do intend to build today, and what we're asking you to decide today is whether we should use this option or option B. And I'll explain option B in a minute, but option A, sorry. So this is a site rendering that Arrington Watkins put together. uh... there's not a lot of landscaping on it but don't pay a whole lot of attention to that it wasn't meant to be a full rendering of what the site would would look like it's mostly to show you what the what what the site needs to be in order for us to have a flat level site to build the buildings and because of the topography there's a necessity for a number of retaining walls you can see the retaining walls along the front here in the front right and the site but this is also a retaining wall here all along in the back and that's because of the steepness of of the site So the retaining walls are stacked. They're tiered. I know that was mentioned in a previous meeting. It's not going to just be a straight up wall. The wall in the front is about 36 feet high. It's tiered on eight foot increments. So every eight feet, it's tiered back, tiered back, tiered back. In the back, the wall's about 40 feet high. Again, it's tiered back every eight feet. In order to have a level building pad, the building is a one level building, one story building. As well as the vehicle building, it's also a one story building. So this is option A on the site that the city purchased from the county, approximately eight acres. So as part of this, both the consultant, Arrington Watkins, and the CMAR said, hey, what would it look like if we bought the other eight acres from the county? Could that save the city some money in site development costs? And so they started looking at that option. So option B would require the purchase of the additional property. It's another eight acres, so it would be a 16-acre site in total. When we purchased the original land from the county, we had the first right of refusal on the remaining eight acres. The appraisal for the full site came in at just over three million, but the county sold the first eight acres to us at 1.55 million, Brian? Yeah, 1.55 million. And then this additional property acquisition under the appraisal would be about $1.5 million. One of the things that having the additional acreage does for the site is it pushes the building up further away from the road and further up on the hill, and it sets it further back. It also allows us to have less retaining walls. We would still have to have some retaining walls, but not nearly to the degree in option A. And one of the biggest things that it would do is it would allow us to have a single finished floor elevation. In option A, we do have a couple of finished floor elevations in order to, just because of the amount of fill and the dirt and the walls. But here in option B, we would have a single finished floor elevation. We'd also have an opportunity with option B to have a more natural setting. As you can see here, it sits a little bit further back from the road, as I mentioned. These areas, they all look like dirt. We would hydro-seed those so the natural vegetation could come back as natural. There were a lot of questions in the last meeting about the $8 million estimate for the site development work that would be needed for this facility. So we did a little bit of investigation and research, and what we found was that when we built our street maintenance building, our site development work was about 30% of the cost of that project. That was mainly driven by the fact that we had to remove the dirt and import new dirt because the dirt was not suitable material for the foundation of the building. But it was a slightly sloped lot, but not to the degree that this one is. But site development work was about 30% of the cost of the site. When we built our intermediate pump station, that was a $36 million project on 12 acres, and we spent about 12% of that $36 million on site development. Site development are things like grading, retaining walls, access, bringing utilities into the site or at least to the property line so they can be connected to. That is pretty normal for any project. This project, and I acknowledge that $8 million is a lot of money, but it's about 14% of the cost of this project. I asked the Arrington Watkins estimator if he could give me an average of a percentage of a project cost for site development, and he said it was anywhere from 10% to 30%. So at 14%, we're right where we should be for a project of this scope, the acreage, the size of the site, and the constraints that we have, the hillside here. And the other little bit of information that I'd like to share with you is that at the 30% design level, the consultant and the CMAR are confident that we will not have to bring in or take out any dirt from this site. So they're calling it a balanced site. They will have to cut the side of the hill, but they'll use the dirt they cut for the fill to create the balanced site. Are there any questions up to this point? Mayor, I think there's- Mary.

Thank you. Thinking about option B, there was the reference to the county that we have first refusal to buy the other parcel. Do we know that the county is committed to the idea of selling that to us? Should we want to move forward that way? And if they are committed to the essentially one and a half million purchase price?

so brian sparks are real estate administrators here with us today he works with me uh... it's my understanding that in our conversations with them they were disappointed that we did not buy the entirety of the site it does make access to the remainder of the site difficult when we build on this corner for them, because the only access at that point then is at the top of the hill, and then you have to come across to the west to get to the remainder piece. So I think the county was satisfied with the dollar amount, but if, Brian, if you wanna get up and talk about that.

Brian Sparks, real estate administrator. I would preface my comments by saying, of course, this would be up to the county board of supervisors. We'd have to go before them for approval, just as it does before this dais. But the conversations that I've had with the county, they would be in favor. That's why we retained the first right of refusal to purchase the rest of it, just in case it was ever needed. And I think it would... And Glenn did not even allude to that at the top of the hillside there along the left of the rendering that you see right now, we have a small triangle parcel of land that's about an acre and a half, two acres that is landlocked right now. And us purchasing that back portion would also unlock that. So the overall site would actually be closer to like 17 and a half acres. by the time we're done. But as far as the county goes, I think they would be favorable to it. I mean, I would have to enter into negotiations with the county manager and see where we could go with that.

So that triangle piece that you just mentioned, is it immediately adjacent to the county portion?

Yes. The additional? It abuts up against the kind of northwest side of the county's property, but it doesn't touch this portion that we've already purchased.

And I don't know, within the schematic, are we thinking that if we went option B, that we would be incorporating using that small acre that we already own?

I don't know if we would need to use it, but we would have it available, definitely.

Okay, thank you. We haven't considered it up to this point. Thank you.

Yes, no problem. Thank you.

I think there was another question, Mayor.

Another question, Mr. Grady?

Yes, thank you. Director, so on option B, so you're saying there's more expansion space available then? Is that what we see as blank land now on that schematic? It would be in front of the evidence facility for expansion, future expansion?

So the evidence facility is within the main structure, and I believe Chief Brambilla can speak to this, but this facility should provide enough storage for the police department for the next 30 or 40 years. Am I correct about that, John?

But other uses beyond the, I thought there was some discussion of other uses beyond the evidence facility that police needed.

So there is room on the site for all of the consolidation needs of the police department, the canine facility, the large vehicle storage. That's available on either option. But the elevation changes as you walk through the site, for example, in the first option, A, where we have a smaller site, we could have elevation changes as much as 12 feet between the main building and, say, the canine area or the vehicle storage. If we go to option B, those elevation changes are virtually gone.

Good afternoon, Mayor Protem and Council. John Brambilla, Interim Police Chief, and I think that answered your question, correct? Yes. So nothing really changes as far as design. It's the exact same design. We're just moving it further up the hill to reduce the amount of the pre-construction development of the site and the retaining walls.

Were there other police facility needs for the future that this site might be able to accommodate?

Yes. So if you go back to the other schematic, Gwen, that shows the overview and I talked to Mayor Pro Tem about this, you see in the kind of the right hand corner there of the site, you see the word range. That would be future. development of an indoor firing range for the police department. The property yard that's just to the north of that, that would be for vehicle storage of vehicles that we seize, vehicles that are part of accidents that we bring in for evidence that are currently being stored at a storage yard in front of Heritage Park. And then if you continue north, that other yard that Gwen referred to would be the canine training area, which is also adjacent to Heritage Park. So it would be, again, combining all of our resources into one area to make it more efficient for us. Gwen mentioned the large vehicle storage. As we started the process with Arrington Watkins and the design and program and the things that we need, and again, looking to consolidate, currently we store the SWAT vehicles and our traffic safety section in the old city fleet building that was abandoned when the city built a new fleet facility down at the end of Virginia Street. So we have that facility currently, but again, it goes to trying to bring all of that into one area. So that could be future phase, a future development, if it can't be done in this part of the project.

Mr. Goering.

Thank you, Mayor. Chief, a quick question. Does the department have a preference between A and B? And if so, which one and why?

I appreciate that question, Mr. Gehring. I've been part of all the design meetings. So as a police officer, I'm learning a lot about construction, right? And they have way more terminology that I don't understand than police terminology. But we have a great team and they've explained things. And of course, we're looking at cost savings, right? Mr. Ruby, as we talked before. That looks to save us some money. It also, from a strategic standpoint and a safety standpoint, puts us higher up on the hill, which is better for a safety standpoint for the police department so that nobody's really above us. So that helps as well. So option B looks to be the better option for us. That's what we would recommend.

Thank you, Chief. And my recollection is that the rough estimate for B is a little less expensive than for A.

That's correct.

Madam Mayor.

Yes, Mr. Gamboge.

I went out to the site yesterday with Scott Balk, the guy in the blue shirt there. And to your question, Patrick, I think there's an aesthetic and a functional benefit of B. The aesthetic is it's less intrusive because you're pushing it back on the lot. In A, you buy about 55,000 landscaping blocks. In B, you buy about 22,000 landscaping blocks. And then from a functionality perspective, I think there's three seven-foot tiers in option A, and as Gwen said, that differential level is mitigated by going to option B. The other aesthetic part of it, I wanna make sure you get this in the notes, Option B has more of an open space look to it than option A, because it's pushed back. As I said, you can put the ground cover in the front, and it's less obtrusive than option A. So I don't think option A is even a discussion here. It's option B all the way.

I'd like to have my turn to speak. I've been wrestling with this, the cost of this. I completely support and trust our police department and city staff to come up with the best option, but As an elected official, I have to follow just some basic rules of good governance, such as transparency, accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, and another important element is fiscal responsibility. And when we were doing our budget hearings, it was revealed that this site was going to cost $8 million in site prep. That's like a year's worth of the tax. Taxpayers hard-earned money going just to move dirt. and also the property and evidence facility is comparable to Mesa's. Mesa is a city of 500,000 people, and they built a property and evidence facility for $750 a square foot, and this one pencils out at like over $2,000 a square foot. So I'm having a hard time with the numbers, and then when the interim chief spoke last month, He said, well, we can get the site prep down to four million. So I said, okay, that's doable. It's gonna be a huge eyesore, but this is where you want it. And then talking to the city manager, apparently the CMAR contractor is having a hard time coming up with a number because whatever number he comes up with, he's held to it. And now it's ballooned past the eight million to 10 million. and then we're finding out that it's too small and we need to buy more property, And so this is just a classic, we need to take a step back and look at other options, and I'd like to present option C. We already own 64 acres that are relatively level. There's a slight grade on Willow Creek Road. Currently, part of it is used by an archery club. And my question is, why don't we look at that property? It would be minimal site prep. You would have plenty of room to expand. And it's right on Willow Creek Road, which is where a police substation should be. How many fatalities have we had on Prescott Lakes Parkway? I can't even remember. But we've got people that have been wiped out on bicycles, motorcycles, speeding. fatalities, and why can't we look at that property? It somehow got, since the city owned it, it did, as I understand, get into the charter as protected open space. But I think that if we took some time, put it on the ballot in August, and brought this to the public and let the public decide what the best options are, and give them an option C where we could save them $8 to $10 million in site prep, and retire this tax early. It's a 10-year tax. We could retire the capital part of it, capital expenditure part early. So I think we need to look at other options, because this is a big decision. The fire department, fire stations, a lot simpler, more straightforward, and I'm ready to improve those, vote on them today. But this, I think we need to look at our options, do some exploration. Why this site got into the open space, it's on a busy road, it's got the Arizona National Guard on one side, it's got a church on another side, it's in a growth corridor, there's gonna be a hospital up the street. It's got a park already on one side. So I really would ask for everyone's patience and keep an open mind. There's no big rush to this and maybe take another 30 days and do some research. and maybe see what the options are, because this is gonna be a huge eyesore. It's going to, I just have a lot of problems with this, and I'm not trying to manage, do the city manager's job for him, but I feel that this process has been going on for a year and a half, and we probably could have been put in the loop sooner so that we could have addressed this a long time ago, so that we're not in this feeling where we kind of, I feel kind of like we were ambushed and we're being forced into option A or B, which I don't find is a suitable option. Thank you. Yes, of course, Ted.

Here's a phrase I've used before and it's appropriate right now, and that is, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. The cost for option A or option B are pretty close. Option B is a little bit cheaper because it buys less than half the block, but it's around eight million. I looked at the heritage site and the rough guess for development and heritage is five, so the difference is not ten million dollars, it's three million. Now there's three reasons why to put it where it is. One, PD asked to be across the street from the courthouse, and it's across the street from the courthouse. Secondly, as I mentioned, it's about a $3 million difference. Now, that's important to pause on, because in our great wisdom, we said that open space has to go to the public for a vote and so if we went to heritage we would have to postpone this for two years to get a vote to get approval to move to heritage and who knows what the cost would be in another two to three years it could be a push and third and near and dear to my heart Do you really wanna put the K-9 unit next to the zoo?

I see no reason why we couldn't put it on the August ballot, and I'm sure the K-9 units will be fine on a 64-acre parcel. Any other comments?

I would like to make a motion.

Well, we have to hear from the public, and we're not done with the discussion, thank you. Patrick?

Yeah, thank you. While I don't pretend to understand the full differences between the site near the zoo and the site we're talking about today, I am terribly concerned about establishing a precedent where a year later we take land that the voters voted on to be preserved as open space and we're gonna turn it into an operational use We've already made, I think, in the past some difficult decisions down along the Watson Woods riparian area. I think that would be a slap in the face of our campaign just a year ago to get the voters approved for that site to be preserved.

Any other comments? Jay? Yeah. First,

I thought it was really great work to prepare option B. And I felt like that in part answered what came up at the last meeting. I do agree though, we didn't really get an analysis of what it would be like to be at a different site. I don't think it's necessarily appropriate for council to speculate on the costs of that. So in some ways it's hard to know what is the best fiscal decision if we don't have data points for what it would be from somewhere else. though I did see your chart and it seems like there's a lot of advantages toward this site being the preferred site of the police department. So for me, there's a lot of different things to weigh into that. But I mostly just wanted to acknowledge and thank you for creating an option B because I do think I see a lot of advantages in that over option A.

Thank you.

Mary? I'm on board with option B for all the reasons that have already been expressed to us as far as why that site has been identified by the police department as fitting its needs best. That is close to downtown, close to the courthouse, both courthouses actually, the county's courthouse just right across the street and our downtown courthouse. I very much appreciate the idea of the additional purchase of land to allow the design to be spread out a little and further back up the hill, and to the extent that by these conceptual drawings, they might look like an eyesore. I don't perceive that that would be the end result. As Gwen has mentioned, don't get distracted by this big bank of brown in front of the building. It's going to be vegetated. and to the extent that the vegetation, I'm guessing, is going to be specific to our location as far as maintenance requirements, water requirements, I think the end result will not be the aesthetic wasteland that this conceptual drawing might suggest that it is. Because the police department has worked over the various options available to them and identified for us why this site is the best site for their operations, And that's what we want. That's why I think the people voted for an additional sales tax because we had to catch up. for decades of ignoring the additional needs for the police department and the fire department for that matter. So I think this is what people were expecting. Yes, we should keep our eye on the prize as far as spending the taxpayer money, but balancing that with the fact that we need to, at the end of the day, have a police department that gets what they need to take care of the citizens. I'm on board with option B.

Is there any members of the public that would like to speak?

I see Mayor Pro Tem with a comment, and I do have two public comment cards as well. Okay.

Lois? Yeah, thank you. I also took my construction husband out to the site with me this weekend, and we couldn't hike up thanks to all the barbed wire. I couldn't even sneak up the back Storm Ranch Road because of the fence. But we did the best we could, and I trust my husband's judgment. I trust everybody here who's in development as well. And of the two sites, as much as it kills me to spend another $1.5 million on land. I would hope that in our discussions with the county that we can figure out how to bring that down a little bit. So I am absolutely for option B. I have heart for what Mayor Roussine is saying. You heard from me loud and clear in the budget process. That was when I just, shared my displeasure. So I'm beyond that and I would rather buy land because what we seem to find all the time and we've discussed this even with the next topic of fire stations, we put fire training facilities next to an open space. So I have no problem owning some more land because we'll finally have some place not next to open space that we can do future growth of this city, which is gonna happen over time. And so I'm okay with that, but I am, You know, we're gonna have a public town hall. We just shared it earlier today in the announcements. We owe the public a reconciliation. I know it's out on the website, but it's a lot to take in if you don't know how to even study it. So we will do that public discussion. And I still think we'll be able to retire the sales tax early with all the puts and calls that are going on. But it is discouraging that we got brought in a year almost a year too late. So it is what it is and I think option B is the better choice. I'm not gonna cry over spilled milk anymore and we will move forward.

Stacy Brown.

Hello again. I spoke earlier about the need for good governance. When governance is lacking, projects can face higher costs, schedule delays, increased resource demands, and ultimately fail to deliver as intended. I challenge you today that I don't think you know yet the information you really need to make a decision about option A, option B, option C, so I'm going to give you option D. I think you should take this time today to consider this just an informational item and figure out what information do you need to give very clear direction to make a decision and give very clear direction on how to move forward with this. You're basing this on the price of the site preparation at a point in the project where so much isn't done. So I think you owe it to everyone to keep that promise of responsibility, transparency, accountability. Hit the pause button. Think of this as like an AI infrastructure project. Let's hit the pause button. Let's figure out what we really need. Let's ask staff to bring that information back. and listen to the analysis and make a really informed decision. At the end of the day, counsel is ultimately accountable of the consequences of your decisions and you don't know what they are yet because you don't have the full picture to make this kind of a change at this point in the project. I also want to point out that We're here less than a month after the conversation on July 14th. And I don't think you understand or appreciate the effort that the public works staff and the police department staff had to do just to bring you this. And we should ask them. How much time do you really need to prepare a more thorough analysis for us to make such an important decision instead of picking an arbitrary date? These folks are already spread too thin. Trust me. I just graduated from the Citizens Academy, from the Citizens Police Academy, and I'm on PBTAC. We have very limited resources, and you can't just keep throwing dates out there and making decisions without even knowing if you have all the information you need. It might take a couple of sessions and a couple of reviews to get to that point where you know. So that's option D. Hit the pause button. Doesn't mean you can't make the decision. Just hit the pause button and make sure you have all the information that you really need. Thank you.

Thank you, Stacey. Ken Fittick.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Council Members. Ken Fittick, Soaring Avenue, and the City of Prescott, Arizona. I've been to several of these meetings on this particular topic. This is not the first meeting that you folks are addressing this. And as the previous speaker just said, Staff and the police department have put a lot of effort into this over a period of time. This is not just a few months. I think this is over a period of maybe a year or two. Anyway, I am a taxpayer. I'm concerned about how this city spends its tax dollars. However, This police chief, and perhaps even the former one, did say that this was the best fit in looking at all the different options that were available to them. It's been pointed out today the advantages of option B, perhaps over option A. for all the reasons I don't need to repeat. Maybe even option B would be on a faster timeline with all the prep work needed for option A. So in looking at option B, I hope that this council can come to a firm decision this afternoon. And as you know, a 4-3 vote isn't something that many of us in the community like. So I'd like to see a 5-2, a 6-1, or maybe even a 7-0 unanimous vote in support of option B. Thank you.

Thank you, Ken. That's all, Mayor. I have one question. Mr. Gamboge mentioned $5 million prep site to prep the Willow Creek property. Do we have that? I mean, is that a firm number?

I don't know where that number, Ted.

It's not a firm number. It's a number that I gleaned from a number of sources, but the point for bringing up that number is you quoted a number of $10 million, it's not 10 million, it's eight, and you said we'd save in the vicinity of $10 million, and it's not, it's somewhere around three. So we either save two million or we save four million, but we can't do anything for two years because it's open space. So what I'm, I'm not drawing absolute numbers, I'm drawing comparative numbers. You want me to, calm down, calm down. You want me to take a breath? OD?

I'd like to hear from the city manager. Can the city manager speak because he was the one that was giving me these numbers. So I'd like maybe him to clarify because he said it was eight million and then there was gonna be another two million. So please clarify.

I'm not sure the other two million. I don't have that in front of me. So the numbers that were up on the screen just a moment earlier, and Gwen, do you still have those?

Yeah, if IT can put it back up.

are the best estimates we have right now. I think the caveat to that is we are early in the process, and so as the engineers continue to do work, the number could go up, the number could go down. It's not a firm, this is the number to the dollar, but there we go. But option A is that almost eight million, and option B is the 7.7.

So those are the, that's that cost.

And to go after Heritage Park, we have to wait two years to put it on the ballot.

Why do you say that? It's not hard to put something on the ballot. We can put it on the ballot in August. I know I'm talking about August of 2027.

Yeah, that's a whole year.

But if it'll save us some money, maybe the taxpayers might approve it.

It's not saving us money. It's putting it where police department didn't want, putting it where they don't want it. They want it across the street from the jail. And if open space is so sacred, why would you give up open space when this space is basically in an industrial area where you got the dog kennel, you got the fire department training center. It's a perfect place to put it. You're not saving money by moving it to Heritage Park. You're just wasting time and you're costing us almost the same money when you take into account inflation.

Well, I'm just trying to exercise some due diligence, which should have been done a long time ago, but unfortunately it wasn't done, so I am in this position to ask some hard questions. I'm just doing my job. So Mayor and Council, Mayor and Council.

That's disingenuous to say it wasn't done before.

Councilman Gamboge, I'm sorry. We're getting off topic. Before the council today is whether or not you would like to vote on option A or option B for the police substation and property and evidence facility at this location. We can take a motion on that or not.

I'd like to make a motion to approve option B.

Second.

Passes six, one. Our next item is presentation and discussion regarding an update on the multiple fire station project development.

Mayor and Council Holder, Fire Chief, I'm going to give you a brief recap of where we were a couple of weeks ago, and then I'm going to introduce you to our architectural firm to discuss a little bit about the details of these stations. First of all, Let's go back to the need. I think that's really important thing to frame all this with is we have a response gap in the middle of town with ever increasing response times. That was the key in the core argument the fire department made when we discussed 478 with the community. And while we are starting to close that gap with having engine 76 due to your approval on street Monday through Friday eight to five, we obviously need physical infrastructure to help us with that 35 year gap that we have. And you see, first of all, the current proposed locations, Fire Station 73, Fire Station 76, and then, of course, the remodeling the existing location, Fire Station 72. On October 28th, you all approved those specific locations, and at that time, we showed you this map. This is, I think, a really good graphic for us to review. What you see on the left is the current coverage based on our travel time standards. This does not include call processing, and it doesn't include our turnout time. So this is truly a GIS-generated map that compares current state to full build-out of Station 76, the additional station, as well as the relocation of Station 73, which is the airport station, and takes that structural component and puts it in a more effective location using existing staffing. I don't have to go into a lot of statistical analysis. You can see the result is pretty significant. And that particular area that I want to highlight there is if you look at the right side on Smoketree, most people say, for instance, hey, we've got Station 74 in Smoketree. Can't it cover? Well, anybody that is familiar with that neighborhood, the best analogy there is you can't get there from here. There's lots of turns, lots of twists, lots of traffic circles, which are all important. from a fire department response standard, this is a very difficult community for us to site capital infrastructure. We spent a significant amount of time, approximately two to four years, depending on how you look at our process, figuring out what the best location would be, not just for the locations that we need right now, but also to start thinking about Station 77, which is the second new station that Proposition 478 contemplated. That station is not yet cited because we want to make sure that once those development patterns over the next couple of years become a little bit more clear, we can plant that new station in a place where it's going to have the impact that we want, which is about a 50-year capital investment window that we're really planning for. And really, the timelines, this is kind of where we shift our presentation. I just wanna, at this point, introduce, if you can come on up, our architect on this project. We've been doing really, really good work for a couple of months now. And Jarl is gonna cover that here in the next couple of slides. I also invite you to please ask him any detailed questions that you might have about some of the concepts. And I think also what's very important is the comparison of how are we doing industry best practice wise, designing these stations, being cost effective, and making sure that we're not just flippantly designing these stations. I think it's very important that you hear from our architect directly of how that's going along.

Thank you, Chief and Mayor Perlman. Council, it's an honor to be here tonight. This is something that Perlman Architects takes very seriously. We specialize in public safety design. Some 140 stations behind us. This is what we do. This is what we enjoy doing. This is our passion. So to give you kind of a quick overview, again, it's an honor to be here tonight. We look forward to making this presentation. It would be unjust if I didn't say a little something about the fire department and the organization of the structure and the way they set up this particular design committee. We first were hired, we were brought on, we had a scoping meeting, and the chief said, hey, we're going to set up a committee that represents the entire department. It's going to be about 20, 30 people sitting in on your meetings on a regular basis, giving input. And we were like, man, that's a lot. When you apply that to all the stations that we worked on, it has been the best process ever because we get representation from the bottom to the top. Everybody's allowed to talk. Everybody's allowed to speak. Some of the best ideas of this whole process have come from the crews themselves, which I applaud the fire department and the chiefs for allowing that to happen because that doesn't happen very often. So thank you for that. It's made this process a lot better in our opinion. With that, our 76 timeline, we're basically about the same as where the police department is. We're about 30%. We start about the same time. We may be a little bit beyond that. Our design development is expected to be in fall of 26, completed 90%, early 27, permit by spring of 27, and then about a year to build it out. So summer of 27, we'll start construction. Project will be closed out late 28 by 10 when it's all said and done. As they say, these projects take a village to put together. There's a lot of steps, a lot of processes. a lot of reviews. You can just kind of walk through. Next slide. Oops, wrong one. There we go. All right, so we're going to start here with this particular site. These sites are all unique in their own ways. As with every project, as you've heard this evening, every project has its own challenges, its unique configurations. and elements we have to deal with as designers. So we looked at this in many different ways. This is Fire Station 76, which is gonna basically talk about the larger of the two stations. This one will house the battalion quarters and also the community facility. So if you look to your plan north, that'll be the equestrian parking and the trailhead parking, which we are gonna be relocating because we can take better advantage of the terrain and also the location of the fire station to separate the two uses, but yet let them be compatible with each other. So we're gonna relocate the equestrian parking to the north side of the property, and then we'll bring the fire station to the south part of the property. If you notice, there's a loop that will get us all the way around the station. So both the station and the parking, trailhead parking, equestrian parking, will have two means of ingress and egress. So something happens, there's a blockage or whatever, one doesn't impede the other from responding in a timely manner. This site is unique in terrain. As you know, the existing Trailhead parking is sort of up on a hill. We're going to level that off. We're going to kind of bring that downhill, and we're going to bring it to the other part of the property. There's some exhibits in there that show part of that is equestrian DG sensitive parking, and some is rate or asphalt type parking, and that'll be approved through Parks and Rec as we work through the details on that. As we go around on the left-hand side, the lower left-hand side, you'll see that's all the public parking, which will then support the fire station community room. And then as required by NFPA 1585 and other NFPA standards, the parking for the secured staff would be behind the fence in a secured area. As you can see, there is some terrain on this site as well. We're going to be working with some cutting, some terrain, and elevating the sites and lowering some sites. So on the right-hand side, we're going to be elevating. On the left-hand side of the site, we're going to be cutting a drainage channel to accommodate the flows that we know that are there. To answer some questions about that, what's that flow going to look like and how are we going to manage that water? Well, we're working on it. There's a lot of data that the city has shared with us and our engineers. We've gotten all the information, the flows. We're working through those. We're analyzing that data. And I assure you, we will be able to come back in the future and give you a direct... tried and true sample their bees looked out the models in the doubt and everything to make sure that we've addressing the water we know that the site has issues regards to water drainage and flooding uh... we're still too premature to give you next to the actual answer how it's going to be but this is the framework that we're using to start that discussion to work with the different years within the public works engineering our team to make sure we address these issues questions so far

Thank you. Some of the questions I sent ahead of the call, you just basically said you plan on getting to that. And the only other thing that I sent ahead of the call that relates is at the end of the current small filled with trees and weeds drainage ditch is a area that's kind of like a retention pond. And so I just want to understand when you come back in the future, what will be, where will the water flow to? and how does that fit in the plan and how does that fit into our parks and rec space, okay? So if you can, because there's a lot of concern from the public about this most used hiking trails, okay?

Thank you, I appreciate that. We recognize that and we are looking at those items. We, by law, have to protect the pre versus the post flows unless we can prove that there's capacity downstream from where we are. and then that will all be engineered and analyzed through the city and through our engineering team. So all that data will be analyzed and looked at before we can submit a drainage report, but that drainage report will address all those concerns.

Patrick?

Yes, thank you for that presentation. I am sorry, still confused about where the trailhead parking is.

Okay, the trailhead parking, I think, top button. The new trailhead parking will be right up in this zone right here. See that hard line? The back row is the equestrian parking, the double parking is trailhead, and the third row just south of that is the overflow or additional parking that will be used for the trailhead and it can also be used as overflow parking, shouldn't have been occurred at the fire station. But we've increased the existing capacity from what was there before. We've added additional spaces in this particular design.

And there's access from what point off of Sundog?

There's access right here, up and around this way, and then also back this way, up and around. Sir.

Okay. I have a question. The Peavine Trail, although it isn't just an origin point there, because people do use it from further up, and I know that there's also some long-term plans, so in terms of the Peavine coming from what would be the lower left-hand corner of this...

It's right coming off there and going this way.

It parallels the Prescott

Right, so right there underneath that where the arrow is, that's where the current and modern restroom is, and that's where we would end up connecting that.

That's not what I'm talking about, though.

Okay, sorry about that.

This is going to be easier.

Do you have a laser firewire? Yeah. Thank you.

Levi's at the top.

Shut me up.

I have a question. I was looking at the site plan. Is there going to be enough parking for the employees and also for visitors? Sometimes there's events held at the fire stations, you know, pinnings, and members of the public that need assistance. I don't seem to see enough parking.

Mayor, yes ma'am, that will be the case. So this right here is all for the public to come in to visit for the community room. All this stuff back here is for fire, which right now is designed at two times shift count. And then everything north of that is all the trailhead parking, equestrian parking, and all that. So we've exceeded the minimum parking required by code. And we have enough space for the fire department on a two-time shift count, which is being a shift change. So basically half of that parking would be available as overflow should it need to be available.

And then it looks like these buildings are gonna be made out of block. Have you gotten that far in your design?

We can talk about that here in just a moment, sure.

Are you gonna be able to use local sources for the block? We have Yavapai Block here. Are you gonna be able to put some of this money, invest it back into the community?

Yeah, again, Mayor, we have reached out to Yabai Block. They've actually reached out to us. Our specs are always open. We are promoting local involvement as much as possible. But we're trying to be as fiscally responsible as possible. So we want to create a bidding environment that's going to bring the best possible cost to the project. So, yes, they would be invited, all the local, with the Seymour contractor, who is core construction. They're a very good contractor. They will probably in the future have what they call trade contracts. meetings or trade groups to qualify local subcontractors. They will bring them in and they will bring all their goods, they'll qualify them, and they'll be on the preferred bidding list. And then all those contractors will be able to bid on the project to bring the best possible value to the project. And I don't say best cost because sometimes somebody comes in and forgets parts of it and we have to square them up and go through that process, but the best value for the project. And we are promoting as much local involvement as we can possibly get.

And also, as far as the roof, is it going, I assume it's gonna be a standing seam metal roof?

Yes, ma'am. That is a goal right now. Again, it's appropriate. It's easy to maintain. It's long-term. It's a 50-year roof. As we go through the design process, we're going to have to find some VE options to make sure that we're bringing options for cost. So we have some alternatives that we'll look at going forward, but the initial design is showing standing steel metal roof for the reasons of the community, the use of it, the longevity of it, the weathering capacities of that particular product. That's where we're starting.

And I know you probably are planning on it, but I just wanted to make sure you're planning on having gutters and downspouts coming off of these roofs for drainage purposes. You're not just gonna let the water sheet off.

I think in two, I think it's twofold. I think some areas that actually make sense to water harvest to shoot off the building and we can use that to water the landscaping and other areas that are pedestrian friendly. We would have either interior gutters or some sort of a gutter that captures that water and brings it off. So I think it's a combination of both, depending on the needs of the actual site and how it's working. We want to be as sensible and sustainable as possible. And so we can capture that water and use it to be sensible on the site. We want to do that.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Who's next? Jim Gehring.

Thank you, Mayor. I'm wondering if you can point out the restroom facilities for the Peabody Trailhead. Sure.

Currently, they are right up. There's that square box right there is Ramada, and the restroom is right just up above it right there.

Okay, so it's not shown yet.

They're shown, but they're existing. So we're not showing that that's part of the work to not confuse the contracting bidding, but they are existing and they are to remain. That rectangle there is representing the Ramada and you can barely see it on this exhibit, but the little small one is the restroom building. Yeah, it looks like there's a grade issue that will have to be solved. Yes, sir, that is correct. We are working through that. There's a couple of ideas we're working with the city, engineering and public works. That area is the lowest area. That area is prone to flooding. And there's a couple of different examples and ideas that we're presenting with them to protect those structures or if possibly we have to relocate or elevate them to accommodate so that they're protected in the future. Okay, thank you.

Yep.

Mayor, I'm sorry, with all due respect, Councilman Gamboge has had his speaker request on for the entirety of this conversation, so perhaps we should see if there's a comment that he'd like to make.

I'm sorry, I thought he forgot to turn it off.

Mr. Gamboge.

Have you set aside enough parking lots for food vendors that might want to sell people coming off the Peavine Trail or maybe to firefighters? No, that's not a serious question. You have three facilities that have common architectural look, but the footprints are different. and at the expense of asking a dumb question and looking at it from economies of scale. Why are the footprints different?

Okay, I'd like to, we have a video here I'll show you in a minute. One of the things that we did to, again, be fiscally responsible is we designed the two, 73 and 76, to be very, very similar. There's basically, if you actually look at an overlay on, there's a little bit of extension for the BC quarters, and a little bit larger on the community room side of the one station, but the basic part of the station is the same. That's done for a couple reasons. One, it's fiscally responsible to basically get economy scale with the contractor. It also is recognition by the fire crews and the fire teams so that they're switching from station to station. They're not confused when they get woke up in the middle of the night. We make it the same on the response, regardless whether you're at station 73 or 76, and all of those meet that hot zone and the criteria that we're doing there. and also from a maintenance standpoint, from a facility standpoint, from a equipment standpoint, they're very similar. The one that is different is the 72 site, which the chief had mentioned is a ground up of the existing building to be torn down and rebuilt. That site does not accommodate this particular program or a one story structure. In the future, we'll be coming forward with what that's gonna look like. We're preparing a couple different options because that particular site has a couple different context items that we could do. And the committee we worked with is more open on that one. This one, they were very, we presented two early concepts and it was unanimous. They wanted to be very natural, very organic, blend into the community, bend into the sites that they were on. The 72 site is gonna be a little bit more traditional, a little bit more industrial looking, and it should fit into that community. It's really a coin flip of which one is gonna be better. It's gonna be a judgment call, I believe, and that'll be coming in the future. We're in the works right now of developing those concepts.

Thanks a whole bunch.

You got it.

Okay, Mr. Ruby.

I've withdrawn my... I don't think I'm on the list.

Okay, Mary. You mentioned, and something I didn't appreciate when I was looking at the schematic, that the parking that's part of this schematic is parking for the Peavine Trail users. Sure. and the larger parking spaces for horse trailers? Is there gonna be some way of differentiating or blocking the public from using what you've told us are parking spaces for the fire department?

No, they're actually two separate spaces. So the very back area, those long spaces are the drive-through equestrian parking and that will be stabilized decomposed granite, which is equine friendly. The next three rows of parking are dedicated toward the trailhead parking, which is equal to parks and rec. The fire department parking will be behind the fence line, which is between those two. So you have to be credentialized to get in and actually technically out of the fire station parking lot itself.

Thank you.

Yes. So you'd mentioned earlier about having a rendering, and we always talk about a picture's worth 1,000 words. And so if possible, I'd like to have the video kind of show the slides of the renderings, and we'll give you a little fly around. We did a quick little rendering. Again, it's not 100% refined. This is a concept. We have to work on landscape. We have to work on some grading. But generally, the building character, architecture, materials has been reviewed, established, discussed. revised, established, discussed as part of the committee with the fire department. And this is what they would like to have built to represent their department and their facilities at these two locations. So we'll start, I think, with the video for 73 or 76, right? Oh, I can just do this one. So this is just the rendering itself. It's a steel rendering. You can see they look very similar. This one on the right where that red door is and that wing sticks out, that's the addition from the 73 station. And they're very similar. We just made some slight color changes to just give a little bit of personal recognition and it would tie into the surrounding area just a little bit more. The next video here is a fly around. I think they're about 30 seconds. I'll let you kind of take it all in as we're walking around it. This will be the response apron as you respond from their station. You're going to come out around the corner. You can go two ways, left or right, loop around if the road's blocked for some reason. The back door there is returning BC Bay. The private area right there is the patios and secured areas for the firefighters so they can be out there day in and day out and be protected. That's a fitness door that lets them go outside and work out. About two or three months out of the year, they can work out outside and inside. The return apron, and that's long so that they can return back and they can decon the apparatus before they bring it into the building. Again, applying that hot zone and FPA 1585 requirements, which require them to decontamination before they come back into the station to make sure that we cross out the contaminants and the cross contaminants of carcinogens that come into the building. And then here's our front entry, which is very signified. You can see what it is, you can understand what's going on, but it's not grand or taking up a lot of extra space. So the floor plan, just to give you a quick review, is actually 180 degrees, we do this on plant north but actually the upper left hand corner is the bottom right hand corner on the site and that's your bc bay and then you can see the fitness room is on the lower left hand corner everything else between there is your bc quarters and what we call your support areas the the dirty side of the station the laundry the decon the storage the ppe the equipment rooms i.t rooms things like that we have the apparatus base we spine in the middle And then on the right-hand side is the clean side of the green side of the station, which represents the firefighters' dorm areas. And then in the center, you'll see the decontamination areas, individual restrooms, day spaces, your day room, dining rooms, kitchen areas. And then in the back, you have the top right is where you have the public, where the public community room is there. And you have the public restrooms, the lobby, and the supporting spaces of that with the firefighters' office for daytime activity. Again, all of these spaces are laid out purposely. They meet the NFPA 1585 for hot zone separation, which we can show you exhibit in the future where we can show you where the yellow, the green, the red zones are. And these all meet the 90 second turnout time from any location in the station. We actually have to go through and analyze the time versus distance to make sure that if you get a call in the middle of the night and you're in the back dorm, you can be on that truck and respond within 90 seconds. So all these are purposely designed and built and a lot of the ideas that came out of this and the placement was all defined by the committee and the fire department themselves working as a team from different stations and different ranks to come together and say we like this, we want this here, we want that there, we want this over there. This works for our operation and we were just a toolbox to give them the shape and the form. Any questions?

Yes, Mr. Gearing. Thank you, Mayor. So to preface this question, a lot of people don't know that I rode horses for 25 years, towed horses all over the state of California. We had six of our own plus three foster carers outside our back door. And I can tell you that horse people do not like to back up a trailer. So horse stalls, horse parking areas should be pulled through. Yes, sir. They are by design. Okay. Thank you.

I have a question. Are you going to light up? Is there going to be street lights out there to light up the parking lot at night?

There will be lighting. We have to light the ingress and egress drives and the public areas, but they would have to meet the dark sky ordinances and all of the requirements that are required in that area. Our electrical engineer is working on the photometrics as we speak, and all the lights will be full cut off. Even if we don't have to do it, it makes sense to keep that glare down because the firefighters are running 24-7. And again, we want to try to keep them safe from anything else that might be in the area. There is wildlife. We want to make sure that they understand and they can see what's going on. or even people for that sake. I mean, we've heard horror stories on that as well.

And then I think everything's pretty visible from the street. You won't be needing any monument signs or directional signs out on the Prescott Lake Parkway, you know, fire station this way. I think it's pretty visible that it's a fire station.

Mayor, we do too. We originally had a monument sign in there. Again, that's another $20,000, $30,000 cost that we don't think we need to spend. We'd take that money and put it somewhere else. We put the signage large and up front on the station, let the station be the backdrop for the signage. There really isn't a good place for a monument sign on either one of these sites anyway because of the traffic. We want them to focus on where they're going. You can see the station, you'll see the flagpole, you'll see the signage. The less distractions, the better we are. When people are in a crisis, we want to get them in, get them in, get them treated, get them out. So trying to keep it safe and keep them focused on their point, that's what we're trying to do with design.

Because I'm glad you mentioned that because sometimes people have emergencies. Someone's having a heart attack. They can't make it to the hospital. They at least go to the nearest fire station, and these look like they're pretty high profile, and people aren't going to have a hard time accessing them.

It'll take a little getting used to, but within a couple of months after the ribbon cutting, everybody will know where it's at, and I think it'll be well advertised. It seems like you've got a new campaign going that's going to highlight this in the future, so I'm excited to see these get built and show what they can actually be.

Okay, all right, thank you. You want to run through 73? Okay, so...

73 were pretty much on the same timeline.

This is the Fippen, the one by the Fippen Museum for the public to know.

And these are all, all three of the projects we're working on are all start and end staggered by about a month. So you guys see a very, and that was on purpose. That wasn't to overwhelm staff and to make sure we had enough time in between each step with the four projects that are going on, the three fire stations, PD, and then all the other projects. It was thought that if we staggered this, it kind of helps keep everybody busy but not overwhelm any particular peaks and valleys within the process. So this one's basically about 30% design as well. 60% design development expected in fall of 26. Construction documents expected early 27. Permits spring of 27. Billing to start summer of 27 and project close out by late 28. Again, they're all about the same dates. They're up or down plus or minus a month or so. Depending on the contractor, they may bump one a little bit ahead or they might be able to pull them a little closer, a little further apart, getting materials, subcontractors, things like that. And that's where this one looks. This one here is a little bit easier of a site in the sense it looks harder in the surface because when you actually go to the site, you see the parking lot right in the middle with the restroom building. As part of this project, all that will be relocated and all the information, all that currently is right here in the middle and you come off the roundabout and you go up the hill and you park up here. All of that's being relocated down to here. And the goal with that was to try to again separate the coexistence of people coming in to use the trailhead or leaving from the trailhead and conflicting with the fire response. So what we did is we got everybody off the roundabout and then you have to get to the bottom of the roundabout where it's safe, it's slower traffic. You can go right to go on the fire station, you go left into the trailhead. And again, it's a full 360 degrees. The restroom building would be relocated. That's what that box is in the middle. We'll be taking care of that and then just a small modification to the trail that feeds from the middle there. It'll feed right kind of to that opening at the bottom where it says Constellation Trailhead. It'll feed into that location. So in this respect, the trailhead is actually closer to the actual opening of the trail itself and gets them off into the trail in the open area much quicker. and these two are very much isolated. This particular site is only for fire. It does not have the community component just because of the lack of available site. As you can see on here, we've used up pretty much everything that we have available to us. and so it was determined after working with the fire department committee that this actually would be a better site for training for the fire department because we have parking for fire department staff and the public should be over where the BCs are where they're going to greet them and they always have people there. This one the company could be out and nobody might not be in the station if they're on a call. So this one has been converted to a training room which we use for fire department staff and we have ample parking on site for that purpose because it's mostly staff plus visitors from another station. And then we also did a secondary means of ingress, egress, which is really important with fire. So you can come in off of the roundabout and come in, and you go around the back and return through, or we actually have that secondary road to the north there, and you can come in there, and that's private property to the north and to the west, but we have a secondary point of egress coming in there with the cross-ex agreement that's in place for fire to come in for secondary response. Should the roundabout back up or only return, they can do a right-hand, in to the property and come in from the north or whatever the case may be. We have two means of ingress and egress. And if worse came to worse and there was a block on the way out, they could circle back around and go back out to that second means of egress. So the last thing we want to do is lock the fire department in when they need to get out and respond to a road. Again, this one, also we're going through all of the data. We've received, I think, about two gigs of data. on all of the flows and the water and everything that's going on in these projects and we're analyzing that data and I think that one computer's still running from like last week, crunching all the numbers with the data as we work through these sites. But we're pretty confident that we understand the issues with the site, how we're dealing with the site, the soils have been done, surveys have been done. We're well on our way and we're excited to keep progressing forward with the design.

Let me ask you this. Are you going to have some sort of traffic light to stop traffic so that the fire truck can get out onto the roundabout?

There was some early discussions with the traffic engineer. I think they will realize as we go through the 30 and 60 percent drawing review. One of the things that with the roundabouts, they're designed for traffic calming. And so if you put in flashers, they can actually confuse people because they're not used to seeing them. It can actually cause more problems than less problems. Our civil engineer will be working with the city traffic engineer to reevaluate that once we get this 30% which is going in. It's actually in right now. They're reviewing things. I'm sure between now and 60% we'll have a little bit more feedback, but we are not proposing it at this point.

And then also I just wanted to make sure you're aware of the Phippen Trail is going to be expanded to a five lanes and it's gonna be connected to Granite Dells Estates and so that's gonna be bringing in more traffic.

Again, I can't speak to, I mean, that's part of the design. The people that are doing that design will have to prove that that roundabout is designed sufficiently for that. This is a site that we were given. I think fire recognized that, looked at that, or chief's here somewhere. I think that's probably a question more for you.

Actually, Mayor, you brought up one of the key points for the selection of this site, because Granite Dells Estates is one of the areas where we're having response difficulties, and what you just mentioned was really, I would say, one of the major driving factors for locating this station exactly where it's at. Any other questions?

You want me to show you what the rendering on this one looks like?

All right.

Again, it looks very familiar. You can see the forms and the materials are very similar. We've changed some paint colors and some stain colors to reflect each station sat down with us. We brought in what we call our toolbox and get a lot of colors and options. And they worked as a committee to say, we want this for our station. This works in our surrounding. That one works over there. We basically kind of reverse the colors up, re-rented them, and this is what they wanted. Requested that it be and it works very well It looks very similar but yet different and you can kind of see the iconic Silver and tan and the green on this or the other one have the red and the more beige II colors a little bit lighter color in the in the in the stain colors again economy scale the contract where they build this they're gonna order two of everything right just one in red and one in silver and And so we're going to have a kind of a scale and we should be able to capture that and take advantage of the two designs looking together and beyond the cost and beyond doing two, we're still going to do the drawings. Just the iconicness of them and the recognition between crews to be able to walk into one station, know exactly where to go to get to the day room, to get to the dorms, to get to the support side. They don't have to relearn it six, seven, eight times. We're trying to make that simplified for them. That'll show you what it looks like as a rendering. Again, we're going around.

Yeah, I have a weird question. I think it's for the fire chief. I watched you all praying getting Ruby Red backed into Station 72. Do you have other places where she's going to fit if she has to be located somewhere else for a while?

Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, one of the things that this programming between these two stations enables us to do is to actually follow the community risk assessment and standards of cover that is really saying you should locate your resources in places where it's approximate to best serve the risk, not where you have either open or constrained base space. And in this case, that's actually one of the reasons why the battalion chief is getting relocated to Station 76. It's more central and helps us balance that very important incident command function. Both of these stations are able to accommodate that new ladder truck and not only accommodate it, but accommodate it very well. And then also, I think a key point on this, as you'll notice in some of these floor plans, you may say, well, we've got a three person engine company at this point. How come we're building additional bedrooms? My job is to make sure we build you a station that doesn't have to get redesigned in 10 years because something changed in the industry or there's a different community need. It gives us that flexibility while still being economically responsible. But yes, to the heart of your question, 100%. And it's highly likely that that ladder truck is gonna end up at one of these stations. Because it doesn't only deserve the downtown core, it's also our larger residential structures that are located on a hill where it's really dangerous for us to use ground ladders, and that aerial device is really going to be a game changer for us in making sure it's in the right location will be key. Mayor?

Yes, Chief. Chief, before you go too far. Yes, sir. So, having... currently being licensed to practice traffic engineering in California. I know that it's tough to get onto a roundabout from a side road when the through traffic is very heavy. So are you confident that your engines can flash their lights and get on there when the through traffic is heavy?

So I'll answer that in two phases. One is going to be deferment, because unlike you, I'm not licensed as a traffic engineer, and I rely on a team of experts for that. However, I will tell you this. In practicality, this is one of the tougher communities to drive a fire engine in. As you know, the topography, just the hills that our engineers have to navigate on a daily basis makes them extraordinarily adept. and not just managing entering a roundabout at this fire station, but doing all the various things that require an engineer to do just in this community. I don't have any concerns in terms of fire department operations. However, the question that you're asking to me has a bigger community impact. It's not just how do we navigate, it's also how does the public respond to us navigating? And with that, I want to invite and call a friend, so to speak, and ask, if Public Works can quickly opine on that regarding the traffic engineering component.

Phone a friend.

Yeah, we're still friends, I think. So it's a good question, how it will fire, navigate. But they have the sirens. There's the rules of the road. They'll have their lights and sirens on as they leave the station. People will pause to let them out. If I asked Ian Mattingly the question you just asked me, he would look at me and say, Gwen. People know what to do when a vehicle with flashing lights and siren come by. They pull to the side of the road or they get out of the way. That's what will happen in the roundabout. People will get used to the fire truck being there, and I think we will be fine. Thank you for asking the question, though.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, I'm almost done. I got three more slides here. So this is the... The floor plan of Station 73, this is the one that's basically isolated more to fire department operations, a little smaller company. It's the same as the other one, but it's a flipped version. It still has the same amount of dorms, the day room, the day spaces, the useless spaces, the training room instead of community room, fitness room, all the support criteria, and then the... The dirty side, which is a decon area, the laundry, the PPE storage, things like that on the outside. Again, protecting this one. It actually made sense to protect the building and the occupants to flip this one. It actually made sense from a parking and an access standpoint as well. So we flipped this one the other way on its axis to take advantage of the roadway that we have there and Potential disasters, I guess you can never protect everything But we try to think about as many as we can and try to put those front and center what we're doing design You know, I always say if I can save one life in my job, I've done my job My job is to try to save a life every day and so we try to look at avenues and look at angles that protect the occupancy users and those that the people are serving and so that that's my job and it's honor to do it and with that I will run over to 72 with any questions and No questions? All right. So 72 is currently in pre-design. We're just a little bit ahead of programming. I have a quick exhibit here to kind of show you that the site does work and we can't put a station on that site.

72 is on 6th Street. It's the old one that's gonna be torn down. Yes, correct.

Just to clarify for the public. Sorry. That was the one that overlooks the park and its existing metal building. It's been handed down for generations. I think it's been named the Frankenstation, I think is what it was called, or something along those lines. We did evaluation on that project, and there's so many structural issues and code issues and things like that that the cost of bringing it back to life at this point would... not really work, and then the program didn't even work. So we're at the 30% or just a little bit ahead of 30%. That's coming by summer. 6% design development by end of calendar year. So this is the last one of the three. 90% construction documents expected in spring of 27. 100% permit review expected the start of spring. Building expected to start in... Summer of 27, it's going to be a really busy summer. Project closeout expected by late 28. So by mid-summer of 27 to the end of 28, there's going to be a lot of activity going on in Prescott. And you're going to see a lot of people putting a lot of shovels in the ground, a lot of hammers to work as we work to build all three of these stations almost simultaneously. Here is the 6th Street. This is what Mayor was referring to. This is 6th Street. The response on this particular station is not going to change. We looked at this. We looked at traffic patterns. We looked at the responses. We felt that the best way to do this was it's already known, so we're still going to respond out to 6th Street, and we're going to return back to the backside and turn in. Again, this one is just strictly fire department personnel. This will be a two-story facility, the one-story facility. If you look at what's there, that middle section is basically apparatus space. Everything on the south of the bottom of the slide is your basic public entry, public restroom. Just somebody comes up and needs... blood pressure, quick emergency, things like that. And then on the north side is the stuff that we need on the heavy ground level. Again, calling it the dirty side of the station where we have the laundry, the decon, the PPE storage, and then above that is a little bit of a fitness room on that one leg that goes there. This building will also be very iconic in the sense that this is the station that was gonna incorporate the famous department bell. And we'll also house the parade truck. And we have a special design coming up for that to look at in the future here where we're going to predominantly display both of those in Memorial Plaza for the community to recognize and come and see it but not touch it and be able to see it as they drive by and work through this department but stay out of the way of the operations of the fire department. So I'm excited to bring that to you in the future and show you what that looks like. The fire department has seen the floor plans, but they have not seen the development of the elevations at this point. And there's sort of your floor plan on the first floor. We talked about on the bottom there is your public area. You got the fire watch, exam room, public bathroom, the elevator shaft. On the north side is the dirty side with your turnout, SCBA workshop, all things need to be on the ground floor to get quick access to the fire apparatus. We do have our crew decon, so they can decon and get cleaned up before they go back upstairs into their dorm areas. And then we have a fitness room, but you notice there's a long hallway there, and that hallway will be a decontamination or transition zone from our dirty zone to our clean zone. I believe the last slide is the second floor. So I think what's iconic about this, and I'll close with this last little statement here. When we presented this particular floor plan to the fire department, they were overwhelmed. The room went deathly silent. Nobody was saying anything. I thought, oh boy, we really blew this. They couldn't figure out how we were able to accommodate every one of their asks into the particular design. And I had to really prod them to get them to say anything. We were happy, we hate it, whatever, because they were trying to find what was left out, what wasn't there. The mother's room was incorporated, the day room was incorporated. We got the... the day room, dining room, the decon showers. You gave us two patios, one on each side with a bridge across the apparatus space. We can look out to the park at one part of the day. We can look out to the city and the street on the other part of the day. We're avoiding the sun. And then all the dorms are privatized up the upstairs with direct circulation, still meeting our 90-second response time, and all the hot zones are there. So they told me that I cannot throw this away. I can never lose it. This is their most exciting station, I believe, in the whole fire department, right, Chief? And it seemed out to be the hardest at the beginning, but to them it was the most special. So with that, it's been an honor. We look forward to continuing working with the city, and I'm here to answer any questions that you may have.

Lois, I saw you're bringing a pole into the fire station. That's so cool. We are. And you're going to have to train and qualify everyone to get down them safely. Wonderful. Very retro. I like it.

It's actually turned out to be safer than stairs. The data has actually shown that they're safer than stairs. Absolutely. If you know how to use them, they're safer.

Any other comments? Ted?

I'm withdrawing. I was going to ask about a fire pool.

It will be specially identified, I promise you that.

Ted?

I have a question of the fire chief. At the expense of being a little off agenda, and you know how I hate to get off of agenda, On this last fire station on Sixth Street, we made a trade years ago, Williamson Valley for Sixth Street, and from a logistics perspective, made all the sense in the world. From a cost perspective, where are we with this trade? Have we saved money with the trade or are we losing money with the trade? I don't even need a number, just a guess.

Yeah, so we actually ended up netting a check from CAFMA because we did a property condition assessment of both facilities, the one at Iron Springs as well as the one that... We're replacing here and the valuation of the property we currently own now, which we didn't before, was less than the Iron Springs location. And the check was cut in the difference towards the end of the city. And we basically came out ahead, so to speak.

And how about when we build it, tear the old one down, put a new one up?

I'm actually glad because we've got our architect here. Part of the RFP scope was the initial assumption said we should probably replace the station carefully and try to reuse elements to save money, basically avoid the teardown. Once the hired experts came on board and they looked at the cost effectiveness of both options, considering, as Gerald mentioned, Franken Station, there were too many costly issues in the existing station to make that even attainable. And the best option was to do a teardown with a complete rebuild, understanding, of course, that we already own the property and it's in a good location for our response system.

So... We pocketed some money on the trade. How does that amount of money compare to the cost of building a new station there?

There is absolutely no comparison, in my opinion. You're talking about two different things. Now, I'm not Lars. I'm also not a traffic engineer. But I'll tell you that the assumptions that were made as part of the property swap and this are basically two different financial exercises in its entirety. And really looking at the offset to the general fund He was able to defray the cost, and the city was treated quite fairly overall. But that was also prior to Proposition 478 coming in and having dedicated funding to do this. So I don't know if the city manager wants to add anything there, but I think hopefully we covered that adequately.

I think that's a thank you.

Mayor, you do have public comment. If there's no further council comment on this matter?

Public comment. Ken Fittick? Okay, never mind. Okay, thank you. Do I hear a motion? There's no motion on this item. You're right. OK, next item.

Discussion and possible direction regarding the level of Mayor and Council involvement in meetings and decision making as it relates to expenditures on Prop 478 funds. Mayor and Council staff has no formal presentation on this item. This was a request from Mayor Ruesing and all of the appropriate information is contained in your packet. We'll open it up to Council discussion.

Yes, let me start off. I think that since these two projects, the police facilities and the fire stations, very high profile. This is a $100 million, who knows, maybe plus expenditure. And I'm just requesting that we make sure at council maybe we get a like a monthly presentation from the departments and the consultants to kind of give us an update let people ask questions have input and keep us informed so that you know if there's something that we see and you know we think well maybe we should rethink this or this is fabulous and just kind of get it out there at least once a month. Have a study session presentation or a discussion on the voting agenda. So I don't know. What do you think about that, Mr. Manager?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's up to the council. I think that's very doable. If you wanted a monthly update, there may be months where there's not a lot to say, and there'll be other months when there's a little bit more to say. Kind of our normal procedure might be to look at the... key dates that you saw in some of those presentations and that would be kind of our normal rhythm. But if we wanted to say, you know, hey, we want to come every month and just to provide some kind of a status update, we can absolutely do that.

And also I'd like to request that some of this information be posted on our website, on the police website and the fire website, you know, some of the elevations and the site plans and, you know, some of the information.

would be helpful. Yeah, it's a great idea.

Okay, thank you. Any comment, Mr. Ruby?

Yeah, I'm wondering, just because we have a lot of different things that come up, in terms of the bandwidth of the time that we're on the dais, Would this need to be monthly or could this maybe be quarterly? Like could this be an email update? I just, when we're in front of public space, I don't know how much time, like time is a premium. And so I wonder if this is necessary to do every month or if like there was a quarterly update. It's an open question. There may be different needs, but I also weigh that against the needs of all the different topics we have to address.

Well, I feel that this is something that, like I said, it's very important, and I don't think it would be too time consuming to have an update and a presentation, because this is what we do. And I think the public would be very interested in attending. And if there's not much to say, then it can be a short update. Any other comments, Lois?

Yeah, I'm glad we're gonna do something and I don't need it monthly if it turns out that there's things that aren't relevant to council and the public. You know, it could be every other month, it could be every three months, you know, so I do think your project timeline will drive this. But something's been kind of going through my head for the whole meeting, and it comes back to our friend Stacy over there. And those of you that have been involved in governments, you know, have better understanding of what some of these terms and processes mean. This is my first time on a city council. I could tell you what business would do, but I don't understand all of it about government. So I want to also ask you, Dallin, given your ICMA status and other accreditations, is, you know, as I said earlier, I was really thrown through the budget process related to this whole arena. And that says that I should not have been shocked at the budget. I should have had updates before then. So I don't know how many more... I think the fire property and evidence looks like we'll probably have some big news or other things, but I'm not, so I wanna give you the leeway between police and fire and where they're at and the cost impacts, et cetera, that you bring us some ideas and best-in-class processes related to this, because I can't articulate it, but I just know when it didn't feel right, and it didn't feel right this last year. That much I know.

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And we can we can do that. Certainly in all of these processes, we've talked about like the next step coming this fall. So just within the next couple of months, we'll be back to talk about where we are. Another conversation we've had as staff is about bringing the council options. So the council is. is in the decision, you're making the decision about where things go, what they look like, all the things that will be important to the public about these buildings. And so we want to make sure that that not only that we're doing our job, but that we're enabling you to to be part of the process and to be able to do the policy decisions and do your job. So absolutely understand that. And we can be relatively frequent in our updates if it's not strict that it's every month. We'll wait to have something to say maybe, but it won't be. you know, six months in between, it will be more regular as we have decisions. And particularly as we start to get to, you know, these the big markers, right, the 60%, the 90%, we'll have opportunities to be back.

Just to follow up, if I was going to say one of the things I've heard today that I am concerned about, and I think there's one or two other people on this dais that are concerned about it too, is the North Station and the circles and the fire trucks screaming out into the traffic. And there not being any lights, there not being, I am, public safety facilities shouldn't drive more public safety problems. So I want you guys to seriously look at what's the options available to council versus let's just hope and pray people notice flashing lights and stop their cars. So that's the one that I can tell you right now just didn't feel right, but I don't know what's the better plans.

Yeah, so Prothman volunteered that their engineer would be looking at that as well. So we can bring back some options and let council take a look.

Because in my travels, for example, the smoke tree fire station, it's on a connector street and they have a little signal system there where traffic is stopped and I've seen it in other communities where they'll have flashing lights and everyone comes to a screeching halt and that might be helpful. Uh-oh, I hear something. That might be helpful with even on a roundabout, just at least to get people to notice and slow down and yield would be helpful.

Yeah, understood.

So I don't know, do we have a consent, Mr. Gamboge?

This is really a point of order question In 11 D. Let me read what it says discussion and possible direction regarding level of mayor and council involvement in meetings and decision making as It relates to expenditures on proposition 478 funds That's not getting an update That's inserting yourself in the decision-making process. And as a result, Sandy Griffiths wrote a letter to every council member, and I'd like to have this letter read into the meeting notes because this addresses the way 11E is written. And the way 11E is written, I'm totally against. Dallin Kimball gives us a Friday update And that can be the vehicle to provide an update to us. I read it on Fridays. I have questions for him on Friday afternoons. That works for me. I don't know that we need to have updates. I'm all for pre-selling, but not the way 11E is written.

And thanks for bringing that to our attention. We spoke about that and feel that update by the consultants and staff to council and to the public is entirely acceptable and we won't be interfering with the charter by doing this.

Then can we move on to 11F?

Well. There's public comment, Mayor, if you'd like to take it. Sure. Stacy Brown.

You know, you're the reason why we're here so late. I'm blaming you.

I'm the reason why it's costing $8 million too. You know, I want to start by saying thank you for your service to the community. I don't say that as a performative thing. I appreciate how hard public service is. And and I really do appreciate all the effort that the council puts in. And I empathize with the mayor pro tem because, you know, 16 years ago, I was a newly elected something. And, you know, I was a small business owner, so I didn't know squat. So what I did learn is that governance is really the key to working smarter, not harder. And I know how hard you guys all work. I'm really happy that you had the discussion that you just had, because, you know, what you talked about in kind of an ad hoc way is what information council receives, how often it receives it. Well, I'm not going to go through the rest of them. And so I think the piece that's missing here is that if you take the time to actually think through what you want your governance and oversight structure to be, and do that within a study session or do it in something that can be participatory because you want to have city staff there and you want to have the police department there and the fire department there to kind of talk through these things. But you can kind of talk through. It's a very limited scope to define a governance and oversight framework. And that way you don't have to struggle um in having it kind of should we talk about this now should it be a month to month should we wait until we see how this you can it's a little bit more strategic than ad hoc and at the end of the day governing is more strategic than anything else. You guys got to stay up in the big picture area. You guys got to stay up in the creating the vision of what we want our community to be today, tomorrow, and 20 years from now. And I think that Doing it the way you're doing it right now, it's admirable to have these conversations, but I think you've got to find that way to do it smarter, not harder. And any help that I can provide... I gave Dallin some notes on just some framework ideas and stuff like that. I'm more than happy to work with Dallin and staff and just give you the benefit of my experience. I'm a governance geek. Actually, I'm just a regular geek, but I'm really a governance geek, too, as you can probably tell. So I don't think you should set any direction right now other than let's find an appropriate meeting type, time, place where we can have the big picture conversation about how we want to govern the Prop 478 tax measure, because it's going to be really important. Thank you for your service.

That's all, Mayor. And for the record, Lois, when is our open house town hall going to be on March

It's August 26th, 4 o'clock.

August 26th, so it's coming up soon. All righty. Okay, thank you. August 26th, 4 o'clock.

Just to note, earlier it was stated Thursday, August 26th, and August 26th is a Wednesday.

So it's August 26th, Wednesday at the federal. Yeah, correct. At 4 o'clock. Okay, got it.

You're right. I read Thursday, Wednesday, 26th.

Thank you, Mr. Ruby. What would we do without you? Okay, next item.

Adoption of resolution number 2026-1998, dissolving the Charter Review Committee. Again, Mayor and Council staff does not have a presentation on this matter. This was requested by Mayor Ruesing, so we will open it up to Council discussion.

Okay, well let me start off with this. I'm currently the liaison to the Charter Committee, and they've done a lot of good work. and I really appreciate it and I would like to thank them for it. They've got, they proposed seven amendments that made it on the ballot after approval by the city council. and I really appreciate it. But the reason why I'm requesting that the committee be retired, the reasons are simple, because now we need to work on educating the public and campaign to pass the current seven amendments that are on the November ballot. This is where the focus and the discussions need to be. So if the committee continues and they will start proposing even more amendments to discuss, we will be discussing them up here on the dais. And I feel that it will be confusing to the voters. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves already planning on something that'll be on the ballot possibly a year and a half from now in November. So, I think that if we wanna be successful and get the amendments passed by the voters this year, we need to be focused on this year and take it one step at a time and not jeopardize all the hard work that has already been done. There's no rush. If people feel that the committee needs to be reformed, we can do it again in January. But right now, I think that their work is done. And Mr. Getty, who was on the committee, was here. He couldn't stay for the whole meeting. He recommended that it be dissolved. And the vice chair, Rod Moyer, he had to move to Phoenix, and he recommended that it be dissolved. So any other comments?

Yes.

Yes, Mr. Ruby.

I think the Charter Review Committee has done really good work. I think it needs to remain a standing committee. There are various things that can happen vis-a-vis the county or the state legislature in particular that require the ability of our citizens to have a place to go to voice their concerns where a committee can respond. And we can't anticipate when that would or wouldn't happen. Having a standing committee gives people whose focus is the charter and it gives the community a place to put their concerns. the process as it has has worked very well they brought us propositions we voted on some of them and passed them some of them we didn't that's how it should work i don't see any reason to disband the committee and i'd like to hear from some people from the committee to if they feel that their work is done and if they want the committee disbanded And I'm sure that'll come up in public comment.

Do I have any other comments from council? Let's see, I have Ted, let me look at this, Ted Gamboge will just.

I think it's important to understand a little bit of the history and to be all cards face up. Once upon a time, you change the charter like once every 10 years. And now we've got a situation where every time a new mayor comes in, they have a new agenda. So like Barack Obama would say, we want to fundamentally change Prescott. And they create a charter review committee to affect the changes that they see are necessary. I think directionally that's wrong. I think the directions ought to come from the residents. If you look at a planning commission or a PBTAC or any other, it's residents coming to the committee to ask for change. In the past two Charter Review Committees, The two people that obviously should be on it should be the city attorney and the city clerk, because they know most about charter. But that wasn't the direction. Why wasn't it direction? Because it was a partisan effort. So having it be ongoing would allow for input from the residents unlike the way these last two have been. And maybe more importantly, we've already voted four to two for this to continue. So I don't know why we're discussing this today.

Mr. Goering, do you have any comments?

Thank you, Mary. Yes, I do. I received quite a bit of input on this issue from both committee members and the public. And my takeaway from that is the work of the committee is not done yet. They're working on a protocol on how to handle future charter change requests, and it's not done. They're going to talk about it Monday if we let them keep going. I don't think we should dissolve them, but we might want to pause their effort after they finish this protocol until after the election.

Patrick?

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I think that it's premature to consider the dissolution of the committee. Number one, I agree with part of your justification, and that is we do need to focus on getting it passed, but to get the seven propositions passed, but to actually dissolve the committee prior to the vote in November, I think just sins of terrible message, a kind of chilling message, in a large part because we've recently, over the last six months, dissolved two other committees, citizen committees, who we've thanked for doing good work. So I think that it's premature. I think more appropriately, the council can, in our role, give some advice to how we think the committee, what next steps they can take, and I think, as Jim pointed out, They're looking at some governing principles that might drive more citizen engagement. But at the same time, I think it's important that we show our support by allowing them to continue that work, particularly at this very critical time to get these seven propositions passed.

Lois? thank you uh... as you all know i was one of the two that voted no to have this be an ongoing committee and i'm still i'm still there i still think that this is something as our founding governance document of how we operate as a charter, this shouldn't be something that literally everyone gets weary because it's constantly. I'm very worried about who's gonna educate the public over the course of the next few months on seven charters. So I am worried. with the role that the committee will do. I remember the last leader going on radio shows and others just to educate people, not sell, just to educate with the facts of if you vote no and if you vote no, yes. So I do think we need a plan on how, and I, again, you guys never are, you're never videotaped and I can't make your meetings. So I have no idea other than a month later when I get the notes, for the next package. What is going on? So that's a problem. I couldn't even go back and look at what the committees and how they work because I couldn't watch anything where I can do that with other committees that I can't make. So I don't even think we're organized correctly for this. And I do think you run the risk of every single year some stuff going on a ballot of having voter fatigue. And when voters are fatigued, you know what they do? They vote no. So I am very concerned with how this is going. I even sense some of the committee members are fatigued. And so I think, I don't know that I'm ready to say today, let's disband it. But I do think we really need to rethink how we're organized here, because it just isn't working well.

Mary. Thank you. Back in February when I voted in support of the idea that it moved from a mayoral to a council appointed, it was not for the purpose of in perpetuity. It was for the idea that the council as a whole should be advised of each and every Action that the Charter Committee was going to propose as opposed to the mayor being the gatekeeper. That concept had me vote for the change. I was not particularly interested, I was not interested at all, frankly, in the idea of whether or not it needed to be a committee that continued on off into the distance. I am concerned about the charter, excuse me, being nibbled to death by ducks. I don't want it forever to have a committee developing ideas for how the charter could be amended. I am concerned about the idea of voter fatigue. How many times are we going to amend our charter? Isn't our charter a solid document in and of itself? I think the same thing about amendments to our federal constitution. The charter is supposed to be like the constitution of how we govern here in Prescott. I think changing the Constitution or the Charter for every perceived fault or piece that is missing goes down a bad road. I don't think it should be changed Frankly, every year that would be horrifying to me. I'm very happy with the amendments that have been put forward so far. I do think it is important that they be sold to the public. not by us, but by the people who know what's going on, the committee members, and they could be free to make those approaches to the public if they were not continuing on with other items. And the distinction between dissolving versus pausing It's a distinction without a difference in my book because they would have to come back, the committee, if they wanted to go forward with new ideas, they'd still have to come back to the council and say, okay, take the pause off. So I don't see that it's much different to dissolve it and if they feel that there's work still to be done, come back and say, later, next year maybe, please reinstate us, here are the people who want to serve, here are the ideas we'd like to think about and talk about. So I don't see a difference between pausing and maybe lifting the pause later versus dissolving and reinstating later. But either way, I think the committee's work up till now is kind of like at a line. And if there's more work to be done, we can address that later after the November election.

Thank you. Do we have any public comments?

We do. Stacy Brown?

I appreciate that I am what's holding everybody back from dinner, but I had to make a comment because it's very rare that I actually agree wholeheartedly with Councilmember Gamboge. I appreciate the struggles you're having with this particular change and the implementation of it. I think it's the right decision to keep it a standing committee. I don't think that having a standing committee whose job it is to review the charter on an annual basis, however many meetings, is a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. I think about when you, Councilmember Fredrickson, you brought up the Constitution, the federal Constitution. Part of the problem today is that we haven't amended it in like 35 years. And it's a really difficult process, and it should be a difficult process. But there could be need for new amendments, for new interpretations of some of the amendments, right? We're going through that right now with birthright citizenship. So I don't think that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I hate to say this, but this really comes back to council governance. And if I'm wrong about this, please correct me, but you are the only ones that can put a ballot measure up for election. So if seven charter amendments you think is too many in a given year, don't put seven up. You can have some discussion about this as you maybe think about how you might want to reprioritize the mission of the standing uh... charter review committee the other piece of this is that education is so important running a campaign is so important you all know you ran campaigns you got elected uh... i have run ballot measure campaigns many many times And law prohibits elected officials from electioneering, right? You can't go out and work on, you know, yes to measure whatever. But you can go out and educate, and there are ways that as a council and as a city, you can use resources wisely. to communicate the importance of these particular amendments. And a lot of the charter review, I think they have the most knowledge, and they might be the ones that are most interested in actually going out and taking on that education role. So I just think you have a little bit of more discussion to have about what's really going to work for the charter review and have that discussion instead of just pausing it, dissolving it, whatever. Thank you. Thank you, Stacey.

Bonnie McMinn.

Please tell me I have more than three minutes to save the life of this committee that four members of this council supported. The Charter Review Committee is responsible for the election amendment that was brought to you last year it came through the committee to look at the three or four different options that were available to us at the time that happened and the charter review committee perhaps would not have we might have just been waiting in the wings for something to occur but that occurred and we were able to rise to the occasion and come forward right away with our options for this council and uh... be able to educate the public along the way with that so that just that came out of nowhere we didn't know it was coming but it did because of last year's election We also didn't know that the court, the consolidated court, was going to change. And now we have, instead of a justice of the peace, which was how the charter was written, we now have a city judge that reports to you, seven council members. He's not there anymore. But, I mean, the point is, and it's not about Judge Gann, it is about the fact that now we have a court system that the city of Prescott is responsible for. And guess what? In the charter itself, they didn't have to be a licensed attorney. There was, as Elaine explained to me, why it was the second... second whatever tuesday of december and then they became they were serving and so forth so we tightened that up it would have been derelict for this council to not have addressed that specific issue and the charter committee along with staff were able to address that We also had development agreement issues come up, and that would not have been addressed if there was no committee. That's not to say that we're busy in the background trying to do busy work. Trust me, we're not. The last time I was on the committee in 2023, it was housekeeping issues. It was giving counsel time. a CPI pay raise which had not been done in I think 30 years or so. It was changing residency for people running for office, moving it from one year to three years. Those were important things and it wasn't like we were just flipping through each page trying to decide what we were going to do. These were issues that had come up and Mr. Gamboge had served on the committee with me and we had done a lot of good work So the seven amendments were not busy work. They were not designed to, oh, we've got a committee, so we need to do things. These were urgent matters. If we think repeat elections is an urgent matter, which this council agreed to very quickly, So those are the things that the Charter Committee does. We're not looking busy trying to find things to do. We are very methodical and studying the issues and looking at the things that we think need to be done, and we refer it back to you guys to chat and decide if it's something that's important. And we submitted nine amendments, and two you sent back and said, nope, it's not ready. I wholeheartedly agreed, but the committee wanted to forward those to you, but we can put, I don't think dissolution is the point. I think suggesting that we're selling the amendments, that's great. We can do that. We've got a framework, which we haven't done before, because why? It had been an ad hoc committee. Now that it's a standing committee, and you know standing committees take breaks. I heard that TAC was on break until tomorrow, so they had taken the summer off. So you guys can direct us in terms of what you want us to do and the speed with which you want that. So we've got another election in November. We've got one, the primary in 2027. We can look and pace our work accordingly. We were not rushed. We were very methodical. We got the things done that were really, really important. The four that I mentioned to you were extremely important. And Mayor, you supported the development agreement. And Mayor, you supported the appraisal. So those were things that were urgent. We are not done. We want to talk about water. We want to talk about, perhaps, data centers, perhaps we wanna talk about hillside amendments. Those are just things that we're considering and we would do that with the collaboration with council. And so I ask you to support the standing committee, support the resolution that you agreed to by majority in February. And give us the guidance and feedback if you want us to move in a different direction. But we serve you as an advisory committee. We serve all of you. And that, I think, is ultimately the most important thing. Thank you. Thank you, Bonnie.

That's all, Mayor. Thank you. Okay. I think we're...

Hello?

Are we ready to vote?

I did another request.

Oh, okay, thank you.

As a charter city, we wanna keep the charter as strong as possible. It is what protects us. It's part of what makes Prescott, Prescott, as much as I hate to say that phrase, as it has caused some people trauma. But having people who are vigilant about what the charter is and what it can do is really important. And having that be people who are not up here behind the dais, it encourages citizen engagement. And I think that is really the bedrock of good governance.

Thank you. I'd like to make a motion. I move that we dissolve the Charter Review Committee and adopt resolution number 2026-1998. Do I hear a second? Second. Please vote.

Fails 3-4.

Thank you. This meeting is adjourned.