City Council - Regular Meeting

I have serious doubts about that. Who would want to do that?

Madam Chair, I think we're ready whenever you are ready. You're good, Chris? Yes, we are ready.

We are ready as well. Thank you, Mr. Frato. I guess you already hit recording, and I missed that announcement, so we are ready. Okay, thank you. Good evening, everyone. Welcome. We are grateful to have all of you here joining us for tonight's city council meeting, both in the chambers with us as well as online. We will go ahead and begin with we start our meetings with prayer and a pledge, and I'd like to ask for volunteers if we have any volunteers to offer tonight's prayer. I know you're my go-to. All right. Ms. Christensen, thank you.

Our dearest Heavenly Father, we are so grateful to be gathered together this evening. Please help us that as we consider the items before Sandy City that we'd be able to make the best decisions for its residents and its employees. We are grateful for the abundant blessings and freedoms that we enjoy. We love thee and we say these things in the name of thy son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Amen.

Thank you, Ms. Christensen. If we could please stand, we'll all join together in the pledge.

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

Thank you so much.

We'll move on to introductions starting over here with

Thank you Madam Chair. Dustin Fratto with the city council office. We've got a couple other council staff members in the back of the room. Justin Sorensen and Matt Perry who will introduce himself a little later this evening. My name is Tracy. I'm council for the council.

Chris Edwards with the council office. Cindy Sharkey council at large. Brooke Christensen, District 1.

Marcy Hausman, District 4. Allison Stroud, District 2. Brooke D'Souza, At-Large.

Aaron DeKaiser, At-Large. Ryan Mecham, Deputy CAO. We'll excuse the mayor tonight and Martin Jensen as well. Lynn Pace, City Attorney.

And we have online, Councilwoman, you want to introduce yourself? It's a little, we can not hear you very, if you're able to turn your volume up a little bit, maybe.

Okay, we'll do.

There we go. Perfect. Do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself again so we can hear you? Chris Nickel, District 3. That's better. Thank you so much, Councilwoman Nickel. Alright, we will jump into tonight's agenda. As a reminder, we do take general citizen comments. We do not take those comments before 6 o'clock p.m. So if you are here to share anything for the council in terms of anything related to city business, in the back we have blue cards we'll ask you to fill out, bring over here to Mr. Fratto. Again, we will proceed with tonight's agenda. And at or after 6 o'clock, at the point that makes the most sense to transition into citizen comment, we will do so. And we will do that in chambers first, followed by those who are participating online. So with that, we will go ahead and begin with tonight's first informational item, the presentation of the Creek Road Safety Update.

All right. Thank you very much. So this study is a study we've been jointly doing with Cottonwood Heights. The impetus of the study was really there's a lot of weird crosswalks on Creek Road, crosswalks that don't have any type of ADA ramps or anything. Some you'll see that go right into power poles. And there's a theory that a lot of these crosswalks were installed by scout groups or church groups or something. So it's just kind of a mishmash out there. So there's a desire to study this jointly and really figure out where there should be crosswalks and what other things could be done on the corridor. So we've got a good-sized corridor, nearly four miles long. So there's a lot of ground to cover. We did some public outreach because of that. With a corridor that size, we can't collect data for the entire corridor. We don't know what all the locals know. So we did an online survey. and then at public open house. And as you can see here, got some good responses, good attendance at the open house, over 100 online responses as well. So we've got some good feedback from the public. Just a picture there from the open house. Some of the key takeaways from that outreach was that the 4 Bush Lane intersection by far had the most comments. At the public meeting, people could put sticky notes on their area of concern, and there was just a huge pile of sticky notes all over 4 Bush Lane. And then from a safety perspective, by far the dominant comment was just speeding, too much speeding on the road. And then another prevalent one was just drivers not yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks. And then you can see a few of the others there as well. So this is kind of some of the detailed information not expected to be able to read all that But it was interesting that from our survey respondents over half of them crossed Creek Road multiple times a week and so that's a good user base that That would provide us information It was interesting that The most common, when we talked about why they crossed, it was most of them were for exercising, so joggers and things like that out there. The most common location for crossing was as an unmarked crosswalk. So there's lots of people just crossing wherever they find to be the most convenient. And then when we asked what kind of improvements would you like at these, the flashing beacons, the rectangular rapid flashing beacons, RFBs, were the predominant choice as well there. And we'll get back to all these things. And then just a little more of the same information. Yeah, that's not really worth getting too worked up about there. So then they did some data collection. We did some pedestrian counts before the public meeting so we could present information there. But we'd also saved a few counts to do after the public meeting so that if we learned more information there, we could do additional counts. doing pedestrian counts at nine locations, collected traffic volume and speed data and bus stop locations and whatnot. And here's just, again, not really critical to see this, but kind of where the crashes are at. You can see a good cluster there around Forbush. The colors are based on severity, so the oranges and reds are the most severe crashes. Over the last... five, six years, there have been five pedestrian-related crashes or bicycle. And interestingly, several of those were from situations where one car had stopped to yield to a pedestrian but then the car behind them wasn't paying enough attention and they crashed into the car that was stopped for the pedestrian and then caused them to to hit the pedestrian so that was i think happened a couple times one of them was someone swerved again for a stopped car and ended up hitting a pedestrian that was on the or a bicyclist, I think, that was in the bike lane. So a few crashes there. Fortunately, haven't been any fatalities, but a few severe crashes. Here are the locations where we did our data collection. Again, none of this you can really read, but multiple locations along the corridor. So when we talk about what we can do then as we start talking about potential solutions, I like this graphic that says you can't prioritize both safety and speed because the faster you go, if there's a collision with a pedestrian, the more likely it's to be a fatal condition. And here we have a lot of traffic and we have a lot of speeders as well. As you can see, the average daily volumes range between about 4,000 cars a day to 13,000 cars a day. As you can probably imagine, the busiest section of the road is that section between Highland Drive and Forbush. It's where the 13,000 is. And then all of the 85th percentile speeds are over 35 miles an hour. The speed limit varies a little along the road. Most of it's 35, but in particular at the west end, it drops to 25 miles an hour. And based on our speed data, very, very few people are driving 25 miles an hour in that section. So we talk about low-level treatments as ways to improve these pedestrian crosswalks. So these include the RFBs, the flashing beacons, pedestrian refuge islands. That example there in the upper right is on the corridor across from the Catholic Church there. Bull bouts in the bottom left, which helped narrow the distance to be crossed, and then just improved lighting. Just making it at crosswalks, really there's a lot of value in having lights on both sides and just making sure that it's well lit so that people can see if there are pedestrians in the crosswalks. All right, so then we've got the nine existing crosswalks out there. And we selected a total of 22 locations to analyze in a little bit more detail for where there should be recommended crosswalks. And some of the conditions are listed there. I think the third one that somehow is covered up that I'm not sure how that happened. I think that talks about neighborhood connectivity there. That was one of our big criteria. A lot of these crosswalks out there kind of go from a cul-de-sac to just a curb face and don't really provide good connectivity. And so part of it was getting them at locations where they're connecting to roads that go deeper into the respective cities. Yeah, so this goes into a little more detail on the criteria. We started with the UDOT criteria, but then added a few of our own based on the community feedback and, again, the neighborhood connectivity that I just mentioned. And so based on that, here's the Short term recommendations are these crosswalk locations. So there's a recommendation to move three of the crosswalks to new locations, install two new crosswalks, and then to do additional low level treatments at two other crosswalks. And then long term recommendations And we're corridor-wide, getting full sidewalk coverage along the length of the road. That was another big comment that we heard at the public meeting. In particular, on the south side of the road near Forebush, going to the east, there's no sidewalk there. It's a tricky area. We've got retaining walls and whatnot. And so just getting more sidewalk connectivity is another good long-term recommendation. Upgrading the pedestrian facilities to all be ADA and ProWag compliant. ProWag is kind of a newer kind of a new and improved ADA to some degree. Not quite the same thing, but it stands for Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines. So it's potentially more guidelines for pedestrian and disabled access, and long-term also improving lighting and then speed management strategies. So this shows the short-term crosswalk recommendations as far as for moving them, installing them, and the new low-level treatments. The purple are the locations where crosswalks are recommended to be moved. The green are the two new crosswalks, which in this case happened to both be in Cottonwood Heights. And the orange are the additional low-level treatments. And we'll walk through some of these in a little bit more detail here. So let's see here. So this is the farthest west crosswalk. This is one that kind of goes right into a tree. And so recommending removing the tree and then putting in pedestrian ramps. This is kind of a tricky segment of the road. Originally, they wanted to move this crosswalk farther south to Siesta, which provides better connectivity. But that's on a curve. This is a pretty curvy section of the road here between Forbush and 13th East. And the location they'd identified, they realized that there wouldn't be sufficient sight distance. So they backed off of that and said, let's just keep it where it is and just improve it in its current location. Then this one is moving the 1485 East Crosswalk a few hundred feet to the east to 4 Bush Lane. Then here at Oakdale, this was one of the low level treatment locations where we could trim some of the The vegetation, as you can kind of see on that picture to the right, there's some poor sight distance around the curve for anybody that might be on that right side of the road. And then potentially do some bulb outs, particularly on the north side of the road where there's a big wide shoulder. So bulb outs can shorten the crossing distance so there's less exposure for pedestrians. This is obviously a busy intersection or a busy crossing because it is the access to Oakdale Elementary. And then this one is, again, moving a crosswalk from its existing location there on the right with the big power pole and a street sign right in the middle of it over to Farnbrook Way where you've got better connectivity into the neighborhoods. And this is a similar one as well. a crosswalk that doesn't really connect a whole lot, moving that over farther to the east by Willow Creek Drive and to Oak Creek Drive, which provides good connectivity both up into Cottonwood Heights and obviously down into Sandy as well. And so those were all the recommendations for this. I feel like I'm pushing the wrong button here. Yeah, so those were the specific short-term recommendations. And then the long-term, as I mentioned, trying to do some speed mitigation stuff or measures there. And really, ultimately, it's about trying to get a corridor that's a little more focused on all users and not so heavily auto-focused. So it's the full sidewalk coverage that I mentioned previously. Working with UDOT to get a full path on the south side of the road. UDOT has recently come out with a Utah Trail Network, which is a statewide network of trails that's kind of to connect the entire state. A good portion of Creek Road actually is on that Utah Trail Network. So from basically Danish Lane up to Forbush. And so there's a good opportunity there to work with UDOT to get a trail installed. And then upgrading the pedestrian facilities to be compliant with ADA and other standards. And then they mentioned as well the idea of just putting in more trees, also talk about putting in center medians, and just things that can make the corridor feel not quite so a big expanse of pavement. And this shows some of that. So for example, the example on the right is obviously not Creek Road, but an example of a center median there with landscaping and whatnot. And then the corridor lighting, it talks about specific locations where additional lighting could be beneficial. Then on the speed management, putting in some driver feedback signs and then the median islands. They also suggested potentially removing two-way left turn lanes on the end points where the volumes aren't quite as high. By doing that, cars that are turning left essentially start to block the traffic. And so people have to either stop or slow down to go around them. And so those can be effective in just kind of making it a little bit slower and not quite so wide. It also provides opportunities for either more bulb outs by narrowing those, by having no, you can have wider shoulders and makes it easier to do bulb outs as well. So there's some opportunity there for just restriping there. And then this is kind of a, their AI attempt to show a section of our road as it is today versus what it could look like with center medians, with some bulb outs, a narrow crosswalk. And you can see the crossing distance is broken into two short segments rather than one big, long one. And so these are some of the potential long-term solutions. And really, that's it. That's what I've got. I don't know whether you've got any questions for me.

Thank you. Questions, counsel? Ms. Sharkey.

Thank you, Ivan. This is a route that I take all the time. And so it's really interesting to see what your traffic data is. And it looks like you're... Your speed data shows basically what I've seen. If the 85th percentile is 35 miles an hour, that's the speed limit. So most of the people are driving the speed limit. It's not a super high traffic street. It's, I'm not surprised that people are driving the speed limit because it's also a windy street. So because of the street design, right, that would slow traffic a little bit. I do, I'm very concerned about 4 Bush. I'm expecting Allison to bring this up too. I don't know. Somebody called me, I'm sure they did you too last year, asked, this was their primary issue about pedestrian crossing at Forbush, and I said, I think we need to keep pedestrians as far away from that intersection as possible. I spent some time over there again yesterday eyeballing it, thinking, how do you do that effectively? You do show crash data there, and it's understandable why. A lot of cars are coming down Forbush, turning right onto Creek Road. And in doing so, you really have to look over your shoulder. You almost have to look back over your shoulder to see if any traffic is coming. So it's understandable that there would be crashes there. I don't know where you would put the pedestrians. If you were to put the pedestrians on the... If you would put the crosswalk on the... west side of that intersection, there's no sidewalk that connects there and there may never be because that's a hill. There is a sidewalk on the other side, but you don't want to put pedestrians crossing where the people turning are not looking in that direction at all. They're looking in a completely different direction. So it concerns me. I just wonder if we ever do get to the point of building something there, I would love to go out with you and understand. what the plan is because it just looks dangerous to me.

Yeah, for sure. It is not ideal. Clearly, if it were a crosswalk on the west side, it would be much safer because you wouldn't have the left.

Even if you put RRFBs there, I'm not sure that all that traffic, and there's a lot of it, turning right from Forbush on to Creek because people from 13th come down that way and people from 78th come that way. I don't think they'd even see the RRFBs flashing. I'm just really worried about that one.

Yeah, it is a tricky location. I do want to do an always stop analysis there. It may warrant an always stop. The consultants did their data collection with video, so I had them give me 12 hours of video for that intersection to use for really both an always stop and a traffic signal warrant analysis to see if something like that might be justified. Obviously with the always stop, that would make it a little bit safer from a pedestrian crossing standpoint. The through traffic on Creek Road would be required to stop. But, yeah, that is clearly a tricky location with difficult geometry, so there's not really a get-out-of-jail-free card there.

I remember a few years ago Salt Lake County gave us part of this road. Who owns the road? Is it Sandy on the south side and Cottonwood Heights on the north side?

Yeah, that's my understanding.

Okay. And then the bulb outs. When I was at this open house, I met a lot of bicyclists there. And I actually think it is a great road for bicyclists. There's a very wide shoulder active transportation lane that doesn't usually get parked in. And I think it's a great corridor for bicyclists. So I always worry when we're talking about bulb outs that we are affecting the safety of bicyclists. I know that there's a school crossing there. They have lights and they have a crossing guard. I don't know that there have been problems there. I don't know that there haven't. I've never witnessed them myself. But I am worried about putting bulb outs there because it is so heavily used by bicyclists who have to either navigate around the bulb out sometimes be forced into traffic or out of the safety of the bike lane. So I just, I worry about that a little bit.

Yeah, no, I share that concern as well. And so I think the bull bouts would really only be applicable if there's already a wide shoulder or if we did go to remove the center two-way left turn lane And free up some real estate that you could still have a bike lane and a bulb out. But yeah, clearly a bulb out that forces the bikes into the traffic lane is not really super valuable.

So I guess I was just asking, is there a problem to be solved if we're talking about where the Oakdale school crossing is?

I don't know that there is or isn't but yeah, I don't think I Didn't hear a whole lot about that. I don't think we've received a whole lot of complaints there as well other than People not not yielding to pedestrians.

I think we did hear some of that there, but Thank you for that I'll come to this side.

Mr. DeKaiser Thanks very much for the presentation I just want to start by saying today I witnessed another accident at Alta High School. There's been many. Drivers are distracted speeding is common rampant throughout the city appreciate the police department slow down Sandy campaign. But like I know from campaigning speeding is the main concern of residents not just on Creek Road across the entire city. This is the number one issue for residents. So why we're not reducing our speed limits. I am so unclear about this and I understand there's transportation policy and stuff like that. First question. We keep talking in presentations like this and others about the 85th percentile. Why are we still using that as a metric when the newly updated MUTC guidelines don't use that anymore effective March of this year?

Well, I mean, the consultant put that together. They highlighted the 85th percentile speeds. The average, we obviously have the average speed data. They didn't include that, and I didn't ask them to include it. So I probably should have, because it's often more useful. We want to know where most of the people are at. I mean, I'm with you. I don't like 85th percentile for setting speed limits, because it essentially becomes a one-way ratchet to just move them higher and higher.

And so. I would love to see thoughtful changes on how we think about this within the department moving forward. The city, the Cottonwood Heights and Sandy split the ownership of the road. Who decides the speed limit?

I don't know. I've not been here long enough to know that for sure.

Yeah. In your experience, Ivan, would you say the windiness of the road would justify a speed limit reduction from 35 to 30 or 25? I think 30 to 35 is the appropriate range.

I think 25 is a little low. My general thought is when you've got center two-way left turn lanes, 35 is usually not a bad way to go, especially if there's not a ton of houses facing the road. But again, this type of facility, in my mind, 30 to 35 is the appropriate range.

OK. You said that the Siesta crossing location provides better connectivity, but not enough sight distance. So I get that. But people are going to cross the road where they're used to crossing the road. My question is, is the determination for sight distance affected by the speed limit?

Yes.

So if we reduce the speed limit, it would affect whether or not we could put a crosswalk there.

Well, it's more based on the 85th percentile speed, I think, is what's used for that. But we can lower the speed limit. That's already the location with a 25 mile an hour speed limit where we get very poor compliance with the 25. Even though that is a 25-mile-an-hour area, we're not getting vehicles there driving 25 miles an hour.

Yeah, and Ryan Kahn, Public Works Director. Kind of to get into this a bit more, Aaron, Councilmember DeKaiser, We can change the numbers on the signs, but that is proven to not change driver behavior. So it's a balancing act of what is the road engineered to naturally create versus what do we want our citizens and drivers to do. So by implementing more traffic calming measures, more bulb outs, raised planted medians, Changing striping we can actually reduce the speeds of which vehicles travel But I can tell you if we throw up 25 mile an hour speed limit signs We will not see a noticeable reduction in actual traveled speeds Which is why I feel the 80th percentile still extremely valuable when we're determining these engineering decisions like sight distance just changing its 25 doesn't mean that somebody driving 35 will now see that person at the crosswalk and

I understand that. And I don't mean to be adversarial. You know I love you guys. I think the world of Ivan, it's just that this is a huge resident issue, and our roads are unsafe. And we know that from Safe Systems for All, Vision Zero, that Reducing the speed of cars is what we need to do. And we can do it on the cheap like that with signs and have enforcement. Or I feel like if we do bull bouts and whatever, it's like, oh, we don't have $20 million to do this around the city, which is true. And so I'm just trying to find the balance to make it so that our roads are safe because we are in an epidemic not only in Sandy but across the country. And so I want to wrap this up. I really appreciate all you do. You said that striping can change it. I assume that's a cheap way. I would love to see some new striping in our short term plan. I've seen all kinds of crazy stuff where it like totally alters the way the road looks to really slow people down. I would think that the windiness as council member Sharkey mentioned of the road would justify be a natural thing to justify lower speed limit. So anyways, you all know how I feel about this.

And there is debate, and we can use Salt Lake as a case study. They dropped their speed limits 20 miles an hour citywide. But the data doesn't show that they're having a sharp decrease in their traveled speeds. Outside of an opportunity for increased enforcement, which many residents would say has just become a speed trap, there's debate on whether that actually did anything effective.

Yeah, I understand that. And I understand that data is still forthcoming on that. But thank you guys for the reporting on this. Looking forward to working with Cottonwood Heights on improving this. I'll be talking to their council members about this presentation. But whatever we can do with you guys at the helm to make our streets safer.

And to be clear, we also understand that the number one goal is safety. We don't want people to get injured in our streets either. And I think by implementing these short-term measures that Ivan's highlighted, we can increase the safety along the corridor.

Thank you.

Mr. Sousa?

Thank you. I just had a couple of questions primarily about the road, being that it splits Cottonwood Heights and Sandy. Who makes determination on these locations for crosswalks? Is it mutually agreed upon in terms of cost for implementing some of these solutions? Is it, again, like a split cost?

Yeah, absolutely, and that is why we partnered with Cottonwood Heights to do this study in the first place. We wanted a shared document that both cities bought into so that there are known solutions that both cities say, yep, this is how we want to approach it as a joint entity. With this study in place and with sharing it with both councils, we're hoping that we can move ahead in a shared cost splitting to implement these changes.

Okay, and the short-term solutions that you've identified in your presentation, have they already been kind of reviewed by Cottonwood Heights and potentially approved?

Their council had a similar presentation in June. That was what we received, maybe early July.

OK. And then my other comment, Council Member Sharkey actually hit on that, and that was the bulb outs. I think they're great. But at the same time, again, like Wasatch, you see a lot of bicyclists on those roads and ensuring that we don't inhibit their safety or increase their lack of safety by putting them into the roadway, can the bulb outs have, do they have to go all the way to the curb or can there be, can you still have an effective behavior change with vehicles if you were to leave some space for bicyclists to continue through?

Yeah, you could do something behind the curb. I mean, yeah, you could basically move move the cyclist to the curbside, and have the bulb out come a little farther out into the road so that they're riding behind the bulb out. It's not super common. You want to make sure people don't, they might not see the cyclist, you know, so it could be a little risky. Certainly stuff like that's done just for drainage purposes so that you don't have to rebuild the whole thing. You can just leave the existing curb and gutter in the back behind the bulb out for drainage purposes. So there are options there, but yeah, you would just want to make sure that the bicyclist has a safe spot and that the pedestrians would essentially be doing two little crossings, you know, a little one for the bicycle and then obviously a larger one for the road.

Okay, yeah, and I think that generally speaking, when I think of a bicyclist, I'm thinking of adults who are versed in bicycling on roadways and utilize the bike lanes, but that's not always the case, and especially now with the e-bikes and e-scooters and the lack of sidewalk ability for those types of travel, kids are using them, right? So when we're thinking about Bicyclist safety. I just want to make sure that we're also considering our children In these spaces and making sure that we create safety for them, too So I'm sure you are I just thought was that was my one thought on the bulb outs was Bicyclists and potential kids, you know out there using that area and I I can understand and appreciate Council Member DeKaiser's passion for safety. I think that we all share that passion for safety. I don't know that I personally agree that the only solution is reducing the speed limit, so I just want to make sure that when feedback is given, I appreciate that there is a well-rounded approach to safety, and it seems like You may have identified that some of the crashes that have occurred thus far are maybe because we don't have crosswalks in appropriate places. And so that's kind of the first start is to look at ways that why isn't this road safe and look at ways that we can make it more safe. Speeding happens because people are not going the speed limit that's posted. And so to like what you said, that's kind of always been my thought. It sounds like there may be more emphasis needing to be placed in enforcement of our current speeds to try to garner some additional safety. And I am happy to see that of the accidents that you have reported on, that there haven't been any fatalities, right? And reducing the instances of accidents at all and serious accidents, I think, is the number one goal. And I appreciate your overall attempt to create opportunities for safety. Thank you.

Ms. Stratton. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you. I remember probably two years ago working with Ms. Ward and working with Cottonwood Heights to get this study done, resident after resident after resident. And primarily, they were looking at Forbush, so working with them, and crossing the street. There's always speed that's brought up. And at different times in the day, Certain people are always going to speed. But the biggest concern that I had heard, and it gave me a great opportunity to work again with Jared Gerber. He was instrumental up at Cottonwood Heights, connecting with Public Works as well. But looking at this, a lot of it was that connectivity. and people crossing at Fort Bush, and then seeing that it was already cut down as an ADA, that it was supposed to have been some sort of crosswalk there. And at some point, one city, both cities decided that that was not feasible. But understanding that that challenge was part of it, because Sandy owns part, Cottonwood Heights owns the other. And to look where both cities have to agree. So this is, I think a great starting point. Um, you know, and I say starting because we've got four miles, you know, looking at this of what we can do, and it's not something that can be done very easily, very quickly with minimal money. It's going to take some planning to make sure that we have the proper speed that we have the proper accessibility, and that we've been able to better design this road to maintain residents and their concerns that they have brought over and over and over. And I appreciate the trimming the trees. I was out with Public Works a year and a half ago after first bringing this up and looking at it, and we were trimming trees. we were going back the second day because the first day they were run off. The person did not want them touching their tree that was on their property that was blocking the view. And I think I was there as part of, well, then go talk to her part of it. But there are several areas along that road. Hearing some of these other alternatives of what we can do and understanding speed. People, they get comfortable with that. I know even just on on my street when painting lines in did more I mean reducing that the lane of travel did more to reduce speed than anything else that we've tried on my street and that was an eye opener to me. I was thinking, that is crazy. That's not going to work. So I know that there are a lot of things that we can do. I'm excited to hear what we're going to do next. Because once again, I see this as a starting point. We have several different catalysts of residents coming in with concerns. We've identified that there's missing sidewalks. We do know that cyclists, I was up at that meeting as well, a lot of cyclists that were there, Kids walking to school, parents walking their kids to school, and often they're kind of back and forth trying to find the sidewalk of where they can walk safely, the speeds with vehicles. But what are we going to do? What is that suggestion? Where are we going to start? I can see that you've suggested with some of those crosswalks of moving them. Is that going to resolve? Most of the issue. I mean, that's what are we going to do next? You know, is Cottonwood Heights ready to start making those changes? Are we able to do that? You know, what's what is that? You know, where we've got this, you know, the bulb outs, they are expensive. I think somewhere in a budget at one point, I'd heard that they're about $300,000 per cent. You know, so I I'm not seeing that anywhere in our budget So I would think that if that is something that we look at in the future that that will take some planning and I would Follow that that same, you know path of looking at the pedestrian refuge islands that those would be a significant Cost change as well, you know that the flashing beacons, you know, those are a little more reasonable improved lighting You know, is it primarily, you know, the lighting when we're getting these these crashes in there Is that was it is it due to poor lighting or? I know safety factor, I mean, that makes people feel more comfortable. But what are we going to do other than moving these crosswalks? And when is that going to take place?

We've not really gotten into those conversations yet with Cottonwood Heights. We actually don't even have a hard copy or a copy of the final report yet. But that's the idea is we would do these short-term ones, which are pretty low cost as far as moving the crosswalks. There's still some costs associated with it, because we'd want them all to have ramps on either side. Some effort to determine exact locations, especially near Willow Creek, where the right spot there would be for a crosswalk. So there's certainly some things to be done just to implement the short terms. From there, then it really becomes what do we think we're able to do. I think trying to get UDOT to advance They've got a pretty robust funding source for the Utah Trail Network. So if they can see that the communities are engaged and interested, if we can get That portion of the trail to kind of climb up the priority list could be very beneficial because they'll be covering cost of building a trail, which would obviously help our missing sidewalk situation and all that that we have on the south side. So those, I think, are some of the real short-term-ish things we can do. From there, it really becomes kind of a budgeting exercise, I feel like, to figure out what's a reasonable cost, where are locations we can do this, Take advantage of when we do our pavement maintenance, see if there's a collective appetite to reduce the number of, reduce that center turn lane out there to make bull bouts even more effective or just to get people to have to slow down when the car in front of them stops to turn left. So those are, I think, all things that we can do relatively inexpensively short term.

So what... What is that next step? And what can I or we do to help support you in making this other than, OK, we have a study. We've heard about this. The district, I know the school district representation was at Oak Dell, looking at that because they have that interest with their safe routes to school. But what can we do to help? make sure that we're staying in contact with Cottonwood Heights? If it's contacting UDOT, what can we do to make sure it doesn't just stop here?

I see this three individual steps. Step one is working with UDOT to advance the trail funding money and helping push that through because that would be a UDOT funded for them to step in and spend some of their trail money here. Step two is doing the low-key, low-cost items that we can partner with Cotwood Heights and handle within our existing budgets. And there's a lot of things we can do, like adding the RFBs and moving some of those crosswalks. And then the third phase is coming to you in future budget years for projects that cost more money Partnering with Cottonwood Heights and say we want to do a bulb out and raise median through this segment We agree that this project will cost a quarter million dollars will each pitch into 125. I'm just throwing numbers out speculatively Coming to you in those budget years, so You dot money low cost items we can do with an existing budget and then future projects Thank you

I agree. That was the question I had remaining. Ms. Stroud asked it, beautifully answered. I don't think I need to ask any questions. So we're going to go to Ms. Nichol, who has her hand up.

Hi, thank you. Hey, Ryan, how much are bulb outs?

It can vary greatly. It depends on the extensiveness of the project and what we're trying to redo in terms of drainage that can add to the cost. If we're doing a cheap concrete project without touching the existing flow lines and keeping it minimal, it could be done probably for $20,000. But if we're revising drainage, moving things around, bringing in irrigation and doing plantings, you can approach six figures.

Okay. I'm thinking Segal Lily with street, just concrete because everything's been updated in stormwater, that type of thing.

Yeah, that would probably be, depending on the size of the bulb, out somewhere you're at $20,000 to $50,000.

OK, awesome. Thank you. Thank you council members any additional questions. Thank you so much for that tag team effort there. And so just clarification tonight is information only. We can follow up with additional questions and you'll let us know when this is coming back for actual action after we've had the conversations you just described correct. OK. Thank you for that clarity. So with that. We are at the 6.03. I wanted to check before I go on to the next item. So we are going to go ahead and move to public general citizen comment. As a reminder, if you are in the council chambers and you would like to speak to the council on anything city business related, You can fill out a blue card, pass that to Mr. Fratto. That'll come down. I'll share that in the order in which we receive those cards. Then we will move to our online participants, if any of them are wanting to participate in general citizen comments. So we'll go ahead and open general citizen comment. And Mr. Butters, Henry Butters, we've got you on the deck.

Thank you, city council. Sorry about how I felt last week, but no one should be coming, like I explained last week, no one should be coming at anybody. Some public is having a concern, even about the mayor, one of you guys. You guys can always come talk to me, like I have always said. But I want to tell you guys I appreciate you guys on what you guys have done. Brooke, thank you, and Brooke, thank you, and Sharkey, thank you for talking to me about my concerns. I do appreciate that. We need to look at truck parking again and see what we can do on that. I'm just bringing that to your guys' attention like we have talked. On the mayor situation, someone did email me the code. It is what she did. She broke the law. under the county code. But I want to say it this way. I'm going to use this analogy. If I get pulled over in my semi, I have to keep a federal law book, OK? I have to be held accountable for that federal law saying it's authorizing me to drive and be safe. If I have a violation, it's me that gets the ticket and the company. It goes on both of our CSA schoolers, okay? If someone gets like the situation with that mayor, I feel like she, it got swept under the rug. There you go. How I have been told on some other stuff. But I felt like the county swept it underneath the rug. They only investigate it for one day and swept it underneath the rug. That's not right. I feel like how the mayor came at me was the wrong way. If she would have came and talked to me and said, hey, I want to talk to you in a nice way about this. What is your concerns? I would have been a lot more. Calmer. There you go. But if you come yelling at me, that's not right. Like even the police chief. Hey, Henry, can I talk to you on this concern? I don't think this is right. Can we talk about it? He actually came and talked to me on something I accidentally said wrong. And we even worked it out and said, okay, that was my mistake. But when you come at someone just gun-hoed, You don't need to do that from the public's point of view. That's my concern. And thank you guys for all you guys do.

Thank you. Do we have any other blue cards? OK. Then we will move it to our online participants, please.

Thank you Madam Chair. If you are joining us virtually this evening and you'd like to comment on any city business now's the time. Go ahead click the raise hand button on your screen. I'll call your name in the order in which you raised your hand and you'll have three minutes to comment. Madam Chair we do have Dave Eagland online ready to speak. Dave I'm going to allow you to begin speaking. Please remember to unmute yourself and you'll have three minutes.

Good evening, everybody. This is Dave Egland. I live in Community 12, District 4, so right below 10th East, between 106th and 110th. And two things I wanted to comment on. One is the meeting last week that was done over at Alta High for the 110th and 10th East intersection. Just wanted to thank council members that were there and the mayor. and just tell you that I went in with guns blazing about. I shouldn't say it that way, but ready to. I gave them a hard time, I should say, because I thought a roundabout was a stupid idea. And it was a wonderful experience to talk to them all. And I came away thinking that it was the best idea out of all of them. A couple of them won that accident. and the death of that gentleman would have happened on that side of the street if there was a roundabout and many other things. So I just wanted to thank for having that. And I left changed in my idea. The other thing I wanted to mention about is the wonderful citizens we have here in Sandy with the Thursday rain. Savannah Drive is just below my house in the neighborhood, and we had four major problems with flooding and a fire truck came through, made sure nobody was, you know, everybody was okay and there wasn't any life threatening situations and then they went on to others and but a bunch of neighbors came out we were bailing and helping and Running pumps from house to house 15 total were damaged Slight damage before we were working on the work really a lot. So Just great people here. I appreciate you caring about us and listening to us and Helping us to have build sandy make it greater and a better place to live And so thank you for your efforts and good evening

Madam Chair, next up is Craig Ulrich. Craig, I'm going to allow you to begin speaking. Please remember to unmute yourself, and you'll have three minutes.

Thank you for that. I would like to personally thank the council for all the difficult work that they do. It goes without saying that there are many, many difficult items to have to consider and I applaud the entire council for taking the time to thoroughly discuss and review everything that you do. So thank you, thank you, thank you for that. And I'd also like, since Mr. Cupp is there in the chamber, I'd personally like to thank him for addressing the issue that I brought to his attention about a speed sign on 13th East and 112th South that was almost totally covered by limbs from a tree and within three days after I sent an email to him, that was taken care of. Also, when you discussed the roundabout there by Alta High School on 110 South, I'm just surprised that the very last presentation, the last screenshot that you have is a typical roundabout, but I'm surprised that you haven't got an actual layout of how that would look because it was a drunk driver that caused that problem, not the road. And I'm just surprised that if we do a roundabout that there isn't a mock-up and a sample of an actual layout of how that particular intersection would look with a roundabout because you've got vacant land on the northwest and on the northeast you've got a catch basin. So somehow you're going to have to acquire more land for a roundabout to make it worthwhile. Thank you.

Madam chair I don't see any other hands raised at this time.

I don't either. So we will go ahead and close public general citizen comment and move to our next item. It is also an information item and is a presentation on the intersection that we just heard a little public comment on. So moving into the intersection study presentation please. Thank you.

All right. So in response to the fatality back in January, the city hired a consulting firm to do a study of this intersection to determine what the best improvement would be to this intersection to increase safety. And so that study is going. largely complete. As was mentioned, we had a public meeting on that last week, and I'm just going to present the results of that study. My apologies.

Usually I have Tim Gibson here who reminds me to turn the timer off, and he's not here.

All right, so the study looked at a number of different factors listed here, with safety really kind of being the primary driver. So beginning just general existing condition information, let's see, something interesting. So they went out and they did some data collection in March and determined the peak hours for traffic, counted the number of pedestrians crossing the street. which you're all seeing here. The busiest time of day was found to be right after school, as far as peak hour, that 2.30 to 3.30, with approximately 120 pedestrians or 120 crossings of the roads there. The AM had slightly, had about 130 crossings of the roads there. And then not super surprisingly, I don't think, is in the PM, kind of the standard PM rush hour, that 430 to 530, only five pedestrians crossing during that hour. So clearly, the vast majority of the pedestrian crossings are associated with the school. Looked at the number of crashes out there, average of about three and a half crashes per year over the last six years or so. That fatality is actually the only severe crash that's been out there in that time. And then over half of those crashes are the type that could be corrected by either a traffic signal or roundabout, mainly the angle crashes. And really on the safety side, there's a desire to make this more safe. And this safe system approach is a newer philosophy that the feds have been going towards. where it really is getting to making it safe for all users, trying to mitigate errors, reduce conflicts, reduce speeds. And so this is kind of comparing how it's been done in the past and really how this safe system approach works. As I said, focusing on reducing the serious and fatal crashes, allowing for mistakes, reducing the speeds and whatnot. So really, these are kind of the key things that were considered in this analysis, or where there's real valid comparisons between the different intersection types on these reducing conflict points, reducing speeds, and whatnot, as it says there. So here, comparing a standard intersection, which would apply to both an all-way stop or a four-way stop and a roundabout, you can see the intersection has got 32 vehicle conflict points, 24 pedestrian conflict points. with a lot of the intersection conflict points located in the middle where you often have higher speed crashes there. So you've got somebody making a left and someone's blowing through, coming straight through, and you can get some high speed collisions that way. Or someone heading north, someone heading east at the same time. People disregard the traffic control. A lot of more opportunity for some of those higher speed types of collisions. On the roundabout there on the right, there's eight vehicle conflict points. And those are going to be lower speed collisions, more fender bender in nature, where you'll get, you know, maybe the car doesn't yield to the vehicle in the roundabout and they run into each other. Those are the most common types of crashes in a roundabout. And then fewer pedestrian conflict points as well. And we'll get into this a little bit more. At the pedestrian conflict points, vehicles are only approaching from one direction at each conflict point, so they know exactly where to look for a car. Versus the pedestrian access points in the intersection, a car could be coming from a right turn, a left turn, or straight through, so they're going to be hit on a swivel looking around at where they're all coming from. A good example here of how the roundabout helps on a safe system approach in reducing those conflict points. They did essentially a cost analysis based on crash data where they applied what are called crash modification factors, which are basically based on on nationwide research, different types of intersections affect safety differently. So they have these factors. Will they reduce or increase the number of crashes based on the type of modification? There's five different types of crashes, severity crash ratings that are used, ranging from just property damage only up to a fatal crash. And costs are assigned to each of those types of crashes. And so using that, they were able to basically calculate a societal cost associated with each of the intersection types. And so here they're presenting over a 20-year time span what the cost, the safety cost would be for each of the intersection types. And you can see that the roundabout is by far the lowest at about 2.6 million, traffic signal the highest at 10.8. And here we've got that delta, so traffic signal a little worse than An always stop in the roundabout is substantially better than an always stop. And a lot of that is because the roundabout is effective at reducing those severe crashes. The more severe the crash, the higher the cost associated with that crash. So if you can remove those high costs, high dollar, high severity crashes, that cost part of it really bears that benefit out. They also looked at a traffic signal warrant just to see whether a signal is actually warranted here. And these are all the different, there's a number of different warrants that are described in the manual uniform traffic control devices there. So we looked at these different warrants and found that it did not meet a single one of the warrants. So none of the criteria that you would look for to determine whether to put in a traffic signal are met in this location. They also looked at traffic operations to see how well they would work just from a vehicle delay standpoint. And they also looked at emissions comparison, which is closely tied to vehicle delay. And so in this case, we've got level of service A for the roundabout under all three of the peak hours and the other two A's and B's. So they all work well from a traffic standpoint, just the roundabout works a little bit better. And then that's borne out with the emissions analysis as well, where the roundabout has got 37% less emissions than the always stop. The traffic signal is at 12% less than the always stop. And that's due to the free-flowing nature of the roundabout where every vehicle is not required to come to a stop. If you come into the roundabout, there's nobody on your left coming through the circle, circulating in the roundabout. You can just proceed right in without having to stop. So that free-flow nature of it is where we get that both the vehicle delay and the emissions benefits here. So as they're each compared, they're going to talk about benefits and disadvantages for each of them. They always stop, low cost, familiar. um we've already had a fatality there it doesn't they're not designed to to reduce speeds so it's easy for people to not slow down through their traffic signal very similar easily recognized Signal does establish a clearer priority for whose turn it is to go than we have it always stop. There are higher maintenance costs. You've got the angle crashes. And again, it's not really good at slowing down vehicles, if anything. You'll get vehicles speeding up to make it through on the yellow. And then the roundabout, it's got the fewest conflict points. low speed, which reduces crash severity. The disadvantages are the high cost associated with them. So this is kind of the qualitative figure showing for different factors how they felt each of them compared. You can see the roundabout. has by far the most of the green dots on the crash severity, vehicle safety, pedestrian safety. Based on that, the consultant recommended a roundabout at this location. We've got the large safety benefit. We've got less delay, fewer vehicle emissions. The intersection doesn't actually even need a traffic signal warrant. And then there is a history of roundabouts near schools that have been well received and have been very successful. And then I didn't really get into this, but this was really kind of a critical part of the overall study is we had a team to get put together of city staff. the mayor, city council members, planning commissioners, other concerned citizens all involved in this team where the consultant we met together several times and for one of those meetings we went on a tour and this was invaluable and so I would suggest anyone with concerns about roundabouts in general to do your own tour. But in this tour, we went to the intersection of 9400 South and Sandy Parkway 500 West. traffic signalized intersection. It's basically the same size as what a traffic signal would be here at this location. And we just had invited, we all walked across the street and just said, all right, you know, how do you feel? And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, you're kind of looking around all the different directions to see where traffic's coming from. So they all did that. We went to a roundabout down in Draper, a pretty standard issue roundabout that you could find hundreds of throughout Utah. And that felt good. People liked that quite a bit. We had 15 of us walk across the crosswalk at a time. Ended up with a pretty good sized queue of cars all backed up waiting for us to get through the roundabout. And we were pleased to see that as we After we left the crosswalk, it didn't take more than 20 seconds or so before the queue cleared right out. And then we went to this roundabout here on the screen at Brighton High School, which I consider to be the gold standard as far as pedestrian amenities at at a roundabout. And so this figure here highlights some of the amenities that this roundabout has that we would propose to basically copy every one of these for that 110th South, 10th East location. So pedestrian lighting, lights on either side of the roads, the splitter islands to deflect the traffic to get them to slow down. One of the primary goals in a roundabout design is there's no straight paths. You don't want anyone to be able to drive straight through a roundabout. You have to slow them down so that they drive at a reasonable speed. So not a lot of straight lines in a roundabout. Pedestrian fencing, valuable for corralling people to the appropriate crossing location so that they're not just running around willy-nilly. High visibility of the center island. They had pedestrian Z-crossings with big center islands where The pedestrian has to turn to face the oncoming traffic as they navigate that, similar to what UTA has at all the tracks, crossings in the city. If you're on the sidewalk, you kind of have to go through a little Z pattern to make it through just so that you have to look towards the oncoming trains. Similar idea here. And then they have the RFP, the flashing beacons on each of the each of the crossings as well. So these are all amenities that we would propose for this recommended roundabout at 110th, 10th East. We do have a nice rendering for it, but I wasn't thinking when I was finalizing this presentation. I didn't put it in and realized after the fact that I wish I had. I know many of you were at the public meeting and saw that. There's a nice rendering showing that. where we are thinking that we would likely push it to the north so that we would minimize property impacts to the house on the southwest corner to the high school. The northeast corner is owned by the city, so there would be essentially one property owner that we would have to deal with on that northwest corner. So yeah, that's the study, the recommendation, and happy to take any questions.

Thank you so much. Council members, questions?

Okay. Ms. Stroud. I'm trying to go back to the slide to it where you had that comparison of, you know, like a fully signalized intersection and then for the roundabouts, so alternative comparison where they always stop, traffic signal on the roundabout. I'm just curious with the cyclist safety. So that seemed, on the roundabout, that was the only one that was yellow. Is it because they're not quite a vehicle, but they're also not quite a pedestrian? What is making that one yellow versus having just full green column there.

Yeah, I think that is the case. There can be some uncertainty. Typically, what the idea would be here, there's typically roundabouts handle pedestrians in two different ways. One, they can just remain in the traffic flow as a vehicle and just drive through. They're advised not to ride on the shoulder, just go right in the middle of the lane and just be a circulating vehicle. At the low speeds, a bicycle's not a whole lot slower than any motorized vehicle through there. So that's one option. The other option, and so that would be more the option for your more familiar or comfortable bicycle riders. Another option that you'll see is essentially a ramp that goes from the bicycle lane onto the sidewalk and you go to a wider sidewalk where essentially you're bringing the bike lane onto the sidewalk where they can use the sidewalk and cross at the crosswalk. In a situation like this with the Z crossings, they would possibly have to dismount and walk across, which would be preferable anyway. But that's the route that could be taken by your less familiar or your less comfortable cyclists. And that right and roundabout that we were looking at has that on the east and west legs. They don't have that on the five-leg intersection. They don't have it on all the legs, but they have it on at least three of the legs, that option. So I think we would do something similar to that.

Would we do that on all of them? I'm just thinking we have the elementary school down the street. You've got Alta High School. And with all of the e-bikes, so not even just the regular pedal bikes, that we probably have a fair amount of kids, young adults. How would we be able to design that to make sure that we're minimizing potential injury or accidents from people that are not using a vehicle or aren't walking. So the cyclist, e-bike.

Yeah. And so I think that gets to why there is the yellow rather than the green. Because particularly if you've got the cyclist coming up onto the sidewalk, ideally they would walk it all the way through. But they probably wouldn't. And so you could get some intermingling there of cyclists and pedestrians.

And is that accident part of it? So the vehicles, because they're just not seeing the cyclists and they're trying to exit out and then crashing?

No, it's not really. It's more of a pedestrian-cyclist conflict, not a vehicle-cyclist conflict. I guess a vehicle cyclist would be when the cyclist stays in like a vehicle and they're circulating through the roundabout. then there'd be vehicles in there as well. And you'd want to make, you know, you'd hope that the vehicles would see the cyclist and yield to the cyclist. But that might not always happen. So those are kind of the issues that would drive that to not be the green.

Thank you. I just have one question. I feel like you've been very thorough in both the analysis and the presentation. The one slide when you were doing benefits and advantages, disadvantages, comparison across the three, obviously the one that you indicated with the roundabout is cost. But have you served on this intersection team for which I'm so grateful for continuous dialogue and all that has happened with that and the public engagement with members of the public on that team. But throughout that discussion, there was conversation about cost and investment and grant funding, et cetera. And so I would love just to, if that's something that can be shared at this point in what you are communicating about, is how we are funding, should we move forward with the roundabout, and we've indicated the cost is more significant, what is our, you get to answer the cost question again.

I'd love to. Ryan Kump, Public Works Director. Yeah, so this whole study comes at an opportune time in that we had previously internally looked at this intersection knowing that we wanted to make safety improvements prior to the incidents earlier this year. We, as an internal engineering team, had managed to secure a WFRC grant to put in a roundabout, but that was scheduled for five years out. I'm forgetting the exact cost, but it's in the ballpark of, what was it, three? about three million dollars and the reason it's so expensive is because in order to completely rebuild an intersection you gotta go all the way down to the dirt and redo all of your grading redo all of your drainage it's basically reconstructing the road from the ground up in order to redesigned the entire layout. And they take a much more substantial footprint compared to a standard traffic intersection signal. So there's a little bit of land acquisition cost. We'll be into the city detention pond, and so that would have to be revised. All around, you're looking at seven-figure projects. Knowing that that's a tall order for the city, we were able to secure the WFRC grant. The city has an approximately 7% match on that money, which is about $300,000. After the incident earlier this year, we approached the WFRC on if we wanted to move forward with the roundabout, would they be available to advance fund it? And they've agreed that they would be able to do that for us. So should the city decide to proceed with the roundabout, with the $300,000 match, we can proceed with design and acquisition this coming year and break ground on a project the following year. So one year for design and acquisition, one year for construction, have a functional roundabout two years from now would be a goal. Should the city decide not to move forward with the roundabout but instead leave it as status quo or even look at the traffic signal again, a signal by itself could be purchased for about $300,000. Once again, about the same cost to the city. But with this grant already on the table, it really gives us an opportunity to take the biggest negative of a roundabout cost and still be able to move forward with all the other positives.

And just I thought of one other question. Thank you for that. Thinking of your, oh, I wish I had put the actual model for this intersection in the packet. And I was at the open house, and I agree. It was just a really great process. I think I have a picture of that. But anyway, but thinking about that, Just for clarification's sake, you mentioned the Draper roundabout. Sorry, in the South, we call it a traffic circle. So every time I go to say it, I want to say traffic circle. And I'm like, it's not. Here, it's a roundabout. Anyway, so that is a two lane. And one of the questions that came up at the open house a few times, and so the model, the potential design really helped to clarify that. is this is in fact a single, which is also Brighton's, like you showed us that. But anything you want to add to just clarify to the public that this is not like the Draper one where there are like two lanes. This is a true single lane. Back to your point about footprint. I think that's an important clarification. Could you add some additional insight there?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this would be a single-lane roundabout. And when I mentioned in our field trip we went to a roundabout in Draper, I probably should have been more clear because it wasn't the one on 13th East. But I know that's kind of the one everyone, when they think of a Draper roundabout, that's the one they all think of. It was like on 3rd East. It was a smaller single-lane roundabout. But yeah, those... The multi-lane roundabouts are much more complicated. There's a lot more happening. And so those are more complicated, more tricky, probably not what we'd want to do for our first roundabout in the city. So yeah, it would be a single-lane roundabout, basically as straightforward from just a purely operational standpoint as you could wish for at a roundabout.

Sorry, I remembered one other question. I'm thinking back to the open house of the questions people ask me, and I want to convey them here so that the larger body can hear it. Another question that was asked, which again, I know it's displayed in the model, but in the Brighton version of the roundabout, it's not even a circle. The oval that's in the middle is very low to the ground. big structures and bushes and et cetera, which came up again because people were comparing it to the Draper one that I just mentioned that is two and big walls. And so the question came up, will people be able to see to the other side of the roundabout, be able to see pedestrian traffic even on the other side? So I would love to hear you address that as well.

While firm designs obviously haven't even begun, the intent would be for this one to be visible through all directions. Now, obviously, different Different communities and different groups have different ideas. Salt Lake, they have a piece of art in a roundabout, and Draper, they have massive landscaping. But from the engineering perspective, we would like to start from the starting point that it's clear line visibility, and then how the treatment of the center of that roundabout would be landscaped or hardscaped or treated would be open-ended for a future discussion.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Appreciate your patience as I kept remembering additional ones. All right. Last check with everyone else. We good. OK. Thank you so much both of you for that presentation. All right. So that does bring us we've completed our information items. We're going to move to the next item which is our consent calendar covering items 3 and 4.

Motion to approve the consent calendar.

Second. OK, we have a motion and a second. With this, we can just take a voice vote. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed, say no. OK, seeing none, we are good with that item. And that actually concludes our agenda for this evening, aside from standing reports. So we are going to move into that, starting with Mr. Fratto.

Thank you Madam Chair. I'll be brief tonight but I want to remind you all that next Tuesday it's a little bit of not a standard meeting. We have our youth council and youth court installation next week. So dinner is going to start a little bit early. If you're able to make it a little early that'd be fantastic. Our guests will be coming at about 4 o'clock. I'd say, you know, if you could show up at 4.15, that would be great, if at all possible, so that everyone's kind of through. You can grab some food quickly and then go sit down and have some conversations with the Youth Council and Youth Court members. And then the plan is to do photographs starting at about a quarter to five. And then after that we'll jump into the installation at our normal meeting time of 515 and we'll be done with that by 615. And that'll be the end of the meeting. So if you have any questions let Chris know she's happy to answer those for you. But just a reminder try to come a little bit early if you can so that you can make it to the dinner which will be upstairs in the multipurpose room. And then the other thing is you've all noticed that, where did, oh, there's Matt right there. I was like, where did he go? So Matt Perry is our new communications director. He started yesterday. So this is day two. And Madam Chair, if you're okay, I would just like Matt to take one, two minutes, introduce himself. And if you guys have any questions for him, feel free to. or to ask them, and then we've set up kind of one-on-ones with most of you. If you haven't set up a one-on-one with us yet, we'd love to get one set up so that you can meet Matt and kind of let him know some of your communications priorities. That'd be fantastic. Anyways, with your permission, Matt, I'm sure I'll turn it over to Matt.

All right. Hello, everybody. There you go. Thank you. Hello, everyone, council members. It's wonderful to meet you all here. I am so excited to be serving as your communications director. I am about 15 years into my career in communications. I worked with Stanford University, and their research are getting insights out to the general public at the very cutting edge of their fields. More recently, I've worked with Intermountain Health and their charity foundation, as well as Primary Children's Hospital. Here in Sandy, one of my wonderful favorite projects has been the Festival of Trees, where we've just had an amazing outpouring of support for the Children's Hospital of the Kids, this beautiful tradition going back decades. I am so excited to be working now with the city, to be working with you all and sharing your priorities and connecting you even more closely with your constituents here. I look forward to getting to know all of you better, and thank you for this opportunity.

Thank you. If you'll hang tight, we might have just quick questions. No, no, no. We're excited to welcome you. Side note, my son-in-law and daughter lived at Stanford. And yes, yes, he graduated from Stanford Law, and now he's doing other things. So I've been able to visit that campus. It's a beautiful campus. Welcome. Thank you.

And Madam Chair I'll just add we've we've I've been running Matt Raggett I feel like we've been meeting with all kinds of people. I'll be astonished if he remembers anyone's name at all by the end of the week. But he's been we're really excited to have him on our team. It was a long process to recruit somebody but it was worth the wait. He's fitting in really great and I just want to express some appreciation to the administration as well for how welcoming everybody has been. We've met with quite a few department heads so far and everybody has been fantastic and so I just wanted to express some appreciation for that and I will end my report there.

Thank you and we'll make our way to Sharkey.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So this week, it was very fun and very interesting to meet with the consultants that we've hired in the city for economic development. I was able to meet with council members D'Souza and Nickel, and it was interesting for us to share our visions and our desires of how to spur economic development and where that maybe could happen. So we got a chance to talk to each other about our goals and visions and also talk to the consultants about that too. So that was really gratifying. I hope all of you guys have taken the opportunity to do that because I found it very helpful. I was able to attend the Pink Box grand opening. I don't think anyone would have missed me if I wasn't there because there were like a thousand people there. But yeah, it was really very busy and it was nice to finally welcome Pink Box into our community and fill that space that's been empty for a little while. And I am looking forward to the RSL game tomorrow night with WFRC. And I'm looking forward to spending the evening with them and meeting with them. And that's it for now. Thank you.

Okay. Cindy hit two of them, which were great, the consultants from Economic Development. So thank you for the opportunity. We had to meet with them. And then Paintbox, welcome to Sandy. It was... a thing, a huge, amazing thing. And the donuts were really good. Also, last week there was a historic committee meeting. We received a very informative presentation on the historic mining railroad in Sandy. It was pretty cool. And then also an Arts Guild meeting. Frozen Jr. ended on Saturday. Or Frozen? Frozen Jr.? Which one was it? It was just Frozen. Thank you. And it was very well attended. They even added an extra show and it sold out. So they did a great job there. And they started working on their fall show, which is Tuck Everlasting, which will happen in October. So that's exciting. And I just wanted to express my condolences to Merle, our Fearless Arts Guild leader, on the passing of his wife. And also congratulations, Canyon School District started school this week, so welcome back. I'm sure everyone's glad their kids went back to school. Then last Friday night, we hosted the South Valley Chamber of Commerce Women in Business group at the Royals game, and it was a really neat experience to get together with women who are working their guts out in all different forms of business in Sandy and around neighboring areas that are bringing in a lot of economic opportunities to our city, which was amazing. And then last thing is the very last Health Center Theater cultural celebration event is this Monday. It's coming Monday. And I would tell you the name of the people, but it would not be right. And so I'll tell you what they are instead. They're a traditional Mexican and Aztec dance group, and they are really neat. And so that will be the finale at 6 o'clock Monday at the Hell Center Theater.

Thank you. I'll just be very brief. I want to thank you, Councilwoman Christensen, for stepping into Arts Guild. That was something I was continuing to have conflicts with, and I was not able to attend those, and I wanted to make sure that the arts were represented. So I appreciate you stepping into that. All right. That's all I have.

Ms. Trout. think other than you know meeting with the economic development and yes that was very informative and and historic committee and they're excited getting you know looking forward to the Heritage Festival that's coming up so you know that'll be be fun in the next month and then also wanted to thank a chief for meeting and following up with an animal control, a couple of questions from a resident and the lady who's also been doing all of our videos. Very informative, but I think Captain Arnold as well, giving a lot of detail. and being able to address just some things like we didn't have voicemail down at the shelter. So working on that. Little things that kind of have been under the radar, but working on getting that addressed. So appreciate that. And super excited about Pink Box as well. Wasn't able to attend, but anybody that can take some sugar and some eggs and make this heavenly delight, welcome that business. So wish them best of luck. Looking forward to it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. We've got a couple items tonight. One is we were asked to provide some information on the flooding event from last Thursday night. So, Chair, with your permission, we'll turn some time over to Richard Benham, our city engineer, to give you an update.

Good evening. Thank you for this time. Unfortunately, this is a bad thing and sort of that, uh, let's see, we're gonna share my screen here. Perfect. Um, yes. Uh, anyone that was anywhere near Sandy on August the 13th, uh, witnessed and experienced a pretty heavy storm. Um, and, um, I have some information about the storm event, um, and some brief information about where we know where flooding occurred and from that standpoint just basically some data about that event and where we're headed with that. The first thing I have is some slides that illustrate what happened. These are five minute apart radar As the storm moves through the city the obviously the red is extremely intense storms Rain as it fell at a rate Exceeding four to six inches per hour. That was the raid in range six inches But the rate it was falling over that short time period This is about Right at seven o'clock and when the main, you know, the really intense storm happened, and this sat over Sandy for about, excuse me, for about 10 to 15 minutes. And this is an intensity that exceeded a 100-year event in a very tight area, and some areas approaching what we would consider a 200-year event. interval storm in a very small area through the city, but widespread throughout the city with very intense rain. I'm just going to go on through. As you can see how the storm moves out, it continued to rain. We have rain gauges that showed anywhere from an inch and a half to over two inches of rain in that short period of time. And I have one more slide here at the end as you see the storm continue to move through the area up until about nine o'clock. This is a compilation of all of those radar shots that shows in the red areas we exceeded, we approached a 200 year storm event. So far exceeded the design capacity of infrastructure in that area. As a reminder, the pipes, the inlets in the streets are designed to carry a 10-year storm event. The roadway and conveying the storm away from structures, we designed for a 100-year event. That doesn't mean everything in the city is up to that standard. That's the current standard. As we go through and we make repairs and improvements, that's the goal that we have for the system and that's kind of an industry standard. So this rain gauge is from actually a previous council member, previous parks and rec director. I think we all know who I'm talking about when I say those two things, right? He provided this to us. that, as you can see at his residence, is just over two inches in about 50 minutes with a peak rate of 4.8 inches an hour. And on the chart, that puts us between 100 year and approaching a 200 year event. This is also a rain gauge up at the treatment plant, the Little Cotland treatment plant at the mouth of the canyon. Smaller intensity, but still over a 50-year event up there. The storms seem to subside a little bit as it approached the mouth of the canyon. This is... a dashboard that our GIS staff has put together and we're feeding the information that we're receiving about flooding, about manhole covers that were displaced. We had a very large amount of manhole covers exceeding 100 manhole covers in the city that tells us that were displaced, that the capacity of the pipe was exceeded and then it popped the manhole cover. It's obviously a very bad safety. It's a safety hazard on the road and you can't put the manhole cover back on until the water subsides and you can get the cover. It's a heavy, round structure that you're trying to get back on. As you can see, this is just a sample. This has been updated throughout the day and will continue to update as we look at the problems. This map, this is an exhibit you can find on the website of two current projects. At Tramway, we've had, flooding in the past there multiple times we've made improvements at tramway where we've added some inlets we've connected those inlets to an overflow pipe that makes its way to 9400 south that's phase one on tramway and this event there was we understand we received information that one house was flooded and prior storms last year and several years back we've had multiple houses flood on that that house at that location but as so the improvements helped but they still were overwhelmed and the downsloping driveway caused flooding in a house we believe in the in the area of the city where the the intensity of the storm was the greatest any down slipping driveway house that potentially had flooding. So there was a large area of the city where houses were flooding or received water, at least in their garage. Raintree is another problem area that's planned to make improvements next summer. And we're hoping to get to that. And we've identified many other places. Savannah Drive is a location off of Seventh East but there were several houses that flooded, as was mentioned in the public comment. We made improvements there a few years ago. Actually, one of our engineers Lives on that street. He had some flooding in his house and has never had flooding there But around the corner we've made improvements those houses did not flood So when we are able to make improvements, we're able to reduce the flight, which is which is good, right? We're spending money and quite a bit of money to make those improvements again, this is just an update of kind of the data that we know about the size of the storm and the plan moving forward as we gather this information, compile projects. There are a lot of projects that were already known issues, but this has obviously brought other places of concern. But I'll be glad to answer questions that you might have.

Any questions, council members? Thank you. Thank you for providing that update for all of the extraordinary effort during almost 200, once every 200 year storm. Thank you for that. Councilwoman Nichol, I completely overlooked your hand. My apologies. Please, please provide your report. No worries.

I just wanted to let you know I attended the Hale Center Cultural Series Monday. And it focused on the Pacific Islands. It was a wonderful performance. And I also got to meet Wednesday the camel. So I will send you guys some photos, and I'll give you the story behind that.

Thank you for that. I believe that's, no, you have another one, okay.

Yeah, just got a couple more. Just to follow up on that, we wanted a big thank you to the residents. There were many residents who were out helping one another. In addition to that, our police, fire, public works, and parks department worked extremely hard that evening through the next day, through the weekend, in order to solve the problems that came up. So a big thank you to them. I also wanted to thank especially police, community development, economic development on the pink box event that was noted a huge event and so having police presence there and helping keep all of those people safe was very helpful. Two other notes. We'll have a swearing-in for our police chief, Jeff Nyberg, August 26th at 5.30 here at City Hall. And I welcome those who would like to attend. And also wanted to mention Holly Marsh, Merle's wife, viewing will be Friday night, funeral on Saturday. So just so you know that. Thank you.

Thank you. I think that concludes our standing report. So we'll take a motion. Move to adjourn.

Second.

All right. We have a motion and a second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. We are adjourned. Thank you to all of you for attending tonight. We appreciate your efforts.