City Council - workshop

Today is July 14th, 2026. And the first item is going to be our agenda packet. Is there anything? I don't see a work session agenda. Or do I? Perfect. Perfect. Clarification of agenda items. Hearing none. We're going to move on to item number two, information pack and discussion, June 18th. June 25th.

Just wanted to flag, this one kind of overlaps, I think, two IPs, June 25 and also June 30. June 25, the Iowa City water rate study, just as a thing for all of us to be aware of the needs that the city has for new infrastructure and how that could impact rates. I saw an article in the newspaper recently about some places in the state seeing doubling rates. I don't think that's at all what this is suggesting, but just a recognition that we do need some continued improvements and that has to get paid for some way. I know that that's going to be probably a budget item in the future for us. So it's a long-term strategy as opposed to a shock to the system. And then the other one, is it okay if I skip to June 30 just because it's this similar issue or do you want to?

You're at June 25th.

I am, yeah. There's one in the 30 about nitrate levels, so another water-related issue, but I can wait for us to come back.

You can go ahead because it's... Yep.

No, I just, again, I know the Public Works has fielded a lot of questions from people about nitrate levels in our water. Everyone's obviously, for good reasons, concerned about that. This is just to let people know that we are always within that federal limit, below that federal limit, and what's the EPA... 10 milligrams per liter requirement and then the the memo does go on to say um what what we do to keep the nitrate levels low but also like at the bottom there isn't sort of options for major major capital improvements if we wanted to invest in new systems which i don't read this as a recommendation to do that yet but i appreciate sort of having a sticker price to understand that if We wanted to do one of the two different kinds of nitrate reduction systems. In addition to the one we're currently doing, it would be in today's dollar $30 million improvements. And not just sticker price, but pros and cons of each. Yes, yes. It dives deeper than just price. Yes, yes. Thank you. But big budget items for us to consider for one of the most important things our city does, which is provide fresh water. Mm-hmm.

One thing that I was also going to bring up, the nitrate level packet item. And correct me if I'm misremembering. There was a lot to read. But when it comes to updating the federal nitrate recommendation, which is 10 parts per million, that was in like in 1974. And I guess I was just curious about potentially in the future hearing about what, you know, I know that federal guidelines are generally the thing to go by rather than a trust me bro source. But there's lots of concern that 10 parts per million is really kind of an outdated number. and somewhere between three, or somewhere around the three parts per million level. That's what I hear a lot from people in agriculture. So I was wondering if, is that something that staff has heard of or looked into, or is there a way that we could maybe look into all of the evidence on the table?

Off the top of my head, I don't know how much review has been done by Ron and his team on that federal standard, but we're happy to get back to you on any research that's been done on that standard.

Because I just feel like hearing from our professionals rather than would be able to ease some of the concerns of people in the public. Yeah.

Is that something the full council wants or you just want individual follow-up on that?

I mean, I think it's generally good information, so. Okay.

I was also going to just highlight the nitrate memo and the water rate study as well. So thanks to my colleagues for that. One thing I just wanted to make sure the public understands is that many people are using home nitrate tests that have kind of the pink and purple color ranges as to the milligrams per liter. And that our water department would be glad to provide folks with, help them order a lab certified test from the Iowa State Hygienic Lab for a more accurate reading. Just because there is some, it can be hard to tell what the, which. Which pink. Which pink. Yeah. Which mall. So look online, contact our water department if that's something you need. Sorry, sorry.

We'll move on to July 2nd. And July 9th. I don't know if they're already here.

I was just going to say that I appreciated the overview about what we plan to do with the city allocated $1 million for affordable housing and appreciated the reasons given.

It's very transparent. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think I was just going to make a comment about that, so I'll just let that be. All right. Anything else? Hearing nothing, we're going to move on to item number three, University of Iowa updates. Come on down. Welcome.

Thank you. How is everyone? Awesome. Mayor Teague, it's good to see you again. Good to see you. Nice to see everybody. Jeff Fruin and I, we work together all the time, but on occasion, we look for opportunities for me to come and present a little bit about the University of Iowa. I think it's been a couple of years. Of course, nothing ever happens on the University of Iowa campus, so that's probably fine. But what I wanted to do as senior vice president and university architect, come and give you a chance to see some of the projects you may be familiar with, but others that we've been working on in our master plan on campus. And I think a fairly exciting both message and story with the projects we have. And before I start, not to carry pom poms, but congratulations, I suppose we share, but congratulations on the CNN Number eight. Oh, yeah. Visits and also on your recent news on the grant for the Burlington Street Bridge. You're excited and we are excited. So thank you with that. I often have opportunities to visit campuses all over the country. And I will say over and over again, first, I know of no. campus that I've ever visited that has the physical connection of its core of the campus to the core of its hosting community downtown and no better town and gown relationship that I've seen anywhere at a university campus. Our partnerships with you are constant and with your team and very appreciated. So thank you. We win together. And so with this, if you'd like, I'll just briefly go through this presentation for you. And generally, what I'm going to be showing you is an update or A summary of projects associated with a master plan, a campus master plan, a 10-year look ahead that we gave to the Board of Regents in 2022. The map is nothing to show you. It encompasses a lot of our physical campus. I'll start at the core of the campus, the origin of our campus, the Pentacrest, of course. And I've got an arrow pointing to McLean Hall, which was built in 1912. And it's arrow to the renowned Frank Gehry, Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories building. McLean Hall hosts our computer science program, mathematics, and others. And as a part of this project, we are actually relocating that program to IADL and making more of McLean available for modernization. It, for all intent and purposes, has not been modernized since it was built in 1912. One of the things that is happening with this project is a unique as a university architect kind of a proud moment for the project. We are actually putting an addition on the building which you can see in this rendering to the left side of the rendering and that actually finishes the original design concept Frank Gehry had for this building. In 1992 it was the first building he had ever designed that took shapes of different shapes of metal, put them together into an assembly for a building, went all over the world with that concept afterwards. But we couldn't afford it at the time he did it. Nobody had built a building like that. There was quite a war in 1991 about whether we would finish his design. And interestingly enough, Frank Gehry passed away this year. And it's not specifically in honor of him, but we are very honored to actually finish that design, which will allow room for computer science to move into the building with the other science programs that exist there. Our next project is also near the core of the campus, our Tippie College of Business. The building you can see in the lower left was built in 1994, the Papa John Business Building. Since that building was built, the Tippie College of Business has more than doubled in the number of students and the number of programs associated with the college. And they are the one college we have that is literally out of space and needing to catch up. in the concept of our addressing that for Tippie, and after a lot of study, we started on a plan that allowed us, in concert with our master plan of rightsizing this campus, and not just building new to build new everywhere we walk, but in this case, to stem that because we are trying to right-size a campus. We're moving the folks out of the building you can see in the center at the bottom, which is Gilmore Hall, 1910 original law building, has several inhabitants. The major one of those is our graduate college. And so we are going back to a recovery from the 2008 flood in one of those buildings that, thanks to FEMA, survived the flood but remained, it still remains mothballed for the last 18 years. and that's the building you see at the top of the screen which is the original 1936 art building we are thrilled to be able to remodel that building renew that building and make it the future home for our graduate college i think i've got you know a little rendering that shows some of how the original gallery will be and is rendered for that college and a couple of other graduate programs And then that will allow us to empty Gilmore Hall and turn Gilmore Hall over to the Tippie College of Business as a renewal project in that building, taking care of deferred maintenance, modernizing the interior for the Tippie College of Business while being careful about the history of the original building. They will garner 45,000 new square feet for the college without us building a new building. What we will do is, as you can see by this rendering, create a connection of Gilmore in the light yellow to a new core for this building. In the lower left, you can see the part of the courtyard of the Tippie College of Business, Papa John Business Building, and the patio above the courtyard is very underutilized. It has been since it was built. In this concept and in this rendering, we are going to build that patio into the building for important both event and student spaces and teaching spaces, but maintain and actually more open up the courtyard to the general public and to the campus. So it modernizes that block for the Tippie College of Business while utilizing existing spaces and historic existing spaces we have. Another building on the east side that is a big and important one for us that has a number of dominoes I'll describe. To the left is the Iowa Memorial Union, originally built in 1925. It was added on to in the decades in the middle of the century and was another one of those buildings that suffered the impacts of the flood. FEMA did not allow us to take care of a building that was very tired with a lot of deferred maintenance at the time because they had to keep pure the federal dollars coming in to fix the flood and not other things. So we actually had to freeze any improvements we'd make to building systems, layouts, and others until a three-year, and Iowa City knows all about this, but a three-year audit period after our final flood recovery project happened. And on September 18th, 2021, we hit that date and started this project on a design perspective. It's a partnership with the students of the University of Iowa where we will modernize not just the systems, but the layout of the building to work as a home, social home and a gathering space for the students at the University of Iowa. The next stage, now we're in construction on that project. We're within six months of finishing the first phase, which will move, and you'll see this later in the presentation, will move student health from the west side of the campus into the student union, which is really where it should be. And then we'll start a second phase, which will run roughly one year. When we finish this project, it'll be a great modernization of that building. But then we look next to it. And as you can see in this presentation, across the street is Halsey Hall, which currently houses right next to the Pentacrest. currently houses our dance department, has for decades, happens to be the worst conditional building we have on campus, was the only building we closed down during the COVID concerns because it doesn't have an air infiltration system that was, we believe, to be appropriate or safe at that time. We were all trying to figure out what to do. It's additionally on a hillside, Jefferson Street Hill, that... precludes it from being ADA compliant. There are elevators you can get up, but then there are certain levels where it's only two or three stairs in different places. It's been a difficult building for us. At the same time, as I show you by this arrow, right next to the art building across the river was another building impacted by the flood. Our original museum of art designed by Max Abramovitz was the first building that brought internationally famous architecture to our campus. We've been, FEMA recovered it. We've been using it for temporary reasons and temporary functions. We have now and are within only a month of finishing a renovation for that building to turn it into the future and a little rendering, as you can see up here, using one of the galleries. as the future home for our dance department. They have seven galleries, or seven dancing studios in Halsey, and there are seven galleries in the original museum, so it fits them really nicely. Takes them right next to the arts building, the new finished art building, as well as theater and Hancher, so it's a really nice fit for dance. At the same time, taking that very tired Halsey Hall, And raising it allows us to fix what we'd call the worst parking ramp in the world, which is the Iowa Memorial Union parking ramp, built in 1962. It had no choice at that time. It was hemmed in between buildings that existed, and it resulted in a helical entrance that many cars today can't make the radius turn on. And unfortunately, it's the first impression visiting students and families have of the University of Iowa, because that's where they park to go to admissions. With the room on that site, we'll be able to and are starting this fall studies on either replacement or expansion and improvement of the ramp. The idea is not to add more parking or traffic there, but to make it flow more effectively for the visitors who would come and use the IMU parking ramp. There's always a slide for athletics. We have a lot of work.

Do you have a question? Yeah, please. So for the parking ramp, you stated that you're going to kind of close it this fall?

No, we're going to start design. Start design. Halsey Hall is scheduled to be raised next summer. So we couldn't do anything before then. And we're actually going to treat them sort of as one program or project together. So it wouldn't be before a year from now and Probably a little after that. Got it. Okay. Great. Thanks. But great warning because it's a good point. It has important parking purposes at the core of the campus. We do fortunately have one further down the street, the north campus parking ramp where our chilled water plant is that will serve, I think, in the interim while this one is improved. When we look at athletics, you see, and they're often covered, a lot of the impactful projects. Carver-Hawkeye Arena, which was built 1983, was our first national design award-winning building when it was opened. We have put its final addition on that building, which is the Goschke Family Wrestling Facility Training Center for our men's wrestling team. the first major conference women's wrestling team in the country, and our Hawkeye Wrestling Club, which is our Olympic and international training venue. So an important project and making great strides because of buildings like that. Out west on our Hawkeye campus, we've added a building there for our gymnastics program. and our Spirit Squad, the two combined. It's the Nagel-Duda, Duda-Nagel facility, husband and wife team funding that project. Mary Lee Nagel was a cheerleader for the Hawkeyes in the 1950s, and they've come back and given generously to make that project a possibility. And then, as I mentioned, Carver Hawkeye Arena. While it was state-of-the-art when it was built, while it's still in many ways a state-of-the-art building, its age was almost immediately felt with the introduction of ADA and access and ultimately having different places for anyone in our community to sit and enjoy those events. It was also before... premium or alternative seating options, clubs and suites and other things when most incorporate that now. And so working with Athletic Director Beth Goetz, we're going to be, we are advancing the design of that project as we go. Be a fully gift funded project and one we're all looking forward to honoring its architecture but modernizing the building from the inside.

And I have air conditioning.

Why, of course. Yeah, it's an interesting question that is also, I don't know about the return on investment on air conditioning. The building was built, and we have always touted it as green before green was green. In 1983, it was built into a ravine and literally a bowl hosting 15,560 fans is not air conditioned. You won't find very many of those. It has worked, but we have seen changes in climate that have made for more fringe season hot days. We hosted two NCAA back-to-back games in women's basketball on a day in March where the temperature was 89 degrees. I don't remember very many marches at 89, but it was that day. Graduation is always a challenge, and it also does limit our ability to program concerts and other things in the arena throughout the year. So that is going to become part of the scope of the project. Thank you, Mayor Teague. We look at UIHC and the Carver College of Medicine at an area of the map there. First, I'll start with two inset photographs. The North Liberty Hospital has been a great success, both in delivery of that project, but also in how it has performed since it was built. It's an orthopedics hospital and has really served the community well. And then, of course, as all of you are aware, when the matters came up with the bankruptcy of Mercy and that drawn out process, ultimately the University of Iowa purchasing and taking, occupying that building. That has also been off to a really great start. Denise Jamison, our VP for Medical Affairs, and Brad Hawes, CEO of the hospital, assured the people who worked there and the people who would visit that that it would remain a different feel than the main hospital, remain a neighborhood feel, a quieter feel. And it has maintained that while we've continued to modernize it. One of the things you should know is we did adopt a building that had not been cared for in those final years. And for instance, we are advancing the project to replace the parking ramp, which is structurally not as an entire building instable, but spalling of concrete, rusting structural members that after careful evaluation, we need to replace it. And so those are some of the modernizations that have to happen on that site, but it has been a successful rebirth of that building for our community. We will continue to work on and have to continue to work with all of the fiscal constraints associated with it on capacity for the hospital. We are the only tertiary, quaternary teaching hospital in this state. We are forced to turn away as many as 3 to 5,000 transfer requests a year, which is tragic. and it's because we are almost completely full all of the time. And capacity and the combination of that and some remaining double bed patient rooms are reasons for us to continue working with the team at UIHC and Brad Hawes on the solutions that will allow us over time to grow capacity. Additionally, because we're a teaching hospital, we don't just hire doctors and surgeons, they teach and they do research. I'm showing you two areas on a landlocked health science campus that are really the spaces available for us to think about future research in cancer or other neurology, other areas. Additionally, where you see number two, the one on the right, those three bar buildings represent potential future buildings on the site that is currently West Lawn, which was the 1919 Nurses Dormitory. My grandmother graduated from nursing in 1942 and lived there. I don't know what room, but the building is really at the end of its conditional life, and it's also very narrow and a small use of that site. We are aiming at options for cancer research in the future. Additionally, as we all know, the shortage is not only in Iowa but throughout the United States with nursing. Just south of those, just to the bottom of those three, is our nursing college, one of the top. public nursing programs in the country. And if there's any way we can produce more nurses for our state, it's going to take more space. So the third, the bottom of those three bars would be something we would aim at as a future expansion for nursing.

Can you talk a little bit more about Box 1? I know over time that has evolved. The addition, there was going to be, I think, three oval towers, and that's changed over time. And my understanding is that... healthcare delivery costs have changed quite a bit and the way you get paid has changed and maybe changed that master plan. And then all at the same time, you guys got mercy.

A lot has been complicated by the last, I mean, as I said, the things that were presented in 2022 came before elements like the Big Beautiful Bill, the healthcare challenges that have been going on nationally, and yes, then our addition of of two hospitals, one we built and that one, and statewide needs in Des Moines, trying to extend a network that helps some of the healthcare deserts better served by our doctors have, a good plan is always ready to change, but finances force the hospital to think about the different ways, some in this hospital, some modernization of this hospital, an additional space, but also remote, I mean, it includes Mercy. in trying to activate more patient beds there and in North Liberty. So it's kind of curious.

Should the community expect Mercy to expand potentially in the future?

Well, what I would say is the site allows for us to expand when finances allow it. Within the hospital's planning, yes, I think they see Mercy as an expandable site. It would primarily be for patient beds. I mean, one of the nice things that we have that we really like about the downtown campus, as we call it, the former Mercy, is that it is allowing for, for instance, mommy-baby births and those. But when we have specialty challenges or premature births, they're in the main hospital. So there are a lot of family medicine advancements, and that kind of thing is going to grow in a hospital that wants to keep that same atmosphere as a neighborhood hospital. hospital, but it has potential on the site to grow. No immediate intentions, but the hospital within their master planning will consider it.

And then just to be clear, the parking garage that you're talking about being replaced is the Mercy Plaza one, not the two-decker thing.

Correct. The one on Van Buren or it faces, it's one of its walls faces, the one that you take the elevated walk across to the hospital. Correct. Yeah. Correct, yeah. It was pieced together like a lot of hospitals are and we're gonna make sense of that and the existing buildings and make them work for the generations in the future, starting with that hospital, with the hospital ramp. And in fact, as you look, you talk about ramp, parking's important. And we have just finished lower picture you see here, just finished the Hawkeye ramp, which is by the arrow, a replacement of hospital ramp one, which is still open. But we're working on winding it down. It's another one of those hospital, another one of those ramps that has increasing structural concerns, mainly just based on age. And so we built that ramp. And as if you happen by that area, you also know we're building another one, which is We're referring to as the arena ramp, which sits between that and the dental science building. About eight months, eight to nine months away from that ramp being finished. Hey, there's a water tower. That's what it used to look like. So the water tower obviously has been replaced and brought up to code standards. The original water tower had been grandfathered in at a million gallons. It is required now to have two, and that's why the different configurations and shapes of the two that you see We are in the process of raising and demolishing that old water tower currently. Half of the bowl is gone today. They're doing the work to control traffic in and around the hospital and the visitors and the patients. They're doing the construction demolition work on the weekends, and so you'll see fits and starts. It'll stay looking like it does right now until this weekend, and then I expect the bowl will be gone by the end of this next weekend. one more building to show you. The health science academic building is one example of a building that is an addition of our space, but related to antiquated spaces. Three nationally ranked programs, physical therapy, our speech and hearing program at Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing, and our Health and Human Physiology, which is the largest program in the College of Liberal Arts and fastest growing in the College of Liberal Arts, are all now going to be under one single roof for the Health Sciences on that site, and they're all but moved in. Two of the units have already moved in, and the third one is moving in ahead of this fall semester, so an exciting addition on that part of the campus. I have one slide on our landscape. We're very proud of what connects the many buildings on our campus. We are a Tree Campus USA university for the last 15 years running. We are now a bee-friendly, as BEE-friendly campus. And we've been an accredited arboretum for the entire campus now for a decade. So as you can see, it's an area of pride for us. In our landscaping, we have three primary improvement priority areas. They include the Pentacrest, that first visitor walk on Cleary Walkway, and then the Iowa River. In just a few sample projects, we are going to be this Next summer, we will be advancing a modernization of the Iowa Memorial Union Bridge, which needs a lot of love and care. We're going to be putting a new sort of gateway wall. It's a safety wall as well because of the difficulty of going down a steep hill to Iowa Avenue, but a way to welcome visitors to the west side of the Pentacrest and the old Capitol. We'll be doing work following the Iowa Memorial Union project to activate more of Hubbard Park adjacent to it and increase the connections between Hubbard Park and the IMU. And then little quaint buildings like the Canoe House or the Lagoon Shelter built in 1939. Rec Services at the university has been diving into paying attention to it, programming the outside, putting some rock climbing walls

uh and and different activity spaces surrounding it to activate the river as we go and the river connects all of us obviously iowa city and um and coralville as well i was curious about um i love driving in iowa city on dubuque street and i think city park is beautiful i love the the nature that's there and then you see hancher which is so impressive and such a great foot forward if you go back a slide The love of our river kind of stops at Iowa Avenue a little bit. Make it go back. That's okay. You can imagine it. I'm just curious, what can the city do, what can the university do to make that oval there connect to Burlington Street as we do this major project on Burlington Street?

Yeah.

Jeff and his team and we are working together on the Burlington Street project. It will make more visible our connections to the river. There's a lot of volunteer tree growth in the area that we're going to be doing this. And there are moments where you really don't see the campus or downtown from there. And I think a lot of that will open up. But we are also doing a number of years ago, we tied our master plans together by the river to show where walks and bike paths fall. from Coralville and North Liberty would connect at the university and then connect through Iowa City. That work is gonna continue to happen when we're doing our river walk work that you can see in the two ovals next to. That is all intended to extend the pleasant walk from City Park and on both sides of the river and southward. I think wherever we have it as a priority, not because there's always, there are some specific projects we're doing, but also as a priority of opportunity for us to work with the City of Iowa City. And when you're going on Riverside Drive, there are elements of it that look very utilitarian, And there are ways for, we can't make things like water tanks disappear, but we can do things to improve the gateway feel of the campus. I think in the vistas, especially upon the completion of that great Burlington Street Bridge project, which is gonna increase and improve an attractive pedestrian and bike way across the river, I think will make everybody happier, but it'll also be more beautiful.

Yeah, I'd love that. I'd love that. I just want to stretch your oval right there. Just keep stretching them. I can stretch it as far as you'd like.

And we work with Iowa City as much as we can to partner on these. In fact, I would say the nod to the river as a priority is our nod to the community. I would argue from some campuses or places I've been, like Providence, Rhode Island. river you could light with a match. And then they turned it into one of the most beautiful settings you can imagine. And they have a theme song for their river in the middle of Providence. And it's scaled like ours. And the entertainment and the events they have down there are remarkable. And we're not very far from each other. We look at our Friday night concert series. Are there opportunities for Iowa City University to move that family environment down to the river on a Saturday? and continue our weekends and make it a fuzzier line. And I think Burlington Street Bridge is gonna help all of that to make a fuzzier line between that river on the university campus and our great downtown. Yeah, so that's that. Any other questions? I wanted to ask a little bit about housing.

And we have a huge housing shortage in Iowa City. We hear about it all the time. And we know that students who are residents of Iowa City are competing for the lower cost apartments with everyone else in Iowa City. One thing I think that makes us unique is that is really just freshmen living in dorms. What is the university's current attitude on that? And is there hope for more housing options for sophomores, juniors, seniors? It seems like we've built a university in a city around not doing that, but... Tell me more about that.

Yeah, it is a demographic difference from us and many of our other peer institutions, and part of it is our direct connection. It has always been, without a requirement, 97% of the freshmen at the University of Iowa live in the residence halls. And the number hovers. Our vice president for student life, Sarah Hansen, could give you more exact numbers, but around 15% do not. as returning students to live in the residence hall system. We are in time encouraging more who are interested to do so, because it takes all kinds. Some people want to jump out to the apartment life. The sad truth is, to get your second year apartment, You have to know who your roommates are by October or November or it's too late. And I've had three freshmen at the University of Iowa. I don't think they know what they're doing in the first three months apart from trying to figure out a completely different world. And then to know your influences and who you should room with, it's a tough task. So having the opportunity for second-year students to return. We do have graduate housing, of course, out on our Hawkeye campus. We are always, we are working on what you're referring to. We have to take care of the first year students from a capacity perspective. We've had some changes in our residence hall populations, quadrangle residence hall used to be on our campus. Didn't survive time that left a real shortcoming for us for the number and at that point we were actually Leasing apartments in town for first-year students. We've now built back with Catlett Hall being built We have the capacity we have the capacity for all the first-year students in somewhere around a thousand which is a larger percentage than we have wanting to come back to our campus at this point. We're not at capacity. The question becomes what to do with buildings, residence halls like Mayflower, which is further off campus, a little bit different design in that it's two small rooms around a kitchenette and a bathroom, a little more apartment-esque. There have been some thoughts about turning it into the returning student residence hall space, but there's some work to do to it. It has a lot of deferred maintenance, and to take that jump, you have to do it. We are looking at other options, but we added two new residence halls in the last decade. Mary Louise Peterson Hall on the west side, Elizabeth Catlett on the east side. Those were the first two residence halls we added to our campus in 47 years. So we had some catching up to do, but housing and dining is an auxiliary unit. bears its own weight and is responsible for stringent bond covenants and bond coverage regulations that don't really allow them to proactively go out and build residence halls and hope that that works. And we do have a balance with Iowa City and Coralville and others on our building residence halls and whether that impacts the market and those in the market. There have been interesting developments of student housing, a lot of them expensive. And, you know, they're obviously they're full or mostly there are students that will pay it or parents that will pay it. But it doesn't attend to most of the students. And so that battle from second year, third year, if you're a second year student want to live on campus, you can live on campus. And you could on the in the third year. It just wouldn't be, you know, you'd be two years senior to those in the halls. And most are on to apartments by that time.

But there's, I guess, more precisely, there's no plans for new dorms or no plans to expand housing for all.

No, we will master plan in the long term to afford... future generations of planners and vice presidents for student life to take actions based on student population. As you've probably heard, we are in what I'd call the first year of this birth dearth or the reduction in 18 year olds in the United States. Birth rate impacts 18 years ago for the next five or six years. How that will impact our university, we're doing very well on making ourselves notable enough in-state and out-of-state to draw. But over that span, all the universities are looking at that with concern. So for me to say I know what our student population will be in seven years, we stride carefully because we have to pay for those residence halls once we build them.

Well, we're supposed to be building 365 units a year in Iowa City, and we have not been making it. So if you guys could help us out, that'd be great. I hear you.

Hearing no other questions, thank you so much for coming.

Absolutely, thank you for having me. All right, and thanks for your service.

Thank you. All right, we are going on to item number four, which is council updates on assigned boards, commissions, and committees.

Economic Development Committee met last week. Was that Wednesday? We met last week. And the discussion was about the arts sort of next steps in the arts endowment fund. And there was, if you look at that packet, you can see projections on how different kinds of investment vehicles would work for us. I specifically asked them to provide us with a standard investment portfolio versus one that's an ESG. So you guys can kind of look at that. And then, do you remember, Councilor Weiland, what else? That was the bulk of that conversation.

That was the bulk of that conversation, yeah. We just asked some updates about the progression on the Arts Alliance and learned that they are now hiring for a director of the Arts Alliance right now.

And it'll be under the umbrella of the downtown district. They're the ones managing that right now. But I think, do we know when the next council decision will be? It was more of an information for us than us giving direction to council.

Yeah, I think we anticipate August. I'm not sure which of your August meetings yet.

So I would say it's not the easiest, most accessible thing to dive into, but the different investment stuff like that maybe I would appreciate. I think we would appreciate some input on how people feel once they look through that and continuing conversation with people that would be involved in the Arts Alliance and that would be affected by the funding. Yeah.

I do know Councilor Sala is on. Can you hear us still?

Yes.

Great. All right.

I don't have anything to report.

All right. Great. Just wanted to mention that joint entities meeting is next Monday, the 20th at 4.30 p.m. Are there any agenda items yet?

They had asked for items by last Friday, which is earlier than usual, and we're supposed to send out the agenda today, and I hadn't seen it when I came in here.

It did come out right as this meeting started. Okay. There is a meeting and there is an agenda. There is a meeting and an agenda. It looks like... Some conversation about data centers probably related to the moratorium discussion at the county. And then an item called joint entities meeting housekeeping. So I'll let you interpret that one because I have no clue what that is. Bring them up. And where is that meeting? That is in conference room 203 at the Health and Human Services building for the county. Thank you.

Since last we met as a council, the Jack board met and we learned that work has been progressing with our consultant to work on a new CAD, a computer assisted dispatch system to hopefully or soon we'll replace the very outdated current system And, of course, our fire and police have been part of that process and report back that so far so good and things look promising for a much more efficient and flexible system. So that will probably take about two years before that's all done, but progress is being made.

All right.

Is there a meeting?

The meeting that next for the joint entities meeting is at 4 30 p.m Yeah, I'm not gonna be there do I have to assign somebody to represent me or no need no you don't Okay, yep, but thanks for that. Yeah, good. Good question All right If nothing more we are adjourned and we'll be back at 6 p.m. For our formal meeting