City Council - Regular Meeting

Bye. Hi, how are you?

I'm well. How are you, Lisa?

Why did you call me here? What's that? You called me here this morning.

Yeah.

All right. I'll do it. Okay. All right welcome everybody I'm going to call the Moab City Council meeting to order on June 23rd 2026 at 603 604 p.m. and we'll start with the pledge and Jason if you could lead us in the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag United States of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God, in the visible, with liberty and justice for all. Thanks, Jason.

Good job, Jason. Thanks.

We have Miles on Zoom with us tonight. He was not able to be in person, so he is here, but not sitting in his chair. Hello. Hello. We'll start with after the pledge, we have public comments. And it looks like Pete, did you fill out a form? Okay. No. We know you by now.

My name is Pete Gross. First, I want to have two very quick comments. First, Colin had mentioned at the last meeting about every time we have a new paving job, it's like cyclists end up kind of being penalized, not necessarily and certainly not intentionally, but like where the asphalt and the gutter of the curb join that forms a seam. So like one example would be there's an island across from the ball field of the high school and it narrows the lanes and then also increasingly narrow. You've got, it's kind of scary if you try to hug the line and stay on the asphalt, not in the gut, in the concrete there, then you're pretty close. Like it's supposed to be a three feet, you know, car's supposed to keep a minimum of three feet and it's pretty tough for them to do it in that space. Anyway, I've had a couple of like, well, that just doesn't feel comfortable. But anyway, just, just a point I wanted to make one to, you know, And then another thing was I mentioned at the beginning of the last meeting when I spoke that I've been attending some other meetings in Grand County. And this one is just such a much more nice atmosphere, almost like I might even describe it as a quiet riot. Anyway, that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

If you need to elaborate, Jason might know more about it.

Thank you, Pete. Anybody else would like to make a public comment tonight? All right, we'll close that part of the meeting and move on to our workshop. And tonight we're going to have Val and Alexi workshop us with the water conservation plan and ask any questions you might have on that. Getting pretty scary out there. Yeah, it is.

Thanks for watching!

Hello, everybody. It's my first time doing a full-on presentation in the City Council. Glad to be here. I'm Val. We're going to be going over to the Water Conservation Land. We'll be going through a bunch of different Data points that we've been crunching, how we've been doing as far as water conservation is going, what we've been doing for water conservation. And then we've prepared some stuff for you all to go over. We've got some stuff that we can do in the immediate. We got some stuff we're looking at that we can do over the next couple of years. And yeah, excited to get into it. So what is the water conservation plan? Why are we doing this? Why are we going to do this whole thing? Obviously, there's a drought right now. But more so that that is just timely with a state mandated every five years. The state has us prepare this big water conservation plan to just update them on our progress towards a 20% reduction from 2015 numbers. You can see on this map here that our regional goal down in the bottom right there is going from 333 gallons per capita per day down to 267 gallons per capita per day. So we have to report on our progress with that. We also have to report on a couple other things, including system profile and supply, billing, system water loss, use and measurement, and our conservation practices, which we're going to get more into today. It requires the report on this in order to receive water development funding. So the timeline for this, we have to submit a draft on July 15th. So I've been busy, busy, busy getting it all together. Got some numbers to share with you today to see how it's going so far. In August, we'll get some feedback from the state. September, we'll implement that feedback. Then we'll get feedback from the public. We're required to have a public hearing, official public hearing in October. So we'll be back here. We'll be back here again in November to present to you all on our final plan. And then we'll be submitting the plan. The plan is just due at midnight on New Year's Eve. So we will be submitting by the end of the year. So this is what we're looking at. The state uses gallons per capita per day. So that's essentially we take the population into effect with it. And this is essentially looking at year over year how many gallons of water each resident of Moab is using on a daily basis. You can see to clarify some of these lines here.

So the blue is the actual gallons per capita per day that we're using.

The dashed line is the trajectory. So if you were to kind of like average all that together, we are on a trajectory to keep shooting way down. And the dashed red line is that goal that the state wants us to hit. The good news is, if you look at here, the last time that we did a water conservation plan was in 2020. And our GPCD then was 277 GPCD. And we brought that down to 269 GPCD. So over the course of the past five years, we've decreased that GPCD by about eight. And we're pretty much at the goal. We have kind of dipped and have come back up. So we're going to talk about some stuff that we can do to eliminate that dip. You can kind of see that there's just been dips over time. So hopefully we can kind of continue on course and just come back down and keep conserving water there. So... I've just kind of been teasing apart a bunch of different data points to kind of just move away from just this like big massive GPCD number to think about what that looks like in different ways. This here is just total amount of water used across sectors. So the takeaways here, you can see commercial is in orange, residential is in blue, green is institutional water. So that's city usage as well as nonprofits, churches, stuff like that are all grouped together as institutional use. um so just to give you like a broader look at actual total numbers um you can kind of see that commercial is doing a great job commercial is on its way down residential is uh experienced the peak in 2020 is kind of coming back to what we've been at and institutional has been doing well coming down and then kind of coming back up a little bit This is a chart with a lot of data, and there should be a line that is that little green thing there but I'm gonna lost that mix, but. Again, trying to take apart all of this data from that broader GPCD number. Immediately, you can tell from this pie graph that residential is the lion's share of our water usage. It's 55% of what we're using. And this is just in the year 2025. Commercial comes in at 37%. Institutional is going to be 8%. You can see those GPCD numbers as just moving up there. is to give you an idea to relate that back to what the state wants us mandating at. So again, it'll just be a percentage wise of what that 269 GPCD looks like right now. So 150 in residential, 100 for commercial, 22 with institutional. And then, yeah, it's just broken down in a couple of different ways. I was trying to like tease out what it looks like because yes, residential is this massive over half of what we're using here, but obviously there are more connections. There's going to be more people using things at home and more connections using stuff to water lawns as opposed to just like a per person per capita number that we're reporting to the state. So I tried to tease that out a little bit on the next graph.

Just a question really quick. Could you let us know what is institutional, what's considered institutional, what's considered commercial?

Yeah, institutional. So that's stuff that we're doing. It's city buildings. It is churches. It is nonprofits. Marcy might be able to speak to that a little bit better, but that is what she had related to me. So you can think of it as our end of the deal, as well as a couple other users. Stuff like the golf course, things like that are going to be quantified by that institutional law. Commercial is just going to be our commercial accounts, basically.

Hotels, restaurants, retail.

Correct. All those. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Also happy to answer any questions as we're going through this. I'm sorry if it's like very data heavy and we can go through this. And if you all have like specific questions of like, I'm going to be in these data points for the next couple months going over this plan. So anything you all specifically want to see, I'm happy to kind of chase that down and look up. But this has just kind of been my initial parsing through this for this plan. So this is to go back to how I was saying with this graph. Yes, residential looks like it is like this massive user and it is. It is just like this is all based off of the acre footage. So this is just how much is actually being used. But I tried to quantify it with the connections. Just to understand how much each connection is using. So over time, I mean, it looks pretty flat. It's kind of boring as far as residential and commercial. It looks like it's like kind of staying flat as far as like what each individual connection, like each individual house or the residential is using. So they're watering their lawn in kind of the same way. And that may be over time is being affected by more connections coming up. But just the general idea of Each home is kind of maintaining and using the same amount that they've been using. Commercial is going down a little bit. There is this weird little bump in 2024 for institutional. I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. I'm definitely going to dive more into it because I know that we've been like adding different things and taking different things out of institutional definitions. So I'm going to work with Marcy and see what that bump looks like and get back to you all on it. But to kind of as a takeaway that as I'm seeing it right now is that it seems like our users are all using the same amount of amount over time, at least since 2021. It might just be these actual individual connections that are rising, which is kind of this Um, so that's the first little bit of data. Um, so to kind of account for our success, uh, coming down, uh, from that first graph, just to go over what we've done, um, in 2021, we updated the water conservation plan. Again, it's every five years. Um, in 2022, we, uh, started the water utility resource management planning, the WRMP. And then we continued planning the landscape ordinance, which I think you all are familiar with. 2023, the landscape ordinance passed. And then we also passed that water-wise indoor water conservation ordinance. So the fixture ordinance passed in 2023. In 2024, we really made an effort to start using smart watering in our parks to ensure that some of that institutional water usage went down. And we did a lot of landscape outreach and then we held an irrigation workshop with USU.

And doesn't that, that just makes it so much more fascinating that the institutional bump when, you know, our parks must be such a significant amount of our usage. Yes. And we implemented that in 24. So I'm fascinated to hear more about that.

It was like combing through all of it. And I'd be happy to give a report back at some time. And again, if you all want me to update you over the course of this, I know this is a very important topic that we're all caring about. I'd love to come back at any point. And this is just going to be a big part of my job over the next, however many months till December. So yeah.

That's great, Val. Yeah, I would like to hear more about that.

It also includes the golf course and some other things too, I believe.

Yes.

It's not just city building.

Sure, yeah.

But right, trying to figure out which parts of that. And then as Val mentioned also, this is a new category in 2017. So different properties have been going in and out of that category. I think it hasn't stabilized yet.

And you are very lucky because I'm getting back on the data here in a moment after I go over this. And I have been able to tease out city park stuff specifically. And I was trying to do more of that. This is kind of just like your first glance at it. And yeah, feel free to reach out if you need anything. If you're curious, I'm like in the water files right now. So I can snoop it up. If you toss it and turn it, you're like, wait a minute. Let's swan it. To get back to where I was at. We will get back into that kind of institutional in our usage here in a moment, but I really want to highlight what we've been doing recently. So for the past, since 25, so this year, 25, 26, we held the Moab Localscapes. So we gave a really great primer on how you can transition over your home to be lower flow and have more local landscaping. um that resource management plan was presented uh we adopted the water shortage response plan which we're gonna get back into in a moment as uh we have we have kind of some options of what we can do with that water shortage response plan here for you all uh we've been doing a lot of social media outreach if you've been looking at our um instagram Lisa's been doing a really great job on her posts there. And then what I'm really excited about is that we've had staff going out and having in-person conversations with restaurants and hotels and stuff all around town. We've been doing outreach. We already had outreach going on with Matt. So I would we've got sasha um our executive assistant in the office and she's she's been doing a really great job collecting information about how people think about the mat and like doing like getting into the psychology of the map and then also having this like deeper conversation with the folks that are actually like using the water at these places of how they're using water and how to use water better and we have all these handouts and stuff so You will see here in a moment how that is going to affect what it looks like. So these next couple graphs I'm going to be showing you, I'm going to give you the bad news first. So what you're looking at right now is a comparison of 2025 usage to 2026 usage. Residential usage is up. You know, it is dry. It's hot. People are watering. And that is like something we can improve upon and come up with a plan to do something better. But to move on from the bad news to go to commercial. Commercial, we see a significant drop into May. And I'm hoping that is a result of these in-person conversations. Like that is like maybe kind of a reach, but like that's the numbers right there. Like we were projected to go the same way as residential and we brought it down in May. So maybe we somehow crib something from that model and think about it. But I was really excited to see that. And then this next graph is what I was talking about. So I've been trying to kind of parse out. I found just like what the actual city parks account is. Marcy helped me find it. Marcy's been super helpful in this. A lot of stops have been super helpful. It's a really collaborative effort. But again, we see a big success here with parks. You can see that we started off watering pretty heavy just because it was hot and it was going on. But then we leveled out in April and then we are down on 2025 in May. So parks, commercial we're looking good um and you know we're going to be doing our best to bring down that residential stuff as well um so that brings us to um what else are we going to do just one thing does the residential include like our farms um you know i think it's just homes and it is i can definitely look into that i don't

It would not include like irrigation water. It would just be culinary connections.

It's a good question, though, because there are there are some smaller farms that use irrigation or culinary water to irrigate, but they would need a larger meter to do that. And does that fit into the commercial or industrial category?

For the residential staff, we do have two farms, but they don't use our culinary water the entire time. They only use it when their water that they use isn't available. But it is ran through their residential system, so we don't have it segregated on how much is used for farming versus how much is used for their home, if that makes sense.

So do you anticipate, since their irrigation is down 50%, is what Gwissa basically said that the irrigation water use has to be cut back 50% that those people are using their culinary.

They will be and they probably experience the same thing with the golf course, which the golf course actually in my stuff isn't included institutional. It's got its own rate and it's because they use one of our wells. They don't actually use a connection.

There's also thermal irrigation.

It's also my understanding from Gwissa that the 50% cap happens whenever you hit 50% of your allotted usage. And only one customer of all of GWSA's customers has hit their shutoff point. So everyone else is still within their allotment and using secondary water provided by GWSA. I don't know who that person is, that wasn't disclosed, but only one customer has been curtailed.

Colin, did you have a comment?

I was just suggesting that I, and I don't know these two, these water users, but there's, there's a, I think there's a pretty good likelihood that they're on low irrigation company water and not Quissa, not, not Ken's Lake water. which hasn't had any sort of reduction, but now we just learned that a lot of these people have not hit their reduction.

Has GWISA started using the cemetery well to augment?

I just heard from somebody who irrigates with GWISA water that the water has changed dramatically and no longer has a smell, and it seems to be well water. So I don't know. That's anecdotal, but yeah.

Wissa has other wells to pull from to supply when, when Ken's Lake can't supply right now, they're still using Ken's Lake water, but they are currently pumping to re replenish Ken's Lake and to reduce the impact of their current irrigation obligations. Um, I don't know that they're pumping from the cemetery well, they have a couple of other wells that they also use to bolster that secondary water. Um, So it's my understanding the cemetery well is not being used yet because that needed a considerable amount of repair before it could be used, but that they are currently pumping from their other wells to bolster their water supply that they're providing to Moab Irrigation Company.

Yeah, the cemetery well water goes into the Moab Irrigation Company system. Not a totally separate system. Yeah, confusing.

So does the Ken's Lake water goes into the Moab Irrigation?

Oh, so it goes right into it. Okay. Thank you for pointing that out. So the Ken's Lake water stays on GWISA.

Yeah, that's GWISA. Yeah. The Moab Irrigation Company is separate miles.

And that cemetery is backfilling, for lack of a better term, for The water that they can't pull out of Mill Creek.

Yeah. GUISA is required to send a certain amount of water down to be utilized by Moab Irrigation Company when they can't pull from the cemetery water to put into two separate irrigation systems in the valley. Ken's Lake Water and Moab Irrigation Company water. Yeah.

okay sorry for the yeah sorry we're getting into the weeds here that's water that was going to happen in any any way um yeah and yeah happy to always talk about this stuff as i will be um doing a lot of water stuff here coming up okay back to what we were talking about here's what we're looking at this is just a zoomed in version of that big graph that we opened up with So we need to decrease our usage by two GPCD to that gallons per capita per day to meet the state's goal. We were talking internally of even shooting. higher than that because the state goal was based on a 333 GPCB. Whereas we started at about 280 something. So our 20% would land us somewhere closer to 250, but that's something that we will kind of talk about internally more. But the main takeaway of this is that we're doing great as far as the state's goal. We're there. We're right on it. We've decreased a ton. We've been below it. And we're totally capable of hitting this goal. But we've got a lot of options to continue our work and continue bringing down that residential usage and other usages. so uh I'm gonna move into what we can do um so I've kind of separated uh what we can do right now this instant we could we could do it next city council meeting um and then I'll kind of move into later of what we're going to be looking at I've got a couple of ideas of what we can be looking at for this five-year plan so the water conservation plan is basically a plan over five years what are these larger scale things trying to think So what you're looking at is we're definitely going to continue our outreach efforts. We've seen some success with these commercial outreach efforts. We'll continue posting on social media. We have that schedule that we presented to you a couple weeks ago. So definitely going to keep going with that. We have been brainstorming internally of some options for y'all if you choose to move forward with them to basically trigger beyond our current voluntary water restrictions. There's two paths forward that we've determined in-house of how we can go about this. The first in which, so Alexi has presented on this a bunch. I'll just move forward a slide really quick to show you this. This is our water shortage plan matrix. Right now we're at yellow. We're at code yellow advisory. All those little kind of not filled in dots are voluntary measures. That's what our outreach measures look like. I'm telling people, please do this, please do that. But we have discussed that we could potentially come up with a mechanism that we could easily move forward to that orange if the council sees fit. We could codify it on whether the county is going to, when the county declares an emergency, we just move forward to this orange. If the state declares an emergency, we can move forward to this orange. Or we don't even need to rely on either of those. How it's built into the code, you all could declare an emergency and we could just move forward to this orange. To give you a little bit more perspective on what these little filled in dots look like. That is the definition in the plan of what each of those look like. So aesthetic uses, think about like a water, like a fountain or like a waterfall at like a hotel or something. Vehicle and pavement washing. So we're going to have people go to a car wash in town if they want to wash their cars and not just do it on the street at home. And then the next two are just time restrictions. So just making sure that we're watering at night so we're not losing water to evaporations. The lodging laundry is guidance for how we're going to change linens and how we're going to be using water at all of our hotels in town. Then the last one, misters. I'm going to be very upset. I set up some misters at my house for World Cup matches in the backyard. You know, I won't be happy about this, but I think I will grin and bear it. Thank you for your sacrifice. Someone finally wrecked my deep, deep sacrifice.

So how do you know if you're reducing your misters by 15%? You know?

Yeah.

They don't work anymore.

Can't wait to figure that out.

Turn them off at 8 instead of 9. Yeah, if you have them on a schedule, that would probably be the easiest way for you to know. That one's going to be a little hard. And as Val said, the way the code's worded, it says, or whenever in the judgment of the city council it shall be necessary, we can declare a water shortage, which would send us into this plan, at which point we would decide which stage The reason we're showing you stage three is because it's the first stage in the plan that has mandatory action.

Yeah, there's some more stuff we could move on to. I think stage three makes the most sense right now. And yeah, we kind of just developed, we discovered this kind of part of the code that we could just kind of go forward with it. My third option almost is like rendered a little bit moot now that we can just utilize current code but the third option I had for you here was going to just be mandatory restrictions that we could just create a code that it's not even codified to an emergency declaration it's just summertime we're not doing this we're not watering during the day anymore we're watering at night and we could pick and choose from some of these things in this plan and some of these definitions and come up with a code for you and we could see you at next city council meeting in August or we could set a special city council meeting and it determined by what y'all think about this, we'd be happy to prepare what this looks like and get it going for you. Happy to answer any questions now or at the end, but that's kind of what it looks like for what we can do immediately. I'm just going to go forward to what are we looking at for the water conservation plan? What are we going to do for the next five years? A big one that everyone agrees upon in-house soft staff is saying that we are looking at adjusting our billing rate structure. So we're going to get a tiered rate structure. We already have the tiered rate structure, but we're going to adjust it to incentivize lower usage kind of based out on like as a placeholder say 10 000 gallons a day is something that like a think tank has determined is like that's that's probably you don't need to use that much money it'll jump up really high so it'll be pretty expensive to use um we're also looking at water reuse incentives i know that colin and others have definitely been talking about gray water and how we can incentivize that uh educate about that We're thinking about, I know people have been talking about nature-based solutions like rain gardens. A lot of this work I've just been kind of combing through older plans like the sustainability plan, other water plans that we've done over time and just kind of looking at stuff like that. Something else with this water use incentive stuff is that we could provide like a match for a state provided program, like the state does the flip your strip program. And if, you know, if there was some type of money available in the budget, we could bolster a little bit locally to kind of incentivize people further to use those programs. Uh, something else we could do is internal water audits. So, uh, I mean, I think I'm going to be doing that regardless with this work and we're definitely gonna be doing it with the water master pilots coming up. Um, so this is less of a choice and more of it's just going to happen. Um, and yeah, we're going to look at, you know, like separating parsing out, like what is the golf course using? What is, what are our own parks using? Um, that data I think should just definitely always be checked in on and, um, making sure that we are leading by example and using the latest technologies to do so.

What if a citizen wants to do an audit on their own use?

So that is available in our current billing structure. Marcy could likely talk more about it.

Yeah, there's a couple things. So on this slide, we included some stuff that people could do without any additional effort. So one of them is the postcard people receive, and it shows you what you're using this year and last year. So you can see if you're using a lot more. So that would be an easy comparison for someone to do. And then the graph right below that is an online portal snapshot for city center of what people can see if they go online to look at their water bills. So that again, you can compare your use over time and see if you think something's going on. If you need more data, then you can call our treasurer's office and they can provide that to people if they're listed on their own account.

Thanks, Alexi. Yeah, we have a wealth of information. Just give us all or your members of public. We'd be happy to help. Last thing I have on here is considering a wastewater plant retrofit. It'd be pretty expensive but um there is there are ways that we could essentially um do gray water recycling on a massive scale um you know on a centralized way that we could look at that was just offered as a option in a number of plans that i looked at um and yeah there's potential for it that's pretty much all i've got for y'all um any questions happy to talk through much stuff

So I'd also like to just another plug for with the billing we had talked about going to gallons from units so that there's a little bit more information on your bill because the units are harder for people to understand the amount they're actually using. Is that still something that we are exploring?

Yes. We talked about it briefly, but we can definitely do a

Yeah, I think we can definitely look at that. Units break down smaller, so it's, I think, a different way to bill where you can bill smaller increments. But we'll talk about it internally, see what it would take to do that and everything. But absolutely, it does make sense. Otherwise, maybe we could put a little –

Yeah.

Conversion rate on there. Yeah. Somebody could see what they're what they're using in gallons per day, since that's how the state tracks it. And that's how, you know, that's how we're presenting it to you as well. I prefer quartz.

So everybody knows 748 gallons equals one unit of water on your bill.

So it's a bigger unit. That's right. It's a bigger unit. So it actually works in the favor of... How many quarts is that? How many ounces is that?

It's two big feet. I don't know. It's 2,831 liters.

So... Go ahead. I was going to ask, going back to the different... Mayor Mrakas, Warnings warnings, you know something can we put on screen back up yeah we talked about like what triggers those you know, like is it like is it well. Mayor Mrakas, Your water teams going down as well, you know yeah what what like what is the criteria for moving from one station.

And the plan right now it's set to be I how much demand we have compared to our supply. So if our supply is exceeding our demand by 120%, we're doing fine. And as it gets closer and then crosses, like we have less supply than demand, we move through these emergency or stages of increasing restrictions. That's how it's currently structured as an automatic trigger. Since we have wells and springs, drought doesn't affect it as immediately as it would reservoir. So we haven't hit one of those triggers that are listed in the plan, but the code says that it can be triggered by the city council when they see fit. So the plan would not trigger us, but it is still possible to go into one of these stages if the council wants to.

Alexi, what defines our supply?

So that comes from OB and the way he monitors the water that we're using. So OB is the designated body to recommend a water shortage stage. And that's because he has access to what we're seeing both on supply and demand.

Yeah, he has several points of data on supply and demand.

Yeah, I imagine it's pretty complicated.

Storage and everything.

So is that something for council? I mean, can we, as we get further into this slow-moving crisis, is that something that we can be hearing from OBIEE? regularly on so that he can be reporting, even if it's just a report through you, Michael, or something else that he can be reporting on.

I can definitely do that, and I can assure you if there was ever an emergency, you'd hear about it immediately. But we can build it into just reporting. And more than an emergency, I would like to just see trends. Yeah, we can talk more about that, and we could probably report on it just in council meetings and then have a periodic presentation on it with graphs and everything. Okay, that would be great.

I think the one thing that is concerning to me, and I've talked to Obi about this, is he has his way of monitoring and knowing, but we really don't know because our aquifer, we can't see it. And so he has his way to monitor. And so what he's seeing today could change next year or in two years or in five years. And then, you know, so to me, we need to start thinking about these kind of things today, regardless if we have supply or, you know, have enough supply to meet the demand, because we know it's going to change. I mean, this is, you know, unless everything goes back up to like we're getting 100% or more of snowpack, which we're not seeing, I think we need to be thinking about the future. Yeah. today and not when it's like, okay, we've got to do something now. Anyway, that's my thoughts.

So can you talk practically about if we did trigger this, what does that look like? Obviously, we had discussion about kind of fee schedule, but what does enforcement look like?

Yeah. So if you wanted to do this and I can see, like, I guess I'm going to start with, I can see doing this because we do have a particular job this year. I can also see if the concern is less acute, like what is happening this summer and more what's happening long-term that you might use the change code to do other restrictions on a regular basis, you might go that path. But if you did either one, what would happen is you can give us some direction tonight. We'll start working on whatever it is and run it through that path, right? So the fastest thing to do probably would be triggering this plan because we have code to do it. Whereas we would have to do a code update process to do the other one. Once we did that, these things effectively become illegal. Like you couldn't do them. And because they're in the water shortage response plan. And when we went through that, the council designated different kinds of fines and warnings for that. people would then start getting a warning and then paying fines. So at stage three, a warning will result in a $250 fine. At stage four, a $750 fine. At stage five, a $1,000 fine. And then each subsequent violation increases the fines. So that's what would start happening to people if they were violating one of these things.

I think that the further we go down in the stages, I mean, I think right there, that's your educational framework, right? Where even if it's not a violation to water between eight and eight, we should be educating people that watering at night is advisable, that we should be educating hotels. I mean, I think that before we go directly to punitive measures, that we use exactly that framework to be proactive. And Joe, this is to your point that we immediately start, and I'm not saying we don't go into that warning stage, but we immediately start exactly with those punitive, the things that potentially will have a punitive effect as an educational component. And I think you're already doing a lot of that, right?

I'm wondering if we want to start telling people we're probably going to get to this stage this summer. And so because of that, you know, this is what you need to start preparing yourself to do. I mean, watering your lawn between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. That should be in the code. I mean, to me, I see so many people that don't do that. Same with the lodging laundry. Everywhere you go, if you don't need to change your sheets tonight, put a sign on your pillow or whatever. So some of those things I think we should begin codifying anyway, but I also feel like we should let the public know that this is something we're thinking about doing.

Start changing your habits now.

Now, because when this warning comes into effect, it's going to start costing you money.

Yeah, I agree with that, and I'm comfortable with all of those things.

And then in our meeting in July, we can kind of decide, you know, see where things are at. Maybe we'll get some good rains, maybe not. You know, we can kind of decide at that time. That's just my thoughts. I don't know what the rest of us think.

Well, logistically, we can, and we have been working on education. We can take that to another step, which is face-to-face contact, which we have been doing with hotels and other users. But we do have community service officers who can start making contact. I was going to say that if you elevate this to stage three, these things would go into effect, and then we could follow up at any time during the summer with with an ordinance that would make it so that it went into effect every year or that it was just in the code. These things that are so basic, I think, as pointed out, they are. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I'm wondering if, I think it'd be valuable if we could send community service officers to give us back, because I know that I've seen some watering, but I'm curious how much people have changed their habits with the notices that we've been sending out, just to know how much of a jump it would be to go to this point.

Yeah, and I've prepared them for that. We've talked about this. We're ready to start right away. We don't have to get too punitive to do this. We have been using, we haven't started this as of yet, but we knew this was coming. We weren't waiting for the council. This is just part of the process. We had a little bit of training to do and a couple of other things, but we can get this started right away.

Can I ask a question on the vehicle or pavement washing? Are there any car washes in Moab who recycle water and put it back into their system? I don't think there is.

I had a similar question about that one.

Based on the age, I would doubt it.

You go to any car wash and they're putting them into things and that water is going into the sewer system.

Yeah, we can look into whether we have recycled water use at our vehicle like or washing stations. This could be something that we have to strike the word recycled here really it's just you have to use a car wash because they're more efficient.

Yeah, and we'll talk a lot more about this and the entitlements that they do have, but there's another area where fees make a big difference. Because if water doesn't cost very much, there's no incentive to conserve or recycle. And so that's one of the main things that we need to work on.

Miles?

I just wanted to kind of echo what Jason was saying. I don't think I can identify a car wash that recycles water. And really that's my only point out of that list that I think would be unreasonable to ask for right now. Like otherwise, I think everything on that list is so common sense, particularly the watering after 8 p.m. and before 8 a.m. I would be interested in, you know, doing our best to inform people for a little while and then codifying that as soon as possible. The only other thing I had to note, which is the reduction of toys and misters and such at 15%, that's really difficult for a layperson to quantify whether or not they're reducing their use of their mister by 15%. So if there's a more concrete way we can present that, I would appreciate that.

Tony, do you have anything you'd like to say? No, I think a lot of this is just common sense. I'm going to get on my HOA because they water our lawns in the morning. So that's going to change. How do you guys want to proceed?

I would like to start working into that, the orange, you know, first with education that these are, you know, these things are coming up, you know, change habits now and start working to, you know, make them like what punitive or more enforceable.

I agree. Do you? Yeah, I do.

No, I was gonna say, like, I don't mind working into into that as well. But I would like to see some as much data we can find to to back up the decision making process, you know, I think would really help with, you know, in what we're saying, to try and get people to, to do these things, you know, let them see some data behind it.

Yeah, I think I'm still going to sending out community service officers to talk to people and hand out individual flyers as we're seeing it. And then I think, because I'm just thinking about when the city first started putting out media about this. I think even putting out education, I know we're going to get pushed back on like, well, You're so our golf course or you're still watering 20 arc. So, so that's also I'm hesitant to go fully orange until we address some of that public comment public sentiment. So that might be a suggestion as well terms of outreach.

I I absolutely agree 100% of that. And I think it kind of goes back to the whole you know, unit gallon thing, you know, and stuff. People just don't know, you know, what they're using and what that equates to.

I think you're right. I don't think people know how much a unit is. I Googled it. Marcy, is there any way we can add something on the bill that says one unit equals 748 gallons and that, you know, at least the... at least to get people to do their own calculations, as opposed to, because I don't know of changing it to gallons, because I think the normal use is units. We do kilogallons, so one unit is 1,000 gallons. Yeah, Google's always wrong.

Hearing that terminology, I was like, oh, that's a second. So yeah, we use kilogallons.

We can definitely do that.

We can update our description for the water portion and put one unit equals 1,000 gallons. Most people do know that, though, because we do communicate that when people call in for their read reviews or what have you. But it's 2,000 gallons. Our code outlines it. We utilize the code a lot for our winter water usages and things of that nature. And it says one gallon is 1,000 gallons, or one unit is 1,000 gallons. Yeah.

Well, I wonder, too, like, and I'm sure I could YouTube it or some silly video about it, but, like, because I look at it and I go, I use 230 gallons or whatever, 260 gallons a day. Like, how? You know, where am I using that? And I think that if there was some sort of educational thing that showed people, like, where the average person is using those gallons would really help them to, because I look at it and I'm like, there's no way. But I'm sure I am somehow. I mean, is it? the Maverick foundry machine is probably where.

Well, we take it for granted. You know, that's the thing. Water comes out of the taps. We take it for granted, you know, so we don't, we need to stop taking it for granted.

We're also looking at additional things that we can give to the public to help conserve water. We do. We do low flow shower heads. We do the water, the toilet tank bags, things like that. I saw a thing recently, I'd encourage everybody to take a look at this, but when your shower's heating up, they have these new things that you put on the ground. You can also use a bucket, but as it's warming up, you could collect that water and water your plants with that instead of it going into the sewer. So there's lots of things we are looking at other inventive or things that we can potentially get out there to the public to either encourage them to use or even have as giveaways. Yeah.

And if there's concern, I think that if I think I'm hearing some concern that maybe the city is not walking the walk. I think that that information should get out about the water systems at the park, the things that we're doing to try to set a good example if we're asking the public for this stuff. Miles.

On that note, let's make absolutely sure that all the public spaces that the city has purview over and that we water at least comply with these things we're asking for so that they're watering during the appropriate hours and otherwise. I know I've had public comments or the public come to me and comment on the graveyards and they're not necessarily our purview, but they water in the middle of the day. So we should know about that.

Yeah, we we when we hear about those things, even if they're not our purview, if they are using our water like the golf course, I don't think they're using our water yet. But even if they are watering during the day using water, we let them know. Actually, we do talk to them about that stuff. And we are I will double check miles. But I I know our Levi, our public works director, has been working hard to make sure that we are on top of this with all of our staff. our spaces that we water. Perfect.

Go ahead, Caitlin. Just thinking about, I mean, one of my ideal immediate next steps is actually to look pretty quickly at our billing rate structure. I think it's going to take a lot more staff time to educate and to enforce this. I think people are going to notice real quick if we drop that down and you start noticing you're using over one unit. You're going to start noticing real quick and you're going to volunteer to save money on your bills before any kind of postcard. So that feels like a next step for me personally.

When I asked him, he's taken all this. He's like, yeah, all the conferences I go to, everything I do, billing structure is like the number one. So that's, I mean, I'll let him speak for himself.

Yeah, and we do have that coming up with some water master planning. So that will be coming soon. your way to consider how that tiered system should work.

Right. Yeah. That's a good one. Right. And we're going to do the water master plan and we will be putting those, we will be raising the rates at some point.

I hope so. It'll be this group that decides that. Can I throw one more thing in there? There's no way that we can mention all of the things that we try to do to conserve water, but Marcy and I think it's important to mention that there are thresholds where if a residential or any other use gets above a certain point, Marcy's team will automatically review the bills with the owners to make sure that there isn't a water leak. And if there is that we get on top of it or they get on top of it as soon as possible.

We actually create a reread list. So we send the reads out on the first or the end of the month, every single month for the water department. They flip those around usually in a half a day or a day. They come back to us and we do a manual review, which is a little bit time consuming, but it is beneficial. So we do miss things every once in a while, but we go through and review. And in the summertime, we do 30,000 gallons above last year's usage. So if we're comparing somebody and their last year was 20 and this year 60, we flag it for a reread. And the reason for that is so that we can determine if they have a leak, if they're just using higher usage or what's going on. Commonly what we have found, yeah, people have a small leak and they're just their sprinkler system was broke or something had happened and they can get it fixed. But we do have that whole month period where we don't know what that usage is. So this is our way of trying to combat wasted water. And then in the wintertime, the threshold is less because we assume you're not watering your gardens and your grasses and things of that nature and that you're only using your water inside your home. And so anything that's above 20,000 gallons is flagged. for the water department to go out and do a read. And then they go out and do a manual read on the meter. If we see something that's like 60, 70, 100,000 gallon over, they will actually pull a history if we need it to determine what time of day that usage is super high, which is great, but it's time consuming. And not all meters are up to that data lockers yet. They're in the process of doing that because of the new SCADA system, but we still have several accounts that aren't to that point yet. but they are able to then flag, let the homeowners know if they can't get ahold of homeowners, we call them and say, hey, and we'll explain to them that they need to either contact a plumber or somebody of that nature to help combat, again, wasted water. So I hope that that helps explain. A little bit better.

Great. Good. All right. This has been a great discussion. There's more to come. I would like to propose that you start working on code adjustments for some of those things that we've identified that have been brought up, particularly what time you water. I think laundry at the hotels. And what were the, there's a couple others. If we could have that at our next meeting in July, we won't be meeting on the 14th. So this will be at the end of July. So that'll give a month for our code folks to go out and talk to people, do some, make some really strong educational pleas out there and then see what happens and then decide if we want to go to Orange.

at that meeting so that gives us a month and then as far as the code goes i don't know if you guys can do that in a month or not well we can we can can start it and we can without the code adjustment we can start doing these things and and get the code adjustment in place for next year but you have the authority this year to start doing those things without the code adjustment okay we'll we'll start with this education and then if you want to you can trigger an orange uh stage three

which would in July, that would have people start following those policies now. And then at the same time, which would take longer, we can work on a code update specifically, let's say for hours of watering, which will take longer, but people will already be doing it if you decide that. Right. Yeah.

Does that sound good to you guys? Sounds great. Yes. Okay.

Okay.

All right. So it'd be great if Obie could be available to kind of give these guys an update on where is Obie. he's probably at home he's in alaska actually just just to be fair obi would be here but he is somewhere off the dalton highway in alaska doing pack rafting so it's nice and cool there's probably no smoke right um yeah so that'd be i mean and i didn't mean that any other way this would be important for you guys to hear from him because i had a really good conversation with him and be good for you guys to ask questions because his response is we're fine but for me it's like we're fine now but are we going to be fine next year and he can't really answer that so all right you guys thanks so much very informative a lot of work looking forward to you all right Next, we have Alexi and Val. And this is just a quick update. I don't know if you guys got an email. We got an email from the Youth Garden Project inviting us to do a walk with them, and then they mentioned a community garden, and I'm like, I didn't know we were doing a community garden at Old City Park, and I thought it'd be good for these guys to let you know what that process is and where we're at with that, which I think is a great I love the idea of having a community garden.

OK, I'll get started, and then we have a visual for you, too. So this is a community garden update. When I started with the city around October of 2022, there were a few projects that were sort of teed up already for me to work on. One of them that came in my email was something between Carly, the city manager at the time, and MOCOM about putting a community garden in Anonymous Park. Now, it's a few years later and it's a different park and it's a different organization, but the community garden is still moving. It also came up again when we were doing our sustainability planning. We had that process that went through the year of 2023. And then when we finished up that plan, we had the technical advisory committee tell us which six things out of that plan were the most important to go forward. And urban agriculture was one of the top things that they wanted to see. come out of that plan so those things I think kept this moving along and then from there we had some conversations and talked to some people and we finally came up with a solution for Old City Park and then Val came on and he has a much greener thumb than I do so he's been working on it

yeah thanks for the green thumb kudos i am so excited about this probably um yeah as lexi said there is a lot of history here all the way back to 2023 or something like that but we have been meeting uh I say like every month or so since I started. So there's been like three meetings, but basically just going over site plans. I can kind of walk you through what you're looking at here. So that is a Google earth view of old city park. If you were to be on the top of that, that'd be Murphy lane. And then we were just out there this morning doing a walk around. Part of their current requirements is that we do a food security walk. So we got out with YGP staff and did a walk in the neighborhood. And that is the proposed site. Park staff has already shut off the waters there in anticipation that they're going to scrape it and get it going on. We currently have a draft MOU that we're working through the details for the end of the week. We're going to get that over to Nathan and all approved. And once that's signed, they're ready to go on construction. We're going to start getting it going. Happy to answer any questions. I've been involved with the process. The meetings have basically looked like sitting in that nice little garden and talking about how we're going to build the garden boxes and what the irrigation looks like and stuff. But yeah, I'm thrilled. Yeah, one other thing that I want to highlight too is that they have had folks with disability issues in the past try to garden at some of their other plots. They have two community garden plots currently. And their main focus for this is making this ADA accessible. So having passed there that have that are able to have a wheelchair roll on, they're going to have some crushed gravel in there that will be able to go around. If you look kind of squint at that superimposed plan on there see the circles in the corners those are radii those are radiuses so wheelchairs can turn around uh these six raised beds on the left are going to be ada accessible so it'll be like at level for a wheelchair and just um yeah it's uh one of the staff members is very much uh forward focused on the ada accessibility of this space and it will be all ready to go for everybody to enjoy But yeah, happy to answer any questions as I've been kind of coordinating it on the end of watching.

Is there any financial or maintenance obligation from the city or do we just turn over the space?

We're working through irrigation. It's kind of a win-win for both parties where... YGP kind of needs a space that it isn't a private property owner in case it gets sold. So this will kind of exist in perpetuity. We are providing water and land for them. I don't know if you want to speak to.

Yeah, so we don't have the signed MOU yet, but the way it's written, there's, I think, an introductory period of three years, something like that to make sure this is working for everybody. I the city maintains up to the fence or the irrigation up to the connection and then they maintain inside the garden great everything will be on drip right yeah that's the plan I bet they're still working on their actual irrigation plan so that's I think there was a meeting today on irrigation in fact with our parks department any other questions.

All right. I have a feeling the neighbors will be much happier with a community garden than a pickleball garden.

And I love that there's potentially space to grow.

Yes. Yeah.

Oh, yes. There's very good. Not intended. I think that was intended.

We call it makes a great point that we could expand into this. I even have it in conversations. Obviously we will check what this looks like internally, but it'd be a cool space to highlight our water conservation practices. Even just have this like kind of sustainability hub of like, this is what like, like a Sherwood Lake looks like. This is where you can go to kind of see what the community is doing for all these things.

And they left several horseshoe pits intact for people who like horseshoes. But the Parks Department helped pick this site because a lot of those were being underused. So this felt like a more productive use of the space for more people.

And this section right now is not used. So nothing is being pulled out to put this in as already blank piece of space.

All right.

Thank you. Thank you.

And if you like the Nibble Garden of the current YGP, you're in luck. There is going to be a Nibble Garden here. So members of the community, walk in on that.

All right. Thank you for Nibble Garden. All right, next up, consent agenda. We have four items, a confirmation letter for the funding match for building resilient infrastructure communities grant. That's the BRIC grant. We don't have it yet. So all this letter is for telling them that when we get a grant, we do have a 25% match. But we don't have that grant yet.

We don't. This is specifically for 300 South Bridge.

Correct.

And the waterway.

Right. We also have a letter of support for glass recycling foundation grant with the Solid Waste Special Service District and approval of the minutes from June 9th regular meeting and approval of the bills against the city of Moab in the amount of $308,414.38. Could I have a motion to approve the consent agenda?

I'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda.

Motion by Jason. A second. Second by Tawny. Discussion, Jason? No.

Anybody else I get for the break grant you remind us how this ties into the appropriation request that's also in motion right now yeah. Go ahead.

I'd be happy to. So we are looking at multiple sources for funding for the 300 South Bridge. In fact, I think this is going to be how we're going to approach every project. This one is FEMA. FEMA is looking at this and has the potential to fund A large portion or a smaller portion if we get approved. Obviously, it'd be a smaller portion if we got something from the federal government, but we're just getting as many feelers out there and putting in as many applications as possible, trying to get funding for these projects that we're desperately in need of.

Okay. And the federal probe, you know, we put in for 12. We know we're not going to get that. So we're going to have to finagle money from other sources as well. Okay. And usually they require a grant.

So it'd be kind of a match.

I'm sorry.

Partially some of that funding, we get this grant. Yes. If we get a lower amount for the grant, our match would be lower.

Right. Or we may get a different grant altogether. I mean, this is... that we're going to continue to be putting in and looking for opportunities everywhere.

Yes, and this is going to be going to FEMA so that they know that we have the funding to provide it.

And just so you know, there is a portion of the 300 South Bridge that is funded through stormwater and a couple of other funds as well. Obviously not the entire thing, but we can feel safe in saying that we will be able to come up with the match.

Any other questions? All right. Motion by Jason, second by Tani. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. General business item 6-1 is a public hearing on amending the fiscal year budget 25-26. We're going to cancel that public hearing because we don't have any amendments. So it's not needed and we have to cancel it because we noticed it. 6.2 consideration of ordinance 2026-13 and ordinance adopting the city of Moab residential utility assistance program. You know, this is a pilot program that we've been doing for a year. We kind of modified it six months ago. And so Marcy is going to present where we're at today. And hopefully you guys will support making this a permanent program.

I'm glad you said my name there. Sorry. All right. Thank you, everyone. Let me pull up my stuff. So before I dive into this, I just want to touch base and let you guys know kind of our process. I did explain this the last time we did a review in February. But anytime we have anybody who comes into the office, calls us on the phone because they're struggling to pay their bill or anything else that might be happening, we are offering the program to them. We are sending emails. We are providing it at the window. We're filling out the forms for family members who are coming in for their grandparents and things of that nature so that we can hand it off, they sign it, they give us the documentation back and we put them immediately into the program. We're doing pre-reviews too, because we have some people who will call and they'll be like, I don't really want to do all this work. And before we weren't because we were getting overwhelmed. And now I actually take the time immediately if somebody comes in or is on the phone and we review their income to see if they qualify based on the new criteria that we put into place, which did open up the window for more people to apply, but it has not actually had people applying, even with our efforts of trying to push the program out there. So with that said, we have still 20 people on the program. We did have one that sold the property and we had a new one who just got onto the program this month. So it was great when she had come in, she was just struggling a little bit and she seemed very overwhelmed and we're like, Oh, we have this great program. And she was so excited and her family was so great and brought it right back in and it was awesome. So nothing as far as like the number of people on the application has changed. Even with our efforts, Lisa has done a big push and putting it on Facebook. It's been in the paper, things of that nature. I have actually tasked Cheryl, my deputy, with collecting emails for every single utility account that we have. It is a huge undertaking because we have so many accounts that don't have emails or things that have been open since 1990, 1980 that, you know, and then we have people that won't, they refuse to use email. But our goal on doing this is to collect as many emails as we can. One, to start sending email communications from our accounting program for utility bills, not just express bill pay. to open it up because there's people who don't want another program. They don't want to log in and set up a new account for Express Bill Pay and have one more thing that's emailing them or providing or tracking or whatever, passwords, et cetera. So we have taken a huge jump on trying to collect all of our emails for all of our utility accounts. And right now, Cheryl is tasked with getting the information from all of our resources we currently have, and then she'll start cold calling. Or if we don't have a phone number or current phone number, then we will send a letter. And this is us trying to open up our communication availability to everybody. It will also help Lisa in communications as well to be able to utilize these communications for things like the water conservation services and things of that nature, and also allow us to communicate with things that are going on in the treasurer's office or we you know or communicate with people when they have a water leak and we can't reach their phone number or they're out of the country or whatever it is so we are hoping in the next couple of months i say that it'll probably be about three or four months because we are in the depth of business license renewals right now too so our office has been really busy but we're hoping to be able to have that list um together for us so that we're able to blast this out we put this program on our utility bills for three months straight and we didn't get a single call from the utility bills, believe it or not. And the people who have actually come in have the newspaper clipping. And I found that very interesting because now that the paper goes out into everybody's mailboxes and stuff and people are actually reviewing them a lot more we've we've noticed that and so the few people have come in it's it's been that um the newspaper clipping cut out everything it's fabulous i love it it's like scrapbooking um anyway so that is our our hope our goal our drive in order for us to try to reach more people with the program. One of the things that Michael and I had talked about was potentially doing a letter out to our residential people. The county did provide us with a list of emails and phone numbers for people on their program, which is great. We have made effort to try to contact some of those people and some of them are just They're just not interested. So I do want to put it out there to the public, though. The application is very simple. We will fill out everything for you. And we'll even review the data with you. All you have to do is sign it and provide the required information that we need. for the financial review side. And to also just reinforce that the information is confidential. We do not share names. We do not share any of your information with anybody else outside of the people that are allowed to have access to that information in my office. It is not accessed online. Those are all hard copy stuff. If they email it, we immediately delete the file after we have printed it and we actually have a hard copy interlocked. cabinet because I also know people are afraid of providing tax forms and things that's got all this information on it and a lot of personal information and so we just want to make sure that we put out there that we do follow all the regulations and we go above and beyond to protect people's privacy and and their all of their financial information if that helps okay and then in the program I just closed all my documents sorry hold on Okay. Oh, nope, wrong one. You know how Adobe usually says, would you like to close all documents or one? And it shut everything down on me. Okay. So before I jump into the, um, the review of the small changes that we did on the policy, do you guys have any questions about our outreach and how we're trying to approach this or do you guys have any feedback or.

Um, the only feedback I have is you explaining it to right now was amazing.

Okay. Thank you.

And, um, And I think that like, you know, you, you kind of saying like, you know, if anybody's listening to the meeting, I bet there's four people listening to this.

Okay. People review it after.

But what I'm wondering is like, it would be great. You know, Miles did a video. Don't you do that to me, Jay? No, I think, I think if you explain it to me, it was like, it was like so personal and it's so good that it would be amazing if, if there was like some sort of, video or something that you did, like some sort of outreach. I think it would

reach a lot of people and um and would assure a lot of people of how great of a program this is that's you're explaining to me i was like i was like wow you explained can we just click it out of the council meeting no that makes sense and actually um i am slated to do uh one of our outreach videos in december but i could move that up if there's availability and talk with lisa and coordinate to do that if that works for you sure cool So yeah, okay, well, thank you. I'm glad that was so appealing. I totally winged it. I was just trying to give you guys information on what we really are trying. And so we really wanna see this program expand further. Right now we do have the funds. We have the $75,000 set aside for this program out of the property tax funds to help our community. And while a lot of programs can take a lot of time to have an outreach into the community. It feels like this program is not reaching as far as we would like. And we also have had some hurdles like with low-income housing and people who are on fixed incomes who live in low-income housing. If we give them subsidy, they have to count it as income, which is such a bummer because then it defeats the whole purpose of the program and helping them. it will actually increase their rent. I don't know how much, that's not information that I have or that I've dug into, but we were really bummed when we learned that after we made all of these changes in the program to try to accommodate other people that this program really is based around. So just something to think about. In the program itself, as Michael, maybe you didn't know that in here, but our attorneys have reviewed this. They're actually the ones that took my data And then they put their legal jargon on the program that we have. And so we've only done slight modifications to the program based on feedback from you, Caitlin. Back in December, I think it was. And then also just updating the dates, duration, or any feedback we've received from council. So we are now, our goal and our hope is is that we are able to put this program into place. And this verbiage came from Michael because I was really struggling. I'm like, what do I say here? The program will remain in place unless the program is either repealed or no longer funded. And so now we won't have a expiration. We removed the verbiage that it is a pilot program because we're hoping that council will go ahead and make this a permanent policy unless these two things take place.

Perfect.

Marcy, I'm trying to figure it out. Maybe you have this number handy. So we have 20 people enrolled in the program right now. The $75,000 would allow for how many people?

It was 120.

120, okay.

And that's a variable because the credit is up to $40. And before, when we set this program up, we had utility accounts that were only $15. So we're not going to give a credit on the utility account that we... a $40 credit when their bill's only $15. That's not the purpose of the program, but we, we, um, right now though, everybody that is on the program is getting the full benefit every month of $40 that we automatically apply. I say automatic Cheryl, our deputy puts on their account every single month for their credit.

So automatically it's yes.

I have an awesome team who just, I don't even have to check. They just do it. It's great.

Can we,

Make a motion. Yeah, please do.

I'm going to go ahead and make a motion. I move to adopt the ordinance 2026-13, an ordinance amending the City of Moab Residential Utility Systems Program policy to become a permanent policy.

Awesome. Second by Colin. Any further discussion, Jason?

No.

Colin? Anybody else?

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Just an excellent program.

And then to the outreach, I mean, I mentioned at LHC meetings a lot. Yeah, I know Chris Kaufman gives out information anytime he has people come in for property tax. I think it's

We've got two from them, actually, from their office. It's been great.

It's been really great. If there's anything we can do to help with outreach, it seems like you're trying the best you can.

And anybody who is on GWISA systems, too, which I think that when people hear that, they're like, oh, that doesn't work because we're in the county because we do turn down a lot of people from the county. But if they're in city limits and they're on GWISA water, they, too, can apply. And I am hoping that we can... figure out a way to do an outreach to those people. And we do have, I don't even know, I think less than 40 accounts that are on GWSA. And so there's a possibility that we could expand that in city limits on GWSA water because we have it outlined in our system. So.

All right. Motion by Jason to approve Ordinance 2613, adopting the City of Moab's Residential Utility Assistance Program, seconded by Colin. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes 5-0. Thank you, Marcy. Nice job.

Awesome. Thank you, guys. And Jason, we're going to do it.

Nice. There you go. You'll be fine. You won't have people in front of you. You won't have us. I'll have Lisa. Yeah. All right. Our next item, 6.3, consideration of an interlocal agreement with the Monmouth Valley Fire Department. And once again, we have Alexi. And Clark Mon is here also.

Okay, we have two agenda items that are related. So I'm going to do one presentation because they really only make sense together. Clark is here. He's wildland division chief to be our subject area expert. I'll run through what it is we're doing procedurally. And then I'll let him talk a little bit about wildfire danger. Okay. With the smoke rolling in from the Cottonwood Fire, this is like a kind of eerie presentation to be doing. We've done a lot of things over the years to try to prepare for wildfires here and the danger that we could face. So this is just kind of a list of things that have happened over time to show this is just another step in the process. That includes, just recently, updating our community wildfire preparedness plan and then also adopting the wildland urban interface code and map. Both of those things are required for a cooperative wildfire system agreement. Something else that we need to do that's a little different from previous years is we need an interlocal agreement with Moab Valley Fire Protection District to provide those services with us, which is more or less a legal thing because we need to delegate them those duties officially because the city does not provide them through our own staffing. Okay, the reason we want a wildfire system agreement is because it helps us reduce our wildfire risk and it ensures that the state will assist if we have a catastrophic fire. So we commit to do a lot of things as a part of this, including the plan, the code, training firefighters, maintaining equipment, implementing prevention, preparedness, and mitigation actions, also making reports on this to the state, and then providing and paying for initial attack on fires. Now, Those first two are clearly city things. And then the reason why we're looking at an interlocal agreement is because some of these things are fire department actions. From there, what we get out of committing to do this and following through with this agreement is that the state agrees to pay for costs of extended attack on catastrophic fires. So if it moves past an initial attack into something much larger, the state will come in and help with that and then also pay for it. long as we have all these things in place yes we have to live up to the agreement we have to sign it cwpp that's the other thing so okay and then the reason we need the interlocal agreement is because it formalizes our delegation of these fire protection services in preparation for the A cooperative wildfire system agreement essentially. This is created by changes at the state level about who signs these agreements in the past, the fire department did now the city does so we have to delegate those duties in order to be able to be the signatory this is based on our legal advice. What is in the interlocal agreement is designating the fire district as our city's provider for fire protection, also wildfire prevention, preparedness and mitigation. It delegates training and reporting to them, as well as maintenance of equipment and other things like that. And it commits us to being responsible for our plan, for our code, for the filing for cost recovery from wildfires, reducing hazards on our own properties, maintaining data that might be needed for any of the reporting, and cooperating with the fire department to do that, and then providing public outreach. So the two agreements are both for five years, so they align. The idea is that it's they should be going hand in hand. All right. So on the agenda, we've done a few things already in past meetings. In this meeting, we're considering an interlocal agreement with the fire department and a cooperative wildfire system agreement in the following agenda item. And I figured I could also turn this over to you to talk about the importance of this and like what kind of danger we're facing. Why would we consider agreements like this?

Yeah, the Cooperative Wildfire System Agreement, or CWS, it's basically the city or the county, whatever the participating entity is, their insurance policy for large fires. So a large fire, the costs can be really, really high, really fast. And by us entering into this agreement, With the state, they'll absorb those costs once they reach a certain threshold. As long as we do the preparedness work, the prevention work, the mitigation work, and have effective initial attack where we put out fires and try and keep them as small as we can. If we can't control a large or a small fire, it does get large, then the state will come in and help sell at those costs. So that's really the importance of the agreement. It's basically an insurance policy with the state.

What's that kind of distinction between an initial attack and like an extended or catastrophic event?

Yeah, it's if we can bring the fire under control in that first operational period, a lot of fires start in the afternoon. If we can gain control of that fire and it's where it's not going to spread any further in that period of time and the You know, that would be initial attack. It's really that first operational period. If it's going to go beyond that, if the fire starts moving up the mountain, the Pack Creek fire, the Deer Creek fire, something like that, that's going to move into an extended attack fire. Aircraft are going to be required to help bring that fire into control. You're going to need a lot of hand crews and equipment, and then the costs just go up exponentially at that point, and so. That's where this is pretty important. So it's really how long of a duration the fire is going to be and kind of how hard it's going to be to control it.

Thanks. Any questions?

Yeah, I think this is a great agreement. I think this is something that kind of needs to happen to get state support that we're doing our part to do this and stuff. I don't want to bring it up now, but could you give us kind of a state of where we're at with fuels and fire risk within the city limits right now? Yeah. What's going on with this? Crazy as outside, you know?

Yeah, well, this is all coming from the Cottonwood Fire, which started over just outside of Beaver, Utah. Last night, it's really only been burning a little over 24 hours. And it's close to 25,000 acres. So that gives you an idea of how fast that fire is spreading up through the pinyon juniper and the sagebrush right up into the timber at high elevation by the ski area that's up there. So Um, it's very dry out there. All of the, um, fire danger rating areas in Southern Utah, especially are at the very high level. Um, and part of, you know, how that One factor or component that goes into that is your energy release component, which is kind of a measure of how hot a fire is going to burn, how intense it's going to be, how fast it's going to move. ERCs at all elevations in the Grand County and San Juan County are at the 97th percentile right now, even approaching the 99th percentile. So That gives you an idea of how dry it is out there. That's directly tied to your dead fuels from your larger logs, which should still have some moisture in them at this time of year from snowpack and rain and spring, but they don't. They're just powder dry to your finer fuels, to the live fuels, the sagebrush, the oakbrush, everything else that grows. It started to shed that fuel moisture and becomes more receptive to fire at that point. So We're kind of at a critical level with that fire danger, right? 97th, 99th percentile across the board. Our weather, I think of the weather stations that we have in Southeast Utah, it's been at least 25 days since we've had measurable precipitation at those weather stations, which there's about five of them in Southeast Utah that we use for fire danger reporting. It's been a long time since we've had any rain. And then the red flag warnings that you've been seeing frequently in June, I believe we've had 15 red flag warning days out of the month so far. So the majority of the month we've been in these hot, dry conditions. So the conditions are there for explosive fire spread, like they have seen over at the Cottonwood Fire

and on the iron fire here over the weekend i would also assume that state resources or federal resources resources are starting to get spread pretty thin to the point where if we did have a fire um that resources might not come for a while or might be pretty limited to what we would get to to help fight these fires from the state or federal agency

Yeah, as the fire activity picks up, which it's definitely doing in the last few days, fire resources get assigned to those fires. They, you know, they're large fires that require a ton of resources. A lot of those resources are coming from out of state now, too, to help in states that aren't in the same situation that we are. But as fires continue to pop up and grow, which they're going to at this time of year in Utah, we're at the height of our fire danger now. right now in southeast Utah. That's right, this last couple weeks in June. Those resources are going to get spread thin.

Can you explain the level one, level two fire restrictions? Because I think we're going to hit both of those this week, right? And can you explain kind of how that works and when?

Yeah, there's two stages of fire restrictions, the stage one and stage two. Stage one restricts fires to designated camping areas, designated fire rings. They can still have a fire made with organic material at that point. Stage two restrictions, which it sounds like, I think we're going to see something official coming from the state on Friday, but... Jumping into stage two fire restrictions is no fires, no open fires. Right. So they can have a propane fire at their campsite, but no open fires.

So tonight at midnight, stage one goes into effect, right? And then we're expecting stage two to start this weekend.

Yeah. It sounds like the latest word I got from the state is that Friday is morning, really at one minute after midnight, we'll go into stage two fire restrictions on unincorporated private land and state land. The federal government still, the Forest Service and BLM are still working out the details on that. But they said we could expect an interagency press release tomorrow at some point about that.

And this is all new information that we've learned since the meeting started, right? Yes. Yeah. Just in the last little bit. Just in the last little bit here? Yeah, he texted me during the meeting and told me about the stage two.

Just out of curiosity, stage two, are fireworks considered open flames? I'd have to look at the code on that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not. I'm not 100% sure. There, you know, there'll be some language about fireworks in the fire restrictions, but it's nothing. I don't think it's actually banned fireworks.

Could we ban fireworks?

That decision is up to the municipalities, city and the county.

So if we chose to do that, so would you or the chief be okay with that?

Yeah, we're here to support and, you know, whatever decision that the city goes with, we'll support that.

So the process should be our experts at the fire department make a recommendation. And what we've heard from them is that they do believe that there is fire danger, that they would support a restriction if the city wanted to go that direction.

What do you guys think? And obviously we didn't notice it for today, but I do think it would be an emergency declaration that the mayor would actually do. I think that would make sense. Last meeting we did it just along the creek corridor. Right. But yeah, we're entering stage two.

Yeah. And just to be clear to anybody listening, we're talking about restriction of fireworks throughout the city in relation to the stage two fire danger work. the fire danger.

I would absolutely support something like that. I've had it brought up to me. There's a lot of open fields within the Moab city limits that I feel like are very dangerous and they're just a spark away from having some devastating fires within the city limits. So I think that this is, as we're talking about know drought and water restrictions i think this this goes like this is up here you know and um you know and um so i i would absolutely support um for this year doing you know stage two fire or whatever you want to call a firework ban within the city limits i think we need to do that i think it it just it it's too much of a risk this year with the perfect storm or no storm um

There's, like Jason said, there's just all kinds of dry, dry field. The cheatgrass and the foxtails have gone nuts this year. And once that stuff starts, it just doesn't stop. So I would support that.

Miles?

Yeah, I'm with you guys. It seems incredibly prudent. I mean, With just the sheer lack of soil moisture, which is something that came up again at the GWSA meeting, everything, including the stuff that really shouldn't catch, is so dry it could. So I think a citywide fireworks ban would make a lot of sense to me and be a very prudent call.

Colin? I'm totally comfortable with that.

So my understanding, Lisa, is we don't really need to make a formal motion that I can just go ahead and sign an emergency declaration to ban fireworks within the city limits. It doesn't need to be ratified because it is an emergency. So I am hearing from the council they would like for me to do that. And we're within, we're able to do that even though it's not on this agenda. Correct, Lisa?

That is correct. It's not an agenda item, but it is an emergency declaration. It doesn't require city council action, but the information that you're receiving through the fire emboldens you, lets you know that it's the policy with the fire experts as well. It's a good idea.

All right. All right. So we'll do that. And in the meantime, I'm going to look.

Yes, go ahead. I have one question. We were told some years ago that the council can't ban the sale of fireworks. Is that still correct?

I think it is.

So I haven't noticed if the firework stand is in town or not yet. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it, but I just wanted to clarify.

Connie, that's correct. That is correct.

We can't ban the sale, but we can ban the use of. Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.

I did have a chance to talk to Chief Bell about this before the meeting or during the meeting. I got up a couple of times. We talked about this. This is something that they feel comfortable they can enforce. With the help of the fire department, I think we'll be out there talking to people.

And we need to do some education miles.

That was what I was going to mention, is let's make sure there's a fair bit of outreach about this going into the holiday on the 4th. If we're going to make this decision, we need to make sure people are aware that that's the case.

We'll make sure the stuff gets out there. We will be working through every channel we can to get it out there.

It doesn't exclude the fireworks show on the 4th of July up in the hill. So we still will have that event on the 4th of July to celebrate 250 years, but within the city limits. And hopefully we'll see what happens in the county. All right. So I'll take care of that. In the meantime, I'd like to ask for a motion to approve the interlocal agreement with the Moab Valley Fire Department.

I move to adopt resolution 07-2026, approving interlocal agreement with Mog Valley Fire Protection District for fire protection services and authorize the mayor to sign it. Motion by Caitlin. Second.

I'll second.

By Tani. Any further discussion, Caitlin? No, thank you for all you do. I mean, even just having two house fires in our community, you guys do amazing work and we are reliant on you and we appreciate you.

Thank you.

Tani?

Anybody else?

Yeah, I just want to echo the same thing. You guys have been running like crazy the last few weeks and we appreciate it.

Thank you. We love our fire department. All right, motion made by Caitlin, seconded by Tani. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion passes 5-0. Our next item that I'd like to ask for a motion is consideration of the cooperative wildfire system agreement with Forestry Fire and State Lands.

Motion? My computer's not cooperating.

I got you. I move to adopt resolution number 08-2026, approving the Cooperative Wildfire System Agreement with Utah Forestry, Fire, and State Lands and authorizing the mayor to sign it.

Motion by Collins. Second?

I'll second it.

Second by Jason. Any discussion, Colin? None. Jason?

No.

Anybody else?

Yes, Caitlin. I did have a question about the annual participation commitment statement. Is there a financial obligation from the city for this agreement?

Yes, and currently the work that's being done by Rim to Rim is more than our commitment, and it will be for the next several years. So the state averages our fire costs and then determines what we need to spend on our own city for mitigation. So there is a participation cost, but it is spent within our own community for fire mitigation, and we're already exceeding it.

Thank you. All right. Motion by Caitlin, second by Tom. Oh, wait a minute. Motion by Colin, second by Jason. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Passes 5-0. Thank you so much. And hopefully we will not see any fires here. this year.

Let's just take it easy the rest of the year.

It's kind of a depressing meeting. It's like drought and fire, and then you look out the window and it's just like, I feel like Armageddon. Okay, our last item, 6.5, consideration of Ordinance 2026-11, an ordinance of the City Council of Moab amending the Moab Municipal Code Title 17, Chapter 17, Dot three neighborhood commercial zone section 17 point 30 point zero to zero permitted use and regulations to include a medical clinic as a permitted use. This is a the clinic that is proposing that this is referring to is moving and where they're moving doesn't allow for it's not included in that particular zone. So the planning commission reviewed this. They are recommending not not moving.

Right. Staying in the same location. Oh, is that what it is? Adding services.

Thank you. Anyway, that's what this is about. It's just including medical clinics in that particular zone because that's what they do. And we want them to continue to do what they do. So, Johanna, go ahead. And like I said, the Planning Commission gave this positive recommendation. Before we begin, we have a new person in our office. This is Caitlin. Hi, Caitlin. Hi, Caitlin.

Okay, so the title really says it all. This is a code amendment to the C5 zone to allow medical clinic forwarded by the Arches New Hope Pregnancy Center. They submitted their application on May 26, and then we got a positive recommendation from Planning Commission on June 11th. Here are some excerpts from their narrative. This is a nonprofit that's been in the community for quite some time. They have about 1,500 square feet facility that offers pregnancy tests, health education, family resources. And they came to the city with a proposal to expand their scope of use. So that triggered the need to add medical clinics to the community. uses of the C5 zone so that they can expand their offerings to the community. They don't have any proposed expansions to the building, be operating in their same scope that way. The criteria for approval of a code amendment is laid out here and in your packet. We've got staff analysis of all the criteria in your packet as well. If you need for conversation, I've got the medical clinic definition, which is already in our code. We don't need to create a new one for them. And then I also have the C5 zone objectives and characteristics, which this use should fit nicely into. And that is the end of my questions for Johanna. We also have a representative from the applicant team if you have any questions for them.

I do have a question. More so about zoning text amendment process. So when I was looking, thinking about, you know, Mug Free Health Clinic, for example, is in C2. Mm-hmm. Um, medical clinic is not in any of our commercial zones that I looked at. Um, so I am definitely in support of this and if. the New Hope Center is considered a medical clinic, then surely the free health clinic is. Obviously there's hospital to cover the hospital campus, but I'm, maybe this is a question for Lisa or Michael, but I'm wondering if it's allowable for me to make, excuse me, make an alternative motion to include this text change in more than just the C5 zone.

Yeah, I mean, that would be great, except text amendments need to be noticed and they need to go through a public hearing at the Planning Commission. And so in this case, it wouldn't, I don't believe a motion would meet the criteria of what the state requires us to do. However, That's a good point. And I think Corey is working on the text of our, or everybody in planning is working on the text of the development code. And I will make sure this is on our list to fix. Unless it's something that we think we need to get fixed right away, then we can process a text amendment. I would think that we don't need to since they're already operating and they would be considered fixed. non-conforming, legal non-conforming use because they were permitted to operate there.

Yeah, well, just in building out this own argument, I would assume that they would be considered professional office or service establishment, which allows medical clinic as a use, but yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yes, right now some practices that you might think of, oh, they must fall into medical clinic, do right now fall into professional offices just because that definition is so broad.

Yeah. And we have no concerns about the free health clinic and its licensing zoning right now. So everything's good there.

Yes, I'm happy to make emotions feels like an easy one. Okay, thanks for your comments. I will move that the city that the city of Moab City Council approve city ordinance 2026-11 and ordinance of the City Council of Moab amending municipal municipal code title 17 chapter 17 point. 30 neighborhood commercial zone section 17.30.020 permitted uses and regulations to include medical clinic as a permitted use motion by colin second second second by caitlyn discussion colin i don't have any discussion caitlyn um well

I don't know if it's really in the process. Obviously, the applicant is here. I wanted to give you space and time if you wanted to say something. But, yes, I guess my other comment is, for sure, if we have definitions in the code, like medical clinic, we should be using them. So I would love to keep that in mind.

Miles, since you're our liaison to the Planning Commission, do you have any comment you'd like to make?

I think Johanna covered it fairly well. It was described in the planning meeting as somewhat of an oversight that it wasn't included in just essentially just an accidental omission that it wasn't included in this zone. And so I know that Corey is working towards better integrating it into the new code that we'll see at some point. So this was kind of a A necessary fix to allow this use that should definitely be allowed. So they parse through it very well. And I trust their recommendation. And I think this is a good thing to do and an easy thing to do.

Thanks, Miles. Any other discussion? I just want to clarify, there's not, you said there's no plan to expand the building. This is just adding services within the same building, same hours, same time.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Same folks that are operating.

Okay.

Yeah. If you have some deeper questions on that, that's my understanding. But again, the applicants are here if you'd like to ask them. Okay. I just wanted to find out.

That was kind of my question too. I kind of had the same thing. Just that the, I don't know, what happens at the building, you're expanding the services, what is happening there? However, like there's not going to be... Because I think right now everybody that goes to that building basically parks on the street. So there's not going to be more people parking on the street because there's more services going on, because services are still going to be scheduled according to the thing. I just want to make sure I'm reading that right. There's still going to be appointment only. And so the parking, there's not going to be a need for increased parking because there's four different types of services going on at the same time within the building. Is that correct? Okay, that's it. That's why I read I just want to say, yeah, yeah. So, okay. Yeah, that's my right.

I have a motion by Colin second by Caitlin to approve ordinance 2026 dash 11. amending the municipal code title title seven for permanent uses to include medical clinic as a permitted use. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Motion passes five. Thank you.

Thank you.

There you go, you guys. Thanks for all you do. All right. That was on TV. We will move on to city manager updates.

I've got a few updates tonight. Every year we do a community confidence report. It goes out usually by mail this year, and this is about our water system. It talks about the annual water quality, the water that we're delivering to our customers, and also talks about the mineral content and other things like that that's in our drinking water. So it's information that goes out every year to all of our customers. This year, that will be going out in the Times Independent as opposed to being mailed to all of the citizens. We have a quite large ad in the Times that will be informative. And if anybody has any questions, our utility department would be happy to answer those for you. Business license renewals are coming due very, very soon, June 30th. Just if anybody out there, if you know anybody who needs to do business license renewals, please get them information so they can get in here and talk to Marcy and her crew before the end of June. We already talked about fireworks. Flood preparedness is also on everyone's mind. Our public works department is starting to put up some of the warning signs, things like that, about crossing creeks, those types of things that you might see out there that are folded over right now that get folded up during when we have a threat coming on. We also have sandbags being filled. We've got a number of community groups. There are youth groups that come to town and they call us and they say, what can we do for a youth activity, service activity? We always say sandbags. So we've also been talking to people where we know there are issues. Levi has done an amazing job getting out and talking face to face with people, talking to them about their needs and what they might need for this coming season. And he's, I think, solved a few problems with hopefully with sandbags that are going to be delivered to people's homes where they can address persistent issues with water coming down. Creek maintenance is always going on, but it's going on now as well. We did a lot of projects this year for the creeks. As you probably saw, there's a lot of work going on, millions of dollars being spent in the Mill Creek corridor. And a lot of those projects are finished. A lot of those projects are still being planned. There's a lot of things left to do, but We are continually moving forward on that for more mitigation. And then we're also constantly working on detention basins and detention basin access. And as a history, a lot of the detention basins were built on private property with the Civilian Conservation Corps back then. And some were built later, even in the 70s. And they... They had agreements with property owners. Those agreements didn't take the form that I think lawyers like and or title companies. So we're still working on working with property owners, getting access to basins to keep those cleaned out. We had the Cross Creeks open house this week. The Cross Creeks is a project that goes along Mill Creek and then catches Pack Creek at the confluence of Mill Creek and Pack Creek between Main Street and 500 West. We had an open house last night. I think it was a good time that a lot of people show up. We had a lot of conversation going on. The main topics at that meeting were about how to take the 100 year flood and put it into a smaller corridor, which we have engineers who have proposed some ideas for that. I think they've done an amazing job with that and it would have a huge impact on positive impact on properties down in that area. And also the second item was about trails and active transportation. The property down there, a lot of that property down there is public. There has been a trail in the past. And we talked a lot about the potential for a trail going back in there, which has always been in the plans and continuing to talk about that. And Michael, sorry, do you want to?

I was just going to say, is there opportunity for people to continue? Yes. I know we're going to put, I saw the one poster up out here.

Yeah. We just had the one out here that shows some of the alternatives. We'll leave that out in the hallway. We are putting these online. We will have information there on the front page of our website. I talked to Lisa about that today. And we will also be taking comments throughout the process. If anybody would like to comment on this, we'd be happy to hear and have an email from you. You can send it to our general email box, send it to the city council if you'd like, or send it to me at mblack at moabcity.gov. And we will have another opportunity to speak. It's going to be as we present it to the city council. But we do expect to present this plan and to make a recommendation on the master plan or the conceptual plan for this area in the first meeting in August.

Go ahead. I was going to ask the same thing.

Okay. Thank you for asking that. So on another note, our leadership team has just finished our second book on leadership principles. This one was called Shackleton's Way. It's leadership examples from the great Atlantic explorer. I knew it was Antarctic explorer. So it's a great book. We had a really good time reading it. Shackleton is a great story. And there's so many great lessons coming from that. And we're trying to constantly, as our leadership team, stay on top of these things and talk. We have an opportunity to get together and talk about how this relates to challenges that we're experiencing and things like that. That book was written by Margo Morrell and Stephanie Caporell. Great that you do that, Michael.

And thanks for all the things that you've implemented with the staff and the leadership team. They love it. Yeah.

It's our favorite thing. They love it. They absolutely love it. Thanks for the vote of confidence. So we have two new police officers who were just hired. One is a lateral from Grand County Sheriff. I'm not going to do names today, but one is a new officer who recently took the Citizens Academy. You may have heard Chief Bell talk about that. recently. Somebody who went through the academy, then applied, went through the process and is on their way to the police academy. Came through the citizens academy, got interviewed, got a job and is being sent to the police academy or post.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, so pretty exciting. And then I'm also excited because I participated in the process to interview potential candidates on our staff already to be advanced to the position of sergeant. And I know that the process has finished. Chief Bell has made a decision. There is one person who has the potential to move up to become a sergeant. We have one sergeant who is retiring at the end of this year. In August, actually, is at the end of this sentence. At the end of the summer, we do have a sergeant who is retiring. That's our Detective Sergeant Jerry for her no way no not a lot not allowed no yeah yeah um and then we also have the new uh employee in planning uh she is a planner as as was pointed out as caitlyn pointer we're glad to have her here and and working with corey and johanna and they've got a lot of work to do as we all know and and she seems really excited to get in and get working so glad to see her here tonight and those are my updates

Well, council reports will start with you, Jason.

I don't have much. I didn't have any meetings this week. I had a meeting with the chamber, the city, and the county, and some other people who put on events during the holidays in December. And we all kind of sat down and coordinated the holiday efforts for the first week of December to kind of get everybody on the same page and talk about what went well last year and we've started planning the, I don't know what you call it, the winter festival in December. And I thought it was a really good meeting. I think it kind of kick-started everybody off and got people thinking about what we need to do to make next year or this year even bigger and better than what happened last year. And I think we came up with some really good ideas and a good working group.

That's it.

That's it.

Melanie. On the 11th, I went to a Canyonlands Health Care Special Service District meeting. It was pretty much finances and basic business meeting except that we went out for bid for a development grant. We've got eight. Is it eight applications? Or eight bids back?

It's not a development grant. It's an RFP. That's right. Completion of the maps project.

I wrote the wrong thing down. Extending that to the end of June. But we've got six. We've got six. And we're going to open those and review those next month.

July 9th.

I attended a meeting with Moab Museum staff today about fundraising and strategic planning. It was a really good presentation. It talks about the ethics of fundraising. Transparency compensation, how you review annual budgets for nonprofits and your revenue plan and The staff at the museum is on a good track. They're working to grow themselves as professionals in the museum too. And I just want to tell you, tell Levi and his crew that I think King Creek looks beautiful right now. It's just, I drove down it the other morning pretty early and it just, it only took a year and it just looks so pretty.

I will love it.

He might be watching.

Colin, thanks, Connie.

I just have two things on the 11th I attended another bike access charges working group meeting and we actually have now. An initial proposal that will be taking to its first opportunity for public comment at the trail mix meeting on the July 14 so if anybody's listening anybody anybody um. there is an opportunity to check out some of the initial work and initial proposals on the 14th of July. And then I also attended with Michael the Cross Creeks meeting last night. You know, very passionate conversation. It was good. It's going to be really interesting to see how this process unfolds because a lot of people care deeply about that for different reasons, that section of the creek itself.

Thank you. On the 10th, I went to a homeless council meeting. And of note, updates coming up, cottages still have a couple of rentals. And then on July 1st, the free health clinic wants people to know that that is a deadline for changes in unlicensed driver penalties. um so they're doing a lot of education if you are um unlicensed and driving a vehicle um and are looking to get some kind of permit um or id to reach out to the multicultural center i know that they're working really closely with pd and with the sheriff's office to coordinate rollout on that um And then on Wednesday, they will be having, there's some attorneys coming down from a Utah legal clinic. They're having a clinic free legal services for folks who need it on Wednesday, the 25th. And those kind of general updates. On the 12th, I went to Arts and Ag. And it's always a pleasure to see how many city people are there. I love seeing Patrick collect feedback for Suwannee Park and do a little bit of master planning in-house and for community development to be doing a little exercise about how to put an ADU on their property. And then on the 21st, I went to a Pride pool party at the MRAC, which was a great time to celebrate. That's it for me.

Is that it? That's it. Okay, Miles. Thank you, Caitlin.

So, um, On the 11th, I attended the planning and zoning meeting virtually. You got to hear about the major agenda item on there already in regards to the code change to allow for the medical clinic. They fielded another of requests to adjust screening and buffering on properties where there's significant elevation difference between the two. And without getting into it too deeply. I just wanted to really applaud the careful consideration that the Planning Commission is having in regards to what is an appropriate screening and buffering when you have a nine foot retaining wall separating two properties. I think they've done a really good job of fielding these different requests and I really appreciate that. Otherwise, they had Some more discussion about municipal code for vendors and what that's going to look like in the new code rewrite. It seems like that's moving right along and Corey is excited with the addition of our new planner that he's going to be able to dedicate more of his time towards bringing that full code rewrite to us. So that's my update from them. Um, And then I also attended GWSA this past Thursday. A few things to note. So Ken's Lake, since the last time we had a GWSA meeting, so about a month's time, was a 33-acre foot net loss. And they are pumping as hard as they can to refill the lake, but we are using more than we're pumping out of the ground. Soil moisture in La Salle is seeing a significant drop. It had been elevated going into the last couple months just basically because the snow was melting sooner than it should. And now that all the snow has melted, the soil moisture is dropping off considerably. So we had a presentation from both of the different cloud seeding projects that the state and that GWSA have going on and the county have going on here. There's a lot of in-depth stuff we could discuss with that. Essentially, they are showing us their results after one year. Some of that they can show us with radar. Others is other results are essentially a comparison to unseated areas and they are using historical data to try to say how much rain would have fallen had they not seeded. I think it's important to note that this last year was very different from any historic precedent in snowpack and otherwise, so it's hard to conflate data when the year you're using doesn't really fit the metric of this historic data you're supposed to use. But it was still a very interesting presentation. They discussed talking to the state, and I don't know if the city could at some point put in some kind of letter of support, but the state has talked about putting more Doppler radar down here, and that could help us a lot with our storm predictions and otherwise. And if the state is willing to put up some money for that, that'd be amazing. Otherwise, they wanted to point out that their new water line is progressing. So they're installing a new main water line all the way up 191 through Spanish Valley. If you live in the neighborhood off Holyoke there, you've seen the construction that's progressing well. And they have an RFP out for the sewer line replacement. And they also have an RFP out for the cemetery well rejuvenation work that needs to be done. um i'm not sure if this is the case the city level but i know at gwissa they're being hit with additional state fees from the division of drinking water um and so that will be reflected in your bill it's minor but um it is coming down the line and that's the majority of the high points from my gwissa meeting and that's all i have thanks miles

For me, I attended the ULTC Resort Caucus, which is resort communities around the state, just to see what's going on with those communities. As Tony mentioned, we had a Canyonlands Healthcare Special Service District. We met with our lobbyists, not much new to report there. We should have more information in July. Today I attended this special service district training with this special service district association which is really beneficial. And then I also went to the cross creeks event last night which was really very good. attended an Arches shuttle work group. And at this point they are in negotiations with the park service on their cooperative management agreement. Not sure if they signed it yet. I know that they were planning to go out for RFP for the shuttle service contract. Their intent was to have that on their July 7th meeting to approve who they're going to sign a contract with. At this point, I'm kind of, you know, they're in their own negotiations. So the city is not involved in that. But once the working group gets back going, I'm sure I'll continue to be there. But right now they're in negotiations and RFP and things like that. We do have two openings on the Planning Commission. I'm going to make those appointments at our next meeting in July, which will be July 28th. We will not have a meeting the first, on July 14th, we will not have a meeting. So I believe we extended that. I have four meetings. People that are interested, we've extended that timeline until July 17th. So if anybody's interested or if you know anybody interested, please have them submit a letter to me. How you can do that, Lisa's going to have it out on social media. It's in the papers. But anyway, that would be great. And then, like I mentioned, our next meeting will be July 28th. And the only other thing I want to say is have a happy, safe 4th of July. It's 250 years of America. be safe and don't use fireworks in the city limits. That's it for me. So we do have to go into close to talk about reasonably imminent or pending litigation, if I could have a motion.

To go into close to talk about imminent and or pending litigation.

Motion by Jason. Second by Caitlin.