City Council - workshop

We'd like to welcome everyone out to our work session this Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. We'd like to welcome all council members at this time. We excuse council member Phillips. We will turn the time over to and welcome all those who are in attendance and online. And we'd like to invite director Megan. Are you, you're handling this? Okay. We could have our new intern come up and handle it. Is that okay? Yeah.

All right, so as we've talked about before, we made a decision this summer to close an hour early at the pool. So the idea was to take a look at the end of the summer on what this looked like. So this is kind of just a basic overview of 2025 versus 2026. You can see where some of the differences are. Unfortunately, without really doing surveys and things like that, we don't have all the answers exactly right now on why all the things are what they are. But I have a couple of explanations on some of it. So memberships, if those kind of our biggest numbers are memberships and day passes. Memberships are down, but something to note at the very bottom, the rec pool combo pass, we integrated that back into our membership cells this year. The last time we sold that was 2022. So we sold 110 of those. Now, do we know 110 of those are people that would have bought a pool pass? We don't know that answer. So we can't necessarily say that that 110 of those pool rec combo passes are in, you know, make the difference on the membership side of the pool. But that is a number to consider there that part of that membership number being decreased may be part of those combo passes. So you can look at as a whole, we were down in revenue for the pool between last year and this year. However, in staff costs that we saved per hour, it's $425 per hour on staff costs, we saved $42,000. So in the end, we do come above ahead when you look at the overall revenue versus the money saved. Do you have a question?

When you say staff costs, what do you mean? Like you just, you just have lifeguards, hours, like what did you reduce?

Direct, yep, very direct. So if there's 18 lifeguards on stand for that hour times that by what they make per hour, an hour a day for the entire summer that we were closed an hour earlier. This does, this staff cost per hour does include the, I think there was 13 days in the end of August that we were normally open in the afternoon when school started. but we also closed those days and only were open on Saturdays. So that is also included in this number. We did not, as far as I know, that we did not have anybody give us any feedback that that was an issue. I think the biggest feedback we got online was the hour earlier closure. Yeah. looking at it at face value at least to me it looks like it could be negative at first but i think i see about eleven thousand dollar correct okay yep so looks like negative in revenue but by the time you look at how much we saved in staff costs we do still come out ahead by about eleven thousand dollars

Well, if I can point out, that $11,000 is probably the low end of that. We probably saved more money because of what she was pointing out is in 2026, the 110 rec pool passed combos. In 2025, we sold zero. So we had 110 people that we don't know how many, but we're assuming some of them bought memberships in 2025 that did not buy memberships in 2026.

But the combo wasn't offered in 2025. It was?

It was not.

It was not in 2025.

The most recent was 2022 that that was offered.

So... I mean, this is why I want to do a survey. I want to find out why people didn't come this year. Is there a reason? Sure. It's hard to have the data and not know why we lost $16,000 and it went from $85,000 to $69,000. We don't know. That's why I wanted to do a survey to find out, do you like the hour change? The after-school thing I agree with because once school gets back in, there's really no point in being open. Right, it's hard to, yeah. It's cooling down, people are back in school. But there was a lot of feedback online regarding the hour closure, and I just don't know if that's, I don't know.

Yeah, we don't know what the exact, yeah, we don't know the exact reasons at this point.

I mean, and even asking why did you not purchase a, because right here the membership, there's a $25,000 difference. I just want to know why they didn't buy membership. Do they have less kids at home so it made more sense to do a punch pass? I don't know. But that's what I think we need to figure out from the community is why those – because I don't – I don't know if it needs to be community.

I mean, is there a way to survey that the – previous member the 2025 membership holders for sure yeah that's what we need to implement because if we can figure out why they didn't why they bought in 2025 and they did the next year and they didn't buy in 2026 or if they bought the combo pass instead correct it just just so we're clear the combo pass it goes into the rec budget it doesn't go into the i think that but but that could that could explain the the delta well that that's what we think we have 39 000 in a combo pass And if that's the case, then great.

So three quarters of the combo passes were previous pool membership holders. That explains the exact difference.

We just changed the revenue.

But Todd, I see what you're saying, but still, we still have day passes and memberships overall that are down.

But they may not be down, is what they're saying.

Well, memberships, the day passes, yes, but we don't have a way to survey day passes.

The combo, yes, or the combo's up, but the day passes and memberships broken out are both individually down. And I see what you're saying with the group of four in 2025, analyzing them. But I also want to know.

But if they bought rec passes instead.

The combo pass.

The combo pass. It wouldn't show up in this line. It would show up on the combo pass. Yeah, it's not showing up as a revenue in the swim.

So there's no way to analyze that? Or is there?

So just cross-reference that.

Yeah, we could probably cross-reference. So, but just, yeah, just to be clear, it looks like membership is down 25,000, but let's say even half of those 110 last year bought just the pool pass, but this year went to the combo pass, right? It may not look like it's a deficit of 25,000.

But it's still going to be a deficit, maybe not 25,000.

It wouldn't be to that number.

The deficit would probably be, if it was half, it would probably be 5,000.

So here's my, because we've done renovations to the pool. We've added features. So I'm curious, yes, with the 2025 pass holders until now, why they didn't buy again, but also the community as a whole. If you've never bought a pass to the pool, why? so there's the two groups, the previous pass holders who didn't come back, and then the community as a whole, that if you're not going to PG, where are you going?

Sure. So we don't have an ability to survey the daily pass people.

You can't identify who they are through email or anything?

Not, so yeah, just to be clear, day pass, no, because they could walk in and just pay their $5 cash.

Oh, well, that's true. Yeah, that's true, but membership people. But membership, yes. Membership, yes.

And so we can still work on that, and that's still the plan, obviously, to work on some surveys.

Because I'd rather get those out sooner than later while it's fresh on people's minds because the pool just recently closed. And I'd like to have the data available in the next couple weeks so we can make changes, whatever we need, the feedback that we get from them to possibly improve the pool. If there's something that we need to do differently for next year instead of now we're at March or April for next year and the pool's opening. Because I don't want to continue this trend of going down. I want to know what we can do so people keep their families here at Pleasant Grove to go to our pool. Sure. And I don't know why they're leaving.

Can I ask another follow up question? I know it's more about what's not maybe on here. Sure. I don't see any line item on here for rentals.

So second line, second line item down.

So the rentals, that's the group rental.

Yes, that is. Yep.

So that's so having it available for that hour seems to have worked.

Yes, it brought us up, not probably by what we would have wanted to see, like $8,000 is not a ton, but it did go up in rentals.

Do you attribute it because of the, I mean, just anecdotally, I know that you probably don't have, but it feels like that.

Yeah, because we just had more time to provide those rentals, right, because we were closing later, so now we had additional time frame to do those. So yeah, it did give us an increase in rentals. Our hope would be that now, knowing it's out in the community word of mouth, that rentals would continue to increase. Knowing that we closed a little bit earlier, it's easier for birthday parties, whatever it is, right? Corporate parties, that we would hope to continue to see that to increase as well. But not sure what that looks like for the future, but we hope to see that increase.

And also, I mean, there's not a way, this is anecdotal too, but our demographics are changing. We do have less kids in our city than what we've had in the past.

How do we know that?

By... Education. Yeah, we're seeing schools close. PG High is down, I want to say, 500 students from where they were 10 years ago. We're not necessarily seeing that in our RUC programs, but I think we're pulling people from other communities is probably helping make up for some of our REC numbers.

I was going to say, the REC numbers are through the roof on a lot of youth programs.

Well, but that's why I'm not... I don't believe this is a revenue loss. My gut tells me that without the rec information, this is this is a little bit of an anomaly because i think that the 25 000 is probably not as big because those individuals are the ones that bought the wreck pool combo pass and we don't we don't know what those numbers are sure if you look down if you look down from 2022 to 2026 i mean we've got 30 more passes that were bought um which rep would represent how much money That was probably $15,000. Yeah. Right. So $15,000 just from that four-year delta. That would be an interesting analogy to cross-reference.

I guess in my mind, this is somewhat of a high-level overlook. We're going to break into demographics and why people are, it's going to be like there's a lot more we'd have to jump into to do that. So just on a look at a high-level look that we're looking at here, in our minds, closing in an hour was probably a net benefit for the city. it's not a huge number swing for us.

Because of the 42,000 saved. Correct.

Yeah. And so, yeah, because my understanding was there was some feedback on social media from a handful of people, but I mean, we do have thousands of people that use this pool. So I don't know if the individuals that were on social media were saying, I'm never coming back here again. I don't know if they're representative of a large portion of our community or kind of where they're at.

But some of this $42,000 was from the hours that were cut back after school started. So there's like a couple weeks there that we don't have a number specifically on that. And yeah, a couple people did say... They may not be coming back. So that's why I want to do the surveys because we don't know why people left. Was it the hour? Was it we don't have enough features? Was it they found? I don't know. That's why I don't know. It's hard because now we have the data, but now what are we going to do with it?

Well, yeah, looking at a high level, our recommendation is to continue to keep these savings in the payroll costs and to close the hour early. I mean, again, we can do some additional data gathering, but at least for me and in talking to Sean, not one person reached out to me. Sean got one email. So it's also hard for us to gauge what does social media input look like versus nobody's reached out to me as the director to say, this is the dumbest decision you ever made, right? So no one tried to weigh that.

Can I push back a little bit on the framing of it with Scott saying there's a net benefit to the city? Economically, yes. Economically, yes. But the question is, is the benefit of closing down now early, did that produce a net benefit? benefit to the city recreationally. I think, to me, the rental numbers make a difference because that makes up a decent swing in the day passes. But I guess that's the question, right? Correct. That is exactly the question. People who bought the passes, even day passes, that's the demographic that I'm maybe... wanting to know if they're going to buy it again or if closing down the hour early and closing during August, if that would lead them to not purchase a pass next year. That's maybe the demographic of people that I would care about. And those are people that you could send an email to. I assume you have their emails and say, hey. Yeah, memberships, yep. You know, we had some different hours. How did that affect you? Are you more likely, less likely, somewhat more likely, whatever, to figure out if those people had a problem with the hour closing? Because, again, $11,000 plus or minus one way or the other, that's not really that big of a deal for the city. I mean, it's a lot of money, but at the end of the day, operating the pool, it's almost, it's very even, and we probably... No, and I agree with that.

It's fairly negligible. So really, the one hour is just a decision that we can make to say for the community good. let's do the hour or let's just save the money and hold back. It didn't affect that many people.

Steve, I have a question. Would you specifically ask them about the hour or would you just say, would you buy a pass again in 2027? Would you ask them about the hour or just like in a comment section, let them bring it up? I mean, I think that's a good question. Because if you put it out there, then they're going to be like, oh, my heck, you did close. Yeah, that bothered me. And it really didn't affect them. So I'm wondering if you even put that question on there.

Anything about the change of the pool.

Maybe not say it, but let them give comments and just say, would you purchase the pass?

Are you planning on buying another pass next year? Yes or no. If not, tell us why. And that might be an easy way to not taint any kind of – or push it one way or the other. Because I'm also curious, are there things that they want to see at the pool that could enhance their experience? Because it is a main asset that we have as a city. Well –

Keep in mind, once you open that door and say what do you want in this pool, we're going to have... Well, I know, but we need to know, though.

And we've never done a pool survey, and so I think it would be helpful to know because what they say, we may not be able to do it. We may, we may not. But then it would give us an idea about maybe whether we're going to other cities or is there something we can do that's a minimal cost to keep people here. We just need a starting place to...

I like the idea of just a comment of are you going to get a... a full pass and if not, why?

That would be fine. Well, and it's simple because they'll answer it.

Tell us if this is an aging demographic.

No, and that's a fairly easy survey we can put together pretty dang quick and get it out pretty quick and get that answer.

And go to everybody that's ever had one.

Yeah. I think that, like I said, so you can target memberships? Yes.

Okay. Day passes.

Because we have emails for them.

Okay. So I like the idea of specifically sending one to them, but then also putting it out on our social media and the community, because I want to know why a community member has never gone to the pool. I don't know. I have no clue.

Like, is there a reason? But that's a whole different survey.

Well, but that's okay because we need to hear from them too. Is there a reason that they have never thought about it and never come? Maybe they go to Linda, maybe they go to, I don't know.

I just prefer if we're going to do that, we do two separate surveys.

And that's fine. You can email to the membership, but I think we should put out to the community as a whole to see why they are or are not coming. Because then you're just going to open up to a much larger audience that I'd like to hear from.

Yeah, so what you're talking about is now a citywide survey where we actually – Just a link, a link on social media that we just sent out.

Let us know. I don't know, it could be three questions. I don't know. Very basic, but let us know. The pool is now closed for the season. We'd like your feedback.

Yeah. I mean, I think those two things are very doable for us. I mean, we are ending the end of the season, so now is the right time for us to get those out, and we can target the membership and take a look at what that looks like.

Can you send us the questions before?

Scott and I and Megan will sit down and talk for a minute, and then we'll get back with everyone.

In my mind, I just want to start with our one question. Let's get that going.

I'm of the agreement with that one. Yeah.

Okay. If we're going to do a citywide survey on a pool, we might as well do a citywide survey on a lot of different things. And that's just a whole different world.

Ultimately, the pool, as far as I saw, I wasn't there a lot this year, but it was pretty busy. And I didn't see a drastic decrease. the days that I was there. I don't know. You guys may see otherwise.

Honestly, I typically, when I was there, it cleans out pretty around dinner time. The lifeguards kind of do their 15-minute break time. And at the 6 o'clock, the 6.45 break that they take, the pool kind of clears out because people are going to get dinner. Anyway. That's what it felt like to me when I was there.

But that's been that way for years.

Sure.

But I agree with the survey. Maybe we start there and if we see some stuff that's concerning, then maybe we take the next step.

Sure.

Okay. And Megan, do you want to touch base on the fixing the, I can never say the name right. The wibbit. Wibbit.

Yeah. So we finally confirmed it's just two, so there's multiple sections of the wibbit. There's two sections that need to be replaced. It's about, oh gosh, I didn't write down the number. Thank you. I think it was about $5,000 for the two or $15,000 for the entire component. Sean and I have talked. Our plan is to replace the two. We've done that before. We've replaced some components, give it some more life until we're ready for a capital improvement project.

It was five versus 15? Correct, yep. So a third of the cost? Mm-hmm.

I don't know. I would be, I mean, a full replacement.

I don't know. I mean, if it's a third of the cost to replace 10% of the women.

Megan, does the full replacement get exactly the same thing or does it add more features?

No, it's exactly the same of what we've got. So we could. spend more and get more out of it. But I think also our thought process was our timeframe for capital improvement projects, right? If we just do the five right now, we know for sure we've got it for another summer. And then if, you know, next spring, we do want to look at 2028, replacing the entire thing, we can look at doing that or whatever that looks like down the road.

Maybe look at the other components and ensure that they're not going to fail next season.

I don't know if we have the ability to actually look and know if they're not going to fail.

I mean... On like frayed edges. Yeah. You know what I mean? If it's looking a little worn.

I mean, if the whole thing's falling apart, then... We'll take a look.

If it's falling apart, then we'll have a request for a new... How long does it take to get here?

Like, is it something...

No, it's pretty fast. Like they sell them all over the nation and they're like, it's a, they sell them to pools all over the place. So it's not, it would be something we'd need to do in the springtime, like, you know, January, February, March timeframe.

One more question, Megan.

Yeah.

Can you add to this thing? Like if you replace the two pieces, can you add other pieces to it? Like a puzzle?

yes i mean they're like they are all like if you go to wibbit.com you can see the variety we have we let's say we replace the two pieces and then we steve wants to add you know a couple other pieces on the other side as long as it fits in the pool then yes okay there you go so yes we can we can look at those options and and uh

But to me, I guess what I would look at and I would maybe want you and Sean to recommend is take a close look at the condition of the other pieces of the wibbit. Because if we're talking about, I mean, we just saved $11,000 in the budget from the pool from the difference of the time.

Now we're spending.

And so we're going to put five grand into two pieces, which is, I assume, maybe a third or 25% of the wibbit. I don't know.

Probably about a third, yeah.

Yeah, so then it's like, okay, well, did we just... take that or do we make sure that we have some backup pieces that I don't want that with it to ever be down because our pool doesn't have a ton of sure sure but I just to me it seems like usually it's like a used car once one thing kind of goes out then you just have to end up placing the fuel pump and then you end up you know placing the other thing yeah I don't know okay that makes sense we'll definitely look into the yeah evaluate the entire piece and take a look at that okay any other questions for me no thank you okay thank you

All right, the piece that we've all been looking forward to is Director Winterton. Are we talking?

Well, let's introduce our intern. Oh, sorry.

Who's doing the introducing? Don't let David. All right, David. You can come up too, James.

We're going to want you to speak. Yeah.

That's all. That's all.

So, as you know, we had a management intern that helped us over the summer months, Soad Singh. She did a great job. She was not able to stay on with us during the school year, so we opened up the position and we did interviews and we selected a new intern to help us out and his name is James Mitchell. He started yesterday, and he's already been a great help, and so we're very much looking forward to having him help us. He'll be with us working part-time between now and the April timeframe. So I will let him introduce himself.

Welcome, James.

Hello, great to be here. My background's in education. I taught out of middle school in Provo for about five years. I decided to go back to school. I got a master's degree in data analytics and just working. Oh, a man of my language.

Where did you graduate from?

So my undergrad was at USU up in Cache Valley, where I'm from.

Sorry, Scott.

And then my master's degree was through WGU. Also blue. So, you know, there we go. No, no, they're not.

That's because they were all in class.

Yeah, yeah, that's the one. So, yeah, excited to be here. Very good.

Counsel, any questions? Okay, welcome.

All right, thank you. Good to meet you guys.

Yeah. Let's take a moment of silence just for a minute before Neil comes up. And here we go. Okay. Yeah. Oh, no notes? You're just going to go?

We're postponing the utility rate discussion. Okay. So we wanted to get a little bit more data to have. It'll be heavily data-driven, and we wanted a couple of more data points to represent what we're suggesting on that. So we felt like... it would just be a good thing to postpone.

So was this just a ploy for you to come up first before the rest of the staff?

Well, that is part of it. So there was a couple of things I did want to bring up with you as far as just a report goes. But along those lines of water, I've reported that we're going to do okay, and we did have another discussion this morning. We've pretty much got a month left of the irrigation season, and our – Water management strategies this year have worked and we're going to be okay to continue on with a normal year as far as mid-October. As far as shutdown goes, we're going to watch the weather. If it gets to be freezing early to where people's irrigation systems are in jeopardy of freezing or even our lines, we'll shut it down a little early. But otherwise, pretty much October 15th is what we aim for. to continue to provide a last watering for people's orchards or trees or shrubs to go into winter. Your evergreen trees need water even throughout the winter time if we don't get natural water from the sky. Any questions related to just water use and irrigation moving forward?

We talked a little bit about some of the road projects. I think they're still on time to get those done before the shutoff. I think you'd like to have those paved before shutoff.

And that's one reason we like to get the paving done and at least have the irrigation running right up to that point of paving. So those are on schedule for that. I did send you an email. It was just earlier today. You may not have gotten it. We got a compliment, and not we as a city, but we as an extension through our contractor from Quick Quack Car Wash. I don't know. That's a pretty large project down there in an area that the logistics of maintaining water service and even vehicular service off of 800 North into that, which is pretty much their only access, has been extremely challenging for a project that you're blocking an entire water line, replacing service lines, and then tearing up the entire road, prepping the road, and then paving the road. And the manager, I assume, of Quick Quack wrote a letter to the contractor expressing his appreciation for the diligence and care in which they administered this project. Super unusual for someone to take that effort to say that. I'm gonna take some credit because that's just what we do for that and that balancing over protection of don't work during this time and don't do this, that costs us money as a city. That costs the other residents money. So we're always in balance of giving the contractor the leeway to do the work the way that works best for them, which ends up saving us money, but also protecting our residents and protecting our businesses. And this is one of those examples where I would say I think we hit the mark because we have a business reaching out saying thank you, and yet they had to cease operations for a time on a Monday to accommodate some concrete pouring. The contractor, as I think we probably all recognize, had to shut a water main down on a Sunday at like 5 a.m., 4 a.m., and work through Sunday. That's not an ideal situation for the contractor, the residents, not an ideal situation for our staff who are out there. So... It's all about optimizing those best times, and I'd just like to almost just have some good news out there that a business reached out and said thank you and good job for our business. So yeah, I forwarded that. Let's talk about stop signs. We govern stop signs on the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, shortened to MUTCD. When we put up new stop signs, they're warranted through a series of data collected to determine whether or not they should be four-way stops. We had a three-way stop at Nathaniel and Loader that we analyzed, and that analyzation or warrant analysis or traffic impact study came back and said, you should take out the two stop signs that stop Nathaniel and Loader. Nathaniel and leave the one at the loader, obviously. So it was previously a three-way intersection with three-way stop. Now it's a one-way stop. When motorists aren't anticipating a stop sign, it can create challenges when you do put stop signs in. It also is a challenge to take out stop signs for residents who are used to those and have grown up with those and live with those in their neighborhood. So I will say that we're following and we took out some stop signs over the last week because we put a new surface on the road. We felt it was the right time since we were covering those markings anyway. Let's take out those stop signs at that time. We did an A job in getting the analysis and warrant and doing our due diligence to make sure that we were following proper transportation guidelines. And not just guidelines, but pretty heavily enforced engineering standards for when things come up. We didn't do a good job of communicating that and getting the word out and executing with fireworks and blaring signs. So that's something that we can improve on. We do have a couple of variable message signs out there and some additional signage now. We could have made that a little bit more robust through notification, maybe even some door knocking on some neighbors that that utilize that intersection as much as they do. So I wanted to report back on that as well and open it up for questions.

So initially it was the single stop sign, and then it was the triple stop sign. and now it's back to single. So what warranted it going from single to triple to now back to single, and what warrants, like, I guess I'm just trying to understand.

That I cannot answer. I can estimate in my mind that now that the school isn't active right now, that when we analyze the data, it didn't come back with as much volume heading in those directions. The other portion that included was it was a safe route. It's not on the safe route map anymore. So when it's not on the safe route, that crosswalk isn't there. And so we would encourage people to go up to the other locations to cross. And that's my best guess. I wasn't here whenever it went. You might remember when it went to it. I do. so what made you analyze this now like is it complaints is it accidents like because that you could be analyzing every stop crosswalk and stop sign in the city so what made you do this one now great question uh with um the roadway project looming in 2023 we identified this as a potential area to analyze and so we did that but based on what um

Like an accident? Something had to trigger that. I'm just wondering.

Well, we were redoing the road for one. The school had closed down. we analyzed it because of those two factors. We also analyzed 1100 North and 300 East at the same time. And that came back warranting the four-way stop. So there were three intersections I wanted to look at.

But do you do that with every single project or not necessarily?

Not necessarily, only if I suspect that some changes might be needed based on just kind of gut and experience. Since I've been here, I think we've performed six to eight warrants studies. Oh, okay.

And some come back yes, and some come back no.

Yeah, for sure. I'm just interested in the process, because this is, yeah, it's just... Also, part of the criteria is volume, meaning just number of cars.

Mm-hmm.

if I go look at an intersection, I can generally get a feel for what might or might not warrant. I might not get exact, but it will say to myself, I really don't think it's worth. They're $3,000 to $4,000 a piece. The intersection has counters placed, whether that's those little tubes, whether that's optical cameras, or whether that's a physical individual human being going out there and counting every car that turns left, right, and through. But if you go out there at peak times, you can get a feel for how that's gonna come out. When it gets close to something, I might feel like it's worth it to look at that and see. And also, if there's an accident that shows up, I might say, gosh, we oughta get that warrant study done. If there's enough residential complaints that says, gosh, this really needs to be a four-way. I've gone and unfortunately sat in my truck and watched intersections quite a bit, whether that's school zones or whether it's intersections or roadways, stop signs, crosswalks. I've only missed the mark on one, and it wasn't due to one reason. It was due to a different reason as to what I thought the outcome would be. And we do these independently so that my opinion isn't a part of it, my thought. I want them independently analyzed on the merits from someone who doesn't even live here but has extensive history with performing these types of studies.

As someone who may or may not have experience receiving a ticket for running that stop sign. on my way to school. I mean, that's only one of the concerns I would have is that that is a main route to the high school from coming off the hill, right? And I think that it's a funky intersection. Yeah. But I do feel like it feels a little bit like an F1 track where you can kind of race down the hill and take that corner pretty fast. You want to talk about? Yeah.

I do.

So that's only... Not that I may or may not have. Yeah, you may or may not have tried that. But it's just... It's a concern that I would have is that without any reason to stop, you're going to have some pretty fast cars coming down that hill. Yeah.

I'll try to say this as delicately and non-bluntly as I can.

You'll be blunt.

But stop signs are not a reason to, or speed control is not a reason to install stop signs. That is specifically mentioned several times in the MUTCD for not using stop signs for speed control. And the reason is that is because as a driver and a user, you have inherent biases to where you think you should stop. And when you don't think you should stop and there's a stop sign and you run a stop sign, That's equally dangerous as to not having the stop sign there. And that's what the data suggests with the transportation.

I can believe that. So I guess going back to one of the points you said, so what are we doing now to make sure that it's advertised that that is now a single stop sign?

We've got the variable message signs up on both sides with new traffic pattern ahead. We've got extra signage on Loader saying that there's a new traffic pattern.

Do we have the little sign that says, like, cross traffic doesn't stop?

That was installed with the original intersection, yes. But again, if you live there... I feel like we could have done a better job notifying the surrounding area, again, even to the point of door knocking, because we could go door knock, load, or drive in, I don't know, 45 minutes and say, hey, just so you know, this is what's going on. And for that type of change in traffic pattern, I think that would have been worth it. So what I'm acknowledging is we could have done better in that scenario. We don't install stop signs when people say, hey, I think it should be a stop. We don't take them out when they say, I think there shouldn't be one here. We don't govern traffic by opinion. We govern traffic by the engineering analysis, and the MUTCD, otherwise known as the Bible of Traffic, is how we administer those and make those decisions.

That was a deep sigh in there.

Well, who knew stop signs could be this cool, right? I don't know if cool is the word for it.

Definitely interesting.

Yeah. So that's my report. In your packet is a notice of award, and that's all I've got. So I can wait to take questions on that, or I can take any questions you might have related to public works right now.

And you said secondary water shutoff was going to be...

I would say April 15th. Sorry. Or a day or... Sorry. Are we prepared?

I'm already headed to April 15th. I don't know if we want to say that.

Why?

Well, we just don't know what the weather's going to be.

Yeah, I typically wait until a couple of weeks. The forecast is usually pretty good at that point. So that... Because we just don't know. I mean, I would say, if you ask me right now, I'd say plan on April 15th.

You mean October?

And October 15th, start and stop dates. May 1st is when it will be totally available. And that's how it's been for at least the last eight years that I've been on council.

But that's what I'm saying. Why can't we? Because we're starting to get questions because now we're like about a month out and people are just curious.

Because what if it's 88 degrees on October 15th?

Then we set ourselves up.

Yeah, I mean, we can say tentatively or thinking about, but that's the default date that it will always be, and we could just remind them of that, however we want to message it.

If it's 90 degrees on October 15th, we're going to keep the water on another week?

Possibly. I mean, it depends on several factors, and that's why typically right around the end of September is when we aim for when we shut it down. Because shutdown isn't just, hey, it's gone. There's a methodic process of how we shut it down to – bleed the air and drain it. So it would be my recommendation, even if it was another week or two, to wait and say, this is what we're anticipating. It could be as early as October 1st if the temperatures and precipitation suggest that that's the best time. It could be later. I don't even know what day of the week October 15th is. Generally, we would start on a Tuesday or Wednesday so that we can wrap it up. But then again...

Can I just flag on the website, it says October 9th.

That's probably 18 years old. I mean, I don't know. There might be some data associated with that. Let's go with October 9th.

Can we just take it off, though?

Yeah, we should get rid of it.

That's what I'm just saying. We just need to clear that up. I'll send it to you.

Yeah, thanks for that.

I don't think it's binding on you in any way. I just want to pull it off. But if people are looking and they go to the website, they're going to see. I saw somebody repeat it on social media, so I verified it. Okay, thank you.

Thanks. Dion.

We don't have a lot. We've been busy doing tournaments and events and trying to wrap up a bunch of stuff before winter gets here. We have a few projects that we want to get. They're smaller projects, but we want to get them lined out and wrapped up before winter. We had our day of service on Sunday or Saturday. Sunday, not Sunday. Saturday. The cemetery had a great turnout. They got a lot accomplished out there. The parks was not so great. We didn't have a lot of turnout. for those four different parks that we had projects in. But the cemetery got a lot of stuff done. So we were happy with that. And yeah, that's pretty much my report. Awesome. Any questions?

Questions? OK, thank you Megan. I forgot when you're up here. Maybe come up and talk about. The the Saturday that we had with the yeah, right? And what? Oh yeah, sure. Heritage was busy, was crowded. Right Steve?

It was awesome. Yeah, it was great.

Well, I'm not sure we could have asked for better weather. It was like if we could do events with that kind of weather every time, it would be golden. But yeah, Heritage Festival went well. I actually haven't attended it before, so I didn't know exactly what it looked like before, but at least from what I experienced last night, it was enjoyable. The bands were really good. I do think it's kind of interesting and fun for us because this kind of serves a different demographic than maybe what all of our other events do, so that's great. It's another way to serve a different part of our community, so great event there. A couple Saturdays ago, I don't even know when because I can't remember what's happened when anymore, but we had the Mikey's League partnership where we ran the all-inclusive sports clinic. Steve, I'm going to tell you, I got a hockey stick signed by... Liam himself. Nice. So you missed out. If you were there, you could have gotten yourself a signed hockey stick.

Going on a vacation with my family.

Must be present. They were awesome. The Utah Mammoth came.

Did he check you into the board?

No. Oh, I didn't play. No, I wasn't playing. He actually brought his kids. Oh, did he? Yeah, I think it was him. There was two players. I think it was his kids. Anyway, so we had a close to 80 that registered. We ended up with about 60 that showed up, both youth and adults with disabilities. But the Utah Mammoth gave out hockey sticks. Then we had a jazz kind of clinic. They're not players. It's really hard to get jazz players. But we had some jazz representatives there. And I never caught his last name, but a retired NFL player that also played at the University of Utah. His name's Jesse. But I don't know what his last name was. But he came in part of the flag football component. So it turned out to be another great event. We learned some things on how we'll do things a little bit different next year. But it was a nice, fun, inclusive day with everybody there and part of it. So yeah. Other than that, we're just gearing up for flag football, I think, is starting right as we speak right now. So soccer's almost winding down. We're getting ready for basketball, the fall, all the fall and winter things coming around the corner. So any other questions or anything for the rec?

Steve, I did get bumped by O'Brien, and he's a big boy.

Yeah? I don't doubt it. I'm just disappointed that Todd and I didn't get to reprise our roles.

Yeah. Last night, you missed out. Yeah, yeah. You could have gotten up and sang if you wanted to. We could have made a spot for you.

That's why we had more people there.

We didn't drive them off. We were Emmy material. Exactly. So next year, just something to put a bug in your ear.

Perfect. I'll let Andy know. She'll get it scheduled for you.

Tell her thank you, though. That was really good.

It was a good event. It was fun.

Okay, thank you. Epic. Daniel. Epic. Nothing? David, do you have anything else?

I sent an email out this morning that you might have received. We're doing a get-together to celebrate all the effort from our employees with the Steps Challenge and the Bingo Wellness Challenge. We'll go over the numbers there, but we had record number of participants and steps, and it was great. We surpassed our goal. We set an audacious goal of 100 million steps. And we not only reached that, but we surpassed it. So between 115 participants, we had 110 million steps, which is pretty impressive. That's almost circling the equator like two times. Wow. When someone says take a hike, we have quite literally done that. But yeah, we're going to be celebrating that on Thursday in this room, 11 a.m. We have a lot of certificates to give out, some prizes, and just excited to celebrate that accomplishment. So we'd love to have you there if you can make it. Thank you.

Denise, do you have anything? Wendy? Sierra?

Yes, last meeting, our former intern, Soad, gave a presentation on the Cook Park Survey, and you guys had some questions that I just helped look into, so I just wanted to follow up on that. The main question was about the number of attendees who were from outside the city who were visiting businesses, and from what I found, we had approximately 40% of that group were visiting a business either before or after they visited the park. So it was a significant number.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And from what we could see with that, it didn't really have a correlation of whether or not they lived in American Fork or were in Eagle Mountain. It really was just we had quite a few people when they came to visit the park from out of the city who were choosing to visit some businesses. So that did have a big effect on that.

Great.

Most of the time when we asked the question, people associated with food, most of the businesses we saw were related to getting some kind of breakfast or lunch or snack or something like that.

Great. Thank you. Chief, your turn.

Oh, thank you.

No, everything's going great in the fire department. Just busy. We're fully staffed. For right now, we've got a lot of young people. people in our department, I think two-thirds of our guys probably have four or five years or less. So we've got a pretty young department. We had two new babies for some of the guys in the department. So I think we'll be growing quite a bit for families. Oh, I thought you were talking about new firefighters. Oh, yeah. Well, that too. So we're a young department, but we're growing. Families are going to be growing. So it's going to be kind of a fun thing to watch this next little while. Just keep up with calls. We've got a couple guys in camp right now, recruit camp, that we hired with the – with our Alps team with, you know, AF, Lehigh, Lone Peak, and those guys. So they're doing really good in that class. Our wildland team, they got called out to Texas a couple weeks ago. they wanted them to extend them. They wanted to extend them. They had this little kind of a cool front come through the country and kind of calm a lot of the fires down. So a lot of them are getting released. Texas wanted to keep them. So they're going to stay there for another two weeks. And so we're switching a couple guys around this next little bit. So they're doing great out there. They got good rapport with those guys. They work real well with them. So it's been a fun experience. But other than that, everything's going good. We're just kind of like, say, doing a lot of training and keeping guys going. So...

I understand that your pickleball tournament went really, really well. Oh, it did, yes. Did Sid take first? Am I hearing? Oh, what place did you take? I'm just messing with Sid.

I was down in St. George. I had some family stuff going on down there, so I was kind of down that way. I made it Friday morning, but I got back.

My family was represented on the podium.

Oh, nice. Yeah, it was kind of our first little association to that first little play. So I think you had a good time. That was all good replies, a lot of good comments and stuff. So I think they'll work on a few kinks here and there and make that hopefully a little bit better and fun this next year.

I did play mixed with someone that's never played before, and we played for fourth and lost.

And I think you took last and we took second to last. Thank you. You had to say it. It's all good. So we represented the bottom podium, whatever that is.

Hey, as long as you had fun and smile. That's what we're looking for. Yeah, sure. The award, yeah. Yeah, sure.

The reason Drew was down in St. George is that his father-in-law is not doing well. Yeah. So for those of you who know Dana.

Yes. Fun stuff. Yeah, no good. Yeah, he's not doing real well. And so... We'll see what happens in the next couple of days. Thank you.

Yeah, just a question. You talk about the new hires. Is that from the budget increase that we just did?

Are you fully staffed now? I was kind of prepping myself. I was kind of keeping ahead because I want to make sure we had an eye on our few guys that we'd like. And so we wanted to keep that going. So as soon as the... The word was out. We jumped on it and got after it and got them here. So we got some really good guys. And I know some of them played in the golf tournament. They've got some pretty good golfers. One of them got a hole-in-one. Yes. This last time, yeah.

On a par four. Yeah.

Yeah, I know, and I don't know how you play. So we're going to be changing out the players.

So finally, Fire has some good golfer guys. So just kind of so you're aware, we have two or three guys that can definitely hit the ball and play some golf.

Well, good. I'm glad to hear the hires are there. Yeah, we got them.

Like I said, they're all young, but I think we got some real good guys. They're motivated. They're real good. So, yeah, we're excited about it.

Thank you. Thank you. Carl, are you handling the police? A little bit. Okay.

Mayor and council, only thing I have is we'll be hiring one new guy tomorrow. He starts and the next week we'll have another hire. And then the other one is we're doing the final background. We'll have another one. So then we'll still have two more to bring on. So we've got some laterals coming on with some experience to help out with some of the new guys and stuff. So that'll be good.

Yeah, can you talk about the burglaries? Yeah, the rash of burglaries?

Yeah, a bunch of burglaries have been born.

I can't. I don't know much about that, so anyway.

Okay. No, you're good. Anyway, thank you. That's positive.

Yeah, that's a positive thing, so that'll be good. Thank you, Carl.

Okay. Dustin, do you have anything?

Sid? How many balls did you lose?

Yeah, how many balls did you lose? Oh, you...

If I could have the stat guy interpret that for me.

Is that you lost 50 and found 47?

Golfing with Dustin, I mean, he spends more time making sure he doesn't lose a ball than he does prepping.

Glad you're here. I know that's a long drive. That's a drive. So we can talk about that later.

Sid, do you have anything? Thank you for participating in the Fireman's Pickleball Tournament. It was good. Diana, do you have anything? Steve? Steve?

I just wanted to mention, I thought it was cool, the new skate park, Time Machine, Todd was down there, and they chose to be on Main Street in Pleasant Grove because they came out to the skate park and saw how cool it was and that the city kind of was accepting of that. sport and then they wanted to be right on the main street and it's a cool it's a cool little store and the basement has a little art gallery that's kind of skate themed and uh really cool young family i thought it was awesome very impressed with the family my understanding is that you're giving up hockey for skateboarding I would not trust myself on a skateboard, even if I was wrapped in bubble wrap.

Same.

But, no, that was awesome. So just seeing new businesses coming into downtown, and they're excited. And, you know, I think the plan is in place now to make that a really great place. And having Heritage Festival down there as well, it's just – Yeah, it was great. It was great to see all the activity down there on Main Street.

Todd? Yeah, I'd probably just echo that, that the growth that we could see in our downtown is exceptional, and I love what's currently transpiring downtown. I think that's this, what was it called, time? Time machine. Time machine. You know, those type of independent owner businesses businesses, independent owner-operator businesses, really gives downtown the hometown feeling that we want. You know, the cravings, the chocolate, the bistro, the Mexican. I mean, it's all just very good. Cookies, right? Yeah. I've lost the name. Cam's. But, you know, those are the kind of things we need to continue to enhance in our downtown.

Awesome, thank you.

Nothing further.

All right, I'll entertain a motion to adjourn from work session. So moved. We have a motion by Councilman Williams, second by Councilman Rogers. All those in favor?