City Council - workshop

at one o'clock a.m a.m um thankfully we don't meet at one a.m just the other one Today we have with us Gary Garrett, Councillor Becky Bogdan, Katrice McKay, Craig Christensen, and Jeff Whitlock. And we have Travis Hoban online. All right, great. And we have Mayor Marcia Jenkins. Although this is a public meeting, only the presenters and those invited by the council may speak or ask questions, unless otherwise invited by the chair. Please wait to speak until called on by the council chair. When speaking, please be sure to use a microphone so that the record is clear and those attending virtually can hear you. Please also be sure to limit side conversations as they interfere with the audio recording. If you need to have a side conversation, please step out of the work leaving room. is to propose that we approve the following minutes, June 8th, 2026 work meeting. Are there any objections or requested changes? All right, seeing no objection, I declare the minutes approved by unanimous consent. All right, first we're gonna look at is a resolution approving an urban deer control plan. And we'll have 30 minutes, and this will be presented by Nicholas Wilstein, Assistant City Attorney. and Greg Hoke, a BYU Managing Director of Building Operations and Ground. I'm actually very excited to hear about this.

You're welcome to come up.

This is the mic, I'm assuming?

It is.

Yeah, we don't have any slides, so I'm off. This one, I was told more or less that, well, people read the materials. They don't want too much of a preliminary presentation. So there's a few things, though, I want to cover that we'll be into on that. First, one thing that isn't in your materials, though I think in at least the resolution it refers to it, is that if we were to go forward with this, there would need to be a contract between BYU and Provo. That would primarily be, basically, they agree to... act as described in this year plan since really as you know as it's written they do basically everything as far as that day-to-day operations if they also have to follow that what they call the core you know the certificate of registration there's certain limitations on how you approach the program because of that so they would agree to that and we would agree you know to we oversee it we have to be the liaison i mean it's we're approaching this in a new way. It's still our program. It's still the program. But at this moment, if it were approved, it would be, you know, most of the data operations can be run by the way. One other thing that would be included in that is a sort of broad indemnification clause saying that the actions taken by the BYU employees in creating this, you know, in running this plan, they'll indemnify BYU, or PROVO, I should say, against, you know, incidents, damages that arise from that, because I mean, that's just sort of our compensation to a degree. And of course, there are risks involved in this. So if BYU is the one requesting this program, which they are, seems sensible to have them be the ones, you know, sort of taking on the risk there. One other thing in the current version of the program. It says the deer were euthanized with 22 firearms. Having reviewed that, discussed that with police officials both here and at BYU, that is not what we intend to go forward with. The current intention, if we can continue with this plan, would be to use captive bolt pistols to euthanize the deer. So it wouldn't fundamentally change that. They'd still be trapped, still be euthanized, but there would not be a firearm used in at this which of course would reduce the danger and we hope reduce you know potential public disturbances as well anyway um and really that's about all i have we do have a greg hook here he's sort of be running it on there and we do have an attorney from byu uh aaron worthen if we have any questions for him he could run up too but i guess i'll just open the floor any anything anyone wants to discuss about this and um any questions council gary get

When this was first presented to us several months ago, possibly a year or two, there was talk of a range of 50 to 60 deer in the campus area. Is that still the case? Where does that sit?

Yeah, that's the estimate, that there's about 60. My guess is that there's more than 60, but probably going to lower in 60. Can I add on to that? Sure. And once again, the idea is not to limit all the deer on campus. It's just to get that down to a manageable amount. And we're thinking on that. Hopefully, we could call 20 per year until we get down to keeping 20 on campus.

Councillor Becky Bogdan.

So you're looking at safety. When would you do this? Would you do it during the summer?

Yeah, good question. Yeah, we would. We're hoping to do this just in the month of August, while most of our students are off campus and there's not as much going on on campus.

We'd hate for it to be a human and not a deer that gets hit or something, right?

I didn't hear that.

We'd hate for it to be a human and not a deer that gets hit, because your campus is still pretty much within the inner parts of our city.

Correct.

And this is just on your property, right?

Just on campus.

Council Whitlock.

So just walking through the basics, just layman, make sure I understand. Basically, you're going to catch the deer with traps. Take them.

What kind of traps?

It's a walk-in trap.

Like the whole body goes into a trap?

Yeah. It's almost like a netted pen about this tall. Not wide.

We bathe it with apples and they go in and close it. And then you're going to then move it somewhere and shoot it. Where is it going to be moved to? So we would euthanize the deer right there on spot.

And then the people that were donating the venison, the meat to, they would show up at that time and so it's going to be almost like you're already coordinated the the donation of the meat is pre-coordinated correct yeah once we know that we have it in the trap we're going to start calling people that are on that list and say hey can you be here within an hour and and have that all happen about the same time oh sorry you can go as part of the program we are required to use the you know the carcasses and the meat as much as we can so we do have a list of 20 donors who will they can get it taken and they'll ensure that they'll have to put the you know that

I think it's a good use instead of it just being white. That said, as you may have seen, the antlers, they're all taken by the wildlife division. So it's not some sort of, I don't know, secret antler collecting method or something like that.

And then I assume There's going to be, like, you have some protocols in place for safety as far as discharging the firearm.

Yeah, so things have changed. We're going to use a bolt gun as well, so there will be no discharging of the firearm.

What is that? What's a bolt gun?

It's a gun that comes out. It's really fast.

that's pneumatic so the bolt shoots out about two and a half inches and then immediately goes back in so nothing is shot far as i understand it it's pretty much the standard livestock you know slaughtering slaughtering method and then um one last question two two final questions on my end

What's the underlying motivation? Can you speak that a bit more?

Is that safety for the students? Yeah, there's deer all over campus if you guys have the opportunity to drive through there. And we'd want somebody to get hurt, whether it's driving and hitting them or if they're on their segways or... uh etc another one of the problems that we're starting to have is that there's a lot of inbreeding that's going on and so these 60 deer that we believe are staying on campus they're just they're just inbreeding and i don't know if i could pass this around but here's here's a picture of one of the deer you can see that there's it's deformed i don't know what's going on with your eyes but this is kind of a severe case a lot of them have antler issues as well should i pass this um

I'm welcome to check that.

OK, thank you so so safety. And they do damage on campus as well.

Do the goal is to reduce the hurt to 20? Correctly 20 white white down to 20 set of all the way with foots, but I don't.

I don't think first. I don't think we'll ever get it all the way down. Just our proximity to the mountains and then we feel that. without eradicating them completely. We know that there's people that enjoy having them. They're on campus, students walking by and seeing them, and they're cute. We just thought it would be more manageable, that number.

And then final question, the indemnification, I don't think I saw that drafted in the packet. Will that be drafted before the final meeting for us to review?

Yes, it will be.

Okay. And Brian, you feel comfortable with that?

well i in concept i was gonna say in concept you need to see the draft but i i think as long as the there's pretty standard language for that usually so as long as it meets the standards i think that'll be fine okay thank you so along those lines if you're not eradicating to zero potentially every five years you need to undertake the program is that well we're yeah we're i think we're hoping

If we feel that it's getting close to 20, we'd probably pull off four a year, but I think it'll take a few years to get down to that number. Yeah, especially with us just doing this for one month. If we were doing it all fall, we could get more.

And to explicate a little more, it is currently set that it runs through, if we approve it, it runs through 2029. So like, so you can, they can, they can adjust and they can, they do it for a year. They see what things look like, see how it looks like. And they, I think it says they could take up to 20 each year, but that doesn't, that's sort of the max. It doesn't mean that they're going to do that. It's just that, that said these, I mean, these programs aren't set in stone. If it turns out that it, uh, you know, we discuss it and think there's ways potentially modified to make it better. We can revisit it in the future, but this is how it would be set. All right. Obviously, we haven't even said it now, so, but my point being that if we provide a program and if we set it, that's, you know, there's still room for modification in the future if we work and look into it and think it's needed.

All right. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

right next we have an ordinance amending the general plan to add the storm drain master plan and this will be presented by hanel salzel our city planner and carlos garcia our storm water engineer we're shane winners we're saying layers

My consultant, we had a consultant that was actually going to present, and then Carlos, they're on their way here. You guys are done about a half hour early. Sorry. So they are on their way. We trust you, Shane. I will go ahead and I'll start.

Yeah.

If you want to go. So the stormwater master plan. Again, this is not my presentation, so may fumble through a little bit. Every so often we update our master plan every five, typically five to 10 years on our stormwater. When we identify some issues or system capacity problems throughout the system, we also identify and pull up capital projects or projects that were as part of the impact fee that we've completed. And then we update those Again, on that five-year, 10-year plan. In that modeling, we look at, we look out in the horizon about 10 years on stormwater. We do a complete study taking city information, the consultant's background. And then we also look at new policies that are implemented within stormwater. Oftentimes we get new regulations from the state and federal regulations that that require us to update our stormwater policy. Our water quality is a big concern within stormwater. And then, of course, one of the big ones is our impact fees. Those from the development side help pay or fund for those future development and their impact that they cause to our system. And that's a big one that we looked at this year in changing how we apply impact fees. and how that works. So how we deal with stormwater is there's two competing different ways that we look at it. one is we can convey all the water and if we just say we're going to convey it all we're going to move all that water the pipes can get really big bigger than probably we could even construct so the second component that our second idea is to reduce those pipe sizes and that is by take detaining water we detain water within in various different types of systems a lot of those you see open basins and what we try to do is we take off this really peak high flow we store this area that's under or above that curve we store that area and then we release it back slowly back into the system so that our pipes don't get extremely large and that's how we manage our storm water systems One of the other key components that federally mandated now is water quality. Oftentimes that can get overlooked, but that has over the last 10 years become a high priority, keeping our rivers, our lakes clean through those. And so these detention systems often help with that water quality. Actually, we require it as part of our policies. What's that?

How did you make the water cleaner by detaining it?

So we do that by what happens is when a storm first comes or storms come, there's that first part of the storm where we get really the oils, the sands, the green, all that stuff. It's really, yes. So by federal requirements have us or are required to actually keep that on site. They are to retain what we call the 85th percentile. So there's a certain amount of water based on that area that they need to retain on site, keep that stuff on site. They can include that within their storm drain basins. They can include that within like landscaping. They include that within swales, that first part of the storm. um retained on site that way then it can be cleaned on the site and that does not get into the storm system or to our lakes and rivers and that's how we deal with the water so are you saying that it settles at the bottom of yeah i don't know so sometimes they'll put underground chamber like we have underground chambers that they'll store masses amount of water one of the chambers will just be strictly for retention it actually re it's it's built such that that will fill up it'll let that all that those really water quality issues kind of settle into that chamber and then it kind of spills over or it's contained and that comes out. And then anything after that comes out much, much cleaner. That's one process. We have hydrodynamic separators where these big, huge manholes actually work through kind of a big whirlpool and separate a lot of oils. And then it'll, cause oils like to raise, sit on top. It'll actually let, then underneath, it'll let water underneath through a hole. And that way then it's clean. We can clean, it's not on the bottom, but kind of in the middle. That way we keep the oils on top, the sands and the grease down in the bottom. And that's another way. So there's various different methods. Other areas like curbs, we do curb cuts and you'll put them in swales. So that first part will actually, will drain through large, long swales. And then it'll come out at the other end. And it'll let all that oil and sand and those things settle into that park strip before it comes out on the other end clean and then gets into our stormwater system.

So we have these magic rollers underneath our street.

Yeah, they're called hydrodynamic separators. Yeah. We have a big one on University Parkway. It's part of the UDOT that we, to save on space, we'll use those. They're expensive, but they save space. So we have all these different methods that we and the developers and those that are meeting those federal requirements have a variety of options to use for that water quality. And then that way we can clean those systems out and not have issues in a water quality. It is one of the bigger issues that we deal with within stormwater.

You're referring to like streets.

Yeah, correct. Any drainage. so any drainage off any property within the city that's what we're talking about now in our residential we don't require detention so most of all residential because it's impervious meaning um it just kind of infiltrates um those areas we don't require commercial we do require detention so Residential single family, we don't require, but mostly as streets. Commercial, we do require the detentions. But even in our streets, even in the streets and everything that we deal with within the city requires those water quality features. So when we design our own systems, the streets, they are required to have these water quality, some kind of water quality system as part of that. So that's all water quality, all water's treated.

So you say, you know, how it's set up needs, you know, sand or the oil. So do we go through and clean that stuff up afterwards? So there's a whole process?

Yep.

Is it like always, is it just systematic? Like we do this once a month or is it like, oh, we had a big storm and there's extras with it? Like what's the system?

It's systematic. So there's federal requirements. that we, as part of our, it's called MS4, it's our permit. We are actually permitted through the state on our water quality and our stormwater, which has been overseen by the federal government. We are required by our permit every five years to go through our entire system and clean it.

So that means- So you're systematically doing a full city every five years.

20% of the year we go through and we clean our catch basins, our pension basin, all that stuff. Constantly we're out there. It's a year round process.

I want to go on a cleanup trip.

You can come with us. We have a huge fat truck. So yeah, you're more than welcome. We love to our guys are loving it One of those vacuum trucks, isn't it?

Is it one of those back?

It's a big vacuum truck that goes down the man goes down We'll put it down manholes. Yeah, we do TVing of our pipes.

Yeah She wants to go down the manhole. I don't want to go down the manhole.

We have some pipes she could actually walk down. Oh

They get very big. This seems like one of the headline policy changes here is the shift in how we assess fees from just gross acre chart to per ERU.

We'll get to that. Now that our consultant is here, I want to have him talk because we did spend a lot of time with that. That was an important feature for us. that and working with the administration, we felt that we needed to change how we did it, we did it typically on a just everybody pays on a girl sacred. Now we want to make it more specific to to what your impact was, how much impervious or sorry, pervious area, hard surface you're bringing in. And so proportionately apply that impact fee to that impact. So I'll go over that they're here now. I'll go ahead and turn the time over to Carlos and our consultant here to kind of walk through the rest of this.

Okay.

Maybe.

Yeah. Okay, great.

As mentioned, my name is Carlos Garcia, engineer with Public Works Storm Grain, and we'll just be covering an update to the City Storm Grain Master Plan. With that, we're just going to go over some key findings, some differences, some recommended capital improvement projects, and as you mentioned, the proposed impact fee changes. With me here is Cason Schultz with Hanson Allen & Luce. He's been our consultant and been behind the technical analysis on this update with that um we'll just go walk through the presentation i understand you guys might have the slides if feel free to stop us whenever you might already be familiar with it um feel free to stop us with that um i'll just turn it over to casey okay thank you so it looks like you might have been a little bit through thank you shane

um when we do this master planning um some of the key things that we're looking for is just looking at the system as a whole a lot of times when developments come in it's like they want to look in this little box but we have to look at the system as a whole because we're receiving water from upstream sometimes we have to take all of that into account and so we want to size these facilities based on the best engineering practices that we have and so we use modeling to do that we use technical data that's available online through different sources like noaa soil surveys from the nrcs and things like that to base analysis off of those things then we try to plan for cost-effective solutions. As I walked in, Shane was describing, there's many different ways to manage stormwater, and so we try to use all the tools in the tool belt to get a cost-effective solution to manage the stormwater. There are federal requirements, there's lots of different ways that we can do that, but we do have some things that we have to do. to be in compliance. We have our engineering design standards that we use, and then we also have projects that have higher priority than others. And then we'll have our impact fees that help us to fund future growth, the infrastructure that's required to fund future growth. And so here's and sound like you're talking a little bit about detention. So I don't want to belabor this point, but you have a couple of different choices in terms of, are we going to, when I say convey, that's just think about a, a ditch, a pipe, something that water flows through. Um, and then we have detention, which are these kind of large areas where we temporarily store water until there's enough capacity in those conveyances downstream to pass the water through. And so those are some effective ways that we can kind of reduce pipe sizes when you use detention. So if you don't use detention throughout full city, you would end up with huge pipes. maybe pipes that are too big to put in the ground. And then you could be talking about a channel or a river or something like that to handle it. And so we use these techniques to kind of knock that peak flow rate down. That's what this figure I guess you can't see it on the screen, but that's what this does. This is without detention. You get this big, this spike.

Yeah, Shane went over all this for us. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Okay. On top of that.

Okay. So here's some of the key differences. We went, we had some stuff to work with to begin with. You had a prior master plan. We increase the resolution of our drainage basins. That just means we cut them up into smaller pieces. I'll kind of explain why later. We define some directly connected impervious versus unconnected impervious areas. And so that's the difference between like a driveway that goes directly into a street, right into a drainage catch basin versus say a patio in your backyard that drains off into the grass. Those are two different things when we're modeling that kind of thing. We did a city-specific analysis to define impervious surface throughout the entire city. And then we had a few different projects that we did that were a little different than last time to manage the stormwater. So when I'm talking about resolution, this is just a depiction of what I'm trying to say is like the picture on the left, you can tell that it's like a lake and a canoe and a mountain in the background, but it's a little fuzzy, right? There's bigger pixels. And then when we get more and more small, small pixels, we can get better resolution. And it's much the same with our drainage basins. There's a drainage basin that could define what the Provo River drains, right? And then there's a basin that could define what this parking lot drains. And so you have to create a balance of that when you're doing a citywide master plan to kind of come up with that, how much resolution do we want, right? Because there can be overkill, There can be two lower resolutions, so we want to try to meet a good kind of, we usually like to have about 10 to 30 acres. That gives us, what we've found over the years, that's kind of a good sweet spot to be in. And so here's just an example. The red outline was a sub-basin, a drainage basin from the prior master plan, and then we split it up into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven different basins. And basically what that allows for this to do is if all the water is coming down and it's coming down to this point right here, and if I just had this one sub-basin, I would have one output from the model. I would have one of those spiky hydrographs that you saw, one peak flow rate, one volume. And so if I have a bunch of pipes that are draining this and it's all coming down into here, I don't know what the flow rate is right there. And so that's the reason why you would split it up is that I can go, okay, well, I want to analyze this system a little bit too, as opposed to just worrying about only the trunk line that's kind of down here at the bottom. And so we just refined it a little bit and that's common in storm drain master planning. We take our first cut, maybe it's a little bit rough. And then as we go, we can kind of refine it down and come up with more and more refined answers and solutions, and we can look at more stuff, more detail as we go. OK, this is a graphic that is trying to explain what I was talking about earlier. There's directly connected impervious area, and there's unconnected impervious area. And so from this graphic, you can kind of see I have this driveway, and it slopes down to the street, and there's a catch basin. If there is, if there is nothing in between that, we call that directly connected because they're in a straight path. That water falls into the driveway and goes right into the catch basin, right into the storm drain pipe. Right. But there's also one connected this roof right here in this graphic drains down to this downspout, and then it goes into the grass. And so the response of that in, in, from a hydrology perspective is different. That's that hydrograph that we showed earlier, that, that, that one that's got a big peak on it. That would be mostly from your directly connected. It's going to come really fast. It's going to come fast and hard. But if it has to go over a big pervious surface like this, some of that water is going to seep down into the ground. We're not going to get it all, right? And so distinguishing between the two of those is really important in storm drain master planning because if we assume it's all going to just run off like this, we're probably going to decide our pipe's too big and vice versa. I think there's more of this than there actually is, then maybe we're gonna undersize stuff. So we have to kind of distinguish that and get that balance going. And so one of the things that's really cool that's coming with the technology that we have and the computing power that we've got and the AI and machine learning and all these kinds of things is the ability for the computer to process stuff for us. And so we did this impervious surface delineation using those concepts where essentially you train the computer to be able to correctly identify the street or a roof or a sidewalk. And so you give it, you give it 30, 40, 50 examples where you just go into the map and you draw a little box around it and you say, this is a pavement. This is a driveway. This is a green, this is a brown roof. This is a white roof. So you go through and you train it for certain areas of the city. And then you, and then you say, take all this information and now go out and go do the whole city, go and do what I've just told you everywhere. Go and identify all the pavement, all the street, you know, all the driveways, all the white roofs, brown roofs and everything. And then it can come back and create this sort of data. can be used for lots of different things um and specifically for stormwater mastery planning is really useful because the amount of runoff we get is it's not a hundred percent just the the pavement that creates all the runoff but it's a lot of it and so this is really important for stormwater mastery planning and doing it this way allows you to have a city specific Because there's lots of, you know, back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, they created these really nice tables that had kind of some typicals for this. Like the residential neighborhood is 25% in purpose. Or a commercial is 85%. And they were basing that off of just typicals where someone went into a map and actually hand digitized this stuff. They said these are around what it is usually. impervious delineation that helps us to, again, refine what we've already done in the past. And then, I don't know, is there a way for me to . I don't think . So we took all this information and we created a model where, and the parts of that model are the hydrology side, and then there's also the hydraulic side. So the hydrology is what creates those hydrographs or tells you what the runoff is from these drainage basins that we looked at before. And then they'll flow into the pipes. And then inside of the pipes, we do hydraulic calculations. So how much water can flow through that pipe and the slope, the material of the pipe, all that stuff, matters and it goes into the model. And then we're able to estimate, well, can that pipe handle all the water that is anticipated to go to it? And if it can't, then the model shows the water coming up out of the manhole. It says, oh, I'm flooding here. You would expect to see a puddle in the road right here because the pipe is not big enough for how much drainage is coming to it. And so that was the intent of these PDF maps. And I apologize. These maps.

Yep. Yeah.

I believe so.

Yeah.

We can just show that the first page. Okay. This isn't exactly, but that's okay. So this, this is kind of a schematic bubble city. You can see. What we have is a bunch of pipes. We have detention ponds. That's what these hatched areas are throughout the city. And basically we have a model that shows like, and these are these catch basins. You can see these light blue lines. And basically we feed that into these models and it tells us, okay, where are we flooding? How bad are we flooding? That helps us to prioritize. Not only do we do that, but we also meet with Shane and Carlos, others, Scott, And we go through and we say, the model says there's flooding right here. Have you seen flooding right here? And they'll say, yeah, we see flooding right there and say, great. The model and the evidence from the city says there is a problem here. So let's put that on our capital improvement plan. There's other times where you do the best you can with all this data, but we have to recognize that there's uncertainty in these calculations and the data that's behind it and say, okay, Do you see flooding here? And they might say, no, I haven't seen flooding here. So then what we'd like to do is we put that on a wash list. We say, Hey, we want your crews to kind of watch this area and big storms and see if they see flooding. Maybe they just hadn't noticed it before, but we don't want you to spend good money trying to fix something. That's not actually a problem. Right. And so that that's, that's the intent of this and these maps kind of show like. These are flow rates and capacities and stuff like that, based on our hydrology, hydrology analysis. So I think we can go back to the PowerPoint slide. Thank you. Good question. Yeah.

As you went through that, did you have any, were you able to point out areas of concern where you thought, Oh my goodness, we're really short here and there. Yes.

Yes. And, and so the model will kind of with the model, we can kind of identify how bad is the flooding for the model. And then we'd like to confirm that with Shane and his staff to say, yes, this definitely is an area of concern for it for some of us.

I think when we started doing that higher resolution, we started to see things that both of you noticed and things that you didn't notice. It started from our old plan to this one.

started this thing to have more line up with really what was going on so it did change i'm glad it's great okay that's not about me advancing you're trying to pull them out but if you look we can't pull it up right now to show it does have kind of the areas of the city that hey this is where you should watch out for no i i don't want to slow you down go ahead with your presentation i was just i was just assuming that would be the case it's good to hear

Yeah. Okay.

Perfect. So here's kind of just a summary of what we found as we went through. So we went through and tried that again, align our projects that we were going to recommend with known problems and issues. And that total price tag came out to 76.8 million. Okay. So don't fall out of your chair. You don't have to do all of those projects right now. Try to prioritize those and kind of. You eat the elephant one bite at a time, right? So that was the summary of what's finding. And then 25.8 of that was impact the eligible. I mean, a lot of those are future projects that there's nothing there right now. And so 25.8 million is what we estimated for impact the eligibility. We, again, we use detention to reduce the flows when feasible, but sometimes you're in a tight urban corridor and detention's not feasible. get all that water through there without flooding. Any questions on that modeling? Perfect. I'm going to talk just a little bit about impact fees. So impact fees, just to simply define it, it's a one-time fee that's charged for new development that's necessary to service that future growth. You can't include maintenance, O&M, operations and maintenance, and that is just to put that infrastructure in the ground that the future development is going to require, okay? And so from a legal and planning framework, these master plans that we do, they're important because they give a baseline for the sizings that we provide. If someone comes to me and says, there's no way I need a 36 right there. Say, well, we did a master plan and the calculations that were done yielded a 36-inch pipeline. And we can take a closer look, but that's what it was. This was the technical basis for that, right? That's really important. You don't want to have someone questioning it and they just say, well, you know, Scott in the storm drain department says he thinks that 36 is great. That's not good reasoning. Even though Scott's smart, he's a great guy, he probably does. You probably could estimate it pretty well, but it doesn't have that technical basis. So you do that so you can have that for this impact fees. Now I want to talk to you a little bit about a couple of different approaches. We want to talk to you about two different approaches that I've seen for stormwater impact fee assessments. One of them is to use a gross acreage approach, and that is currently what Provo City does. If an acre, if a five-acre development comes in, it doesn't matter how much impervious area, it doesn't matter what they're doing, they will be assessed a certain impact fee. And then there are other cities that I've done work for that use a stormwater ER dilute. And ERU is something that you've probably heard of being on a city council, but I'll explain it. It's a way for you to take one, it's a way for you to basically say, what is an equivalent to a residential connection? Whether it's commercial, high density, how can I make these things equivalent to each other? Stands for equivalent residential unit. And so on a stormwater side, to illustrate the point of the difference between the two. If you have developer A, let's say they're going to be a low impact use. They've got five acres. They're going to have a small parking lot. Maybe it's like a strawberry stand or something like that, right? Small parking lot. They're going to use most of the land to grow crops. And they come into the city and they say, okay, we're going to do this. And the city said, okay, I'm doing gross acreage, $40,000 for your impact fee. Okay. Now the other one, if it's a high use, big commercial development, five acres, they're 90% of it's paved. You can imagine how much more runoff developer B is going to generate as opposed to developer A. And so if you use the sperm in the gross acreage approach, they pay the exact same. In this other approach, Sperm Water ERU, You basically did that. You remember that, uh, impervious surface delineation I was talking about throughout the city. We took that and we took a bunch of residential, uh, flats and we, we basically said, what is the average residential, um, impervious area based on that data. So we have that data and we can't, it was like, I can't remember the exact number. It's like 3,200 square feet was, was the number. were around there. And so basically, the idea behind this stormwater ERU is if you take how much impervious surface they have, let's say it's three times that, just for easy math, three times the 3,200. Well, then they would be three ERUs, and they would pay that much. And so you can use that data as they're coming in, because a lot of these, when these developments come in, Residential ones will fall under certain lot sizes and they will basically be the average of those lot sizes. But if it's a commercial on their plans, it's going to show how much impervious or hard scape they have in plans. So they can be assessed at that time based on that value. So assessing on the gross acreage is way easier, right? It just is what it is, but there is this maybe perceived unfairness a bridge approach because of now these are showing two extremes right but certainly um developer b their their proposed development will generate more than what a does and so the idea behind the eru is that it kind of levels that thing globally any questions on that yeah

have we looked at this as far as our system? Have we looked at this as far as how this is going to change revenue? And so, because if, for example, our citizens conserve water, which is awesome, but it's greatly affected our water revenue. So we have to raise prices because they're conserving water. I mean, how does this.

Yeah. It's like the laws of unintended consequences, right? That definitely has happened. And with this, Um, the intent is that you would raise the exact same amount of money. However, with the, um, with the gross acreage approach, um, there's probably, I would say there's probably less, um, assumptions that go into it. That makes sense. The other side, there's a little bit more on the assumption side of what do we think is going to come in? But that being said, it is more fair across the board.

Totally.

And we do our best at those things.

So I think it's fairness, I think, yes. I think it puts that impact or the onus more on those that are bringing in more curries. If you want to call it a negative, when you do grow sacred, you get a pretty consistent impact fee every year, right? Just because there's so much development comes in, it doesn't matter what it is, it comes in that. We can have them flow quite a bit if we're going, because this is going to really put it more heavily on commercial, right? Commercial going because they create much more pervious. So if commercial is, you know, not doing much or developing much and it's more residential, then yeah, we could bring in less impact dollars earlier than would be normally. right we'll get the same amount of dollars it's just it's going to ebb and flow pretty substantial um whereas some of what we do and we've noticed it pretty consistent every year we get kind of same money so will the ebb and flow be hard on your budget or it could be essentially we have like projects it could it's just planning is going to have to be a little bit more more right for the bigger projects to make those kind of line up counselor whitlock

How much more on this are you being directed to?

I just have some questions about it. I was just going to show the calculation of it, so if you have a specific... Well, it's actually related to this. Maybe you can go through that.

We have about five more minutes.

The one other thing I'll say is that the city actually is planning on updating impact fees every year on an annual basis, which actually is super helpful because then you're not making a big adjustment in five to eight years when that's typically cities have kind of done that. And it, and it creates a shock wave in the development community of like, ah, that we hadn't planned on that big of an increase when we were doing our developments. And so if it can be just small little pieces at a time every year, you're gonna be much more likely to collect the right amount. So this is just kind of just boiling it down into the simplest terms is as we can here. Here was our total, 25.8 million. We can associate some of the planning from the master plan into the impact fee as well. You can collect for that. And then we estimated based on our data that we have 17,580 stormwater ERUs remaining to be developed. So that's taking all the remaining areas of Provo that are expected to be developed. That's lining them up with the future planning and zoning data. And then that's estimating how much impervious area we think we're gonna get and taking that average number and estimating how much more we think we have. And so basically you add all that together and you get this number here divided by the total number of remaining ERUs. And then that's how much you collect per ERU. So again, if a commercial comes in and there are 10 ERUs, they're gonna pay 10 times, they're gonna pay $14,000.

So these are some of my questions. One thing is that I couldn't tell from this slide if this is actually, because you're basically determining the ERU fee based on the amount of remaining ERUs to be developed and not normalizing to like current housing costs. It's hard to tell if it's like an actual fee increase or not for like an average, you know, a single family home being constructed. Can you speak to that?

So if you kind of, and I agree with you, it's a little bit hard to tell. Right now, I think I have one more slide that shows what we're The current fee is $8,000 for 8,200 per gross acre, and this one is the almost 1,500. So if you assume...

Eight acre lots.

Yeah. Then it is going to be slightly higher.

It's a slight fee increase then, probably.

Slightly higher if you go eighth acre. And so it's kind of hard because there is a spectrum of possibilities, right? But it does kind of all make it go back to this singular unit that kind of, in theory, levels the playing field for everybody.

The other question I have is, so this 1,477 fee assumes 17,580 more units?

Yes.

What's that number based on?

So that's based on if I take all the remaining areas to be developed, And I overlaid my planning and zoning on top of that with the typicals that I've seen in the city already. It basically takes that data and coalesces that together. So this is the estimate.

So what happens if development is 30% less than expected or 30% more based on exogenous variable or things outside of those things you looked at?

So it's based off the general plan you adopted. And if you stick with it, If you change it, then we should change this. So that's what's based off the general plan.

So it coupled it. But isn't it time sensitive to some degree too?

No, because if you stick with the general plan for eternity, our plan will work out great. If you decide to change it in five years, we'll update our plan to match that. Okay.

So update impact fees every year will also address that.

And that's what I was going to say.

So if there's changes to land use, we'll be able to update that 17 to whatever it needs to be.

So you're a consultant that does this at other cities, correct? So the last question I have is, have you worked with other cities to transition from the gross acre approach to this ERU approach?

I don't know that I've done a specific gross to ERU. The staff asked me what I think percentage-wise. I do a lot of these throughout the talk. What percentage of ERU versus gross acreage? And my gut is 70% ERU, 30% gross acreage.

The reason why I ask is I'm curious, maybe either from your own experience or research you've done, does this create any incentive changes? Do you see actually, or is it not a big enough change in... in cost to really change behavior on margins.

I don't know that I've seen a paper that's said anything about that. My gut would tell me it does.

So one example is with the inch farms, they're doing a hundred percent retention. So they're under this plan, they pay zero. impact because they put zero in the system so it incentivizes retention so people will have an opportunity to reduce that number by reducing so now they have a before there was no incentive it wouldn't change what you had so this allows them not that they're going to not that we probably see a lot of it that now they have the opportunity to be creative all else being equal does the city prefer retention Yes and no. I'd say retention is generally not always bad. You want some release, but the more they hold and the more they get in. The problem with retention is it gets a swampy, you get cattails, you get things that you don't like. So with this, it's not going to be that big of a deal.

Does it help the aquifer? Yeah.

federal and state requirements they try to get it worked back to what the natural state was so yes some retention we want right that helps infiltrate it keeps moisture typically where it needs to be but not all of it because a lot of that stuff typically would flow to rivers lakes we do want a lot of that there was recent legislation on trying to change the amount of good intention, right, to almost prohibit it because we do want that stuff to flow through the river, so that way we can eat it very solidly to help feed it. So, it adds in to us.

So, Shane, this ERU thing is the consultant's recommendation, right?

Well, I'm going to say, well, he came in initially with a plan to keep it the same way. We have pushed him, I have pushed him to do the ERU thing.

You have pushed him one about Shane.

From my standpoint, we were looking at it, it's about what we kind of bring in. We have, from our last master plan, we had basically finished all the impact theological projects from our plan. That was one of the drivers that we needed to get this plan updated because that were impact-free eligible. That's not to say we still had a lot of capital projects we needed to do, but they were not impact-free eligible. This oftentimes can be a big part of our stormwater budget to help pay for that infrastructure. Not all of it, but a substantial portion of it. So initially, as Todd was concerned for me, as our capital project, lay projects or how we build those right because you can't just put a 36 inch pipe in right and that developer is responsible for he's only probably responsible for a small portion of that so that means timing wise that that impact fee plus our budget is sometimes can be a little bit but I do agree that this is more fair I think this does put the onus on those that are creating more pervious area that are creating the impact fee which in my opinion now, as I think is the right thing to do. It does, it's going to challenge us a little bit how we plan projects, but that's how we can manage.

But this is just, these are just impact fee projects that it's going to impact, right? It's not going to impact normal wear and tear on the system that we're having to upgrade. No, that's maintenance.

So maintenance is part of, that's the fees that generate your stormwater fee.

This is just increase in development.

this is yes capital facility projects these are new so it doesn't matter if it ebbs and flows because it does in a sense because we still have a lot of the west side like ivory homes and um those areas are undeveloped or we have for instance that North East area that got annexed in there we have undersized pipes and it And because it wasn't annexed or part of the general plan, it was agricultural, now it was now residential. Now those pipes are too small. That, through this process, realized we need to upsize those pipes.

You're going to be getting less because it is residential versus commercial.

Some of it, yes. It will change that a bit to do that, yeah. But other projects where a big commercial comes in, typically because of a bigger commercial, they're going to create a bigger impact. they pay that bigger fee, which means now we have the ability to upsize pipes down that are typically downstream that are too small that they'll pay for.

But at the end of the day, you're okay with this and you guys are the ones that pushed it, pushed him to look at it.

Absolutely. And we looked at it in a lot of detail. We were asked to do that, not take one side of it, but look at it from all pros and cons. And we felt as far as everything kind of laying out, this is a much better solution.

Thank you. Okay, we're about 10 minutes over. Is there any other pressing questions? Okay, thank you so much. All right, next we have an ordinance amending the general plan to update the wastewater collection master plan. And this will be presented by Hannah Salzel and Lane Pierce.

Oh, wait a minute.

Hello. Lane and other public work staff members are here to answer any questions you might have, but the person leading the presentation will be Keith Larson, one of the consultants.

Great. We do have a presentation, right? This one was the biggest. Perfect. Okay. And the first thing is it says Andrew on there. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, I got it.

Good work.

First thing it says, Andrew, he gave the presentation to Planning Commission, but you get me again, sorry about that. Okay, so I guess before we start in really quick, just for perspective, what we're talking about today is the Stormwater Master Plan, which is essentially the document that is used to plan the facilities and needs of the sewer system. This does not include impact fees. I saw you were talking about that on stormwater. This does not include impact fees. Those have been prepared but are in the process of being reviewed and we'll be back in a few months to talk about those. And nor does it include rates, which we're working on as well. Jimmy will be back. uh in the fall sometime i got that right so we're just talking master plan today okay so if you had a chance to look at the packet uh things are pretty good news right now here's your existing sewer system uh we are looking for problems that are either 65 or above uh in terms of how full your pipe is that would be the yellow and the red pipes um we do have this one major pipe out west that is has just it's right at the edge of capacity um the rest looks pretty good there's a couple little uh scattered issues but the existing system looks really good um future model results with development you can see that there starts to be some more problems obviously this it's uh worse.

Um, and then we also have as development occurs throughout the city that there are additional areas that need to be addressed.

Um, really comparatively to what I've seen in other areas, this is in pretty good shape, but there are a few issues to address. The other component that we looked at, and we're going really fast on this, we'll just answer questions as needed, but the other component that we looked at was the age of your system. And this is where there are, just like on your water system, there's some challenges with aging infrastructure. About 20% of your system was built prior to the 1950s. Sewer pipelines typically last, uh 70 to 90 years but sometimes they don't last quite that long sometimes they'll last a little bit longer but there is a big chunk that's coming up towards the end of its life we actually did a quick analysis on when we expected those to need replacement this takes into account the age of the pipeline its material and where it's located in the system. Some areas are a little more prone to degradation than others. And so what you can see is that the amount of annual rehabilitation replacement needs are spread out over the next hundred years here but there is a big group about 15 million dollars a year of infrastructure that has reached the end of its expected life and so there's some need for investment on rehabilitation and replacement so what we do is we take those together and we put quick question yeah so what happens in 2014 uh that's a great question that's a big year yeah that's a great question so uh some of the earlier records were not very complete they didn't tell us exactly what the year uh was the installation occurred and so when we didn't know that and we knew the decade we would just group it to uh the the year so you can see it's actually 2040 and there's another one in 2060 where there's a spike if i had to do this over again i would have just spread that out over the 10 years and we may do that in the final presentation but uh that was what the data uh initially showed so a great question thank you that chart is purely based off the lifetime pipe assumption uh so Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that, but primarily from the age of the pipe. You're correct. However, we did do a statistical analysis and applied that on top of the age because we know a certain percentage of pipes will fail early, a certain percentage of pipes will last a lot longer.

So you have some distribution that you're applying?

That's correct. But what we don't have is we have some condition data in the system, but we don't have it for the entire system. That's something that the city continues to collect.

All right. Any questions?

I think there's just one last slide here, which, well, I guess two. This is where future projects are, specific to capacity. And this is a recommended capital facilities plan that identifies by year when projects would come online, and then also identifies some, a recommended system replacement budget. I think that's, that was super rapid fire, but that is the conclusions of the master plan.

Councillor Gary Garrett.

So with the water rate increase that we've recently approved for this fiscal year, does that put us in line for what? Adequate funding for some of these projects?

So that was on the water side. This is on the wastewater side. And I don't know, did you approve a wastewater increase? Not yet?

So no. There's no wastewater recommendation increase of this budget.

Yeah. And your follow-up question probably is, what does this translate to in terms of rate increases? And the answer is, I don't know that yet. That's what we'll be coming back with on Jimmy, with Jimmy in the fall. This does represent an increase from historic funding, but we haven't quite figured those numbers out yet.

What's the Whitlock?

Maybe I misread this, but we have the EVA biosolids agreement that ends this year. I just was wondering if there was any, if that would be automatically continued, or is that something we're going to have to cover?

That's part of the next presentation. Oh, it is.

Any more questions?

No.

Just a plea. Make sure you get that trunk lane figured out before it backs my sewer up, please.

Don't let it back my sewer up.

Okay. Thank you.

There you go. Okay. Thank you, Zena.

Next, we have a resolution attesting to the review of the Municipal Wastewater Planning Program survey for calendar year 2025 in ordinance with the Utah Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. And this will be presented by Dave Torbetson. Can't see you for a while, Dave.

I know, it has been a while.

See if I can figure this out. So this is a survey that we have to complete every year when we applied for funding from the state environmental quality this is one of the requirements that we complete a self-assessment of our of our system every year and it goes through several categories it goes through financial the health of our financial system on the wastewater side it goes through the our collection system so some of what keith just talked about in the the age and condition of our pipes, to our staff, how many overflows we have, et cetera. Normally the survey is due by April 15th. This year we were a little bit late in submitting it because the survey was emailed out to Gary Calder, who retired, and so we never we never got it until after um the deadline so we worked with um environmental quality and extended the deadline um and submitted it again email is now going to someone else yes it is it's going to me now Like I said, it goes over several topics. The first one is financial self-evaluation. All of these bullet points are sections in the survey that are answered. In the packet, I believe you got the the entire survey and the answers. It's in coordination with several of the departments. So Jimmy helped work on the financial part of it. We answered that. We also then go into the collection system where we did lots of each section of the collection system where we go over parts of the master plan that Keith talked about. Um, I work with community development on new permits, new building permits that came in to the city every year and how that impacts our system. One of the things I'd like to point out is one of the things we're always proud of is sanitary sewer overflows. Those are our backups or where they overflow out into the street.

I had a question about that, actually. Yes. I love this survey, but it's my favorite thing every year. Yes. But the SSO, do we charge, like this one was, I guess a developer was responsible for one of these. Do they get charged for these incidents?

So it typically goes to the claims, like if there's a sewer overflow, um it goes through the claims process where um you know we'll have them contact a restoration company as well as the legal department fill out a claim and it goes through that claims process what for them to get reimbursed for them to get reimbursed or determine um how much of that is two things so you're talking about like happening to a citizen

I'm also talking about the person who's, like the one you said here was a contractor that caused the issue. So does that contractor pay for the issue for the citizen and pay for whatever the city has to spend to fix this problem? Yes. Okay.

Yep. But again, that goes through the claims and legal process. Okay. Yep. So yeah, I'm proud to say we have very few overflows and backups.

I also noticed on your survey you said the average monthly use charge is $13.51. That seemed high. Is that just because of commercials involved in your average?

So that number is just calculated by the total number, total revenue, and the total number of customers. So it includes commercial, laundry, everything else around the city. OK. It's not residential.

Yeah, that seemed really high.

Oh, you have another question?

I have a whole list.

OK.

The sinking fund? What is that?

Essentially a savings account. Okay. Which we don't. We don't do that. Right. Sometimes we save up for projects, but we don't have a separate fund that we use just to save the money.

Okay, because we have a general fund and we... Okay. All right. My other question was the flushable wipes. You got me off flushable waste when I did my little tour with you. I felt educated. We should do like a PSA on it. Is this still a problem in causing SSOs?

We don't do it as often as we would like. We probably should do better. We often go around and do door hangers where we'll hang it on.

Where you know it's happening?

Yep, we do. it's funny um we do that um we also uh not every year but oftentimes we'll go to the elementary schools um towards the end of the year and have a kind of a show and tell with the elementary kids and take they take stuff home So yes, back to Councilor Whitlock, you asked a question about, so part of the evaluation is on our wastewater plant. The wastewater plant treats both liquid and solids. We separate it and treat both of those. And for about the past 30 years or so, we have treated our solids to a point where it's able to be used as a fertilizer. and we have taken it to a farm on the other side of the lake and used it as a fertilizer over there. About four years ago, they approached us and said, we want to terminate our contract, we're done with it. So we've been in negotiations with them for about four years. That contract expires at the end of this year. So 20, the end of December 31st, that contract expires. there is an option in there that we can request to extend that contract so we're going to do that there's no obligation on their part to accept that extension i don't anticipate that they will accept it so i'm anticipating that that contract is going to So we've been searching for a lot of locations to try to find a new facility, a new place to take our solids. All of the wastewater treatment plants along the Wasatch Front are in a similar boat. Most of their contracts are terminating, not as quickly as ours, but they're in termination of their contracts as well. Some of the sewer districts that have a lot more funding than us as a city have actually gone and purchased their own farms that they can then take their biosolids to and land apply them. Timpanogos special service district tried that just a year ago and the community where they bought the land. held a public hearing public notice and denied them so they purchased land and now they denied them use of that land to apply biosolids so currently the closest farm that we've been able to to find is clear up in Logan so hauling all the way to Logan plus they also want a tipping fee to to be able to um dump there uh it's just not cost effective so currently our plan right now is to haul across the lake to the landfill we have to pay a tipping fee for that but we haven't been able to to find a another suitable location that will accept um our biosolids which is unfortunate it's a it's a in my opinion it's a um environmentally friendly option but it's also a controversial option as well um you know uh using human waste fertilizer is controversial so um anyway i hope that answers your question yeah no that's really helpful um is that going to have any substantial economic impact

Or is it simply just a environmental?

Obviously, it will have a financial impact.

Was this farm paying us for the waste?

They were not paying us for the waste. It was a mutual beneficial. They received the benefit of the fertilizer where they wouldn't have to purchase it. It also gave us a means to dispose of it.

Are they not farming anymore?

They are farming.

This just has become not cool to do.

Yes.

Okay.

Yep. They don't, they don't want the publicity that, um, comes with it.

Interesting.

We're cool with cow fertilizer, but not human. Yes. Yes. That is, humans are interesting. That is true. So, um, yeah, so just to wrap up, I don't want to take too much time, but to wrap up, um, The point of this is to present this to the council and get a resolution for the municipal wastewater plan. So any other questions?

I have a couple more questions. Um, we only inspect every five years. Is that an industry standard or do we lack the staff to do it with the cameras?

We do the cameras. Um, one, we don't like we have, what 340 miles ish of pipe.

So just getting through.

And so getting through all of it, uh, takes, takes roughly about that amount of time.

Okay. And how are we able to get rid of lifts? I don't understand that this topography doesn't change. So how do you get rid of lifts?

So, um, That is a very good question. The way we've been able to do it is on the west side, we installed what we call the backbone, the west side trunk line.

Oh, so you did all new piping.

All new piping, and it goes deeper. So we actually installed the southwest lift station down by the airport. really deep really big and that allows us to eliminate uh three or four up to i think five lift stations along the line uh okay so you just did one whole new okay yep right thank you any other questions um counselor whitlock

So this is kind of dovetailing on some of Councillor McKay's questions, but I just want to make sure I've got my head around this. So, you know, just reading the survey, found it a little surprising that we said no to some of these things, but maybe I'm just not understanding. Like we said, we don't have the staff, sufficient staff to provide proper operations and maintenance. Like, can you speak to that?

Yeah. I think through the budget process, You know, comparable to a lot of other communities, most other communities of our size, we are understaffed. You know, the communities that we've compared to have you know 12 14 plus employees for their collection system so uh to counselor mckay's point how come it takes us five years to to get through and video the system we just don't have the manpower to be able to do it any quicker than that There are other places cleaning the lines, doing other parts of the project. So we just don't have the manpower to do it quicker.

As the one who answers no to that question, I just want to specify the main part of that that makes me put no is it says, does the sewer system have sufficient staff to provide proper operation and maintenance? I believe we do. This is and repair and replacement and that's where we're getting into not having sufficient staff to do replacement in the whole system. We do, I would mention that tonight's budget does include a collections position, an initial position to help with that, but it's not, I don't want anyone to think we're not operating and maintaining the system. It's more about the replacement that that we're lacking.

And I think to that point, part of the survey shows that we have very few sanitary sewer overflows. That's an indication that we are able to get out and maintain the system. We're doing it very, very lean, but we are able to minimize those issues and problems.

So you're not personally concerned with any of these, no questions or answers, or are you like that sewer revenues are not sufficient to cover maintenance costs and repair? I'm just, yeah. Anyway, I just, just, I'd like to be that. Cause like, if you just read this prima facie, it sounds kind of, uh, difficult.

So again, to me, it's, it's about the replacement replacement corner that we, um, As part of the master plan, we are going through the impact fees. We have our capital facilities plan, which tells us what we want to do, what we want to extract, what we want to replace. Once we know how much we can charge the impact fees, whether that gets approved or not, we'll know what the balance is that needs to be funded from residents and from the store customers. And so at that point, I think we'll come back to you and talk about rates and determine what's the appropriate replacement. This station, all these trunk lines on the west side, we've done a lot. We have a lot of really low interest loans we're paying off. It all just needs to be factored into how much we're wanting to invest in replacement with all these other things that are going on with where the impact fees land.

but right now we don't have enough sufficient revenues to do public replacement is it is it is it reasonable for me to think about like the process we've been going on for water pipes over the last several years we're going to be on a similar journey for sewer yes okay so thank you

We're not having internal tier grades at the same time.

No, I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand.

I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand.

I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. Like we've talked about it with Dave because trying to find solutions that would help that funding, that change that will happen by taking it out to the landfill. Landfills are now generating more biosaws and are continuing something that we're having discussions currently with what's going on in Spanish Fork and all the cities now transporting that out there is starting to become some issues for the landfills. So we have talked about composting those things. It would change operations a little bit. We feel that it is safe. It would require us to do things a little bit different.

There's a lot of complications.

There's a lot there. There's some pros and there's some cons. Just want you to be aware of that. Just like Timpanogos, they're They were doing it, but the smell got so bad.

The communities that contribute to the wastewater and were benefiting from the compost actually sued Timpanogos. Now they no longer.

I'm not saying it's right there. I'm just saying those are things that we could.

It's something that we're evaluating.

Is the landfill not a sustainable solution? Is it a gap fill?

it is it's just the cost i can tell you right now the discussions with the landfill because the landfill that we use is owned by um south jordan it's part of their conglomerate so now they're closing their system down and we'll be moving all there so the usable land or land fields which tough to permit that ability to now move that into those places.

There's also right now, I don't know how many people are aware there's PFAS is in the news. PFAS is in our biosolids. It's in tiny, tiny amounts, but it is in our biosolids. And landfills, some of the landfills are, you know, they're under regulations as well. And so when they accept a known quantity of pollutant, so they may tighten their regulations as well. So it's a little bit unknown at this point what's in the future. So anyway, I didn't mean to take so much time, but I love to come and talk about- We've missed you. Well, thank you. This is the most interesting conversation I've ever had on council before in my six months.

It's always interesting.

Counselor McKay can probably second that coming out to the wastewater plant, coming on a tour, we welcome you to come. It's a lot more exciting than you ever would have imagined.

All right.

Yes. Thank you.

Thanks, Dave. All right. Yeah, we are a little behind. One more and then we'll have a break. A presentation regarding the action plan for the 2026 Growing Water Smart Workshop. And we have Hannah Salzel.

I'll try to keep this brief and still wrap up by 2.30 with this item, if possible. For context for the council, this is an update on a workshop where staff and other representatives for the city, Mayor was there, Councilor Ripple was there from council, were able to collaborate and communicate on what our next steps might be. We're still figuring out how to do that. Those are all administrative actions. If they require legislative action, we'll bring it to you at that time. But don't feel like you need to... weigh in and shift to developing long-term water policy right now. This is just keeping you abreast of those discussions that are happening. So the Growing Water Smart team consists of lots of different partners in Utah, the Utah League of Cities and Towns. But this team also works with communities across the Western region. They put together information. They put out resources. Their data center water analyses were very useful in looking at our data center code. uh and in addition to all of their policy and information research and research they also host workshops for communities where they will invite five to ten communities with different reps to have a larger conference where they get to talk about new developments and policies and state updates and what research researchers up at the u are learning more as we're exploring drought tolerant plants and then those communities get facilitated breakout sessions just within their community and someone from one of these organizations. In our team breakout sessions, we had a representative from the Growing Water Smart team who's worked with Provo for several years, done some analytical work for us. She knows Provo's water just about as well as anyone at this point. but she also could connect us with a better regional network of information and resources. We also had someone from the Central Utah Water Conservancy District. As we were talking about our needs and our priorities, he could connect us with existing resources we might not have known about. He can also take those needs back to the water district, and as we're communicating back and forth going forward on policy, he knows where we are, we know where they are, we were all able to work around the table together. These are incredible communication opportunities. We participated in a Growing Water Smart workshop in 2023 as well, the first time they were done in Utah. And we are still seeing benefits from those relationships and communication networks that were opened up. Provo is the first city in Utah to do the workshop twice and come back. They brought us in partly as a peer model for other cities as we're talking and showing them what we've done. but also partly to help explore what next steps might look like for communities. So keep that in mind as we're looking at goals later that a lot of the early first steps of developing programs, assessing data, that was done in 2023. As we were in this new phase in 2026, we were able to start taking the next longer term perspective kind of approaches. From this is in the packet so I won't spend a lot of time, but these are the list of everyone who, this is the list of everyone who attended from Provo. Underlined means they were there in the 2023 workshop. You can see a good portion were. There were a few who were unable to attend but will continue working with this group moving forward. Just so you can see it's very interdepartmental, very collaborative. We didn't have anyone from Parks, but we will definitely continue working with them. They've always been a good partner in all of our water policies and programs. Oh, there's everyone. Yay. You can see there's white boards and sticky notes. It was very intense collaboration over two and a half days. Right. So our goals and strategies, all of that boiled down to five long-term goals. And then with our strategies, these are kind of paradigm frameworks for how we were going to approach meeting these goals. Oh, and there was one question that drove these goals and discussions, what we were trying to resolve and plan for, how do we maintain adequate water and deliver it as well as Provo continues to grow. So step one in our action plan was regional collaboration, including centralized reuse in greywater, protecting water rights, water use efficiency, continuing to work with our aquifer councils and including a state presence at the legislature. This is looking more at securing long-term water resources, making sure you can see the list here. I won't go into it because it's in your packet as well, but multi-pronged approach to make sure that we are addressing our water sources adequately and including gray water where possible. That's held up at the county now, but we're going to try to work with the county to incorporate more of that. Sustainable funding for our aging infrastructure looks like ongoing impact fee assessments, as we've talked about, and opening up education for candidates about water use. So as they're coming into the office or debating about this, they can be informed. Community members are water stewards. This is looking at those WaterWise programs we have, seeing what works, what's getting the most engagement, and what is also most effective, refining those. Also exploring different opportunities like the WaterWise garden opportunity at the wastewater treatment plant. Central Utah Water Conservancy is also very interested in maybe giving us a grant for that so they can use it and refer people there as well. So this is where having everyone at the table really came together well. Right thriving Community green space really straightforward just working with the new parks director to see what we can do with parks as thriving green spaces that can also educate and conserve water. Right. And the last one, this is number five, looking at water-wise new developments. So we've looked at sources, we've looked at our infrastructure for deployment, we've looked at educating residents on reducing waste, we've looked at reducing waste on municipal sites. Now as we're looking at new developments, how can we build in those waste reductions from the beginning? So we're exploring these options. We want to keep any code updates pretty minimal and reduce any sort of burden of cost for developers and residents, but it could reduce costs going forward for residents as we're looking at increased water rates as it's come up. All right, our ongoing steps. We are continuing to meet after the conference. We're checking in. We are scheduling our next meeting now. We will continue to collaborate and we'll continue to be part of the ongoing discussions with our partners, especially now that we've reinforced these ties at this workshop and networking event. Any questions? Any questions? Any other questions?

There we go.

Nice work. Nice work. Thanks.

I was going to ask Glenn a question just because I told him he couldn't respond. Anybody got a good question for me? What is Yopify or Yopify?

Oh.

What is what?

Yopify.

Yopify. I can answer that, actually. Yopify is an additional software that we could integrate with our billing and metering system so that if someone has an abnormally high water bill relative to others in their neighborhood or compared to their last months, it sends a message to them directly. Rather than them being able to just watch it on the My Usage portal, it proactively notifies them that there might be something going on with your system check for leaks. Well, my feedback on that is it doesn't necessarily

When you look at your usage and it compares you to other people, we haven't really gotten a great answer of who it compares you to. So as long as it can compare you to maybe average lots of your same size, that would be more beneficial than just whatever information's out there.

We'll make sure if this is an option we choose, it is expensive and it would take staff time to integrate it with our existing Kayenta systems. But if that's an option we choose, then that's definitely something we'll keep in mind. Because I can see people needing that.

It'd just have to be a useful comparison is my point. Because I don't feel like the way that the system runs now is a useful comparison. I'm not even sure who they're comparing me to. But I do know that I'm not using the top tier of my water, which is what it says that I do.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I can't speak to the intricacies of that system. That's run by customer service. But I know it has identified some leaks, but probably could be better about providing context. Yeah.

Right. Well, thank you so much.

One quick question. You said don't think about the future of this, but I am curious, when does this process manifest in some kind of package of proposed updates that you think the council will see?

It will certainly come with any sort of impact fee updates. Largely, these are administrative as we're looking at what pipes to update, what systems to locate, being in conversations with the legislature about our water rights. As we're looking at updating residents for programs, those are all administrative. Those wouldn't come to council. We can present information on whatever the council would like whenever, but this is something that staff has well in hand.

Do we feel like there's any opportunity for code updates around water?

Code updates will absolutely come.

That's kind of what I'm wondering. What would be the timeline for that? That's kind of what I'm getting at, sure.

In our action plan goal, this was scoped as... It depends on what we're looking at. We could see some early updates in the next three to six months, but if we're looking at anything longer, like the idea of a stretch code for WaterWise development was pitched, I don't know if that's something we're going to want to do, but we're going to explore the feasibility. So that might or might not come. But yeah, for the other short-term updates, three to six months.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much.

All right, we'll take a break now. until 2 40. recording stopped recording in progress all right we are back next we have an ordinance submitting publicity code regarding the requirements of an agricultural protection area this will be presented by jessica denny danicky

Thank you. Yes. So this is an ordinance tax amendment to amend the area requirement for agricultural protection area from five acres to one. And it also removes the requirement for the property to be receiving the greenbelt tax. And apparently it's very suspicious. So nevermind.

I have a hold of them.

The background.

Apparently, I didn't want this to go through.

Well, we got to trust a I was there.

Okay, so we have some interesting conversations that

So, these are the changes that we're proposing to be made. Nope, it really does not want me to go to the next slide. The next slide, when it is available to be seen, is going to show the requirements that an agricultural protection area has to meet to be approved. um we are as i said proposing to remove that requirement for greenbelt tax um mostly because greenbelt does require that there's five acres of land where our agricultural zones allow a lot size of one acre here's the second slide um so as part of planning commission there was a lot of discussion about the five acre requirement or bringing it down to one acre if that was too small um And there was confusion over the Greenbelt requirement. My understanding, and I had some help from Becky here. She gave me some wonderful contact information. There is Greenbelt and there is urban farming. Greenbelt requires five acres. Urban farming is almost exact same tax benefit, but it requires only one acre of land. Now? Yes. And those are both handled through the county. They're 100% county applications.

And that's why they want us to, why we would change this to benefit that one acre of county situation to like.

Take them out there.

Yeah. Didn't the farming agricultural commission ask for something like this? Yes. And the reason why I don't have heartburn with it is because the county already has things in place. Okay. So, and from what I understand from one to five acres, you have to have irrigation. So to me, it doesn't give me any heartburn. Okay.

So we are removing that requirement that they are receiving the tax benefits. So they don't have to apply for those and get reviewed for those. These are the only criteria that they'll have to meet. This application gets reviewed 3 times once by planning commission once by the county agricultural advisory board and then U. S. city count. You mean anybody coming wanting to come in and agricultural protection? Yeah, correct. Yes. And U. S. city council would make the final recommendation. And then lastly is just. Just kidding. There are several benefits of being in an agricultural protection area, which is why the agricultural committee is excited about having this opportunity. So these are just the benefits that come when a property owner is approved to be in an agricultural protection area. Okay.

Is there any questions? Thank you. Any, Councilor Whitlock?

I just, I can't recall this from the packet if it was there. So each individual property owner applies, correct?

There can be.

Or can it be like a group? It can be either one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It can go either way.

So I can either apply with several other adjacent... Do they have to be adjacent or can it be like any...

the area requirement is is contiguous um so if we bring our requirement down to one acre there would have to be a total one acre of land it could be technically half acre and half acre but interesting our agricultural zone requires a minimum lot size of one acre so the likelihood is it would be at minimum one property owner but it could be 28 but it could be 20 contiguous acres divided by like four owners yeah okay okay thank you

Any other questions for Jessica? I have one question, sorry.

Is there any, like, okay, so if this APA gets approved, are there any, is there any, what's the right word? If there is a legitimate nuisance concern right adjacent to residential, like, is there any, thing that the residential can do, or they're just like fully protected? Is there any buffer space? I'm just curious how that works in practice.

In state code, there's not a buffer space. This is more intending to protect existing agricultural uses from encroaching development. So the likelihood of someone Buying up a bunch of land that's zone residential, getting it rezone to agriculture and then starting something in the middle of a subdivision.

I'm kind of asking the other I'm saying, like, let's say, for example, there is an existing agriculture parcel right next to. A land that is slated to be developed as a residential.

Yeah. So anything that any like odor, noise, like it says, odor, noise, dust, anything that's related to agricultural activity, that is protected.

That is what you get for moving there.

You've moved next to a farm. You should expect farm-related activities.

Counselor Whitlock, with the caveat that it's normal, reasonable agricultural practices. We had one several years ago where we had a farmer that was going up to... What was the name of the dairy in Orem?

Yeah.

And he was, he was filling a large, like, you know, large containers full of spoiled ice cream, hauling them down to his farm without a lid on the, on the trailer, spilling it all over the road, dumping it into a trough that his cows were drinking out of while they stood in it. It was attracting raccoons, rats. Anyway, in that particular case, we could argue. Now, the neighbors would have to go hire an attorney. They'd have to find an expert. But if you could find an agricultural expert who said that's not a standard practice,

a nuisance claim could still uh give rise to that what about things like damage like it i don't know this is maybe a silly example but a bull charges the fence and it breaks the fence um

Well, yeah, again, I mean, that's different than nuisance, right? That's property damage. Yeah, so there you've got a different cause of action, and then that's going to become your standard legal theories of was there a duty, was the duty not reasonably upheld, did that unreasonable failure cause the damage, right? So then you're just in regular tort law.

So I can tell you for a fact that normally, The problem that we have is the other way around. You have people's dogs that come and kill the chickens. Dogs that come and harass the cattle. Kids that trespass on property that shouldn't be there. Or even adults. Those are more of the problems that my farmers have rather than the other way around.

Yeah, it makes sense. I grew up in Gilbert, Arizona on an acre and a half in a farming community, and that's clearly what we experienced. We'd always get annoyed when the homes would come in and they'd complain and create all sorts of nuisances for the farm. So I totally took it. I was just curious about the other way.

We have had the pig farmer incident, and that was by my house, the cream stuff. The smell is awful, but those things are real. But it's more the dog killing the chickens and stuff like that.

The cow tipping? Do we get cow tipping in Provo ever?

It's more like the kids go south of the parkway and get stuck, and then they have to beg some farmer and pay them 50 bucks to get them out of the bog.

Got it.

all right any other questions for jessica okay thanks jessica all right next we have an ordinance amending provost city parking standards for specific uses and locations this will be presented by aaron ardmore our planning manager i'm just going to give some background and context and then aaron will walk you through the actual amendments um so as you know the amendments have to do with

the ratio of student housing and proximity to BYU campus, the ratio of parking for housing and proximity to mass transit, and then the ability to count off-site parking for residential uses. For the student housing issue or topic, we've all sat through many meetings over the last few years where council members have expressed a desire for redevelopment around BYU campus for more BYU student housing and higher density student housing. Staff is aware of four projects right now that are on the drawing board that are waiting to see what happens with this amendment. One project would relate to the Proximity to transit, that's the Bill Harris block. We'd all like to see that redevelop. One of those projects is Park Plaza, which again, we would all like to see redevelop. The two biggest factors holding back these projects are our parking ratio, current parking ratio, and simply the high cost of providing what has to be structured parking when you're talking about higher densities. Coal West, which is the company that owns the Park Plaza building, they're partners in ownership of buildings at the University of Oregon, the University of Michigan, Wisconsin, Clemson, and the U of U. Of all of those universities, the highest parking ratio is Clemson at 0.51. So 0.51 parking spaces per student, per bed. Utah, it's 0.24. In terms of proximity to the UVX stations, as you know, we've already adopted the station area plans and best practices and city planning across the country calls for reduced parking and proximity to transit. That's not the exception to the rule anymore. These days, that is the rule. Salt Lake City has no minimums in their transit-oriented areas. They allow the developer to decide what that is. In Orem, it's a 50% reduction. Orem doesn't have transit running right through their community like we do, but where they do have transit, they allow for the 50% reduction. Staff has asked several developers to come to tonight's meeting and to address what can be done, what they intend to do or what they have done already to reduce parking demand on site and to guarantee proper management so the city doesn't have to deal with impacts of spillover parking. I'm anxious to hear what they have to say and I think hopefully they have some good ideas that we can adopt. You all are aware of the blank lot, vacant lot across the street from Park Plaza, right? That's the brickyard project. That went all the way to the point of being ready to have a building permit issued. So they spent tens of thousands of dollars just on the building plans, much less getting through all this stuff before you even get to build the plans. It has been built. That is a project where it provided full parking. And now the economics don't work once you actually designed the building that way and tried to go get financing on it. Dave Cabanella, who's built many projects in Provo, had the property just east of the old woman's gym, BYU old woman's gym, just west. Sorry, thank you. Along 500 North and 100 West. That was 86 units, apartment units. Again, structured parking blew the project. And so now we're getting 24 townhomes there. Now townhomes are great. I'm glad we're getting townhomes. They're gonna be for sale. So when, but we lost 60 units. We lost 60 dwelling units in an area that we had previously decided we'd really like to get more housing, more density. So this is having real impacts on projects and on people. Now, again, it's not just an economic issue. It's an issue of management. And those who are going to those projects need to explain to us how they're going to manage lower parking ratios. So I'll just now turn it over to Aaron and let him answer any questions you have about the ordinance itself and walk you through that.

Thanks, Bill. Bill, you happen to know the project south of the Cole Parkland and on the west side of Langton's, and it's right on the sidewalk. It's six stories. They have underground parking. What's that ratio? Do you know that project was built 10 years ago?

They don't have enough parking by far. I've known a couple of people that live there. I don't know what the ratio is.

I'd have to look it up. I don't remember. I used to keep tallies on all the projects that we see, but I just haven't looked at that in years. I'm sorry. I can find that out for you.

Yeah, that'd be great.

So I guess with that, are there any questions that you'd like Steph to answer now or prepare to answer later tonight?

Go ahead. Let's speak about the situation where they can park different places than on the premises. Can we go over that statue?

Yeah, so currently only commercial uses, industrial and commercial uses, can use off-site parking within a certain distance. In downtown, it's a larger distance. Outside of downtown, it's 200 feet. the idea here is to open that up a little bit more kind of take a baby step to allow a multi-family to come into that uh still allow are still single-family duplex multi-family townhomes have to park on their actual property on site but pulling in multi-family allows us to get these apartment projects another option if they're able to find a property that's has extra space or it's not being used or is vacant they can improve that parking lot um just to kind of sub in for space limits that they have on their site there's criteria with that you have to do a traffic report on it you have to be responsible financially and liable for anything that happens on that adjacent parking lot you have to record things at the county if you don't own both of them

How do you connect the two together that they just don't develop the parking lot in a year or something?

Right. If it's the same owner, it's through that approval agreement. If it's a different owner, it's through a lease, it's recorded out there at the Utah County Recorder's Office.

Okay. Is that something, Brian, you've worked on to make sure that's tight?

Say that again?

just making sure that if it's parking offsite, that the offsite parking can't be sold in a year and developed, that that parking goes with the housing in perpetuity.

Can you scroll up, Aaron? Yes, sir, Kevin.

We're in 080. Actually, that's the last page.

Keep going.

He's raising his hand.

OK. A little bit farther. So in 2C, an applicant for an exception has to record their lease with the county recorder demonstrating that they have lawful use of the lot. So now, that doesn't mean that it's not restricted. I mean, they have to do that in order to apply. Um, that doesn't mean that the situation can't change later. But if they, if they, if it changes, then they're not eligible for the permit anymore. I mean, they've got to get a permit from the planning commission. So we just revoke that permit.

But what if they're at the houses or multi units already built and it's done and. Two years later, they develop it into another apartment complex.

In my opinion, while you think about that, that has to go through at least project planning, building permits, all of those processes with the city, right? we know that that is being used for parking for this building over here, we're gonna have to say, well, this can't move forward until you help this guy find more parking, right? So you're not gonna be able to reduce, and that's in code 1437 as well. You can't reduce your existing parking haphazardly like that. You have to go through the processes.

Okay. Is there a related risk where, Because I assume there'd be some kind of lease agreement between the apartment.

Well, if they could own it. But if they didn't own it. Yeah, if they didn't own it.

If they don't own it, they have to have a lease agreement. So I guess maybe that would be an alternative problem is if they had a lease agreement, but they're not the owner, and then the lease agreement gets terminated.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, right now, this just says, and this is, Now, the interesting thing here is this looks like it's new, but it's actually just getting moved from elsewhere in the code. Is that right, or is it... Some of it is new, some of it is new. Was this new in the rewrite?

This specific section is new, like this 2C.

Okay, but we had worked on it in the rewrite, so it was going in somewhere in the rewrite. Correct. Yeah, that's a good question because we're suggesting that they have to record a lease. But even then, I mean, the maximum period for the lease is going to be 99 years anyway, and it probably won't be that long. So we're granting them a permanent exception.

We'll have blind cars or self-driving cars in 99 years. This is a 20-year problem, 25-year problem.

Could we just make it that they had to own it and leases aren't acceptable?

there's a parking lot that's vacant a lot of the time. We'd like to be able to double up and use those if we could.

I have a real life example of this.

I'm sorry, Travis hasn't started.

Sorry, can you guys hear me? Yeah, I was just echoing what Jeff was saying. I guess, can we require like a 10 or a 21 year lease on these? Maybe that's not practical. I don't know. But I do have the concern that all of a sudden there's a conflict between whoever owns the lot and the building and all of a sudden the lease gets canceled or somebody wants to develop their property. I don't know. I can just see these leases getting canceled. terminated and then all of a sudden somebody built a building under the assumption that they were going to be able to use off-site parking and then that off-site parking is gone and now we have a problem on our hands so i would like to mitigate that risk and address that somehow in advance um as part of this this approval process that we're you know what we're going to address tonight so i don't know if we pick a number of years 10 years 20 years something like that I'd prefer we figure out something rather than just assume it's going to go okay.

Kind of plan for the worst.

Yeah, Brian, what do you think?

I mean, it's the first time I've thought about that question. So I guess, what's the objective? Are you trying to get the risk to zero? Because a 10, 20 year lease is not getting the risk to zero. So I don't know what the objective is.

No, if they own it, it's zero.

you know i mean the other thing that occurs to me is i suppose you could say that they must but i don't know how feasible this is the thought that's popping into my head is they must record a lease and they must uh submit a written plan for how they will replace it when the lease expires or terminates but i don't know how feasible that actually is yeah because i don't know what they're doing

I mean, for me, it wouldn't be to get it to zero, but to get it to manageable. I think one year is not manageable. Like if you build a new apartment complex with the assumption you're going to use an empty lot under one year lease agreement, and then it's gone in one year, like that's not a manageable risk. 20 years absolutely is manageable because problems change, societies change drastically in generations.

Well, we can certainly add a time period if that's sufficient.

Yeah, I don't know that we can assume it goes away in 20 years. We can look back 20 years. Same problem previous to that.

Yeah, I agree.

And so that's not a magical, we will have flying cars by then. And maybe we'll have that thought. And if we have self-driving cars, that makes difference. So all of those things I think makes sense. I think we would need to create this to address Travis's issue of, no, I think we do need to think through, because we're taking the approach of focusing on how do we help the developer? I like that idea. And the flip side of that same coin is what's the impact on the neighborhoods? And I hear a lot more from neighbors than I do from developers. So you guys are hearing a lot from developers, I get that. I'm hearing from neighbors who are saying it denigrates, when there isn't sufficient parking, it denigrates quality of the neighborhood. Now, this is one of those glass half full, glass half empty. Do you wanna look at heads or tails? So I don't know that we're gonna wrestle that to the ground and decide and come to a consensus. But I'm very concerned that someone would say, yes, we've got adequate parking in this parking lot and it's five years, pick a number. And then that goes away and boom, who is it that then pays the price for that? And it's that local neighborhood. And so I think we do need to have a solution for that before that becomes an option i i ryan i think we need to we need to come up with something of course it was owned deed restricted yeah perfect but a lot of this is i like the idea of how do we utilize existing parking structures parking lots and byu's got all these parking lots and is there some way to i like all of that and all that could be temporary. And I think we then are just pushing the problem onto the neighborhoods and I wouldn't want to see that happen.

Yeah. Council Whitlock.

Is it okay if I change topics to questions? yeah so you asked if what questions would maybe we'd like have answered either now or tonight one of the questions that i would be really curious to know it's similar to counselor garrett's question but a little bit broader is like for For the area in question, let's call it like the stop south of BYU campus. Do we know what the current parking ratio is today? Because a lot of the existing development are small homes that are being occupied by students that were not parked under any kind of multifamily ratio. So I'm just curious if we know the exact, actually the existing ratio is.

For Joaquin specifically, we do because we did that through that neighborhood plan. That's not going to be true everywhere. And things have changed over the years since that Joaquin plan was done. So we won't know exact from parcel to parcel. New development is easy. We can probably average it out to a number for you.

Yeah, because I guess the thing that I'm curious about is I'm curious if you take the whole area kind of immediately south of campus and you understood what is the current parking ratio? And then under today, what do you kind of have like mixed, like older developments that were parked under different ratios, newer ones that are parked under more recent ones, and then houses that were not parked at all for multifamily, like what is that average? And then if you assumed that entire area being redeveloped, which is not going to happen overnight, but I'm Just saying if you assumed to getting redeveloped under this new ratio, would it actually be more or less? That's the question I'm getting at.

I can come back with those average ratios.

And then a couple other question I have is like, so do we know, have we done any study to suggest how much this savings gets passed on to renters? So, for example, you take an average 100 unit with two bedrooms each, that translates into some direct savings because we can just do the math based on an assumption per stall cost, right? I'm curious, like, do we know, like, for every dollar saved in construction, it gets passed on to be, like, 5 cents per year in rent? Do we have any ratio like that?

I think that's probably going to be different from developer to developer, but I think that's a great question for those that come tonight to have their examples address it. And it just might be different between each one of them. Great. And then, sorry.

I was just curious. So who is coming tonight?

We've talked to Knighton Architecture about this. We've talked to Coal West. We've talked to the owners of Campus Plaza.

Isn't that Coal West?

And then the people that did 400 Element. Miller Construction. Miller Construction. So we've asked them for some input from a lot of these groups, and hopefully someone will come tonight to address some of this.

My experience in economics, and I know when we were looking at the road width thing, You know, the roads, it saves the developer a lot of money to do a narrower road. And so I asked one of the developers who did it, hey, did you sell the houses a little cheaper? And they said, absolutely not. We're going to sell the max for whatever we can sell the market will do. And that'll be the same thing for the rent or sale of a home with parking. And the market may make it a little different because it doesn't have parking. And it might not, because they'll just know they'll park on the street, and they want new. We do want South of Campbell Street to develop. New development would be awesome, clean, without black mold, modern. It would be lovely. I'm excited that we did apply for that Opportunity Zone for South of Campus. And I really, really hope that that motivates some developers to build South of Campus. I've talked to a few developers and asked them, why don't people redevelop South of Campus? And it was interesting to me, a developer told me, two developers told me that, rent is too cheap in BYU. The south of campus, rent is too cheap. It's not worth redeveloping. Because the rent is so cheap, you don't get, you know, the payback takes too long. They build student housing in Tennessee, Montana, Idaho, Kentucky. Those are the ones I can remember. And they're like, these places are just way better to build. The rent's way more expensive. Provo's too cheap. And I thought that was so interesting because I'd never heard that before. And like, that was an interesting perspective I hadn't heard.

I didn't say it's too cheap, Catrice, like $400, $500 a month?

They didn't give numbers. They just said the rent's too cheap in Provo. It's not worth redoing. People are just making money on it as it is. It's all paid for. It's not worth redoing.

So why fix it?

So it's just there's a lot going on. And I've never talked to anyone. that doesn't acknowledge that there is a problem. Now, they may not care about the problem and they may want to, you know, that they think that problem's okay because they don't want people to drive and they think it's, they do think in a lower housing, but all we get is complaints about parking from students, from families that live there, from people that live in neighboring areas. It's tricky. And we can make choices to push things in a certain direction because we want to get rid of cars or we want to just increase housing as much as we can possible. Like we can make those choices, but they all have consequences. And I don't want to live in a city that only cares about getting as much density as possible or that wants to just get rid of cars no matter the cost. That's not where I want to live. I don't think our citizens want to live like that. But Kelks the Whitlock.

It's OK to ask a few more questions. So one other thing is, in the Planning Commission, they asked for, if I recall correctly, a map of the actual parcels that would be affected by this.

Have we created that map? No, they recommended that if the council does move forward with any of this, that we should include maps or figures within the code. OK.

So for me, having that map would help me understand what actually would be influenced by this. Because I think it's hard to conceptualize, because you have the half mile radius, and then quarter mile yeah and then and then if not on street parking and so there's a bunch of criteria and so it'd be nice just to see those plaques like this or the plaques that actually meet the criteria yeah the challenge I have with this uh proposed ordinance is the one size fits all

um i i think we do need to think bill about uh projects and areas um anchoring this to the transit areas throughout the city again i think is one size fits all so i'm not supportive of it at all um i and i i applaud the intent and i think there's probably different ways to get to the same the right outcome I think that this one just overcorrects to the developers. In fact, that's what we hear about is this is what developers need. And I think more important than the developers is the neighbors. So that's my bias is the people living here. It's people like me who own a home and want places that aren't choked with traffic and have enough parking. So I acknowledge I'm taking a very specific approach to this. And you could take another approach and say, no, we need more housing no matter what. I, too, do not want to see Provo just, if we've got empty space, let's fill it up. You can move to Manhattan for that. Or you can move to downtown Salt Lake City. Or you can move to downtown Provo. We need to preserve these places. And even around these transit places, Using transit does not mean you don't have a car because our transit is not that good. Now you could say, well, we just get rid of the cars. You'll have to use transit. That is a strategy. It's not one I'm willing to support, but there's a viable argument. I'm just not in that place. I'm in a place for, let's make sure that we preserve the character of neighborhoods. Parking is a big part of that quality of life. And so to me, this... It's just one size fits all. Am I open to a discussion about individual projects? Let's take the one on 9th East and do we need to do something? Absolutely. Because I want to see that developed. This to me goes, it's just, it's the wrong vehicle to do that.

Travis has a comment. Go ahead, Travis.

We're not.

Travis?

Hey, can you hear me?

Yeah.

All right. Sorry, guys. Yeah, I just wanted to share my thoughts generally since, you know, no surprises tonight kind of where I'm at. So I'm supportive of trying to figure out something for Park Plaza. I'm also supportive of using the offsite parking. I would like a long term lease requirement. But I think with the rest, I prefer to be more surgical about things because some, like there might be a development that might make sense at one spot per bedroom and another might make sense at half a spot per bedroom. And so I'm just uncomfortable with just kind of painting broad strokes and saying like, okay, anywhere in these areas, it can be, you know, it's going to be this amount. I just feel like we should just look, you know, if there's four developments, let's look at those individually and make a recommendation based on the specific need of that development. so that would be my preference um but i also wanted to say that i appreciate the time and effort that development services have put into coming up with a plan um i think i think there's a lot of good points to it so i definitely appreciate that would just like to um yeah be a little more surgical on how we approach it helps uh counselor wetlock counselor bogdan so

Bill, startup, that was one that we expected to have transit and it ended up filling up with BYU kids that had more cars than we allotted for, right?

Yes.

Okay, so that is my concern, is it's not just college kids that are bringing cars closer to BYU. We're also looking at these transit corridors. And when we have experimented with that in the past, we've ended up really far burnt because I remember complaints from the surrounding neighborhoods where the parking was so bad because they filled up the Mary College, so it was two cars per unit, not a half of a parking stall per unit. And people couldn't get out to get to medical appointments because kids were blocking driveways. And a lot of times when we get this overcrowding of parking, the kids don't care. They just park where they can park. I mean, we've gotten all those emails from students and others that are upset because they have to park in a crosswalk and they don't understand why they're getting a ticket or, you know, because there's no parking and please help us. So to be surgical, I can understand that and I can appreciate that. But I also think we need to look at the realities of our situation. And I don't think just because it's in a transit corridor, that's a good idea to go ahead and narrow the parking. Kelsey Whitlock.

So I would concur very strongly with what Councillor Hogan said about Park Plaza. It's a very blighted property. I went there on Saturday just to go check it out and I walked around and I mean, if there is a place where this theory could potentially work, I think it would be there because it's right across the street from BYU. It's right across the street from the Creamery. There is no really adjacent resident parking that it would spill out into because there's no parking on 9th. There's no immediate street within a block next to a neighborhood. And if the developers are telling us they can't get this project done, but they're willing to do it with that, to me, I'd much rather see a nice student housing go there than it continue to be a blighted place with all sorts of safety hazards. Also, the gate was open. That place is a mess. And it's something that constantly was asked about during the campaign about, wait, can we see this redeveloped? um i do agree with you that potentially the impact here is too broad and we might want to learn one one thing i'll say though because a lot of my area kind of is really close to byu i and again i'd like to see the numbers if we could actually do an analysis but my my kind of understanding is uh we're actually under parked in the area around byu as it stands and they kind of work like this is that like student student population has gone up a lot more than we've increased the supply of student housing near byu because there's not enough supply near to byu students then go live in neighborhoods near byu as much as possible those neighborhoods are parked as single-family residential and not as multi-family and so they you know you put for students in there and there's three to four cars. And so I think we're actually in the area around BYU dramatically under-parked. And what I'd like to understand is if we actually had a redevelopment, even at a lower parking rate closer to BYU, would we actually have more student parking for students next to campus? Does that make sense, that argument? So that's what I would like to understand. And if we could, if that is true, then we can look at just scoping this down to like just a few blocks south of BYU and kind of take some of that pressure because we all hear it's a constant complaint from neighbors that zoning enforcement and zoning enforcement primarily is over parking, which is primarily student housing. so that's my that's like my thing about those sleep canes so there are places in go over that it's not just no and i'm not saying it is just near i'm just saying they because there is not housing near they then students then live as close as they can find a place reasonable that they can afford i i agree that we need to um

we need to look at things individually. That works for me. I remember it was over a year ago that I talked to Bill about this, but right now parking reductions go through the planning commission. And I do think they should come through the council surgically like Park Plaza or other ones so that we do know the bigger picture of what's going on because it is such an issue. So we want to accommodate where we can, but we have to acknowledge it's a huge issue. And it makes me think too about like our land. When you up zone land, it just becomes more expensive. And these developers are saying things don't pencil. But then that's also the reality that they're paying too much for the land. They're paying for a zone it isn't. Or they're paying for what can't be done on it. Like if it doesn't pencil, they shouldn't have bought the land at that price. Like the code is in place. They know what the code is when they buy the land. so we somebody sent a message that people can't ask more for their land than it's worth and developers need to be smarter about what they're spending on it because i don't think it's our responsibility to fix their poor financial decision too like there's a there's a situation there that is not the citizens responsibility to take the burden of their poor financial decision on to them

And at the same time, Catrice, you could imagine a developer saying, again, if we strive to get more surgical, here's what I'd be willing to do. and the uh giving them greater distance to having a parking yeah so 200 feet seems pretty tight uh if it was two blocks away if it i think we could be creative in terms of how we help so i i don't think it's it's not a black you're not saying black and white right but i think that speaks to if we had a more surgical approach uh i don't feel like this is uh surgical at all That is my sense. I appreciate the intent, and I don't think that this is the answer, and we must find an answer.

Is that something that, so we tried to, if you look in 370504, we tried to put some criteria in there.

Where they can park elsewhere?

Yeah, there's no on-street parking, no single-family residential zones adjacent to you.

Oh, you're saying the 50% reduction stuff.

Yeah. So is the idea something like that where we can have, if we have concerns and worries, that we can address those with specific criteria to make this work? Or is that not going far enough in your guys' minds? I'm just trying to get a good feel for it.

In my opinion, it needs to be looked at individually.

Like you're saying the property by either area or property.

By Park Plaza individually.

By development.

Yeah.

And I would share, this is Fern, again, this is such, and you might say, well, who in District 1 is worried about parking? I don't hear from District 1. I hear from everyone in the city. You know, so I'm hearing from the, people at Slate Canyon are my best friends because I heard from them so much. So I'm hearing from everyone. And this is such a key issue. I wouldn't support the idea of this being an administrative issue. I think this council should decide this and we should come up with solutions for this because that's who I'm accountable for. It's everyone in the city. And this is one of the top three.

Councillor, I mean, sorry. I would like to acknowledge that Councillor Whitman has joined us.

Yes, thank you. I'm sorry that I was detained. Happy to be here now. I also apologize for entering this conversation partway through. Did you guys have a discussion about the one eighth mile boundary of the main BYU campus? Like how far into the neighborhoods that goes? Because one eighth of a mile is what, like maybe a block? I'm just trying to determine because it seems like this is already very, very limited in the geographic area that would be affected based on the way this proximity to BYU portion is written. Yeah, we're pulling up a map because I think that that might be a helpful thing to recognize that this is already very, very constrained and that we are not looking at anything near Slate Canyon with this. Do we also have a discussion on the previous parking studies that were done in Joaquin that found that there is enough parking there by looking at overnight numbers that there were still on street parking spaces available?

We did talk about that. There was a study done that was a long time ago and things could have changed.

Okay, that's good to know. I also really liked in this proposal that the parking would be rolled in with the rent you know like it seemed like there were some really good things to avoid the particular problems that we've already seen students not wanting to pay additional amount for the parking so they're not using those lots like this solves for that it seems that this solves for the current parking issues that we have in this area of the city and certainly the area south of campus is in my district and i'm on my bike right there every day seeing it. I was riding through it today. I also recognize that by making this change preemptively, we lose that that kind of nitpicky oversight control over every little project, but we also make it easier to accomplish our goals of getting this area redeveloped, which we very, very much want. Because insisting that we review every single project that comes in is making it cost a lot more. It's creating barriers to the redevelopment that we say we want. And I'm really appreciative that this is a proposal that has been developed by the staff in administration, looking at the actual problems that they have encountered and is their thoughtful solution to it. And I think that it behooves us to take the advice of the people who are expert in our city on these problems and listen to them. And then our job is to, as counselors, both to represent and to educate our constituencies, to help them understand why our staff is supporting this and why they believe it will make things better.

each block's about 400 feet um so that that quarter mile is about a little over two blocks away from two blocks so this is still within that 500 north line that we've got yeah it could go down to almost 600 north about not even all the way to 600 yeah yeah this is what i'm thinking in my head just trying to do the math yeah

It says an eighth of a mile in the proposed ordinance.

So an eighth of a mile would be half of that, yeah.

So that would be... Yeah, it's just a very narrow band around the main campus. And if what we're concerned about is neighborhoods other than Joaquin, then I suppose we could change it to this band for just the south campus area? And how are we defining main campus? Does this include the stadium or their public facilities where they do their sales for surplus?

That was another question that came up in planning commission. So I think a map is going to be helpful if any of this does pass that we want to incorporate a map.

Especially since campus seems to be expanding. So we've got the campus east and campus west and everything.

We were thinking of the main parcel. So this is all my parcel up through there. That's what we were thinking when we wrote it, but that's not clear in the code. So I think that would be a life story.

For years we've been anticipating redevelopment north amendment doesn't take you down that far. Right.

Yeah. No, this is much more modest than that whole zone that needs to be redeveloped.

It's like one block.

It's two blocks.

Eighth mile is essentially one block, and a quarter mile would be about two blocks.

So there's two parts, yeah. So it's two blocks. Yeah.

So really just that 700 to 800 block, that's south of campus. Well, there's also the other campus. Right. And that's why I think it might be useful to constrain it. But yeah, because you've got the hospital and everything. Yeah. So it may be a moot point over there. I guess the other part that we need to consider is on 900 East, right? And so I think it would make more sense to have this line at 900 East and not include the new wasatch campus area like absolutely not we're not going into the tree streets or that neighborhood with this change aaron did you did you say that that what we consider the main campus is just one parcel

But we could actually put the partial number in the ordinance.

But then the boundary, if it's expanding to the east, which would be a problem. So we want to kind of rework that. Because they could combine parcels. Right. So the parcel goes all the way to 90. So then you've got that eight mile, quarter mile buffer going that way into some of these neighborhoods here. If those were to get rezoned and redeveloped and all those things happen first.

So what I'm looking at is I think this would be really, really useful for that block south of campus. And that's an area where we really want to have these more new higher density student housing. And this looks like a really good way to accomplish it. And it's not, it's a good way to see if this actually works in that very constrained area without completely throwing off the balance of all of Joaquin or, you know, affecting the rest of the city. So that's why I like it, but also wanted to define BYU campus a little bit better for this.

Great.

Any more comments?

So, Rachel, what about the parking park that is one quarter mile of any transit mixed use?

about a couple of blocks. So that does make it a lot larger. I think that's useful, but I would rather us as a council do something to try this out and so my compromise would be just to do that eighth mile south of campus and perhaps strip out just at that one area to see if if we get any traction with it i think it would be incredibly useful to do this along the transit line and i recognize that there's discomfort with the council for doing that i don't know if the council would be more comfortable changing all of that to an eighth of a mile or the, okay, sounds like at least there's one no. But like we really have gotten stuck south of campus. Counselor McKay and I have for years been saying, we want this area redeveloped and trying to, anytime we talk to realtors or developers, they say, please do this. And nobody has taken us up on it.

Having an opportunity zone in our future, I hope, does something. Because the developers I talked to who said they wouldn't develop now would develop with an opportunity zone. So I'm hoping that that is the trigger we need to move things in that direction. We still can't do... The reasoning doesn't work for me to do something that hurts people's quality of life just to try and get something we want to that is a good thing. It has to be a whole picture. It has to be holistically a good thing.

I don't see how this would hurt the quality of life of our students living south of campus. Having been a student who lived immediately south of campus, anything we do to change that housing stock will only improve their quality of life.

People are still miserable about the parking. It's still a huge issue.

I think we've all over south of campus. It's halls. We were actually to the council. Well, again, we can go over this. I, again, I appreciate the creative thought that went into it. I think it's too large, too expansive. Am I open to something different where it might be more targeted? I also share the concern there may be a better way to do it. It may be an opportunity zone. I'm not sure the changing the parking because we also have families living there, not just students. If we actually blocked it out and said this is students only, But I think that more housing stock will exacerbate the parking issue.

Are there any non-student families living in that one block south of campus? I think it's unlikely.

You're talking about one block?

Yeah, that one-eighth of a mile south of campus.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Maybe there is a slice that we could take a look at. This proposal, I think, is... just far too broad. And so is there something? Could be. Could be. But I'm not in favor of the proposal.

But what would be? What narrow enough thing would you be supportive of?

I would be supportive of actually talking to individual developers. So let's take the ones that you've got built. Let's work with them and see if we can come up with a template that would work.

Per development.

Per development.

Would you be supportive of a block park plaza?

Well, we need to talk about the particulars of it, right? Yeah.

Again, I think that makes sense. Here's what I don't want to do. I don't want to swing the pendulum so far to the other side and we have the other unintended consequences. Because the parking is a big deal. We can say, no, it's not a big... It's what I hear about the most, or one of the things. So I would be much more in favor of a much more focused and modest approach so we don't swing the pendulum over and knock the plaster off that wall instead of this one over here.

We have people that promise things and it didn't work out. We have a Mennonite Hall has huge parking issues. We have a village that promised they wouldn't rent to people who didn't have a car once their spots were gone. They didn't do that. Huge issues over there. We have the tall one by 9th East. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. But that one is huge issues. I've had a number of babysitters who live there and they just drove around at night for a couple hours waiting for a spot to open. Like there's these places are quality of life issue for people and it's, they're miserable. The dorms are an issue at BYU. They don't take any responsibility there. They think that kids with dorms wouldn't bring cars. They bring cars. So they're parking in the streets.

I have a question. How long is it going to take for the Opportunity Zone for us to know whether we're granted it or not?

Do you know, Marsha, when we find out the deadlines passed when we had to turn in our request, and so the governor picks which opportunity, I think it's, I heard it's 35-ish, maybe for the whole state. And so we picked a bunch of spots, but our first picks were south of campus. I think we picked like four or five spots. Five spots. And then the first time we prioritize. Okay. So we prioritize South the campus. And so we're just waiting to see, but I think that's a great point.

We probably should see what that does first, right. Before we get to surgically removing whole block, because that would give us our parking and the other right now, I'm kind of jumping ahead before we see what that'll actually do.

He's the project manager or not, I just asked him.

Okay, what the deadline is? Um, I, I hear from citizens and I have like my lived experience. Like I lived in San Francisco. I had awesome public transportation, the bar, the Caltrain, everyone still had a car. What was fascinating is rent was not cheap. Housing was not cheap. They had no parking, but it was even more expensive because they just paid a thousand to 2000 a month in parking fines or parking paid parking. That's what people, it was just an expense on top of their rent or on top of their mortgage. Like these big cities don't have cheaper housing than us. These big cities don't have, things aren't cheaper. So this idea that we keep building denser and denser and denser with less parking is going to get cheaper. It doesn't get cheaper. I don't see it. There's not examples of it getting cheaper.

uh there are like austin's gone down minneapolis has gone down in rents i'm saying that i i think the issue i mean macro supply and demand factors just exist the reality the issue is like with some of these cities you mentioned that they actually have extremely restrictive housing policies and demand has gone way faster than supply and that's the situation i think we're in now it's like You've used dramatically increase their house their student population by you has a little bit more and more students keep coming to live here and we just haven't increased our housing stock for students relative to that and. That to me is the frame that I see when I hear people complaining a lot it's like. We can do better zoning enforcement, but as long as fundamentally we don't have enough housing stock for students, we're going to continually fighting a losing battle because the root cause of law. And so I agree with everything that's been said about this is particularly too broad of a brush, and maybe the opportunity zone is the trigger, but I feel like If we're able to get more student housing closer to the campus, a lot of the parking problems actually will be less. Not because people are bringing less cars, because I agree with you, people are still going to bring cars. It's that we are actually under-parked. And that's the analysis I really would love to see done, because that's the data we need. If we really look at the area around BYU and we say, OK, what is our best estimate on how much parking is relative to students living in this area? And would that actually change if we redeveloped south of campus with the new parking ratio?

should depend on these breaks translating to cheaper rent for the students. But just bringing more product to market helps the marketplace, right?

Yeah.

Well, I would be in favor of trying some creative things. And hopefully, the Opportunity Zones do provide something like that. I like the idea of saying, let's take something very specific. and let's see if we can work with the developer and let's actually try something. Now, the ones we've tried in the past, we don't have success stories. There's a number of these that you've stated where it was said this and then that, but again, maybe we could be clever enough to figure out a way to put guardrails around that. Because if we could come up with a formula that works, again, I love that idea, as long as it doesn't have the unintended consequences of affecting neighborhoods. And I'd love to think we're clever enough to do that. I don't think this does that. So my vote would be let's repeal this and let's take a different approach to it. Let's actually hope that we can get an opportunity zone and let's put that together and let's actually try something very creative. I don't think that this is the creative solution that we need and there could be one.

What do you think about the concept? If we have the long-term lease agreement in place or some solution for that, what do you think about that idea?

Oh, I like it. The lease is problematic because it's not fee simple. It's a leasehold. It's there for some period of time. It goes away. And so we could do a lot of things and then increase enforcement issues. And that may be the best we can do. We talked about the parking lot. Yeah, that complex is...

please so um i appreciate all the discussion and i know that you've raised really valid concerns um one of the things that opportunity zones might address some of the financing part of it but it doesn't address what it looks like in these areas if we insist on the parking for every bed that we have now because that's just a big huge parking lot they'll have to cut back on any amenities they aren't going to have as many um rooms available like it's so i just think that was interesting when when there were uh three or four developers that when they saw this was going to be on the agenda they immediately came and saw me and said we have had these plans waiting and look at this and this is how we want to um to encourage students to not have cars because i said that's you can't just say we're not going to have cars and then not have cars because that hasn't worked in the past, but I mean, Campus Plaza was able to do it and they have ideas. I just hope that you keep your minds open to listen to what they have to say. The development where Park Plaza is, if they have to do the parking under code the way it is now, they will have like four stories of parking and then two stories of housing on top of that. And is that what we want? Just big parking garages everywhere or a lot of asphalt everywhere. So I think that there's more at play. I understand the concerns of the over parking. I think that that Jeff has really made a good point that it's already where where are there going to be additional cars? It's already over-parked because there are so many places that don't have parking standards at all. And so at least getting additional parking spaces in there, and they do have some creative solutions that I think you might find interesting. I think that an eighth, of a mile from campus. I think that's a pretty surgical targeted approach. I mean, if you think you want it to be less than that, I mean, that's just a street width and a block, right? But I will respect whatever you figure out. I just am asking you to please listen to these developers that come in and hear what they have to say. They were pretty excited.

Do you know, Mayor, what worked at Campus Plaza in terms of when they were able to restrict the number of vehicles?

I'm sure that's... I don't know. There wasn't anything we did.

Their ratio is 0.5. We've never had a complaint on that project because they're vigilant about their management. Yeah, it's all... People spend a lot of time to speak to them.

Do they require in the lease to say that they're going to not bring it apart if there's an assigned stall?

Yes. But I've also asked them, what do you do with the penance who just doesn't tell the truth? Yeah. How do you deal with that? That's what I'm going to hear from them.

What do you do? Bill, do we have much information about the Heritage Halls project? Since that was a BYU project that basically has no parking for, what, 1,000 students that live there? I know they park at the Marriott Center or the stadium. Do you know what went into that? And do their students sign a lease or an agreement that they won't bring a car?

So you mean the housing law, not Heritage? yes uh-huh so um yes they do have their people park at those remote lots like you've said and byu has done a much better job managing that and managing expectations in the last few years because every september i used to get phone calls from very angry mothers of co-eds whose daughters didn't feel safe walking home from those remote lots in the late evening hours or night hours So BYU has addressed that issue because I haven't kind of complained on that from a parent in the last several years. Exactly what those methods are, I don't know. But BYU's been more engaged with us on parking issues recently than they ever have before. So I'm sure we can get that from them.

Okay, does anyone have a... I have one more question.

So I think this has already been raised, but just to put a point on it is I think the... The two classic examples that you hear about when it said we granted a variance and it was poorly received because a lot of extra parking came and spilled on the street is Amanda Night Building and then University Village. Yeah.

As well.

yeah yeah the village the village yeah yeah and maybe start up too is it possible like do we have any way to actually know what like how many car cars per resident like do we do we have any way to estimate that at all no but we we don't i mean we don't tell you what the partnership is we don't know what they're managing what they're what their tenants yeah Yeah, because it's like the thing that I think a lot about this conversation, and I don't mean it in any way to discount what people's experiences are, but a lot of it feels anecdotally driven rather than data driven. And I feel like just more data would help because The thing is, it's easy to be annoyed about a parking situation once and send an email that almost costs nothing. But what's harder to see is the people who are trying to find a place to live that works for their circumstances and can't find it because the housing is not available or the people who decide to live in Payson because that's the only place they can get affordable rent. And then they drive in every single day and create traffic for us. And those things to me, I think there's this big kind of It's just a very complex, interconnected problem. And so I think in general, I'd like us to push us to try to get more data to understand some of these things about actual cars, actual parking, the cost, the passing on of the supply-demand effects. Because I think what Councillor McKay said is true, is if you have an undersupplied market, you basically can just charge whatever the market costs. Like if you have way more marginal buyers than you have supply, like the marginal buyer is always going to just take what the market wants. But if you have a market closer to equilibrium, that's when you actually start to see declining prices with the marginal supply. So I just like, I feel like, anyway, that's my econ 101 talking, but I'd like us to understand the numbers behind a lot of these kind of anecdotes and theories. So it's a general push, but we should have a conversation about how we do that.

I'm going to push back a little bit and say we don't just house BYU kids. We also house UVU kids. And I think we need to be very, very conscious of that.

Totally. I agree with you.

And we cannot be the only city that houses them. Other cities also have to take on that responsibility. And we also have to understand a lot of those UVU kids, you know, even my kids attend UVU and they have a lot of online classes and they do UVX because I'm close enough to that. But a lot of them just don't. And a lot of them, they don't work along the UVX line. They don't work where the train's going to take them. Cars are coming, and we're going to have kids, if they don't live in Payson, they're going to go to UVU, and they're still going to have a car, and they're still going to create a traffic problem for us. So I don't think that's the end-all solution is my point.

My question would be, and how bad do you want data? because we could talk more about it. You're right, much of this is anecdotal because we have such little data about it.

Yeah, well, for example, we said we were going to do the housing stock audit. We should follow up on that. That's a place where we said it was a priority, and I think we're kind of stuck on that. So we should make a note to the council office when we get the new director, Justin, that we really would like to start seeing that data. And then I think that lays the baseline. But yeah, that's one thing that comes to mind.

Yeah, because I think we're going to have to invest in the data. And until then, we've got what we know. So again, I would go ahead and make a motion. I would like to see us come back to this. I think this is a discussion worth having. And if we could bring some data and some opportunities onto it and actually talk to some developers, I think that could be really helpful. I don't want to move forward with this ordinance. I would make a motion that we repeal 0.50 and 0.60. Did I get that right? is there 14 14.37.050 and 14.37.60 well oh no oh oh six oh is all of the parking requirements for the entire city i don't think you do let's not let's not do that are you saying you don't want to move these folk the changes well yeah you're saying repeal a current yeah sorry sorry if this was late at night um i hear you i understand what i'm saying is What I suggest is that I don't want to move forward with this. I would like to take a fresh look at this in terms of a very surgical area. I'd like to consider whether Opportunity Zones might be a part of that and do that.

We have developers coming tonight. Bill has asked developers, do you want to hear them?

Oh, absolutely.

We don't have to say anything tonight.

I think this is the right discussion to be having. And right now, again, I've got a lot of people in my ear saying, this is the kind of problem it's creating. I appreciate that you're saying, no, that's actually not a problem in that neighborhood. I think it deserves some discussion and some creative solutions. I don't think this is it, but I'll bet we could come up with one. And I love the idea of trying something very surgical. Love the idea of hearing from the developers. I just don't see moving forward with this.

So for tonight, I'm happy to come back with the data that we have compiled over the last several years. Hopefully the developers come with some data and some anecdotal information. We can come back with that tonight for the night meeting. I know I've taken a lot of time.

Definitely talk. We want to talk to the developers. I think another point of doing this surgically is that we don't want the reductions going to the planning commission anymore. So we want to, so I would put in with, Triggs, can I do a substitute motion?

Yeah.

That we repeal the... Can you go back a thing, please, Kevin?

More. Keep going.

We just repeal 1437.050 and that we do not adopt these new... Well, there's subsections through there.

So maybe not the whole...

Yeah, we want to delete the reduction.

Yeah, I was going to say, clarifying just the same thing that Erin's asking. So the motion is not just not go forward with the proposed changes, but to actually proactively repeal the reduction program that is in code right now. There is no reduction.

Yes, those things can come to us and we can surgically look at it and do special programs for these ones that we're in question of and that we want to get developed.

good heavens i'm sorry i'm like pulling up the whole code to read it so i can see what it is that you're trying to change well that's only no there's dot dot dot we've done it just stop missing from that that's what you're yeah that's what i'm saying the part of the part of this that i'm i think i think that that makes sense the part of this that i i'd like to understand the council's view a little bit better on is the parking in the unused lots item

I want to read assess that one out. I think we need to. I'd love to do.

We need to figure that out.

Absolutely. But this is going to take some time.

I get what you're saying. So we like that idea, but we just not fully comfortable with the implementation.

I think it's the leasing thing and then not having a permanent thing that is what I'm gathering.

Because I could vote right now on the owning thing if they owned it to lots. Right, as long as it was deed restricted.

And maybe 15 years is enough. I don't know. So I think we're headed there. I think we're headed the right direction. So, well, I guess you had the subject motion earlier in the second.

And then can I just ask this? So if we do remove this and the sort of the current, what Brian said happens, how would, for example, the Park Plaza developer, if they want to come in and put something before the council, how would that process work?

So I'm going to say the final icon. Yeah, I'm trying to think through your options. Because again, this kind of decision, we've talked about this kind of decision. Well, let me back up. Now that Kevin's got this on the screen, I think I want to talk about this first. So this section governs reduction in off-street. This is what's already in code already. Nothing to do with what's proposed. And it allows the Planning Commission to do parking reductions if there's a transportation demand management program and a parking count study. And then there's a bunch of sections down below here that talk about what needs to be in that study and what the criteria for the planning commission granting one of those reductions are. The proposal that you saw doesn't show you any of that. It's the proposal to add a new section to that, creating an automatic reduction near the ITOD. So the motion is to do two things. It's to not just not vote on the TOD. It's to delete the entire program that exists right now for the Planning Commission. If you delete it entirely, then there is no administrative method for parking reductions at all. The administrative side just can't do parking reductions. They're just in code and they're flat numbers. So the methods for someone coming in and proposing to have a parking reduction would be somebody comes in with an ordinance text amendment proposing to somehow change the code so that But then that ordinance text amendment is going to apply to everybody else that's likely situated. So it's going to be broad brush. You could do parking overlay zones where you create certain overlays that have certain, now this is a long-term solution.

Could we take this concept and make it an overlay zone?

Yes. I mean, you probably don't even, I would think, my personal opinion is this concept is probably overblown for an overlay zone because this, this is delegation of authority from the council to the administration by giving them a whole bunch of criteria, right? Right. Application of an overlay zone doesn't need that many criteria because it's you deciding whether you're going to apply it or not. Right? So what you really end up doing is you say, What are the parking ratios that we would be willing to consider? And you create a different overlay for each ratio. And then people come in and ask for the overlay that you want. They want you to decide whether to do it or not. Again, I'm not advocating for that. I'm trying to say that's an option. I'm trying to brainstorm ideas. The other option would be through development agreements because you can under state code grant exceptions to code to zoning code through a development agreement. if the development agreement is reviewed by the planning commission before it comes to the council. We have not historically done that very often. In fact, I can only think of once, although we've got a couple coming up where we're going to be asked to.

We've been using that board lately, and they seem to be legally tighter and more enforceable.

That would fix the Park Plaza situation since that's going to be a zone change.

The downside to that particular methodology is development agreements end when the certificate of occupancy is issued. So they only govern how the property is constructed. They don't do anything after how it's managed afterwards, unless we put something into the development agreement that somehow creates a deed restriction or CC&Rs. I mean, it gets complicated, but those are... Those are the ideas that occur to me about how it...

So, Brian, and the current code has these TDM agreements. Do we know how many properties have TDM agreements? Because if we strip this whole thing, we lose the ability to enforce on violations of those.

Yeah, that's actually an interesting question. I would want to actually take some time and read through this again, because I think that you raise a valid concern that The, the idea of deleting it is so that new ones can't be entered into, but it might have an unintended consequence of undermining existing ones.

Subsection two F says that, you know, where one of these agreement exists, if the owner fails to abide by it, then it's, you know, you can get them on it and the, they no longer get to be part of the program and they don't have the reduction. And they have to meet the parking requirements that were otherwise required at the time their project was approved. So they would have to increase their parking. But we lose the ability to enforce that if we delete this entire cycle code.

So how about if we did this? We've got a lot more discussion. Here's the thing I think that we could all agree on. We want to figure something out. love the idea of maybe it's a pro zone approach and maybe we take a we take a specific session and say that's going to be our pro zone and we figure out a way to make that work in a way that we don't risk uh it's not high risk at all and it's very focused um let's work with some developers and see if we can get something done now i'm not sure that I'm not sure what the motion is there in terms of what we do with the current thing that's being proposed here.

Well, before I go on, let me just point out that I think Bill had a comment. I don't want to lose that.

Also, Travis says he has a comment.

I don't want to lose that before we finish. My counsel would be, even if you want to get rid of the current Planning Commission methodologies, I would still not act immediately. Give us some time to think about how we address the question that Rachel just raised. And so in that instance, I think probably the right solution, if your intent is we don't want to do this, but we want to do something, I think the motion is really simple. It's just a motion to table it indefinitely. And then you work on other solutions until something's ready to come back.

And I don't know if we can do that before tonight because we want to hear from the developer.

Exactly.

So there may be no motion necessary at this point in time.

I was just going to say that I wouldn't make that motion until after the evening. Yeah. Let me also. Oh, sorry. What were you going to say?

Just to answer the Opportunity Zone question, Cody Hill says those will be effective January 1st, 2027.

When do we find out?

That's a different question.

Let me also just interject that part of the making sure that it comes to the council is we need to learn about what works on this. I'm not suggesting that's a long term strategy, but it would be really helpful to actually be involved in. So if we do have that, how does it work? How do we enforce it?

Yeah. Travis, do you have something else you want to say?

no it doesn't say i do sorry now travis are you going to be on tonight yes okay awesome all right so

Okay.

Given that discussion, you just want to withdraw the motion and just- Yeah, I'll withdraw the motion because again, I think there's energy about let's find something, let's get it done. Let's do it in a way that we all feel comfortable with the risk involved with that.

Right. Well, we went way over.

Sorry. Sorry. Thank you.

That was Gary's fault. You didn't say one word.

It was Kennedy's.

okay an ordinance rezoning property at 5450 north canyon road from a15ch and osprey and a11cpd and zones in the north city neighborhood and jessica we can be let's just see we've seen this a lot yes so any questions for this one guys All right. Thanks, Jessica.

Nice work.

That's the best one. All right. Do you guys need a break?

No.

Okay. Let's just finish this one item. A discussion on picking up. Daniel, you've been very patient. Picking up required URS member contributions on behalf of Tier 2 public safety officers and firefighters. presented by Daniel Softly. And just for staff in the future, anytime it's a parking discussion, give more than 15 minutes. Always. We've seen this before too. Any questions on this one? Anything you want to tell us?

Just that the last time we did this was in 2024. The rates have gone up by 1.25%. The mayor has signed the document. It's included in the budget. And so what the state requires is just some sort of a formal statement from the governing bodies.

Oh, like a vote?