City Council - Regular Meeting

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to the May 19th, 2026 city council work session meeting. Um, our meetings are public and you're welcome to join us in person or by watching from the council agenda page, Zoom, uh, or YouTube. Um we hope that you will continue to join us in whichever manner you feel the most comfortable. Uh this is a work session meeting during which there is no public comment. Uh you can join us on May 19th during our 7 p.m. formal meeting to share your comments. Uh we of course welcome your feedback anytime by mail at PO Box 145476 Utah 84114. Um, you can also email us at council.commentsslc.gov. Uh, or uh you can also leave us a message at at our 24 uh phone uh a 24-hour phone comment line 8015357654. Comments we received on agenda topics are shared with council members and posted on our website slc.gov/counsel. gov/consel. Our first agenda item is item one, which is a fiscal year 2026 2027 budget council staff overview. And we're going to turn the time to Jennifer Bruno, our council executive director.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. I will just um share my screen. Here we go. Why is it not? There we go. Um, so this is just a a perspective from the legislative branch looking at the overview of the budget as it's been presented by the mayor. Obviously, um, Mary Beth and the finance team did a great job going over, um, how the budget is put together from a, you know, dollars and cents perspective, percentages, changes in different departments. This is a a little bit of a um higher level kind of conceptual overview of the budget. Um I don't know why it did that. Uh the role of the council. So this is one thing that we just to remind the council the reason why uh the council looks at the budget um in the depth that they do. Let's see why is it not okay having technical issues on myself. The reason why the council looks at the budget is is really to address what does the community need in real time. Every year that changes and um the reason why you all are elected is to um hear from your residents what are the needs? They change every year. What are what are the ways that those needs can be addressed? Usually it relates to money. And so that's um I think the main purpose of the budget. Um but the other kind of uh values that we hold um in terms of looking at the budget and the the role that the council has in the budget is how any decision you make this year might affect budgets in future years, right? Because um you can't necessarily bind councils, but I mean even this year we've gotten questions about how did we end up in this property tax increase

situation and you know how how did our decisions in the past bring us here. So that's something that will will be a theme throughout several of the department um budget discussions. Um that kind of also relates to that next bullet point of how any decisions you guys make this year might create unintended consequences both from a budget personnel um citizen experience perspective, right? Any decisions you guys make might have the ability to for example see less watering in parks or less mowing in parks, things like that. Um, so we want to be sure to just disclose all of the potential consequences that might come from any budget decisions you make. And then I'm really proud of how our city um, ensures a transparent um, process for the budget so that we are very open with the public about how we're using tax dollars. Um, uh, just as a reminder, our budget hub is link.slc.govfy20. gov/fy27 um for any budget information uh for anyone who's looking. Um and then you know of course all of that is rooted in the policy goals and priorities of the council. The policy goal of equity, the policy goal of transparency, um the policy goal of taking care of our um community, our assets, things like that. So that's another reason why um just some highle takeaways from the mayor's proposed budget. Um from the legislative perspective, this is the first substantial property tax increase in several years. Um and I think the mayor mentioned um in her speech that it wasn't a decision taken lightly um and uh that it it was uh arrived at with serious u evaluation. I think the next bullet point gets to what that

evaluation was was which is that it cuts almost an equivalent amount from the overall budget as the amount of the property tax increase. Um, one council member asked me how we would explain to citizens that they're paying more um and potentially getting less. And I guess um it was um this sort of a light bulb moment when I went to the grocery store recently and you know you are spending more and there is less in your grocery cart and it's just it that is the that that is the reality that we're living. Um I think that it's important for this council to know though that a lot of those cuts are um potentially one time in nature. I think that the administration challenged departments to come up with efficiencies and I they did an admira admirable job coming up with those efficiencies. It's always interesting to see how those efficiencies can last over time, right? And if those are efficiencies that can last into the future and especially as it relates to operations. um it does use less money, less sorry, less one-time money than in previous years, which um you know, Mary Beth and I talk about have talked about for 20 years now. So, I think it's one of those goals that we're always trying to achieve is aligning one-time money with one-time expenses and ongoing money with ongoing expenses. Um, something that you'll probably hear about from residents who might be employees of the city is that there's no across the board cost of living increase for employees. And um, this is the first year in a long time that that will be the case for city employees. And so because those employees are also experiencing inflation, that's, you know, something that's uh, difficult. But I think if you ask any city employee, they're grateful for a job and not to be laid off. So um, there is an increased investment in

affordable housing. uh but it is in different formats. So last year the investment in affordable housing was about $8 million. This year it's about $10 million. That said, funding our future uh the transfer the typical transfer for funding our future that goes to the RDA for the NOA is being paused for one year. I think there was a recognition that the westside community initiative, so the money that the city gets from the tax increment from the inland port has grown pretty significantly since previous years. And so it enables the RDA to continue investment in affordable housing without that NOA or sorry without the funding our future dollars. Um but I think I'm just flagging that as a a thing to consider in the long term. those funding our future dollars for affordable housing are really flexible. Um whereas the westside community initiative dollars are um by our own policy um guided to be west of I-15. Um that said that there there's still significant investments in affordable housing from RDA programs and project areas. So there will still continue to be sorry CRA I'll remember that at some point. Um there will continue to be um investments in affordable housing in the different CRA project areas. Um and you'll hear more about the CRA budget on Tuesday. So we'll get into that more. Um it does also add 40 FTEES in critical service areas. So I think we talk about like how to balance the budget while recognizing that it's not that the needs have decreased in our city. So the efficiencies that departments have realized um have enabled the and and then the proposed property tax uh increase have enabled um the budget to add FTEES in critical service areas. And I left um the fire department off here, but fire justice court legal system CIP are kind of the main highlights. And

I'll there's a chart in a little bit later that I'll go through that. Um, this is something we talk about a lot in that each kind of decision you guys make, each um, big topic in the budget has balancing tests, right? It's not that there's a right answer or a wrong answer. It just means that you're balancing different outcomes of decisions. So, um I I'm not going to read all of these, but as an example, the property tax increase, it does add to the burden on residents and businesses in the city, but on the flip side, it also helps reduce the structural deficit in the future because it it aligns ongoing money with ongoing needs. Um it also reduces the city's reliance on sales tax, which is a volatile source of revenue. Um that is something that I think a lot of cities rely heavily on. Um, we've seen our city grow in our reliance on sales tax and that's something that I think the budget nerds of the city have appreciated to, you know, as uh as a good thing, meaning we have a robust sales tax revenue source, but it is a volatile source of revenue and if the economy turns and our budget is balanced on sales tax, that is a difficult thing to adjust. Whereas property tax is a reliable source of revenue. So, um I'll just leave the rest of those um for you guys to read at another time. Um this is the general fund revenue trends. The only reason I'm sharing this is that and the reason that there's a red that it went down in this proposed budget. The main reason is because, and I think Mary Beth talked about this on Tuesday, the um finance department is proposing to separate the CRA property tax revenue and the library property tax revenue into an entirely different account from the general fund.

So, I just wanted to flag that because we do these like longitudinal, you know, charts of what's happening with revenues and whenever you make like a policy shift, I think it's important to kind of call that out. Um, we've gone through this, I think, at the retreat. The only things that you guys can control that the city can control are property taxes, use of fund balance, and then other revenue, which is essentially fees. You cannot control sales tax. Um, you you can if the state lets you, if the state authorizes you guys to enact sales tax, you can. Um, this uh I think we've also been through. This is just kind of showing um the property tax distribution um for a typical kind of Salt Lake City household. Just to highlight that Salt Lake City's portion of the property tax bill is about 25%. Um I've also separated out some of the bonds that are um being discussed in both the city, the county, and the school district. Um, I think especially the school district in Salt Lake City, voters approving the school district's bond this last I can't remember if it was last calendar year or the year before. Um, but it's a very very very significant bond. And so that will be something that I think it will be important for taxpayers to look for and know about um in future years. What most people don't realize is that the bill for bonds does not show up until the entity, whether it's the school district or the county or whoever, actually issues the bond. And so that could be 2 years after you vote. That could be 5 years after you vote. There's a 10-year um time frame for tax exempt bonds to issue those bonds, but um I think that's important for people to know. Um so truth in taxation. So, this has come up uh a lot in the last um couple of

weeks. Do your property taxes go up when the value of your home goes up? This is not supposed to be like a pop quiz, but

no, you guys passed. Good job. So, um Utah is unique. It has a truth and taxation process that the core value of that truth and taxation process is to hold the government's budget the same. So if you consider that baseline property tax budget that green line as what the state wants us to operate with. So if your the value of your home goes up the rate of property taxes that 0.0000 0000 whatever figure automatically goes down. And that automatic thing happens at the state tax commission level because we tell the state tax commission what is the dollar amount that we need that green line to be. Do we need that dollar amount to be $50 million? Do we need it to be $80 million? What we're assume what they're assuming is that we have the same dollar amount yeartoear. So if your value goes up, the rate goes down. In theory, you're paying the same amount of money. Likewise, if your value goes down, and this actually happened in 2009 when property values really tanked um in the area, the rate actually floats up to hold the government harmless to values going down. So, um you could think about this in a case like Detroit, right? That might have been helpful for their government to have that system. They don't have that system there. So um there are there are pros and cons to the truth and taxation system but this is the system we have in Utah. The only exception is new growth which is you know like you have a blank piece of property and then next year you have an apartment building on that blank piece of property and so now that property is considered new growth and the city is allowed to collect more money because of that property. Um or if you say like we're saying this year that green line, that baseline property tax budget is not

enough to pay for our bills. We need to increase that green line by $13 million. And so we're going to ask residents what they think about that and go through a tooth and taxation process and we're going to raise that money. Um this is just a kind of hypothetical of what happens with new growth. So um again that baseline property tax budget is where we operate on a normal basis. If new development occurs in the city that raises our new baseline essentially. So um hypothetically so for example in this budget the um uh mayor's finance team projects that we'll get approximately $2.5 million from new growth this year. Um they actually they do a great job kind of projecting that based on building permits and certificates of occupancy which are kind of which are really good indicators of is this thing an actual new thing or is this just you know a building that was remodeled. Um it doesn't always pan out and we don't find out the actual new growth figure until uh June 12th now um by state law. So then we can collect um additional money from that new development. This is um intended to just be uh an overview of what your tax notice will look like in July. This is what most residents will get in July. I've blocked out I just picked a random resident. I've blocked them out to protect the innocent. Um but I just wanted to highlight in that gold um kind of bar on the left there. Those are the only lines related to Salt Lake City. Um it's really important and um our communications group is working on ways to make it more accessible for to educate folks how to read through their property tax statement because that tells you which government should I call if I have concerns about the total bill that's at the bottom of that number. The

other thing I wanted to highlight here that I think is not always um uh obvious is in Utah um when you have a primary residence you receive a 45% value reduction. So for example, this home is assessed at in 2024, so this was from 2024 is assessed at 787,500, but the taxes are assessed on 433,125. So it's a benefit to homeowners in Utah and um which is great for homeowners. It does cause it does cause the uh situation where when governments decide to increase taxes whether it's the city or the county or whoever um it it's kind of a disproport disproportionate version or u burden on commercial properties. Commercial properties do not receive that same exemption and so they are taxed at the full value of their property. Next, this is um the these are the amounts that are in the proposal for the fiscal year 2027 property tax increase. Um the state law was changed this last year to require a property tax impact statement, which I think is helpful from a transparency perspective, frankly, to let residents see exactly what their additional money is paying for. So you can see 1.7 million of the property tax increase is going to fire. 98,000 is going to public lands, 432,000 to justice court, 172,000 to the attorney's office, 800,000 to CAN. Um it might be helpful here to say youth and family programming. Um the city has recognized that federal grants for youth and family programming have been eliminated or reduced and um this is the city stepping into that

space to make sure those programs don't end. The uh almost half of the property tax increase is going to CIP. The next slide will talk about exactly which projects in CIP are proposed to be funded with the property tax increase. And then several items that you can see in non-departmental. Um you can see that uh 961,000 is related to legal defenders. So I think we talked about that on Tuesday in the justice court briefing that you know the justice court is kind of a holistic system that requires if you're going to in if you are increasing in one area you need like judges for example you also need to increase in prosecutors and legal defenders because it's a a whole system. So that adds up to the total $13 million increase. These are the um proposed CIP projects that will be funded with the property tax increase. Um I think I mean from from my takeaway it seems that most of these items fit in the category of maintaining or fixing what we already have. I think maybe the one exception is the vision zero safety improvements citywide which I know has been a a huge um goal of the councils. This also notes that if for some of these items, the property tax increase isn't the only funding source for some of those items. Some of those items are combined with the general fund or um county funds or class C funds in order to make that total higher. So, for example, street reconstruction, total investment in street reconstruction for the fiscal year 27 budget is 8.3 million of which the property tax is paying 627. Um, this is a chart just kind of showing where the FTEES are changing. Um, and again, I don't want to read through all of this text. Sorry for all the text on the slides, but this is to show uh the in red is where um departments are proposing to eliminate FTEES and in blue

um is showing where some FTEES are contingent upon the property tax proposal. Um there are also several additional FTEES that are being proposed that are not part of the property tax proposal. You guys are fully um empowered to decide which FTEES are funded with the property taxes and which FTEES should just be in the base budget. So this is what is proposed but it doesn't mean that you guys have to stick with it. Um so some other consideration for residents as they think about um bills both property taxes and other bills is the decisions of other governmental entities right like school district's decision for on raises county's decision on properties to buy things like that um and especially bonds I've noticed that um especially school districts are relying very heavily on bonds um and there are usually several years that separate when voters go to the polls, decide that they want new buildings for their kids, and then when the bill actually comes due, there's usually several years separating that. So, just as a good reminder of that, um again, the geo geo bond thing. And then, um utility fee increases um city and Rocky Mountain Power and um the administration has put together a handy, um calculator for people to figure out their rates. That's another thing that our communication staff has been working on with um the administration's communication staff about how to make sure um that's all um transparently communicated to residents. And then this this slide was actually left over from the retreat, but I decided to keep it in because I just can't help myself. This is diverted revenue. So, I think that our city um is in a unique position because we're the capital city. We get a lot of attention and we have a lot of

very important projects that want to locate here, which is great. I think the flip side of that coin is that sometimes those projects, the funding for those projects can come with diversion of revenue that would otherwise come to the general fund. And so I think we have to keep that in mind as we talk about property tax increases and talk about how to balance the budget is that the reason we're sometimes in this especially tight situation is because several million dollars of ours has already been spoken for or has already been diverted. So that's that. Sorry for all the talking. Um do you guys have any questions? And I see we have council member Wharton that's joined us on online as well. So we have council member Wharton and Petro online.

Council member Dugan. Thanks Jennifer. I appreciate that very much. And back to the truth and taxation. So that those rules apply to all the line items in your property tax. Yes. Bill. So there's 12 line items I think we have in our bill. So each line item has that same requirement of the baseline new growth increases it but otherwise it has to be the same there. And so when residents see a property tax increase it could be from the county the school board mosquito abatement metro water natural water central Utah water project

others. Yes. So uh but ours Salt Lake City is those three there that you highlighted in the middle.

Yes. I think the maybe the one asterisk I would say is on each entity the bond line item is the one exception where an entity does not need to go through truth and taxation to increase the amount. What we and what we have to do is send the tax commission our exact bill for all of the bonds we have to pay. Um and then the tax commission allows us to set that rate on the bill to pay those uh geo bonds. Not our sales tax bonds. Our sales tax bonds are built into our general fund, but our geo bonds. Um, so for example, uh, the second trunch of the parks bond will likely, um, and maybe Mary Beth can correct me here. Will it appear on this calendar year's tax notices or next calendar year? It'll be this calendar year. Okay. So, that's something that Salt Lake City residents will see is the second trunch of the parks bond, which they approved um, you know, several years ago voting for. So,

and one more question on the uh uh pay raise side of the house. That's for the un uh non-represented. Non-represented. Sorry. Thank you for that. employees. Yeah. And that is I don't know what the percentage of employees that is, but it's non-representative. It's not police. It's not the fire. It's not uh ask me. Yes. It's a non-representative employees on that side.

That is accurate. And I I probably should have clarified, there is a line item in each department that uh department directors can work within a line item, a certain amount of money. Um and it's based on how many employees are in each department to give um market adjustments or pay increases to specific employees on a case- by case basis. So it's not necessarily like to hold employees stagnant in their careers. It's just um recognizing the tight budget, right? It was it was to bring those who are below well below the market rate up to closer to or at least to the market rate. Yes. Correct. Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions online? No, you don't see any hands up. Oh, looks like council member Wharton has a question.

Thank you. Um thanks Jen for that overview and um explaining the um truth in taxation. Um can you talk a little bit about um how given the um 13.5 million um what would um so a lot of residents have said just you know cut cut make cuts um cut back um you know cut cut back on the extras is what I've heard a lot of um can Can you talk about how um just what that would would look like in a situation like this when we're where we have something um as high as 13.5 million.

Yeah, I think and I would welcome um you know if Mary Beth or if anyone from the mayor's team wanted to speak more to it. I think what I observe is that there w there is a lot of cutting back in this budget. Um and in fact it's just about the same amount as the property tax increase. So each department um was asked to find 5% of their uh department budget in cuts. Um not all of it ended up you know it was evaluated obviously with the needs of the city. And so, um, it doesn't necessarily mean that each department was cut by 5%, but you'll see, um, in the, uh, key changes that each department has, um, has made pretty significant cuts. I think I flagged um for you guys in the beginning of this though, one concern um I could see is how sustainable are those cuts and are we going to find that um what a department thought that they could do without or push off for a couple years is really needed. Um I I I observed that in the aftermath of the 2009 budget crunch where there were a lot of cuts made out of necessity. Um and then we realized that a lot of those cuts were really to essential functions of the city. Um so yes, so we there are a lot of cuts in that and I think we can focus on that as each department comes to brief you guys. I think that would be helpful.

Yeah. I mean one that comes to my mind that was impacted you know even when I came on to the council and we did funding our future in 2018. Um and that was that we, you know, uh before the recession, we had two road crews, um that that just worked around the clock, um all, you know, repairing and um one of them was cut. Um and we didn't bring that back until after the road study. Um and um as part of funding our future and um found that be you know the re by cutting that and having it gone for essentially 10 years um this date the overall quality of our roads was going down every year and we were it was kind of compounding instead of us um e keeping up with the problem or reducing the problem. like the roads were crumbling faster than we could repair them because we only had one crew. Um, are there other examples that uh you can think of that you um you said that you had some thoughts come to mind from back then? Um I think that the other um area that was cut pretty significantly in ' 09 was seasonal and maintenance dollars from public lands which at that point was um in I can't remember the name of the department now. It was in a big it was in a different department. It wasn't its own department but it was cut

public services I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think um it took several you know years maybe a decade for us to kind of bring that back and I think that um to some extent I think what we hear from residents to some extent is still maybe lingering effects of that. Um I don't see that level of cut coming in this budget. I think the benefit of having this budget, the cuts in this budget being part of the mayor's deliberative process and not be if um those of you who are around in09 remember we had to make a lot of those cuts in the middle of the fiscal year. So it was kind of mi midstream cuts. So the options are a lot more limited when you're cutting in the middle of a budget year than when you're looking forward into the next budget year and can be a little bit more strategic. And so um just my general observation for this budget is that those cuts are a little bit they're a little bit more strategic. I think it doesn't necessarily completely erase the the need to be vigilant about when we realize that cuts are not sustainable. So,

thank you.

Um, thank you, Jen. Always love hearing you talk about the budget and how animated you get and how clear you explain it to to all of us and to folks joining us online. So, I want to follow up on what you were talking about in regards to some of the cost savings found this year, particularly um want to zero in on vacancies. Um, I understand, you know, we are saving money this year by holding a position vacant and we've seen a number of vacancies across departments. What happens next year or the following fiscal year 28? Um, and how does the city plan for or anticipate that, decide to never fill the position, close it down versus say, "Hey, we realize we actually are having some real service impacts by not having these um these positions filled." So that's my first question about vacancies and I have a couple others.

Great. I think I mean that's a great question. Um and we I I want to say most budget years there are vacancy savings in several of the larger departments especially um just based on turnover and retention. And I think it's actually kind of a responsible way to do budgeting. Meaning it doesn't leave money on the table that you know is not going to be needed, right? Like you know at a certain point there's going to be enough turnover where you're going to have a month or two of a position of salary savings. Um I think and I'll you know look to Mary Beth if you want to add anything but I think what they'll probably need to do what each department will need to do is for fiscal year 28 evaluate if one if the vacancy savings is sustainable. So if the let's hold on for this tight year is something that is a longer term thing. I know that's what we'll be doing in our department is evaluating if these vacant positions are truly not needed. Um, and I think that that's where you're seeing some of the reduction in FTEES that some departments have decided to make, which is them kind of forecasting. It's not just about vacancy savings. It's about where did they actually need positions. So, but that's a uh that is definitely top of mind for um concerns for the fiscical year 28 budget.

Thank you. Um, and as you can see, I'm thinking about this budget about decisions made in the past that bring us to this present moment and recognizing that decisions we make this year affect future years. And so, I'm really taking kind of that whole timeline perspective. Um, we've got, you know, we've got a reliance that we've had to use on on our fund balance and that's happened in previous years and we're using it again this year. Next year may not be an option for us. So, I'm curious as we both find these efficiencies, but there's also a property tax increase, how can I understand what's going to happen with our structural deficit in the next year or two?

I think that um that's where I think we will lean heavily on um the finance department to look into some of the revenue tools that um we talked about a little bit on Tuesday. the um transportation utility fee and the venue event tax um parking taxes. Um I think there are still some revenue streams that um that we can look at. I also think that just to be perfectly candid, I think that some of these vacancy savings will probably cause departments to reevaluate, you know, how services are deployed. um which may cause entire shifts. So that what would have been a structural deficit because maybe you have you know 10 positions to do a job that maybe only takes three is not a structural deficit because the department has decided we can do this job with three positions instead of 10. Um I think that to a certain extent there's a structural deficit every year, right? because you have health insurance costs, uh, inflation with contractual agreements that departments have with people. Um, to some extent the pension system, Utah retirement systems tells us every year it's sort of like a surprise. Here's your here's your bill. Um, this year it was better. Uh, but in other years it hasn't been. So, um, to some extent there's not a there's there's no way to completely avoid a structural deficit. Um, but it's just about how do you uh how do you manage the size of it? So,

okay, Victoria, Victoria, it's your turn.

Thank you. Um, and yeah, Jen, thanks. This is really helpful to have a succinct kind of centralized review like this. Um, I know that some of the things that we need to do carry some political challenges. um fees. I know that, you know, uh developers who go to municipalities that are newer than us pay more in certain fees there than they do here just because we haven't adjusted our rates or been without the political pressure to adjust them uh since like the '9s literally. And so if you incorporated after like 1992 and you have a higher rate than us and so we're developing a modern city on an antiquated rate scale. Can you maybe help un with understanding this probably isn't a right now thing but maybe like a um a future-looking information. I'd love to know what some of the barriers are on some of those future revenue things just to prepare. I'm happy to get into whatever political trench I need to to make sure that the city is in solid financial shape and that we're not going back to our um our residents, especially those who are on um restricted incomes to ask for more property tax increase. But I'd love to know just to prepare myself psychologically, mentally, politically, socially, you know, for the for those because it it seems really important that we don't just keep relying on property owners for our revenue increases.

That's a that's a really great point and I think um the fees that come to mind that um we maybe are not recouping as much as we could are impact fees. Um, I know that the administration is working on updating the impact fee study to come up with a, you know, more uh, updated true cost of those impact fees. Um, public utilities as well charges impact fees and they haven't um, updated in several years. And so I think the goal was to bring all of the city's impact fees back to the council for approval. I can say the last time that the impact fees were reviewed, there was a substantial um uh political conversation about the balance of well, we we can't just give these people a bill, you know, based on I mean, we do a study to say it costs, you know, X dollars, let's say $2,000. cost $2,000 per unit that's built in order to fund the needs that are going to happen as a result of that additional unit. Um there's a calculation that happens after the sort of objective calculation which is does that mean that we're stalling development in our city? And if we charge $2,000, are we going to kill development in our city? And sometimes the answer is no. Or sometimes the answer is we might kill development. And so instead of charging 2,000, the council could decide to say we're going to charge 1,500. Um, and so that was that was kind of the conversation the last time the impact fee study um was brought to the council. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar calculation. Now, there's a lot of competition with even neighboring cities, right, to say, do we want housing built in our city or in neighboring city where maybe impact fees are cheaper. Um, so there's that. The other um I think tricky one to be perfectly honest in our city is going to be the transportation utility fee

because um two of our major nonprofit um partners in the city, the university and the LDS church will probably see a pretty significant change in how they're interacting with the city in terms of dollars. And so that's probably a conversation that will have to happen on a political level as well in order to um realize that money. But I think that will be happening over the next year. So that's a in a couple months problem.

Okay. Thank you for the questions everyone. Um thank you so much Jennifer for for the overview uh and and uh for helping us understand this these budgets uh for this year and how we're going to approach the discussion. Um, moving on to uh item number two, which is fiscal year 2026 2027 budget discussion for the police department. We're going to welcome at the table Michael Sanders, council policy analyst, chief Brian Reid, SLC police chief, uh, and Shelley Dietrich, uh, financial manager.

Great. Thank you, chair. Um, so the FY27 Police Department budget is proposed to be approximately $142 million, which is an increase of a little over $7 million or 5.24% from last year. This budget continues funding for 13 FTEEs, which would be funded by the Utah Inland Port Authority proposed under budget amendment number five, which is actually currently under consideration. Additionally, it proposes adding four other FTEEs with this budget proposal. None of the proposals from the police department budget will rely on the property tax increase, which we discussed. Um, assuming all FTEEs are approved, the police department would have staff of 797 positions, 63 623 would be sworn officers, and there'd be 154 civilian staff. Notable items from the budget include funding for the real time crime center and drone as a first responder programs

and additionally and additionally the social worker program and mental health responders have been moved from the non-EP department the non-EP departmental budget and into the police department based budget. With that, I'll yield the floor to Chief Red.

Let me give that. Sorry. First of all, I want to thank uh Michael for all of his support and help uh through this process. So, thank you. I want to thank the council executive director Bruno and not just for this, but just I've called her quite often and then Mayor Menhal for the the support in this budget as well. Um I we I just want to start off by saying that our our police department feels very supported by the council over this past year and uh we have some indicators that are showing our morale is is is up in the in the police department and we want to keep that momentum going. Uh we really emphasize being a learning organization. So when mistakes are made, we sit down as a team. We don't point fingers. We learn and we improve. And so that's a posture that we want to take in the police department. And and the value in that is that uh people are making decisions and learning and and we're becoming a stronger organization. Um uh next slide. Uh next slide. Uh just a couple accomplishments that I want to highlight. This year uh you we we started a or we put together a new mission vision values. This is was an exercise that we did with our police officers and professional staff. Uh this this exercise and our new mission, vision, values has really aligned our organization and kind of put us all on the same page. And as I mentioned, being able to push decision-m down to lower levels because we're all aligned has been very valuable. We are currently fully staffed. Now, all of those officers are not going to be deployed until uh November, December time frame, but we are currently fully staffed and excited about that. and we're starting to see the impacts of those those officers as they come out onto the to the street and and uh if I go to the next accomplishment uh we we we saw an overall decrease in crime last calendar year to date this year we're down it's

actually 21% I checked with our data people today year to date compared to the same time period last year uh this includes violent crime going down um so we're we're having some some great successes there our officers are out working very hard. Uh I will also in and I don't have it in here, but our call response times are are are also dropping over the past year and we're seeing improvements there as well. So ju generally the the goal of this of this budget and these budget requests are to help us continue to bring crime down um improve call response times um which will then allow us over time to reinvest our officers time into community engagement, traffic safety, which is a problem in the city. we're having too many uh fatalities around traffic safety and then also investing more in our youth to get in on the front end so we have less issues uh down the road with these these youth. Uh next slide. When we talk about efficiencies, we're still kind of in the process of writing our strategic plan and and getting some key metrics in place so we can see efficiencies uh improving. Uh one of the big ones is we're working on 12-hour shifts. Uh we think that's going to improve staffing ac across the city and put officers in out on the streets in the time at the times we need them the most. Uh we're working closely with the union and the city on this uh to make sure we we're we're thoughtful in in some of these u changes around shift shift shift allocation. Um we're also working on a number of efficiencies. Uh we'll talk about overtime later, but we have brought overtime costs down this past fiscal year and we anticipate and our requests will reflect a a continued decrease in overtime as we get more fully staffed and become more efficient. Um and then we're we're going to talk a lot about in our budget today the our real-time crime center and expanding our drone first responder program. This is an alternate response and we're finding

that we don't have to send officers to a number of calls when we send the drones. Uh or we give officers better information and improved response. Uh maybe a case where we don't have to send an officer at all, but it may be a social worker. And so we're finding some efficiencies there. Uh which is great. And then the last thing that I'll mention is we've worked really hard with our partners uh across the social services and criminal justice system. And for instance, in the real time crime center, we're we're partnering with the University of Utah and the Utah Transit Authority. They're providing resources so that we don't have to come to you and ask for that. Uh we're working closely with DPS and DNR uh Department of Natural Resources on the Jordan River and they're putting a lot of resources into our city and helping out there. And then uh of course you mentioned the Inland Port Authority who's putting a significant investment into our police department all saving the Salt Lake City taxpayer. Next slide. Uh Michael mentioned our overall budget. You can see a breakdown and you can see the mayor's recommended budget request of of 7 million with the 17 FTEES. 13 of those being the Inland Port. If you want to go to the next slide and you can see most of our budget is made up of personnel. Um, so, uh, we're really really excited that the Inland Port Authority invested, uh, into the police department and we'll have 12 additional officers and an evidence technician which will help us in the northwest quadrant with some of the challenges that we're having out there and in our on the west side of Salt Lake City. So, we're we're excited for that. I wanted to just to briefly mention fleet. Uh, last year the council, the mayor's office supported a number of an in a pretty good investment into our fleet. We still have a long way to go with our fleet and we in certain cases we have several cars that are past service life that need to be re re uh replaced and in certain cases we're actually investing more in maintenance and repairs than the car is worth. So

we're just asking for continued support and investing in our mainten with uh the situation that we're in. It is a public safety risk, but also it's a recruiting retention tool. I mean, when officers do care about the cars that they're driving and so uh that's their office and and so when we we compete for the best officers in the state, our officers are constantly looking at salary, equipment, training, development opportunities, support from elected officials. So, it's important. Next slide. Uh these are the key changes in the budget which is in the budget book. We'll go over these one uh one at a time and feel free to ask questions along the way. Uh we if you want to go to the next slide, we can just get right into it. The school district approached us last year and requested two additional uh school resource officers for the district. Uh this is uh that request. Uh the the thing to note here is half of the funding will come from the school district. So even though it shows this amount, half of that will be in reimbursed back to the police department for those two FTEEs. We're working with the school district on ensuring that our school resource officers and they're doing an amazing job by the way, but they're investing in individuals, particularly kids who are at risk. And so, a lot of what we're doing, we're kind of retooling how we use our school resource officers, working closely with the district, and we're we're seeing some amazing outcomes. And you'll see here in the coming weeks an amazing story from one one of our school resource officers and how they invested in some youth, and we're excited for that to come out soon. Any questions on that one or should we just keep going and you'll interrupt if

chief? Oh yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Uh so so I on the school resource officer's request from the school district. My understanding was that they we split them with the school district. We split the cost with them. So is this the half the cost of for two? This is the full cost. Half of that will be reimbursed back to our budget mention at the end that we just have to get approval from you to get the to get the full amount and then it'll it will be reimbured. So that will be cut in half. Okay. And what happens? So in the budget with this you know $25,000 is that going goes back to to the general fund or it stays within the personnel

revenue the general fund. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Do you have Yeah. cuz we're doing

and chief I wasn't quite sure would was the uh because we had the the SRO discussion at the state level and then we had at the schoolboard level. Uh was this a state mandate that we increase the SRO or this just come from the school districts or was it like a highly recommended from the state level or do you remember? So, so the this the the the legislature passed a bill that requires schools uh to to have a guardian, private security or a school resource officer. So, the schools can determine how that breakdown is. So, I think part of this is affected by that. Um it's the school district's request and they and they they they in in talking to uh the superintendent, they prefer school resource officers to private security or guardians. So

yeah, that that decision I'm totally supportive. I just My question really was more is like it was a a these are the three ways you can do this but we're not going to give you any funding either for it. It was mandated but not funded. I shouldn't say if it was mandated that's right. Yeah. I think I I think that the requirement was put in place and I don't know what type of funding was provided but they didn't provide any funding for that. I I I would think I think school districts would say not enough but okay. I don't know for sure what funding was provided to school districts. Okay, thank you. Okay, sorry. Next slide.

Uh the next the next request is one FTE for a drone pilot. This is an officer position. Uh you know, we're going to talk more about the the drone our our real-time crime center as we go through this presentation today. Um, I think the main point that I would just make on this drone pilot, um, we're doing everything we can to find internal resources. So, we've we've reallocated internally to add positions to our real-time crime center. As I mentioned, the University of Utah and UTA are committing some resources. Uh, but this will be a drone pilot that will help us uh get get off of the ground. um these drones are arriving at to calls in 1 to two minutes where officers are taking depending on the call anywhere from six and a half up to 15 minutes. And so a lot of cases are being cleared by these drones. So we just think this alternate response is a is a real investment in in getting call response times down, getting better information to our officers. Um I would also add that that we we deploy for the fire department. So that's another efficiency that we're finding that that we we deploy on fire calls uh fires in the hills or in in buildings and and to give them that overview. So um this that's what this request is. Uh next slide. This next uh request is related to our real-time crime center. This individual will be an analyst uh who will uh work within the real-time crime center. One of the main focuses of this an analyst will be threat management. Uh you know in this day and age there's a lot of threats coming in to the police department. We have to assess those threats. We have to research and do do background work on those. This uh this analyst will do all of that provide for event research. Uh you know we have a lot of events in the community and so that this analyst will pro will support all of those efforts. Next slide. Uh coming back to the overtime just to give

some background. So we're projecting overtime costs for FY27 at $6.5 million. This would represent almost a 10% decrease from FY26. And if you go back to FY25, we were at 8.2 million. So this fiscal year, we've been able to reduce overtime by almost 13% and we're projecting to get that down another 10%. Uh so this request of 1.7 million represents that 10% decrease. Uh we will always have overtime in the department. We're requesting this one time because we want to see what we're going to be able to do this year with alternate response with becoming more fully staffed and we think maybe hopefully we can even get it down more. But we're requesting one time just to make sure we have the overtime as we get our officers trained and and put out into the field.

Go ahead. kind of like along the lines of the uh overtime side of the house. You know, we get a lot of we you get a lot of uh requests and and uh from the University of Utah for all the events that they have at the at the stadium and other places and are is it a uh are we being fully paid for all our services that we provide the at the university level? And is that a separate contract or how does that work? because it seems like we we have to deploy a lot of officers for a lot of those things and it and it's got to be mostly overtime because it's uh yes,

they're not uh so all of the University of Utah sporting events are reimbursed by the University of Utah. Uh Greek Row, they reimburse for our officers to work overtime shifts on Greek Row as I mentioned with the Realtime Crime Center. They're they're putting uh personnel and and and helping us invest in in that as well. And then uh our public order unit, they're they're going to be putting officers on our public order unit. So I I feel like we have a really strong partnership with the University of Utah and and I'm I'm sure if there's any concerns, we could go to them and and but I I feel like it's a pretty fair relationship that we have going. Most most of the overtime is reimbured.

Council Petro, thank you. When we say overtime, is this the overtime that covers the basic functionality of the city? Are officers still will have the opportunity to do overtime um when community entities are asking and paying for that? Is that accurate or are we discontinuing that as well? Oh boy. Could you I'm sorry, council member, can you maybe just ask that question one more time? It's a little hard to understand. Oh,

you sorry. Um, so the when you say overtime and what we're paying for here, that's the overtime that covers functionality within the city. That is when we've been understaffed, people taking extra shifts to make sure that the city doesn't lag behind. But the overtime where entities in the community pay for our officers to do either special events or some ongoing security, those sorts of things, that sort of overtime still stays. Is that correct?

Yeah. So, we have like the Delta Center who reimburses us, City Creek who reimburses us. So, we have a lot of contractual overtime that's reimbursed. I think this amount, and Shelley can correct me if I'm wrong, represents the overtime that we expend for mitigation shifts, for overtime for demonstrations for instance. Those are very expensive for us. Um, and just regular overtime for callouts for our investigations division, our our special operations division for just normal operations. It does include special events, but those are reimbursed as part of the special event process.

Thank you so much for the clarification. Thank you. Other questions on this request? Okay, we'll go to the next slide. Okay, so this is actually a reduction, a onetime reduction. We're currently holding open eight vacancies. These are these are these vacancies are within our professional staff, our civilian staff, which goes across basically all of those divisions. Um, I just want to say our personal our professional staff do an amazing job in the department sometimes in the background. We don't we don't see their work as much, but our police department could not operate without them. So, this is quite a sacrifice on on our professional staff to to hold these vacancies open, but we're committed to doing that. And and as as you mentioned earlier, executive director Bruno will evaluate through the year to see what we can do on the on the long term here. Um, but it is it is definitely a sacrifice for our professional staff to do this. We appreciate them and and the positions may vary through the year, but we'll we're committed to holding open funding for at least that amount. And if we can do more, you know, we would do more. We'll have to evaluate as the year goes on. Next slide. Uh this next request is uh nearly $400,000 uh for our real-time crime center technology. This is uh for cameras, drones, uh our LPRs, replacements. Um what we're trying to accomplish here is to get kind of on a 5-year rotation. So some of this the funding will will go to new tech, new cameras. You know, we pull trailer cameras and we get requests constantly to put put a trailer camera here or a trailer camera there or a pole camera in the city. So, this is allowing us to increase the number of cameras um but also replace equipment as it ages. So, that's what this request is.

Yeah. Councilman Eric Carson, do you have a sense of the breakdown of what is a replacement of existing equipment versus purchasing of new equipment on a percentage basis? Um, I do have a slide or a slide here. Yeah, here it is. Thank you. I had it on text, but here it is. Um, here we're requesting about 15. Let's see. 15. I'm just going to look at a percentage basis and we can get this this detail to you. I would say it's about it's a little it's probably a 5050 or 6040 split between new and replacement. 60% new, 40% replacement.

Um I mean without doing the math on the spot here, I can get you the the specific, but but I I think it's it's a little of both. We're trying to kind of hit hit it in the middle there. Thank you. But I can get you specific details. We can work on that. Council member Dugan. Yeah. We had this discussion before on the grant funding and stuff like that, the contracts we have with the the cameras and the other uh surveillance stuff and do we have contracts with the the Flock group? We have no contracts with Flock. Okay. Just appreciate that. I I think we've already discussed it before, but I that came up again. So, thank you very much.

And oh, I want to do back on the replacement. So, this is these replacements. We're going to we're always going to be replacing new ones and old ones. Is it is it like a cycle right now the city has cycles on the computers it's whatever it is three years or something like that is that the same thing where they have about a lifetime of three years two years something of that nature I mean techn is changing fast but you know I think on average we're thinking about a about a 5year rotation um give or take you know give or take give or take and

and again um we know it's a tough budget year like if if this has to be one time you know that's we understand whatever we can do to to be a team player you know we'll do that But yeah, we're trying to get on an on we want the ongoing funding so we can just have a replacement. Uh we'll grow it some, but we'll mostly it's for replacement.

Uh Chief, the in the past I I learned uh about moving these cameras, the trailer cameras and installing the pole cameras was challenging. Um so are we trying to find a way what is the system that we have right now to move them faster or install them faster and uh because we may have even more um so that's even you know more complication.

Yeah. Right now we have officers that are doing that and one of the things that we're looking at is is is that the best model or should we use our civilian response team and that's kind of I think what we're looking at to so we use you know our officer resources more effectively and so I think we're trying to look at a model of of moving toward a maybe a civilian uh based you know team that could do something like that and we may have internal resources just to kind of work on that. Okay. Uh and a follow-up question regarding this item. Um and are there uh license plate readers in within this budget line item too? There are. There are. Okay.

Yeah. And and and and many of them are for replacement. We can also work with you on what what you're comfortable with. But yeah, there's there are license plate reader uh in in there.

Yeah. Any other questions? I I see Chris Chris Wharton. Um, hi Chief. Thank you for the presentation and thank you for talking about um the um work that we do with the University of Utah um police department for Greek Greek row. I think um I put in a request to to meet and talk about that because I think there are some opportunities for more efficiency there um and talking with um the dean of students. Um but so I just wanted to highlight that and say that I'm interested in in hearing more about that and we can have a separate meeting. Um the other thing I wanted to ask about is just that um from my from my residents um I have heard a lot of really positive feedback um about um our officers and about the department being um more responsive to um kind of neighborhood issues um just a presence in the neighborhood and then also um um traffic concerns, things like that. Um, and those continue to be the number one thing that constituents reach out to me about. And I I know that um it's expensive to do, you know, targeted enforcement and to be out there doing tickets and that um our officers um a lot of times, you know, they have to take priority calls. But um can you speak to what in this budget um is going to help um with that problem? Because again it's it is the number one thing that residents reach out to me about and it's not even close to um you know the second and third place things that they reach out about. Um it's speeding, it's

speeding in school zones, it's um traffic noise um that is um you know so disruptive that it's um having health impacts um and it's um yeah responsiveness to sort those same sort of issues. Can you just speak to that in this budget? Yes. I mean, one, the overtime will continue to allow us to do some of that targeted enforcement, and I think also the investment in the real-time crime center will allow us to respond to issues. So, in February, we ran a pilot where we uh deployed our drone as first responder, which we're going to talk about in the next I think it's the next budget item. We deployed that drone uh to certain calls for service, lower priority calls, and we were able to clearly 40% of those calls without sending an officer. That's really significant for two reasons. One, it means we can send officers to higher priority calls and get there quicker or it means we free up officer time to be more proactive. And again, as I said earlier and kind as we as we began the presentation, traffic safety is a problem in the city. I mean, we're we're losing more people to that than homicide right now. And so, we do need to reinvest. And I think as we get fully staffed, as we have the overtime, as we invest in the real-time crime center, alternate response, that will free up our officers to be more present. you know, we started a a foot patrol in the downtown area, which is is is proving to be very successful and and popular, and we want to be able to spread that across the city and and have our officers have more beat integrity. Uh when the department was down on staffing and crime was up, um not just here, but across the country, uh police departments really just had to respond to the highest priority calls and everything kind of fell by the wayside.

I'm confident that over time with full staffing, with this investment, you know, we can start be be starting to handle these quality of life issues and and be be more responsive, be more connected to the community, um, and work on some of these issues. I I hope that answers your question. And on on the second point, we'll have my team set up a meeting with you, council member, on the University of Utah. Thank you, Counciloman.

Thank you. And thank you, Chief. Um, so the first thing I want to just draw attention to is clarifying that the inland court is rightfully returning tax increment to the city. There would be not there would not be a need for these additional officers if the development out there wasn't happening and we would be able to pay for these officers if the taxes were flowing as typically designed. However, the state has come up with this brilliant idea of an authority to preempt that taxation. So, I am grateful for the collaboration, but I really think especially in such a difficult taxation year. It's very very very clear to our neighbors that this is not an act of grace or charity, it is an act of rightful returning of taxes to a primary function of the city. Um the second thing is in concept I am in support of anything that amplifies the effectiveness of our skillful police force. Anything that returns us to community based policing and allows us to engage with our neighbors. Um, this is not a you problem, Chief, but I am putting on the public record that our data usage AI policies are not in a place yet where we can fully be confident with some of these investments. And so as we are investing as a council, I want us to challenge ourselves to also be investing as policy makers in making sure that the way we use the data, the way we use these tools, the way we collect and retain things is in the best interest of civil liberties, civil rights of all people. Uh we don't legislate for the people who abide by the law. It doesn't matter to me how much premeditation is required in murder for 31st degree because I haven't murdered and will not murder. We have to have protections for those who will

violate though. So I am not worried about you chief. I'm not worried about the officers who I engage with. I am worried about making sure that as we move forward we have policy that protects the rights no matter who is doing what where in our city. So I just want to put that on the public record. Thank you, council member. And we're happy to work with you on that. And we want to have a sustainable uh we we want to have a sustainable program so that we can utilize the technology appropriately. So, we're always happy to engage. Thank you.

Um Chief, one more thing. Um the in 2024 the budget 2024 2025 I believe that's when what the budget was the the council uh shared their their um focus on the Jordan River. Um and uh I believe it was before you you were joined. Um and uh I wanted to our intent then and and maybe I can be corrected uh by our our own staff here uh about what uh we were intending there uh was to create sort of a a group of officers that were just hyperfocused on the river uh on the river trail and going up and down. Um and and that was a big deal for you know our community on the west side but certainly uh this you know generally for the whole city. I am not sure where that is. Uh and I would love an update and and if if that has changed you know I I would love to get an update. So last fall we deployed the two green space uh bike squads uh that were obtained off of a federal grant. The city council I think had to put some money in. You put some money in as well. And so they've been deployed since October and they're operating over in that area. And uh we hope you're seeing them and we hope you're feeling the effects of their work. But we we feel like we're making a lot of good progress over on North Temple along um both and we'll continue to to keep at it. Uh one one thing that we are also looking at is we've seen really great success with the downtown foot patrol is looking at areas like Sugar House and and North Temple and do we start using utilizing that model as well and in those areas and so we're having those discussions as well.

Great. Thank you. I that would be amazing for me to and maybe for you know council member Petro to to share with our community councils about you know how that discussion ended up and something tangible that department is doing certainly beyond that I think it's very obvious to us that live on the west side the improvements on North Temple and the Jordan River Trail it's significant um and a significant positive change um and uh there is still some work to do but it's, you know, please I would like you to share with with the officers that are working in the area. Uh we're very thankful uh to to see that improvement. So,

thank you for that and we will share that. And I I just I will tell you we are committed to the residents of the west side and and making sure they have public safety and and we will keep at it. And you may not always see the bike squad on bikes. They do a lot of uh work uh with the drug activity that we we sometimes see in public. So, if you're not always seeing the bike squads on bikes, that's why. But they are out there working hard, very hard. All right. Uh, next. Let's see where we at here on the next slide. I didn't

Okay, next slide. Um, the the contractual increases. This is just an inflationary increase for things like uniforms, gear, ammo, safety equipment, and other supplies. This factors in at about a 1.86% inflationary increase. Um, again, you know, if it can be ongoing, that's great because those costs probably aren't coming down, but you know, we'll be a team player. But that's that request. And then the last one, uh, this is specifically for our drone as first responder program, and this is for the ongoing costs for the five drone docks that will be placed across the city for our drone's first responder program. As I mentioned earlier, um, we cleared nearly 40% of our calls in a test in February with these drones. Um, it's going to improve response times and we're going to be able to just a couple examples. One, we were able to speed up officers when a woman was threatened by an individual with a pipe. We were able to not send officers to a call where it was it was relayed as a violent person uh with a weapon, which was not the case. It was someone having a mental health crisis. We could send social workers or not send an officer at all. and we were able to pull a an individual off of a parking garage with the drone guiding officers in to to the location, which would have taken much longer to find her. So, this is this is going to be a gamecher. Uh again, I want to emphasize uh that we are not patrolling with these drones. We're not randomly flying them around. We're flying them to calls for service. uh when they fly across the city, we're keeping the camera as much as we can. The camera pointed up so it's not pointing down as it flies across the city. We're getting it to the call. It's it's giving our officers real-time information and then we're we're

bringing it back. Um we keep a we keep a a record of the flight, the flight path, the case number, the reason for the flight. Um and that's all uh recorded and that's what the cost is there. And next slide. And I think that's the last slide. Any questions? Any last questions? Uh, Council Member Dugan and Carlson. No. Carson, then.

Uh, thank you, Chief, um, for your presentation. My first question, I don't I think I know the answer to, but I think it's helpful to at least um, since this is public record, have an opportunity for residents to understand the answer to this question as well. So when the city publish when the mayor uh publishes her proposed budget and um residents of Salt Lake City just take a look at the pie chart of you know how much is going to each department. They look at the pie chart and they say wow the majority of our funding is going to the police department. You've got a deficit problem. You're going to raise my property taxes. Why not just cut from the police department? So, help me um provide an explanation when residents say to me, "Well, why don't you just balance your budget by cutting uh all of the resources that you've put in towards your police department?"

Well, you're asking a biased person probably that question because I am a police officer. I I think generally public safety is so critical and we hear concerns, council uh member Wharton brought up concerns in neighborhoods with speeding or by school zones or uh you know we've obviously the issues around homelessness which is not all homelessness that we are experiencing when we see those things on the streets. Much of it is but some of it's criminogenic behavior um violent crime all of those things. um to have a safe uh uh capital city uh I think you have to invest in in a police department. Now, as I mentioned, we're looking at efficiencies and when you know we we have to look out a number of years and so we're trying to figure out how we're going to model what resources we need. We feel like that this this investment in the police department in the short term is going to continue to bring call response times down. We're already seeing that those improvements. Uh we never want to be comfortable with what our call response time is. We always want to try to get that down. If you're if you're I our our priority one call response times are 6 and 12 minutes as uh as of April 2025. If you're if you're threatened uh in some way uh 6 and a half minutes is a long time. So that's actually a good call response time nationally, but we want to try to bring it down down even more. So, the the investment in public safety drives uh drives people in the community to get out and get into their parks. Uh we've had a lot of complaints, you know, with drug use in the parks and we can't take our kids to the parks or certain public spaces. So, we do need the investment. Um but we want to we want to be cognizant of people who are concerned that we're getting too much money and find ways to be more efficient for sure and we're committed to doing that.

Thank you, Chief. And then just a follow-up question to that because I feel like this is kind of the the number one question that I get pretty often is people look at the budget, they look at the page graph and say, "Well, just cut from there. It'll solve all your budget woes." I don't think it's that easy. Um, but I'm asking this question just for the public record and so people understand more about um how our budgets are formed. Um, so I think it's something like maybe 92% I could be getting this wrong, but 92% of the police department budget is associated directly with personnel. Personnel costs include health care, um, pensions, salaries, etc. Um, what are some of the drivers of those personnel costs and help me understand how things like labor agreements factor into that.

So we do have collective bargaining. So we are under anou with with our unions. So those those costs are are factored in there as well or factored in there. Um when you talk about recruiting you know if you you want the best you want the best officers you want the best talent and when you're competing for a limited resource we have to compete with other you know other departments across the state and nation. So a lot of it is driven by just market uh market uh you know the mark what the market is for for an officer. But yeah, the the theou controls a lot of those costs for sure and the collective bargaining. Um, you know, I'll always say this, we're always willing to sit down if people are concerned. I'm willing to sit down and and and hear them out and and uh see if they have ideas. I mean, we we we we take feedback and we try to improve and get more efficient and we're always willing to sit down with people and and and see if we can get better.

Thank you, Chief. Sorry, my last question. um in thinking about uh this proposed investment in the real time crime center and the uh highest and best use of officer time towards those higher priority calls. How do you think looking forward maybe over the next 5 years this will impact the staffing needs of the department? Yeah, I mean I think I think our alternate response I think the real time crime center may help us not have to ask for more officers as we move toward the Olympics and you know the capital city is just getting large. I mean we have hockey now. We have we have basketball. Uh there's potential for baseball in the future. Uh the University of Utah is expanding. I mean we just have more traffic, more events coming into to our city uh all the time. That's a lot of people. So, there are there are high demands on the police department. Um, I'm hoping that this alternate response can help free up time to respond to those those calls more quickly. And I also hope to Council Member Wharton's uh um concerns that he hears from his residents that we can also free up officer time just to engage on those quality of life issues, the traffic safety, the noise, um just just engaging with our youth so that we don't have issues with our youth in the future. Um, so I think those are I think the real-time crime center will help us get to a place where we can be more efficient and effective and we're seeing we're seeing it work pretty well across the country.

Uh, Council Petro and then Council Member Young. I just wanted to thank you, Chief, for being someone who is trustworthy. Whether we're asking you to go talk to the inland court or we're asking you to go meet with homelessness advocates, every time I hear that our police department is in the community, you all are representing the city. You're reshaping trust where it needs to be. This is I'm doing these surveys with my constituents. Public safety without exception is the number one place my constituents want investment. And that can be kind of difficult because some when some people say public safety, they mean social workers. When some people say public safety, they mean the sworn officers. Um, and I'm just really thankful. I want to put on the public record. I'm very thankful for your leadership for the officers who have been serving the west side and the whole city so faithfully. Um, and I look forward to being creative with you about how we keep our city safe, continue to grow in the face of all of the all the conflicts and issues we have coming here.

Thank you, Council Member. Council Young,

thank you. Um, Chief Red and to the team, again, I echo Council Member Petro's thanks. Um, one of the things that I think is also helpful to highlight is the way that your department has successfully been using data to be able to drive resource allocation to be more thoughtful with the resources we have. Um, just because again not everybody has insight to that, I'm wondering if you could give kind of like the the twominute overview of how like the data that you gather really helps to direct um resources in a more effective way so that if if I could speak so broadly that we're almost doing more with without having to increase um staffing um as the city has grown.

Sure. I mean, one example because this was the big issue when I when I came joined the Salt Lake City Police Department was some of the issues on the Jordan River Trail and some of the homeless related or transient related calls for service. Um, this is these are these are community members calling in or businesses or whatever indicating there's problems. So, we have a heat map that we we look at every week to see where the bulk of those calls are coming in from community members and then we will deploy our homeless resource center officers, our social workers uh or and even our patrol officers into those areas to uh try to see what the issue is. Um, I can I can give an example. In downtown, we were having a hot spot and we found out that we had uh we had drug dealers who were coming to that location and and and that's why we were having some of the issues that we were having. So, we that's an example of the way that we're using we're using data to um you know try to deploy our resources more efficiently.

Thank you. I appreciate the example because for me knowing that you're using that data driven approach gives me confidence as a council member related to the asks that are coming through related to your budget. Um and I appreciate seeing the connection between those two. Um, and I think to me it also gives me confidence in how you're both looking to be at the forefront of innovation to be thoughtful about our use of resources where we need like the human response aspect whereas where we may have you know alternative opportunities to be able to um be thoughtful about those deployments. Um, and just wanted to say that I that does give me a lot of confidence in the budget requests that come forward just knowing that that's a day-to-day practice of Salt Lake City Police.

Thank you. And we're writing our strategic plan now and we're going to have we're going to we're going to continue de to develop better key met keep key key performance indicators metrics. So we we have some work to do still, but we're definitely um utilizing data and it's helpful. Thank you. Thank you. We're good. Thank you, chief. Thank you, everyone. You council,

we have scheduled a tentative break that we passed. So, um I would like uh all of us to consider continuing with the with the discussion. I hope if anybody has strong opinions against speak now. Okay, we're going to continue with item number four, fiscal year 2026 2027 budget discussions. Uh this is about community and neighborhoods uh department. Now we're gonna uh welcome at the table uh Allison Roland, council policy analyst, uh Tommy Hanser, director of community and neighborhoods, Mike Oerllo, deputy director, and Brent Beck, financial manager is um Allison is your time.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um you know I always it always strikes me that can is a very diverse um department with building services, engineering, housing stability, planning, transportation, youth and family and then of course the arts council which is going to be um briefed in the next uh in the next bit. But um in spite of that you guys managed to pull it all together. So I'll just go over the basics quickly. um and then turn it over to the people who really know. Um the proposed FY27 budget is 41.4 million which is just about the same as FY26. The staff size will also remain just about the same. The largest cost savings um 702,000 and change um is will be achieved through an attrition savings pool which is essentially holding vacated positions open for four to five months rather than filling them immediately. Other cost reductions come from cuts in the hive pass program. And this is for general writership, not for special populations like school kids and their guardians and from a variety of smaller items like the city match for fix the bricks um which now that the federal program has expired um there um it basically the program will be closed. Um, the most significant increase costs are an $800,000 one-time youth and family uh I was going to say subsidy. It's a subsidy. I guess that's fair. Um, for to replace federal funds which have disappeared as well. Um, and give the youth and family division time to try to find more um to try to find additional sources of revenue for their programs. and 330,000

ongoing for taking over funding for the VO VOA homeless outreach team and shelter the homeless resource center liaison. So those are the two really big increases. Um and there are policy questions sprinkled throughout the uh the staff report. So I will turn it over now to Tammy. Thank you. Um, thanks to the council for the opportunity to present um, community neighborhoods FY27 proposed budget. I also want to thank Allison Roland. She's been great to work with as always. Um, before we u dive into the budget proposal itself, I want to begin by recognizing the exceptional team um, behind this work. The accomplishments reflected in this budget are the result of a dedicated, talented, and missiondriven department. Allison outlined all of the various divisions within the department. Um, we're a large department with a broad scope of work. Next slide, please. Every division within the department plays a critical role in serving residents, strengthening neighborhoods, supporting community partners, and improving or implementing council priorities. Their expertise, creativity, and commitment to public service are reflected throughout this proposal. Next slide, please. Can's uh recent accomplishments are numerous um too numerous to list, but a sampling include the completion of the $89 million funding our future street bond that resulted in 122 miles of street reconstruction, 310 mi of pavement resurfacing, 60 mi of sidewalk curb and gutter, and we added over 2700 new trees and plants. We have also been working hard within building services to create efficiencies with building inspections and we are currently current on all rental inspections which is a

great accomplishment for that team. We have found efficiencies by cross-training building inspectors. Um by doing so we are building internal capacity, improving institutional knowledge, increasing responsiveness and um providing long-term value to the city. On the transportation note, we have successfully navigated the requirements of the transportation bill from 2025 which recently sunset SB95 and we are currently going through the steps to comply with SB242. Um that process um now entails negotiating with UD do on an an agreement between our two entities. Um we are also continuing to implement thriving in place the anti-displacement plan that the council adopted a few years ago. Um this effort includes various aspects including those in planning and housing stability. An example of a success is the tenant resource center that started in the fall of 2024. To date, we have assisted over 2,200 individuals through that portal. Um, which is great. Um, we are also another accomplishment is uh continuing to provide highquality summer and afterchool programming in spite of significant federal cuts to our grants. Next slide, please. In terms of efficiencies, over the past year, we have focused on operational efficiencies and long-term sustainability of the department from a financial aspect. This includes implementing the commercial and mixeduse zoning district consolidation. This consolidation reduced the amount of zoning code. Um, also reducing resources necessary to administer the code and it created efficiencies for developers and property owners. These efficiencies in

administering the code actually allowed us to shift staffing resources to work on adoptions of or um drafting of community plan updates. We um transferred the advantage service contract to public services to centralize cleaning efforts and to provide for staffing and funding efficiencies. The mayor mentioned this in her budget presentation to you. That um transfer allowed the city to find I think it was like a million dollars in savings. Um we are also coordinating with public services to optimize administrative office space. That includes re-imagining the old library. Um this will allow the city to utilize existing real estate instead of um looking to bond to build new administrative office sta space. Um and then within youth and family with the budget cuts that have been faced we've optimized budget expenditures. We're really looking at how we plan for and order supplies um for youth programming. Um we've gone up and down through that budget to cut where we can and create efficiencies to make the the delivery of services as streamlined and efficient as possible. Next slide, please. Um Allison provided an overview of CAN's budget. As she mentioned within K's budget, we're about flat from FY26. Also on this slide, you will see a new revenue change. That's new revenue that we're proposing for the general fund. And then um we also looked through our non-EP non-departmental expenditures that are attributed to our department and we fi found about a million dollars in savings there. Next slide. So, the new revenue that I just spoke about is $177,000. This wouldn't be new revenue for the Department of Community and

Neighborhoods. It would go into the general fund. But, as the mayor's office asked us to look at cuts, we looked across the board at where we could either gener um generate new revenue or reduce expenditures. and in generating new revenue. The green vehicle program was implemented several years ago and the initial policy reason for implementing this program was to encourage uh individuals to buy EV vehicles and in looking at this program now we really think that the market the EV market is strong and the city's policy in regard to EV parking really isn't influencing the EV market anymore. So, if we eliminate this program, um it would be a net of 177,000 in new parking revenue for FY27. We worked with finance on that number, but it would actually be even a greater amount of revenue in future years because the finance department built in a few months to phase that program out. Um the other reason we are proposing to um eliminate the program is the EPA um publishes an EPA smartway vehicle list on an annual basis and our city code is actually tied to that list and there have been recent changes with the current federal administration with the EPA and how that list is managed. So there's actually lack of clarity right now on what new cars qualify. Um, the other consideration with the program is there are still green stickers out there on vehicles that qualified as an efficient vehicle sever several years ago but would no longer qualify under current lists. So that is one proposal for new revenue. Um, the second item on the slide is access and belonging. This is actually revenue or

budget neutral. This budget was in the mayor's office last year. access and belonging staff moved from the mayor's office to community and neighborhoods. So, this is operating budget that was left in the mayor's office that we're asking to transfer over to CAN. It is budget that is used to operate the programs um including welcoming week, the IFAR dinner, um partnership events, new American projects, and know your neighbor volunteer fingerprinting. The third item on this slide is the police department lease contractual increases. We are contractually obligated um for this budget through lease agreements. So, community and neighborhoods, the real estate services team, we manage lease agreements um throughout the city, including the police department. So, this would be increases for the CL crime lab, the community connection center, and the police substations. Next slide, please. VA and shelter the homeless, $330,000. We're requesting this to be ongoing funding within CAN's budget. This is actually not new funding. It's currently funded through a BA in FY26. And in previous years, it was actually those contracts were funded through the state mitigation funds. Last year, um, the city shifted the priorities of the state mitigation funds from efforts that were being carried out through CAN to the police department because the state wanted cities to prioritize public safety with those funds. Um, so we want to build in the VA and shelter the homeless into housing stabilities budget. Um, VA is for a homeless outreach team. Um this team is actually working a lot with the connect program in PD. It's for engaging persons experiencing homelessness um for that

program and also engaging that population like if there's an encampment mitigation. And then the shelter the homeless contract that is um how much is that one? 80,000. That would be for a homeless services liaison for the homeless resource center. And this liaison is actually an FTE employed by shelter the homeless that mitigates issues, coordinates with stakeholders and um does community outreach um with regarding the resource centers. And then um our fifth request is a large one. It is 800,000 for youth and family. Um, this would be funding to keep youth and family programming relatively stable, compensating for the loss of federal funding. Of note, even with this $800,000 request, this would if if the council approves this request, the division would still be over $500,000 less in budget in FY27 than in FY26 because there have been other federal budget cuts. But in talking with the team and looking at how we can optimize the 800,000 would keep programming for K through 6 and teens stable. We would consolidate adult programming. Right now we have an adult programming site in the Fair Park neighborhood as well as at Sorenson. We would consolidate adult programming at Sorenson and find some cost savings there. And like I said before, the division has already found some efficiencies and cost savings. So, we feel like 800,000 is the minimum that would be needed to keep programming relatively stable. I am sure you will agree that these programs are critical in supporting working families within our city and investment in youth and family collectively advances public safety, educational

outcomes, workforce training, and community well-being. So, we feel strongly that this is would be good money spent if the council decides to approve. Next slide, please. Let let me construct uh council member Dugan.

Yeah, thank you Tammy and I'm uh agree with you on that number about the youth and family services. Can you kind of give the uh the city and the council and the metrics that you kind of make that decision for you? I mean, what are you tracking there as far as how many youth and families and K through sixth graders that you're you're touching by that funding and what you're not touching because you've lost that the other $500,000 I think you just mentioned that you're going to still find efficiencies. Can you kind of guess give us a broad view of those metrics that you're uh using to justify that because I think it's incredibly valuable uh and it's necessary but it'd be nice to know some of those metrics that you're tracking with that.

There are a lot of metrics we are tracking for the youth and family division and programming. I don't have them memorized on the top of my head but we have we actually have that data put together in a wireframe that we can send over. But the um program tracks enrollment. Um the programming is offered on a sliding scale basis in terms of the fees for the program. So most of the kids qualify for free or lowcost programming because they are from lower income families. So we have um income information on the students and the the participants um in looking in working with the team. and Liz Rich is here if you have any specific questions on on metrics. Otherwise, we can email those afterwards. But in looking at the the $500,000 reduction, if we get the $800,000 that we're requesting, in talking it through with Liz and also with the mayor's office, we want to be responsible with taxpayer money. And we really looked at at programming and the the benefits that the programming is providing the community. And the adult programming is very valuable. It's it's well used. It's like computer labs. Um ESL. I think there's some financial literacy training, other things like that. We really feel like the um services for youth, the K through six and the teens is essential to keep intact for the community. So, we really looked at then consolidating the adult programming at Sorenson and just creating other efficiencies that would limit the cuts to services for youth. Does that help?

Yeah, that it does. And I just wondered and there's probably a lot of pressure to for the services too. It's it's not like you have a lot of empty seats. You have more requests than right weight lists. You have the weight list.

And the program has um Liz, who's a newer director, she's been with youth and family for a long time, but she stepped in the director role um a bit a bit over a year ago, I believe. um she's really been creative, been forward thinking. Um she's been a lifesaver in working through all of these funding cuts. We've also um experienced other challenges like we had programming at the fair park. Um and then we moved to the lied boys and girls club, but the Boys and Girls Club is now selling lies. So now we're talking to the about moving programming into the Northwest Rec Center, which the county has been great to work with. So, um, there's been a lot going on with Ethan family.

Appreciate that and I'd love to see some of those metrics just to, you know, for there's probably a lot of questions about that, but because it's a big number, but I think that the the cost benefit is is huge. So, appreciate that. Thank you, Carson.

Um, thank you for this presentation thus far. I think I want to uh follow up on Council Member Dugan's questions about the 800,000 for the youth and family programming and that's really coming um about this year because of uh federal funding uh cuts and and um changes related to that. And so I think my question as I'm thinking about this is are you thinking about this kind of as a bridge year and then in fiscal year 28 finding additional resources to support this line item or how are you thinking about for future years?

That is a great question and I meant to mention that this is an 800,000 one-time funding request so we're not requesting ongoing. Um that being said, we are still it's still to be determined whether we can find other resources or other grant opportunities. Uh we also want to look at local grant opportunities um philanthropic opportunities. So we want to spend the next year uh analyzing and looking at other resources. We also recently um hired a national consultant who did a three-year strategic plan. And I think one of Allison's policy questions to you was if you want us to present that strategic plan to you. That plan was in process when funding cuts started to happen. So it does talk about some options with funding. So um I don't have any good answers for you now, but it's something we are working through. I just wanted to clarify really quickly um because I'm trying to mention it each time a department is before us that is related to the property tax. So um the $800,000 for youth and family is part of the $13.5 million property tax increase proposal.

Thank you. I meant to mention that as well. Um the next item is a $700,000 cut from non departmental from vacant building maintenance. um this funding um for the current fiscal year, a portion of that has gone to the Fiser Mansion. I think it was 400,000's going to Fisher Mansion. So, we have been strategically looking at um improvements to uh vacant and underutilized city properties to help keep those buildings um well-maintained and improved as we look at um disposition strategies. So currently Fischer Mansion receives some of the money. We also use the money for just ongoing security and maintenance expenses. So we're proposing to cut the entire pot of money, but obviously we still need a strategy and a source for paying for um maintenance and utilities and lawnmowing and whatnot. So we are going to use the surplus. We're proposing to use the surplus property account for those basic expenses up to 200,000. The next item is a $50,000 cut from non-EP departmental transit outreach, education, and marketing. This um amount that R can receives in its annual budget is $100,000. So, we're proposing to cut it in half. And we're also proposing to broaden the scope not just to the transit network, but um CIP and road projects in general to do outreach and engagement with the community. Um the third one uh for our reduction request is the hive pass. Uh we were faced with tough decisions with this budget proposal and perhaps the toughest decision is to propose the cut to this program. The Hive Pass program currently

provides discounted transit passes to residents regardless of their income. There are about 440 users of this pass a month. Um we made this decision for two primary reasons um faced with the budget um challenges that we are this year. First, we want to ensure that the transportation funding is doing the most good for the most in need. So we are leaving the lowincome pass program intact. That program partners with service providers to provide daily and monthly transit passes for the city's most vulnerable residents. And we are also proposing to leave intact the school district program that provides passes to school age children and guardians. Um we also are prioritizing the frequency of the transit network. We didn't want to look at any cuts there. So the city contributes about $10 million a year for the go routes, the frequent transit network and for the ondemand programs. And so looking within the transportation division faced with um budget challenges, we felt like the hive pass since there isn't an income qualification that was where we could take the reduction over the low income the school district partnership and the frequent transit network because it's essential to keep that frequency up with the network. The other concern with the Hive pass program is it's getting more expensive to administer. So to keep administering it at the current level, we would actually have to ask for additional budget. So right now the budget is I think 350,000 to provide the passes. Um but the amount there's also an amount to administer the program. I think currently it's 60,000 and that will be increasing to about 150 if we don't cut the program. So we would actually have

to ask for money to keep administering the program. Council Dugan. Thank you for that explanation. Yeah, it is a it is a hard decision to make there on that one because as you said it's a valuable service. We want people on public transportation and this is a nice way to pe get people on keep people on buses. Do we have a number of how many of the I think it's 440 or somehat that use a pass would qualify for the lowinccome uh support for a pass if they were in that if they had taken that route instead of the hive pass route.

Do we do we have an idea? And I don't think we have any idea because I don't think we collect any sort of income data with the hive pass applic. Yeah, because that's not part of the eligibility criteria.

And is there there's probably other multiple sources for passes, companies provide passes. Uh we have low-inccome passes. Is there we're going to be providing information for people who currently get the high pass where there's other options for them to get a pass? Because I I it is a service that they're using and they're using the pass because that's why they want it. and how do we make sure that they still ride the public transportation, they still get to work in that regard.

Um, I can coordinate with the transportation team on ideas for that. Um, I do know a lot of employers provide passes like Salt Lake City does. Um, but I don't know if we have a comprehensive list of of those sources and um I'd need to talk to the transportation team about and maybe UTA about um other ideas for communicating um programs and offers for transit passes.

Yeah, I I keep on I'm trying to push more and more people on about public transportation because it helps everybody. It helps people who aren't on the track on the public transportation because there's fewer cars, but it also helps people get to work and, you know, affordable living. So, I'd love to have that communication so we can absolutely use all the different services for everybody and not just the easiest one, which might have been the high pass. Yeah. One idea, maybe we've done this with housing and with other um areas within CAN, maybe we could create a web page with resources. Yeah. Yeah. Um and ideas for transit passes. Consumer Carlson.

Um in regards to uh the on demand, I think that's if I remember right, it's about like 3.5 million. Um maybe as a follow-up, I'd love to see how many writers are served by that program, number of trips um that that program helps to uh supplement.

We can get you that information. And our partnership with UTA with the frequent transit networks um is interesting in that we are subsidizing the frequency of the transit network and then as the system and the the frequency is in place for a while and then writership increases there's that's actually bringing in more revenue to UTA and our subsidies then being reduced. So we're actually seeing some of those positive impacts start to happen. So we can provide that information to you.

Uh thank you for the update. Since we are talking about the the high pass, I been reached out you know many members of the committee reached out to me about you know what this looks like uh to the city. Uh the impact to individual families. you highlighted how tough this was to decide between all of these programs that do took do good in our community and uh choosing between all of them is not easy. So, thank you for um you know looking through your budget and trying to thoughtfully make deci tough decisions and and uh uh prioritizing what what programs does the best um um does the best for for uh for the most people. Um I do I would like more information about uh the subsidy you know the the high pass that is income uh qualified. Um I wonder if you know ending this program will increase the demand on on the on that portion of of the of the pass. Um I I struggle with the write out you know completely ending of it. Um but I you know I would love to get a little more information as well about uh managing this program and you know what um what does it cost to manage it and you you you mentioned that it may require even more uh resources to manage it. I would love more information about that as well. Um so certainly this is one of those uh programs that I struggle with and it when you are looking at your own department it makes sense that you're looking into this these programs. Um I would like to see it certainly for us it's it's appropriate to do this is look at at it holistically through all the different departments in the city. Um, and I'm more inclined to find

savings in other places within the city to try to uh, you know, potentially hopefully try to make an impact or keep something like this going. Um, which is not on you, uh, and and it's within us. uh and I know that uh 440 you know individuals use this pass and it seems significant to me and uh in some ways disconnected and disjointed maybe to what of the goals of the city are. Again this is not on you because you have a tough decision to make and try to find the the most impact for for the money that we have and you met the task that administration gave you which is try to find savings uh within your your program. Um, Council Member Wharton has a question.

Thank you, Tammy. Um, I appreciate the presentation and, um, yeah, CAM is, um, one of our biggest departments and is vast in terms of all the services that are provided. So, um, thanks for recapping all of that. Um I don't want to uh like micromanage or or say that you know ane every not every anecdote that we uh see is representative of um you know like system flaws or whatever. Um, but I do get quite a few um, requests throughout the year from people that are um, either businesses in my district or constituents that um, say that, you know, they filed for this permit or asked for that and um, that there are delays or inefficiencies in the system. And a lot of times, um, I just want to say like to to our credit and our and your staff's credit, um, most of the time when I look into those, the delay is actually on the petitioner. um and uh or it's something that they um something's been back to sent back to them for um that like something's incomplete or whatever and they didn't know that or they missed an email or something like that. Um but sometimes it is um delay on the city's part or that there's some kind of like um um it seems like extra uh or um more processes that could be streamlined. So I'm really interested. I appreciate the what you've already done to add to that. I I'm convinced that there are um more

efficiencies that we can do out there. Um and so uh I just would be really interested to hear more about that in the coming year. Um I think you said that that was something that that uh you and your team were going to study. Um so I'm really interested to hear more about that.

Thank you for that feedback, council member. And I know this has been an ongoing topic of discussion and the administration has often talked about efficiencies and improvements that we are looking into. Um I think the time is right for some major um analysis to take place for um those processes. I have the utmost confidence in the building services and the planning team and engineering. Um, one tricky thing is is that building permitting crosses departments. So there like public utilities is involved in other departments. Um, but the mayor's office is supportive of looking into significant changes. Another um kind of sea change that we're experiencing is the new IMS director has come to the table really wanting to be part of that discussion and looking at because process improvements a lot of times have to come along with technology improvements. We've been using the same technology for a long time and um he's really interested in going down that path exploring improvements and ideas and alternatives with us. So, I'm excited to see what we can do over the next year.

Okay. Well, thank you. Yeah. I and I think you know to the extent that we've done a lot of these big changes to consolidate um zones and um things like that in planning I I think we should try to do like commensurate um like efficiencies um inhouse within our own systems to uh yeah to address that even though I know it's multi-ep departmental and and that you know there our constraints based on technology, but I would just love to see that um us look at these things more comprehensively and and prioritize that. So, thank you. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Council Member Young. Thank you. Um I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper on the youth and the family programming. um because that is one of the pieces that would be funded by the proposed property tax increase. Um can you give us like a maybe a couple more details about that um to help folks understand why um those programs are so essential to our families and residents in Salt Lake?

Sure. Uh, youth and family provides afterchool programming, summer programming. Um, this is not only benefiting the kid, providing positive social outcomes, there's educational standards that the programming meets. So, it's not just daycare, there's an actual education component to the program. And it's also essential for working families. This allows working parents, single moms to be at work while their kids are doing something that provides knowledge and um social skills. So we really feel that um the programming is essential. If you look at the demographics of the kids that participate in the program in the programming, it's a lot of um extremely low-income vulnerable populations, new Americans. So, um, it's really essential, we feel, to keep this programming at a stable level. But like I did say, we looked critically at where the money was going, how we would create efficiencies. And we're asking for the 800 and cutting from the current budget 500,000 because we felt like if we were going out and asking for property tax funds to be used for these programs that we had to be critical and use our funding as wisely as possible.

Thank you. And I I appreciate those additional details. I would just for the the broader community conversation draw an analogy um to cuts that we recently saw happening um at the county level and kind of the the public outcry associated like with those cuts um when they were part of consideration and I appreciate um you looking at efficiencies within that space um but but tying it to a key core demographic and a need that we want to continue to meet within our community to allow those working parents that opportunity um to you know provide educational opportunities for their kids. To me these are very similar conversations. So I just wanted to draw that analogy um in terms of kind of the the rationale and the justification for that aspect of this request. Can someone repeat?

Did you say Petro? Yes, I did. Okay. Um, Tammy, I wanted to thank you for this presentation and for the amazing work that we know you do. Um, I want to start it off with the Sony. I think it was really interesting to hear that there's actually costing V consumer Victoria. I um the sound is not very clear. So maybe the connection is a little poor. I wonder if you can slow down the So we have time to translate in our brain. Is this better?

Yes.

Okay. It's stupid Bluetooth. Sorry. I'm being a mom while I'm being a council woman. Um, no Tammy, I just wanted to say thank you as usual. This is pretty remarkable stuff. Your your knowledge and expertise in protecting the city on such wide ranging things is really remarkable. Um, first of all, on the zoning, it's really interesting to hear to see the um economic impact of this. Really exciting. I'd love to track some data throughout the year to see what it looks like for adoption and what's actually happening with our land use to have a comprehensive um idea of how successful or how much we need to modify. But this is a really really interesting data point. Thank you for bringing it. Um secondly, I'll look for a similar data point with the hive pass if we do end up cutting it. If uh I don't I don't I say if because council member Dugan is really persuasive and if he finds a way to not cut it, I know we won't. But if we do end up cutting it and we see a change in ridership as a result, I really would love to revisit that and make sure that we collect that data point so we can have a robust discussion going forward. But then finally, I want to join the youth and family programming chorus. I openly admit that this is a place where I am possibly the greatest hypocrite because for a long time I've wanted this uh programming to be transferred to something more privately funded just because you know I want to keep as much free for the core city services at this moment in time. This is to me a core city service if we haven't transitioned it. Our families who rely on this service do not have the bandwidth to absorb this. And the, you know, $2 a year that'll be returned to the property tax holder if we don't fund it is not worth the collective impact of what we can do if we do fund it. So, for me, this is a core city service at this point. I am so thankful for leaders like

Liz and you, uh, Representative Romero, who make sure that we have bang for our buck. But at this point, I am viewing youth and family services as a core city service. While I do look forward to us finding ways to privatize and reduce reliance on the general fund for it, I am fully in support of it and I'm going to go to the Mat to make sure that we don't do it. I'm thankful to you and the mayor for finding a path even in a tough budget year for us to protect these families. But thank you. Um, quick question. I noticed uh that advantage was you know reabsorbed within you know the department. I'm a little worried.

No, it's still in public services. Yes. Uh so we still have a contract with Advantage Services. Yes. Well, actually oh um you're talking about on the next slide cuz I'm actually not done with my slide. So I have the list of things I want to chat with you. Maybe I let you talk about first. I can um be efficient. No, no, you are being efficient. I am uh just a good student, I guess. Uh keep keep going. Keep going.

There's two different advantage services contracts. So, one is still in can. So, and and for the record, we would love to uh preserve the Hive Pass program, but we we know there are it's a challenging budget year. So, um we will leave it at that. Next slide, please. Um, we are also proposing a $125,000 reduction in non non-dep departmental that goes um transfers to the arts council foundation. This would reduce the city's transfer to the arts council um from 1,25,000 to 900,000. This cut would cause reductions in programming such as the busker fest, Mondays in the park, springboard for the arts, professional development, or other programming. If historical practices followed, it would be the arts council foundation board that decides what specific programming would be cut. And the foundation board could look at because they leverage the city's money with grants and other fundraising. So they could look at grant opportunities or um other sources of revenue within the foundation to cover programming. We have I think the next agenda item is the arts council. So we can get into this more. Council member Pu, I know that public art is very important um for you. So this isn't the public art portion of the arts council. This is the transfer to non-dep departmental that is mostly for programming. Um, the next item is $50,000 proposed to be cut from planning for a historic preservation consultant. This funding has been used over the past few years to update historic survey records for local historic districts. We feel that we can transfer these duties inhouse. Um, we still have some consulting money that would remain within planning for the expertise that

we need like for architectural historians and other consultants. The next item is a $50,000 cut um for engineering's public outreach consultant. This would cut that funding entirely. Council member Young, you I'm sure are familiar with these services with the Sugar House Street Reconstruction Project. That funding paid for the consultant that did outreach with the community. Um we feel that with the although we would miss this funding, we feel that with the um completion of the streets bond and with shifting our priorities more from large reconstruction projects to local streets that um we can manage without this funding and do those efforts inhouse. Um the next one, if you go to the next slide, um housing fix the bricks match. There was a federal requirement through FEMA. Um we no longer have FEMA funding for fix the bricks. So we do not need this $84,000 match. Um reduction number eight is the neighborly software for $60,000. We would not be this wouldn't be a cut in services. we would be shifting the software expense from the general fund and charge it to federal grants like CDBG. um the housing funding our future contract. This 90,000 $92,000 reduction from funding our future, it actually wouldn't result in a loss in services because the tenant resource center is administered by the community development corporation of Utah and you just admin or you just awarded funding to CDCU for that program through the funding our future round. So this reduction would not result in loss of services. Next slide please. the homelessness contracts. Um we haven't been using um an amount every

year that's allocated for portable toilet rentals for 32,000. So we're proposing to reduce that. But we are proposing to have a $12,000 increase for advantage services a place for your stuff. So this would increase that contract from 85,000 to 97,000. So that's for the storage program. That's program still administered through CAN, but the cleaning is administered through public services. And then the last two are um vacancy savings essentially. There's actually an engineering 7 position that's currently open that we've agreed to hold open for the entire year. um because we've consolidated um engineering management efforts within transportation, we don't want to eliminate that FTE yet because we want to make sure that this is a viable path forward. Um I did listen to the earlier briefing and I think Jennifer, you described our approach to vacancy savings spoton. Um we really want we have a large um the last item is a $72,000 attrition vacancy savings pool. We did not want to eliminate any FTEEs. Right now, um CAN is a large department with about 250 employees. So, we naturally get quite a bit of vacancy savings over the year. This is more than we typically get. So, we are planning to hold positions open for a longer period of time. And we also want to look at any efficiencies or combining of job responsibilities over the next year. But we really wanted to take the next year to kind of analyze how that shakes out. And I think that is it. Um, again, I appreciate the partnership and support from the council and I'd be happy to answer any more questions or hear any more feedback.

Council Mugan has more questions. Sorry, I just one more question about the fix the brick program. So, is that program now because the feds aren't uh supporting it, is that eliminated or is it still a fix the bricks? you're just not uh so the council has allocated over some previous budget rounds some funding from CDBG so there is a smaller pot of money that is still being used for fix the bricks the FEMA program there was not an income requirement for um recipients of the program but since it's CDBG and HUD there is an income requirement with the smaller pot of money that that we still have.

Gotcha. Thank you very much. But the FEMA had a match requirement and that's where the general fund um allocation came in play. Um so we don't need that anymore. So that's why we proposed that reduction. Gotcha. But the program's still ongoing and but there's there's now more of the income uh threshold for that. And a lot less money. And a lot less money. Right. Okay. Thank you.

I wonder there's no hands up. So I guess it's my turn. Uh so the the cleaning portion of the advantage uh can you explain a little more about how we're going to maintain uh service levels? Um you know a little bit tell me a little more. Um, when Jorge presents public services budget, he can get in much more detail than I can with that because the new urban services team has been operating for almost a year. And um, we did transfer the advantage services portion of the cleaning to public services for administration by that team. And it's my understanding that they have found a lot of cost savings with that contract and transferred a lot of that scope of work inhouse.

Okay, that that's helpful. um EV uh the north the north temple substation uh and you have the the downtown the region street substation and the north temple substation as part of the increase for $60,000. How much is that? How much of that is the north temple? Uh, and are we using it? Because I is it that necessary right now? And I know it's probably the smallest portion of that increase, but I would love

It is very small. I can't remember the exact amount off the top of my head, but I do remember it's a 5-year lease. It's the downtown site is an actual precinct. The one on North Temple is just a bike substation. Uh, I did ask um the police department a while ago if they're using it and they they did say that they use it. It's not a high amount of rent. I do remember the first year the city actually paid zero rent and then I think it went up to like 1,200 and it it ticks up every year but it's it's not a lot of money.

Yeah. No, I remember that you know the offer because I was part of that conversation very early on. It took us a year to actually get pull it off. So that free year was uh but uh I would love to if we are constructed you know to to maintain that rent that makes sense. But I I would love to uh ask the department uh you know if we're going to vacay that place to start looking at it you know sooner rather than later and still getting locked in into a continued rent when we might not need it. Uh ultimately it may not be a lot of money and and they might see value on it. Um but you know I would love more information about that. Um then there is um uh you mentioned EV uh parking um which is uh I think is it makes sense to to make that change. Um is the EV electrical uh portion the cost of the electricity for those uh u charging units uh within uh your department? it isn't

it is.

So I would love to have that conversation as well. So I'm gonna flag it for all of us to make sure that we have that conversation as well. Um as far as dispositional properties, um it's a question I have. I there is I keep learning about new properties that we own and we have owned for a while and I would love to find out what are we going to do with them because they cost us a lot of money to maintain. I still don't know um if there is a grand plan to to dispose of them or to develop them or uh and I feel like this is a conversation we had had for a little while. You know, maybe because it's an administrative thing. It makes sense that we may not be privy to the details, but when we have um budget struggles, you know, to me, you know, it comes to mind all the properties that we own. And you know, is it possible that we disposing or some of them may make sense to try to cancel out some of the costs that we have? Yes, is one-time money, but you know, uh we have we we have uh made decisions like that in the past and currently too. So I would love to know a little more about the disposition of property within the department.

We'd be happy to have that discussion. Thank you. Any other random questions or not random or very smart ones? No. Okay. Could I correct just quickly what I said before? Um it looks like it's sustainability and public services that take care of the EV chargers. Okay. We're looking forward to that discussion soon. Um thank you so much for the update. I I I cannot speak highly of the work that you guys do in that department. I it's just incredible. Uh so really uh we are very lucky to have you uh as a team leading this city. So thank you.

Well, thank you. A lot of the credit goes to the division leadership. A lot of I think a lot of them are behind me. Thank you. Uh council members, we are Not too far behind. We made up some time somehow. Oh, the break. That's how uh we ate on that break. Um we're still good, right? We can do this. You need a Yes, we do have a quorum. Okay, I will speak slowly to give you a little more time.

Oh god. One one at a time. We have quorum issues. Um take turns. Uh so moving on to item number five for this is again fiscal year 2026 2027 as a budget discussion for the arts council. Now we're going to welcome Sylvia Richards council policy analyst Felicia Baka arts council director uh Lauren uh Laurel Conan Alder arts council assistant director. Sorry for you know all of the blame on my English. Uh so thank you. It is your time, Sylvia.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is uh as you mentioned, the arts council briefing, which is a division of the community and neighborhood development department. This division supports, local artists, arts organizations, and cultural programs. Um, it is funded through the general fund and arts foundation contributions and includes nine full-time employees plus part-time and seasonal staff. The proposed budget for the arts council is 1,ion200, excuse me, 1,275,844, which is a reduction of 5.8% as compared to fiscal year 2026. As a result of proposed cuts, the division may need to consider cancelling smaller programming events, which Tammy just mentioned in the CAN budget, and Felicia or Laurel will address in their presentation. the arts council, the CAN department, the mayor's office provided information during small group meetings and transmitts earlier this year uh in response to council member questions and the adoption of a legislative intent to review the arts council's funding, programming, and priorities. And with that, I'd like to turn the time over to Felicia and Laurel.

Thanks, Sylvia. Um, thank you all for having us here and I want to thank some of our board members and staff for being present. Um, we know this is a year with really difficult decisions for the administration and council and I want to just say as of this organization for the past eight years. Um, we've had a lot of conversations about how we do things and what we facilitate, but I have never once had to doubt the administration or council's belief in the power of arts as essential to the social, cultural, and economic fabric of our city. And um, this isn't the case everywhere and we never take this for granted. Um, we've had a banner year and we're so excited to share it with you today. Um throughout this presentation we'll refer to a number of items in your transmittal and council questions. Next slide. Um this year we completed a public private partnership that raised $1.4 4 million including the largest singular grant to our organization for public art with over 100,000 attendees, 13 projects in every city council district and over 50 events and broad international press including the New York Times. We started eight Capitol Public Art projects this year, more than any year in the last decade, with many more in progress and more on that later. We were selected as a national partner of the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival for Living Traditions, the nation's most renowned folk festival, and tripled our fundraising goals. And we hope you'll all join us starting tomorrow. Despite higher venue costs and reduced capacity during the transition to the Civic Center, the Twilight Concert Series, an 8% increase in ticket sales from 2024 to 2025. The series continues to activate downtown and the civic campus while remaining affordable and accessible to residents who might not

otherwise have the opportunity. According to an economic impact study last season, the series generated more than $1.6 $6 million in downtown economic activity, continued to support the careers of local emerging artists, and even drew a surprise appearance from Post Malone, whose tickets are an average of $150 to $700 in Salt Lake City right now. As part of our continued goals to reach new residents, this is evidenced by 23% of our grant applications being new firsttime applicants. And lastly, at the council's request, we conducted a review of annual mural production in five comparable cities and found that our program produced 33% more murals than the cities included in the comparison. And more to come on that. Next slide. We just because we're an arts organization wanted to share some images of what we do. This is Olifer Aliasen's uh Symphony of Disappearing Sounds of the Great Salt Lake at Memory Grove, which served 25,000 diverse residents, the Living Traditions Festival, and then one of our public art projects, Life on State, serving emerging artists. Next slide. uh our Twilight concert series with our appearance from Post Malone, our new ballpark mural program and um bike rack murals in the foothill trails. Next slide. This is a image of some of the programs that our city project grants support murals at Liberty Park and a park um or a public art project in the fair park that was recent. Next slide. So from our conversations last year and for those of you that might be newer, we thought it would be good to res revisit our organization's structure as it relates to the budget. A go we are a

governmental nonprofit as defined by state code, which is an independent nonprofit that receives most of its funding from various public entities. We were created in 1976 as a missionalign nonprofit advancing shared civic goals while maximizing and leveraging public and private investment. In 2020, the structure was re-evaluated and Salt Lake City reaffirmed the implementation and impact of this structure with the administration and move forward to fortify it with an annual operating agreement and public benefit analysis. We are governed by this operating agreement with Salt Lake City in a non-EP departmental contract. We undergo an annual um independent audit that's integrated into the city's audit and we report and are accountable to state, county, and federal entities as well as several other private foundations. We have 64 private funders across our programs. This year to really simplify this structure, it looks like two arms. The Arts Council Foundation operates programs including the Finch Lane Gallery, Living Traditions, Busker Festival, Poet Laurette, City Arts Grant, among others. And we also support non-C capital components of public art here. City public art funding rests on the city side of operations and includes CIP funding as well as the facilitation of many other funds for public art outside our division. Next slide. Part of this oversight structure is two primary boards. The Arts Council Board oversees foundation policy, budget, and strategic oversight and acts as an advisory body to the city and mayor on arts. And the art design board recommends public art projects for mayoral approval by ordinance. Next slide. So with the non-EP departmental funding that we receive, we think about it as going into three different buckets. the city arts grants, the public programming which we've talked about which includes things like living traditions and

twilight and busker and then facility maintenance of our beloved little 1930 uh home. Next slide please. We raise on average and we're really proud of this 30 cents on every taxpayer dollar except for the last four or five years we've raised 55 to 65 uh% of our total budget and we again we have over 64 private funders for our programming this year. Next slide. We are examining a number of strategies to incorporate the budget cut and those have already been discussed a couple of times today. Uh we are looking at cutting the bus busker festival which happens at the end of May. Jordan River strolls is a part of this program. Mondays in the park the city arts grants could see a reduction and other supplemental public art would be just the outreach that happens align aligned with that. uh we will work hard to maintain the service levels and quality that we have. Uh the criteria that we are considering is in the orange box. We are preserving programs with high impact of heart of artists and public served. We're maintaining diversity of programming to preserve grant funders. We are preserving revenue generating programs. We will consider recommendations of course from you and from our board uh based on our strategic plan. We will consider eliminating programs with escalating costs in the future and we are considering what other services are being provided with similar offerings extern external to the city. Next slide. So, we also uh wanted to talk about our public funding because our public funding makes up about 30% of our raised

dollars. So, we get a significant grant from the zoo arts and parks fund. Uh the zoo arts and parks fund has two tiers and we are in the tier one group and the tier one group uh make up the the largest of the cultural entities in this in the city. For example, um Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Tracy Aviary, Redbute Gardens are all tier one organizations. We are the only local arts agency which is a spec special designation within that tier. And in terms of the formula for the way tier one organizations are funded, it's based on two things. It's based on a on a qualifying expenditure and then the services that we offer. They do look at the narrative that we provide on the on the diversity of the programs that we offer. And this year we uh got about $215,000 in that grant. The Utah Division of Arts and Museums is the state funding and we are defined as the only local arts agency within Salt Lake City. Uh the state defines a local arts agency as an agency that provides diverse programming and also can provide grants, short-term policy create supporting policy creation and public art. The this LAA status could change if we had large shifts in our mission and funding could be the basis for a reduced grant award. If we were to significantly change the breadth of our programming or serve considerably fewer residents, that could also impact our award. Additionally, the state is already anticipating a reduction in their FY27 general operating support grants of 30% due to a change in the funding that the state received from that the state received from the legislature. And that's going to result in approximately

a $14,000 cut to us this year. Uh we received federal funding. Uh it's a grant specifically for the Living Traditions Festival and the federal administration under President Trump has again uh requested or proposed complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts which is where that funding comes from. We're hopeful that this will be uh again a bipartisan supported National Endowment for the Arts uh effort and and that it has it has survived previous cuts. We are hopeful it will survive this uh this recommendation. Uh and in recent years we have averaged between 25 20 to $45,000. So we are hoping to again see something like that next year. Uh it's also important to know that all this government funding uh these sources compose again 30% of our non-EP departmental funds but we are pro prohibited from spending any of these grant funds on public capital expend expenditures. Next slide. Now, we're going to transition to focusing specific on public art um centered on some of our conversations that we've hope had over the last year. Um so again coming the Japan town mural, the new u mural to come on out of the blue and then the another image of the ballpark murals. Next slide. So in this slide, as you can see, we partner and leverage many funds in the city for public art, and investment in dollars has been steadily increasing. As I mentioned, in FY26, we started more individual projects than in any past decade with over 15 projects or so in process right now. And we also created a

very much needed maintenance fund in 2022. Um, please note in this chart that percent for art funding is in red. So, this is the only fund within our own budget, the jurisdiction of our own budget. Um, we're incredibly grateful to all our partners in the CRA and public lands and enterprise funds and many others that support these efforts in the city for us to facil facilitate as an agency on our behalf. Um, and that CIP funding, you'll see it here, distributed in the in the year that the project starts, but again, we're looking at, I believe this year we were at about $151,000. Next slide. So, we're gonna Oh, you

get to I get to share the good news about the murals and the challenge that you gave us to look at our uh the cities that surround us and some of the things that are that have been done there. This is a photo of the of one of the uh murals in the ballpark, the 10 murals that were uh were um commissioned this fall. Next slide. So, we're actually really grateful that you invited us to look at uh what uh other mural programs are doing uh and how we could aspire to them. Uh because we are thrilled to share that we are actually doing really well in terms of our of of comparisons. uh we looked at five Utah cities and we had 33% more murals in terms of the annual murals produced uh in that report done by an outside uh consultant. Um so this slide highlights some of the murals that are complete and some that are in progress. So uh we partnered with Love Your Block and in your meeting materials there are photos of some of these of the Love Your Blocks murals from the last year. Uh the 33% higher number doesn't include any of the photo any of those love your block projects although we love working with love your blocks and we do collaborate with them. We just wanted to make sure you were aware of those. Uh we adapted our grants program in order to fast track a funding tool for murals through the grants and this year we had four murals funded through that. And then in yellow you can see the murals that were completed this year. Uh we had one uh permanent with Bloomberg and uh two temporary murals. Uh we had the 10 ballpark murals and then we had the blocks mural that we partnered with.

Uh we have that we are coming up this year. We have Japan Town that was recently announced and it was in an earlier slide. Uh we have the pop the Popular Grove pickle ball court. We have the Jordan River Parkway is going to be receiving four murals. North Temple will be receiving six murals. And then uh I know it's a different surface, but out of the blue, the whale is going to get a a facelift and that is considered a mural as well. Uh and then we also are working on donations. So, I'm going to talk a little bit more about that, but we are in the process of uh accepting the rack into our collection or the rack collective into our collection. Okay, next slide. One quick question.

Just one quick question. Uh mostly for bragging rights. Uh you said you compared uh Salt Lake City mural production to five peer cities. What were those five peer cities? We like bragging rights, too. Uh so we have South Salt Lake, Murray, Midvale, Provo, and I'm blanking. Uh, it's in your cap. Ogden. Did you say Ogden? No, I did say Ogden. So, Ogden. I'm glad that somebody smarter here is good. What was the total of murals that you you're using?

Uh, those cities had a total annual production of 12 at its highest point annually. Collectively, they have more than that because some of them have had programs in the past, but of recent year totals, 12 is the most. And so again, ours were 33% higher, but not including any of the love your block efforts or even the facade improvement program that we partner with in the city. Yeah. So you're comparing you're comparing how many murals they're producing is per just a total number. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, SA Lake is the size of a council district actually smaller than a council district here, right? And they're creating 10 every year. But that is a good point of comparison. I like where the trend that we're we're seeing.

Yeah. And they do have um a really high quantity uh geography and kind of physical landscape is important. High high um quantity of light industrial manufacturing buildings and less buildings that have historical requirements not to be painted or uh property owners that um are vigilant about um not having murals that may be beloved and that are torn down that affects development. So there's some factors that are hard to compare there.

Yeah. Uh the next slide is was taken this week. Uh this is Cosmo and Cosmo is uh in his new home. I think it's a a he is in his new home and we are really thrilled that he is uh that he's landed and and there's some fun stuff coming up with uh announcing that as well. Next slide. So we have received feedback this year that there uh that we could do better and we are trying to do faster more and better. Uh but we are trying to streamline some processes to make our public art processes more accessible. Uh and I want to just walk you through a few of the things that we've been working on. So we facilitated more donations of artwork to the city. We've talked about Cosmo and the rack. We also uh are happy that down the hall we have Martha Hughes Cannon now living in this building. Uh we and this is a a statutory process for accepting a donation. Um, next we have drafted city a citywide guide for internal departments and community members to aid in the facilitation of community sponsored public art. Uh, the 14 council project or the $14,000 through the legislative intent in the seven council districts is well underway and it will be completed this year. We are actively working to structure a tri-governmental partnership with the state and county to facilitate public private partnership for public art to be placed in Salt Lake City. And this uh Robert Love Robert Indiana love sculpture is an example of that effort. We are currently working on both loaning out and borrowing artwork at city hall. And as a reminder, we are we helped ensure the public benefit funding for public art in the downtown entertainment, cultural, and convention district for public art in the coming

years totaling no less than $5 million. So that is coming up as well. Next slide, please. So there's also a list contained in your transmitt of ways that we're hoping to work more closely together in the future. But I wanted to share some potential mechanisms that other larger cities have in place that could be a model for our city in the future when they expand their public art programs. These are tools um of course we'd have to consider with our city family. Um we could expand the percent for art program to enterprise funds. Um right now we do have that program that we partnered with the CRA on and we could formalize it with other enterprise funds. Um we do not have a percent for art program within the transportation or streets budgets. Many cities do. Um there are planning and development based incentives that we could develop for concessions on planning and zoning where we could um require allocations for public art. We do this with the CRA. Um, many cities have impact fees with required cultural allocations. And as we build more business improvement districts in the city, we have an incredible partnership of course with our downtown alliance, but for things like Sugar House coming online, we can um uh request requirements for cultural uh programs in there. Next slide. And looking ahead for the rest of the budget year, um this is an installation coming to Pioneer Park which states the name of the park but when viewed from other perspectives is modeled on uh different languages and their various patterns. Next slide. The following public art projects are projected for completion in FY27 with many more not listed here coming in 2028 like Fleet Block, Glendale, Fairmont, and Mlen. But we'll have Pioneer Park,

the Donner Trail Park coming on, 20 sculptures in 20 different bond parks, the reinstallation of the goals of Salt Lake City with the CRA, and um again many more projects. Next slide. Other milestones for budget that we're looking forward to is our CIP project for the Finch Lane Gallery renovations, launching the poet laurette program fully reinvisioning the mayor's artist awards in the 40th anniversary of our twilight concert series. Um we're again thankful to be here and looking forward to working together more in the future and um we appreciate the constructive feedback that we've received and we're happy to answer any questions. some members. President

appreciate all the work. Uh we all need art. So, uh I I really do appreciate all the work you're doing and and the transformation from, you know, the concerts right here on the civic center. So, that's that was a great uh I mean, I know we had to make the move, but it also it seemed like it was uh still great rep venue and it and it worked out well. So, We were kind of worried there a bit, but I'm appreciate for that. And I and I also appreciate all the the murals and the and the public art. Um, you know, if you ever go to a city that doesn't have any art, you really realize that

there's a lack of beauty in it. So, any big city and any good city has good art. So, I appreciate your work and and uh providing us for the art and the music. Thank you. Thanks. Uh, my questions relate to performing arts. Um the Twilight series I mean we're approaching the 40 maybe the 40th year of the Twilight series. That's correct. Uh Select City has changed a lot since you know you know for for the last 40 years and I will well think that is a tradition to select city. I would love to dig in a little more about um you know the revenue that this uh this uh this series creates.

Sure. um the cost um as far as what you know really cost us in and and in and salaries and and putting it together. Also, I would like to dig in a little more about the economic impact that the numbers the economic impact that you mentioned.

Absolutely. Uh and and dig in a little more about that. I I know that we're now competing with other venues and other concert series in in Salt Lake City. Uh, and I'm not sure while I really appreciate I attended my myself to Twilight before I joined the council. Now, uh, I I wonder if the role of the city has shifted a little bit about this. And I, again, I value the work. I value the the the series. I wonder if uh, the role in the last, you know, almost 40 years has changed a little bit. um and if the place of select city is to compete with other concert venues and other concert series. Uh and um but again so that information will be awesome for me. Um I appreciate the presentation. Uh I appre appreciate big time the the change uh and the direction uh the transparency uh and the work that you have put on uh and your team has put on to to level up the the the department the division sorry not the department.

Um so any information about those things will be great.

I can speak to that right now. Okay. So, um, some of you might remember, I'm looking at you, um, that the Twilight concert series used to be produced in house and it was an economic challenge on the city. In, uh, 2019, I believe, I was tasked with restructuring the way that program ran. So, we produced the series with a private vendor. The cost of that program, of course, since those times, um, has increased the total cost like for Twilight Concert Series. Um, in total for that program, this is not what we pay, but for total production of that concert series, it's about $1.2 to $1.3 million. We pay $180,000 on a contract to get the same value for the residents of Salt Lake City. So, outside our staff salaries that help facilitate that program, it's a $180,000 contract. Um the economic impact uh is generated from a study that we participate in within an organization nationally called Americans for the Arts. And we participate in that study um with the state, with the county, with the cultural corps and many entities nationally to generate the impact, the economic impact of attending nonprofit arts events in cities. The last study we participated in was in 2022. And the way that we generate this number is that it's based on the average per person's spending. When a resident comes downtown, they're taking public transportation. They're getting babysitters. They're going to food. They're getting they're going to bars. They're um patronizing places downtown. And um based on the attendance of the Twilight Concert Series in that series, which is 41,000 people, we that's how the math is created of generating the economic impact of the series. Um, and we do think the program is unique. As I

mentioned, Post Malone tickets right now are $150 to $700. Most concerts in the cities are about $70 to $80 for nationally touring bands. We do think that gathering and belonging for music experiences of of course you can do that in the city, but the uniqueness of this program is the affordability and the accessibility. Um, another feat that we pull off with this program, which most national bands do not um, favor, is allowing local musicians to open for them. We're really about professional development and launching the careers of u, young artists in the community. And this is a key component of that program. And third, like tour tourism and economic um, livability of downtown. Um, that's a really important part of the program. It's been important to us that that program stays downtown for those reasons. It's close to public transportation. So, we we do believe the program is very unique in in its accessibility for residents where they might not have opportunity.

Sorry about that sound. This is not It's okay. The sound in the in those microphones somehow it just like cuts out and it comes back immediately. So,

and and I'll just say with performing arts and the programs that we have proposed for potential elimination, we really are looking at services that are duplicative in the community potentially um services that have the escalating costs in the future, which we've identified the busker fest as that. um and uh ones that other again service providers could do and ones that don't um jeopardize our grant funding in terms of people served and impact and and the funders that we have many of our programs are bundled with certain funders as well. So again that criteria is how we made that determination.

Yeah. Will you expand a little bit maybe uh I'm not sure how how many uh employees uh you know do help with with the putting together of the of the uh of the concert series. Oh. Um, yeah, we have one um staff designated for performing arts on our team which um does a variety of of programs. Um, Living Traditions, Busker Festival, Mondays in the Park, performing arts generally. Um, as I mentioned, Twilight, um, and Buskerfest are also contracted services for us. So, they're um, they can be a little bit more low touch, but we we all work across all our programs. So, there's a number of staff that have a different role in Twilight.

Okay. Any other questions? Everybody's very quiet. Okay. I think we're good. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you,

council members. We have We're almost done. So, let's uh five minutes behind. That's not too terrible. Um let's uh move on to item number six. Um cultural co summary uh on the blocks update. Um we're going to welcome Sylvia Richards uh again at the table and she's staying at the table. And we're going to uh welcome Lucas Horns, the blocks program manager. D Brewer, Downtown Alliance executive director. Is your time Sylvia?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Um, this briefing is an update on the block B blocks arts district, formerly known as the cultural corps. The blocks is a city and county initiative focused on growing and celebrating Salt Lake City's creative community. This is a review of year 9 and um a preview of the plan for year 10. And with that, I will um pass the baton on to Lucas and D and Felicia if she still wanted to participate.

Okay. Hi, council. Uh great to see you all. I'm excited to report on what the blocks has been up to for the last year and give you a preview of what we have on the horizon. Uh first off, I want to introduce myself. I realize I'm a new face since you last had this briefing about a year ago. My name is Lucas Horns and I took over for Britney Helmers as program director of the blocks about six months ago. Uh, next slide, please. So, as you all know, the blocks is a visionary initiative of the city and county to promote downtown Salt Lake City as the premier arts and culture destination of the Inter Mountain West. Next slide, please. Our boundaries per our contract with the cultural corps run roughly from 600 west to 300 east and north temple to 400 south. Next slide, please. Our team is made up of myself and Kai Henrikson. He regrets not being able to be here today. He's taking a muchneeded vacation to visit some family in Colorado. Next slide, please. Our cultural core budget committee is made up of eight members. These are representatives from the city and the county. A lot of these names are familiar to you. Those uh names on the left are your city representatives. Those on the right are the county representatives. Next slide, please. Oh, and just to note, we meet every two months. Uh the cultural core budget committee uh monitors our spending and ensures that our our programs and spending are meeting the goals of the cultural core action plan. So, what are the goals of the cultural core action plan? As much as I hate reading off of a slide, uh I think these are all really thoughtful and important and I think that our our programming really touches on all eight of these. So, I'm going to go through them quickly. One, celebrate and promote Salt Lake's rich array of arts and cultural activities and experiences. Two, support increased collaboration and creative development among Salt Lake's creative community. Three, enhance Salt Lake's brand and

support increased visitation from the region and inner mountain west. Four, expand and diversify audiences for Salt Lake's arts and culture. Five, foster downtown as an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming place. Six, support downtown residential growth. Seven, enhance the downtown business environment. And eight, enrich the urban experience and sense of place. These are lofty goals, and so I want to go over how we're achieving these goals. Next slide, please. I've really boiled our work down into three focus areas. First of all is our programming and events. We put on a lot of our own programming, activations, public art to add to the arts offerings in downtown Salt Lake. And just to note that we really focus almost entirely on producing free all ages programming as not all arts organizations are able to offer this downtown and we see it as a really important niche to fill in in downtown's arts offerings. Secondly is marketing and promotion. We have over two dozen arts organizations who are consistently performing or exhibiting in downtown. This is the highest concentration of arts activity in the region and we want to amplify all the work going on so the community really recognizes downtown as an arts destination. Between our combined followers with the downtown alliance, we have about 300,000 followers between newsletter subscribers and social media followers. And all 300,000 of these folks get updates weekly about all the fun events and things happening in downtown. And lastly, fostering collaboration. As part of the downtown alliance, we see ourselves as a really unique player as an arts organization that also has really intimate, meaningful ties to the business community. We like to bring stakeholders into the same room that are business owners, property owners, as well as arts organizations to really recognize that a thriving arts environment does uplift the business community downtown. Next slide, please. I want to go over some metrics. Um, and just a note that I'm reporting metrics

on the calendar year. Our programming runs during the warmer months. And so it's important that we report on a calendar year because as we're expanding and introducing new programs, we're doing that planning on the calendar year. And so to measure the efficacy and uh impact that these new programs, expansions, new campaigns have, it's important that we do it on a calendar year, although our fiscal year does run same day as yours, July to June. So looking back on 2025 in numbers, we put on 26 events and activations. That was up 17% from 2024. We commissioned seven works of public art downtown. That was up 40% from 2024. We hired 140 artists and performers from the local community, up 82% from the year before. And lastly, we Arctics venues sold about 750,000 tickets. This is not our programming, but we use it as an important metric to gauge the health of the general art scene downtown. You'll notice those ticket sales are down 8% from 2024, and I'll go over why that is uh in a later slide. It's not concerning, don't worry. Next slide, please. Looking at our marketing in 2025, we posted to social media 1.4,000 times to our 300,000 followers. We sent out 52 weekly newsletters. This is our this week downtown series written by the downtown Josh Jones. These newsletters have a 40% open rate which if you know anything about newsletters is pretty remarkable and a testament to the the value people find in in these newsletters. Next slide please. We were in the press quite a bit this year uh for our different uh or last year, excuse me, for our different uh some of our public art commissions as well as activations we were doing on Main Street. Next slide. And now I want to talk about show a little bit of data to back up the the

impact that our programming had last year. Uh this is showing home distance by mile by miles from downtown for people who visited Arctic's venues. So on the uh y-axis there you have the percent of visitors to Arctic's venues. That's Capital Theater, Abraven Hall, Eckles Theater, and Rose Wagner. These are not all the arts venues downtown, but they're representative of where people are coming from to visit arts in downtown. On the x-axis, you have their home distance by miles. So you can see that about a third are coming from within 10 miles. Another third are coming from 10 to 30 m and still another third are coming from more than 30 miles away with a lot coming from over 250 mi away. What this data is showing is that we are achieving our goal of establishing downtown as a regional arts destination um with so many visitors coming from from across the region and frankly across the country. Please

just a quick question. This is a an really interesting um chart. Can you explain, you know, maybe some of the reasons for the 250 mi uh radius in terms of more people coming from from that radius versus 30 to 50, 50 to 100 or 100 to 250?

Yeah, absolutely. That's because that includes the entire country. And so, um, we have a lot of, we have, we had visitors from all 50 states, uh, buy tickets to our arts venues. And so, 250 mi to 2,000 miles is a much bigger area than 150 to 250 mi, if that makes sense. So, that's why there's there's such a large number coming from 250. I'll just I'll pipe in with what I know from the so I serve on the board of the Eckles Theater and so we dove into a little bit of the of because we were seeing kind of similar trends. I actually think it's a credit to the national level of acts both music and you know Broadway kind of touring performance and the value that you get as in terms of like comparing if you're going to go see a Broadway show in Chicago versus here the value of Salt Lake City it's a much cheaper place to go and so we're seeing that a lot of people are choosing to see those national touring acts because of the Echo Theater is more affordable than seeing in San Francisco or you know somewhere like that

100% and it speaks to our local arts organizations as well. Ballet West is at par with any ballet company you can see as well as the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera and the ticket price is going to be a lot cheaper and you're going to have a much more enjoyable stay depending on which city you're going to. Next slide, please. So, once these these visitors are coming from across the region and coming into our downtown, they're not just visiting our arts venues, they're spending money in our downtown. We know arts are an economic driver. Last year in 2025, 317,000 of the visits generated by our downtown Arctics venues, uh those visitors went to re restaurants or retail directly before or after visiting the theater. This data comes from Placer AI, just as a as a side note. Um but that's showing that that the arts are attracting visitors and those visitors are not just coming for the arts. They're coming into downtown to to put their money into the local economy. Next slide, please. Now I want to get to those Arctics ticket sales trends. Um so as you can see over the last four years those numbers have gone up and down quite a bit. This is actually more due to the variability in the number of shows at the Eckles Theater. Eckles Theater relies on a lot of touring shows. Um and that number just varies greatly from year to year. If we take Eckles out of the equation, next slide please. and we look at just Capital Theater, a Braven Hall and Rose Wagner Theater. You can see that there is a steady incline in ticket sales year-over-year, including from 2024 to 2025. Next slide, please. I want to quickly go through some highlights from 2025 of in terms of our programming. Next slide. 2025 was the second year of our co-create program. This is our artist and residence program where we invite artists to envision a placemaking project in the downtown. We had five projects last year including Echoes of

the Great Salt Lake. This was a new symphony piece performed on Gal Gallivan Plaza inspired by the Great Salt Lake. Next slide. We had Sonder SLC. This was a photo gallery that's still on display in the Vicilius Prriscos Walkway by artist Kelly Freshman. Next slide, please. Little Stages was a program invisioned by local community organizer Tim Sullivan who wanted to create these pop-up stages that were easy for buskers to carry around the city and set up to essentially build mobile concert venues. Next slide. Absolutely amazing animals was a large-scale mural uh produced by artist Dallas Graham on the back of a parking garage on Edison Street. Next slide. And the day of the dead festival was put on by local muralist Betto Kanejo that brought around 200 attendees to Feice Gallery for for a large festival. Next slide. Moving on from co-create. 2025 was also the second year of our step-in on Main program. These are the free concerts put on on the front steps of the Eckles Theater every Friday night from June through September. These performances range from anywhere from jazz to Brazilian dance to drum groups and everything in between. Next slide. We also put on the uh third annual mariachi fest at the Eckles Theater, bringing four mariachi groups, one national from New York and three local mariachi groups. Next slide. Curbside theater was a partnership with SB Dance. We programmed that show on the rooftop of a parking garage on Pure Pont Avenue. This offered a really cool venue and a free dance performance in downtown with sweeping views of the mountains in city skyline. Next slide. And lastly, we continued our urban plane air program. We brought uh 19 artists to the farmers market to paint scenes that they saw at the market and then sell their work at a pop-up gallery at the market the following week. Next slide, please. I

want to talk about some of our programming we have on the uh horizon in 2026. Now, next slide. We're continuing co-create again this year, and I'm really excited to announce the three projects we've selected. The Wish Exchange Place will be an uh installation that will be interactive on Exchange Place up for three months uh by artists Alejandra Moya and Kathy Tran. Bees Around the Block is a series of sculptures on Main Street envisioned by uh urban planner and designer Landon Krazik. Standing room only is it will be a series of dance performances as well as installations at former theater sites in downtown. This is by local choreographer and dancer Constance. Next slide. Fridays on Maine. This is an expansion of our stepping on Main program. So I'm really excited to include two more stages in addition to the steps of the Eckles Theater. We'll have a second stage at the um at where Gallivan Center intersects Main Street and a third stage at Exchange Place. So, we're going to put live music and dance performance up and down Main Street every Friday night from June through September. Next slide. The Art Garden. This is a popup art exhibition and beer garden held at the site of the former Utah Theater on Main Street between 100 South and 200. This um is a partnership with the Utah Utah Museum of Contemporary Art who will be be building out two uh art exhibi exhibitions and we'll be partnering with local breweries to serve beer. And although there's beer, this space is still all ages. Next slide. Urban plane air. We're expanding this program as well. Uh we're relieving the market and we're bringing 30 artists to paint 30 iconic buildings around downtown Salt Lake. Their art will then be displayed in the windows of the buildings that they feature. Next slide. We'll also be expanding our curbside theater program to additional performances on parking garage rooftops because this is such a unique interesting place for a a show like this. Uh we're we'll be moving over to

the parking garage right here at the echo uh excuse me on exchange place that offers really beautiful views of this building in the mountains as you can see there. Next slide. Curtain up. This is a firstofits-kind event to celebrate the start of the 2026 2027 arts season. This will bring all arts organizations programming in the downtown into one under one roof. Uh to to celebrate the start of the season, we'll be screening a short film that previews each art organization's upcoming season from the ballet to the opera to modern dance companies to Yumoka and everyone in between. This will be on September 8th. I'll be sure to send you an invite soon. Next slide, please. And then we have some really exciting marketing campaigns um really painting the picture of downtown as a arts destination showing the breadth and diversity of artists working in downtown and public art that we have here in downtown. So be sure to follow us on socials to to keep up with those campaigns. Next slide. And so much more. I don't want to go into these too much detail. Our programming is quite extensive, but we have continued ongoing programs such as our exhibitions on Maine where we display public art on Main Street on our kiosks. We loan assets to artists like lighting, sound systems, stage for free if they're working downtown. And then we've done a number of partner events um already some of these occurred this year such as signs was a block party we did with Sundance and Feice Gallery during the Sundance Film Festival. Cir Kickass was a circus performance we put on at Gallivan Center with Utah Presents. Uh Mariachi Fest will be happening again on June 20th. Pogo Fest is a multi- venue music festival that will be also happening on June 20th. Uh we'll be putting up an outdoor stage as part of that festival on Exchange Place. The Cycle Nation installation is up right now in the Vicilus Prriscos Walkway. I recommend going and checking it out at night. It's a cool interactive uh

sculpture that lights up when you crank these hand cranks. And the Bakau installation will be displayed next month uh on a Bravo Plaza. This is a collaboration with the Gina Bachau Foundation. We'll be building a large-scale sculpture built out of pianos for that. Next slide, please. These are our partners that we're working with on all of these programs. They range from property owners to developers to businesses and of course the majority of the arts groups working downtown. Next slide. I wanted to offer just a really high overview of our budget for FY27 which begins on July 1. Um you will be receiving in a transmitt a more detailed breakdown of our budget. This budget was approved by the cultural core budget committee just this week. Um but we also found out just this week that we'll be receiving open streets funding. Thank you very much. And we're excited to apply that and expand the exciting programming we have this summer even more. So the the new budget you you will receive will will reflect that additional funding as well. Next slide. And with that, I'll turn it over to you all for any questions. Council members, I put a minute in my mouth so I can barely speak. Um no. And will you expand a little bit on the open streets funding? Um I'm a little confused about that. thought we made some, you know, there was some changes regarding the open um the temple opening and whatnot, but is that a proposed

So, I think I think it's my understanding that some funds within uh the city and potentially was open streets was redirected to other programming and in budget amendment 4, you all approved an additional $100,000 go to the blocks contract. So not exactly open streets programming but to the mission of the blocks. Sorry for the confusion. We did aund I think that in last year's budget we did a little but I guess it's the current year. It was a budget on me and I I could it was my understanding it was redirected. I could be misspeaking but it was in BA4 the extra 100.

That that helps. Um he's nodding. Okay, we have a Okay, that helps a lot. Um, it I will uh it's impressive the amount of work that you're doing with with the funding that you're getting. So, I you know, I'd love to see more more more fun things uh happening on POP and downtown um and to see more activation in our in our city. So, uh impressive work. Any No, just thanks. Okay. No, I see some hands. Uh, I don't know which one was first, so I'm going to give um time to council member Petro first.

Thank you and thanks for the work. Um, the numbers on the performances and the statistics that you gave, are any of those redundant with what we saw from the arts council? And if not, how do we decide who gets to count what as part of their programming or does everyone just get to claim it because we contributed to it? Yeah, that's a really good question. Yeah. So the events and activations that I was counting for 2025 and 2024 were blocks produced events and activations where a blocks staff member was present. So uh they there shouldn't be redundancy between anything that this arts council produced. Thank you so much. That's really encouraging to hear. Yeah.

One and one mural. That's the only redundancy I'm speaking for. Uh, Felicia and Felicia for one second. Uh, Council Wharton. Um, thank you for that presentation. Um, Lucas, that was really comprehensive and I'm really excited about um all the programming that's that's happening and um and what we're going to be able to continue to do. and just wanted to congratulate you in this new role and um we look forward to uh working with you as one of the partners.

Thank you. And the last question I have um relates how do you get 40% of people to open your newsletter because no one opens ours. So any tips for the council? It's amazing. If you're not already subscribed to it, it's a really well-written newsletter that has a lot of whimsy in it that I think people look forward to every week. So, it's it's a it's a credit to Josh Jones's writing. I think we need whimsy. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Oh, no. Chris, do you have more questions? Oh, sorry. I think it's probably gone.

Um, council members, this uh concludes that portion of the agenda. We're going to move on to the reported announcements from the executive director, Lehua. The V team here. Um the V team. Not quite. Um always the we have uh Linda came and passed out a handout. And this is something that we did when the council had um the last vacancy. Um and Cindy Lou may come up to the table so that she can help me uh correct. She will correct me if I say anything not quite right and she will make sure the record is clear.

You can throw the hand sanitizer towards us. Yeah. Do you want to Okay. So, this is an important update.

This is an important update. This is to confirm the timeline for filling the vacancy in district 4. Uh the timeline has been created based on a conversation with actually the three of the members here in person um during the chair vice chair meeting on Tuesday. Um the calendar is a visual look of what I would run through in this outline handout that you have as well just to confirm. Um if it's okay I'll just read through this and you guys can stop me if you have questions. Um so the the process basically is um outlined in state code and it requires that the council would receive applications and conduct interviews with eligible applicants and then um select a new council member within 30 days. Um based on the way the counting works out uh Wednesday was day one and the 30-day would 30 days would end on June 11th. Um, because of the number of meetings that the council already has on your calendar, uh, due to the budget, I don't anticipate that you would need to add any new council meetings. Uh, but you can confirm that for me as we walk through this. Um, there's also been a question, so I just wanted to go over a little bit of general info. There's been a question just about how it works. when council member Young was selected and appointed to fill the vacancy in district 7 there um she needed to hold elections because of the amount of time left in the term in this situation because there is less than two years left in the in the term. Whoever you appoint will serve the remainder of the term and then elections will still be held in fall of 2027 for the next term um beginning in January of 2028. Uh the recorders office will also post the applications um on the website once they have been or

the names of the applicant and the paperwork on a website once those applicants have um the eligibility has been verified. So, that information is available to the public um along with also a conflict of interest form. Um, and we'll see how this plays out in your timeline down below. But just wanted to note um Cindy Lou pointed out that there's a new state code requirement that conflict of interest forms would be placed and available online for 7 days before the council appoints the new candidate. So, that is another extension that needs to be accounted for in our 30 days. Could uh are we allowed to request the the conflict of interest form with the application?

Exactly. It will be so it's it's so yeah they won't be a valified a verified candidate until they submit that. Okay. So it's part of the process. It will be part of the application. Okay.

Okay. And then also you'll you um will have a resolution placed on one of your upcoming agendas that just cl addresses um the voting circum different voting circumstances. It's a new state code requirement as well that that information is um formally adopted so that everyone knows what to expect about how voting will occur. So, I'll just run through the dates. Um as we said, May 13th, yesterday, Wednesday, May 13th was day one. Um and so from that time, uh our office, Cindy Lou and the recorder's office, Keith and his staff have been coordinating on getting an ad posted. Um there is a requirement for a legal ad to be placed in the paper. It will be placed with the Salt Lake Tribune um and it and Utah legals. Um and it basically outlines what the timeline will be when application the application period opens, when it closes, and when the council anticipates you might hold the interviews and make um an appointment. Um, so in that time, not only will the public notice go out, but also um the your council staff communications team will kick into gear. Um, there's a there will be social media posts, website updates. Um, they have a vacancy hub website that goes through and explains a lot of the information that people can expect. We also take emails from anyone who wants to receive notification as we proc progress through this process and also notice will be posted in the city building. Um and the recorders office is also able to post that in the district 4 library and other community gathering spaces too. So I I would say we will go ahead and do those steps but you guys can tell me if you don't want any of those things to happen. Could we add an additional things?

Yeah, of course. Um, could we uh can we ensure that the newsletter on the social media pages for the district specific are updated so those that are in that email list and they're following those pages of course get it get the nudge.

Yep. Absolutely. We will do that. So, the application period would begin next Monday, May 18th, and then it would extend through Monday, June 1st, at 5:00 p.m. The council's past policy and practice has been to keep the application period open for two weeks. So, that is that twoe period, especially given that there's a holiday in the middle of it. Um the application um obviously will follow the state code requirements for what information needs to be provided. And then in the last time that the council held this process, we also included three to four questions on the application that the applicants would provide written answers to when they turn in their application. Um, I'm going to keep going, but I have a question for you on when the application period closes, but we'll come back to that. Um given applications being completed and provided to the council, um if the application period closes on Monday, June 1st, then realistically those would be the recorder's office could provide a complete packet of all of the applications to you by Tuesday morning on June 2nd. Given that, do you want to consider having interviews held on Thursday, June 4th, or do you want to wait and see how many applications you have to review and then decide on an interview and appointment schedule? I think it would have to be on the number of applications we have, but even on a Thursday, even if it's just only a few, uh I almost think that we need more time, especially that's the and because we have the budget going on also that I would recommend the 9th as a first date that we could actually interview it and select.

Yeah. And the reason that's helpful too, just to insert, is this 7-day conflict of interest posting requirement. If you wanted to definitely plan on Thursday, June 4th, we would want to change the application close date. So the nine will meet that, right? Because if the applications end on the on the first, that that will be enough time for that piece. Nine seems to seems reasonable to me. Um, okay. I think we got Sarah's Sarah's nodding. Yes. Okay. Okay, that's perfect. And then that also allows you flexibility for me too.

Thank you. It also allows you flexibility if you did need to delay the final appointment until for one more night for whatever reason, then you would have until the that Thursday the 11th. So you we we'll just kind of reserve that as 9th and 11th. Okay. Um so that takes us through those last few items. Um next page um direction needed date a item one we already covered also item two and then so application questions. I've listed here the four questions that were used on the district 7 vacancy application. I modified them very slightly just to account for the fact that this is a different district. If you wanted to review those and give me any edits and council members online, I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that you have this information in your email either from Kristen or me earlier this afternoon. Um, and so if you wanted to review those questions and either give those to me now or by tomorrow, um, I could follow up with you all tomorrow to get any edits to the questions.

I personally think that there are accurate questions. they're they follow the a pattern of you know that we have followed in the past. Um but if maybe if any council member has changes or suggestions um but then by you know Monday uh you know we go with this questions um or no time right now. Well I think it's tomorrow Friday would be good so that by Monday the application is available. So if but if you don't have any suggestions on changing them um then let's you know submit them by tomorrow.

Perfect. Yeah. No no edits here. No edits. Me either. Me neither. Thank you. Perfect. Okay. We'll go with those. Don't even wait then. Then we can have it already online. Um regarding the interview format. Um, in the past the council um had on the night of interviews, um, state code requires that you give everybody an opportunity to address the council. The way that you've handled that in the past is to give each of the applicants five minutes to address the council on any topic they they want to. Do you want to continue with that practice for round one?

Generally, yes. Let me ask a clarifying question. So we are required to give every applicant uh every single one of them an interview opportunity. An interview opportunity and it has to be in a public meeting. Correct. It does and it does have to be eligible. So only validated applicants. Okay. If someone does not meet the requirements that are outlined in state code or does not submit their conflict of interest, they would not be available to be interviewed. Let me ask about the time. Do we have to tell them how much time we're going to give them?

Yeah, that's my question. I'm wondering if it's like possible to give a range and then adjust and give them a final number based on how many applicants we had. That's that's what I Yes, we we're synced in here. What do you think is a good minimum number? I feel like between three and five, but you know, that's what I was thinking. Yes, so you know, if we have 20 people apply, you know, we might go with a three. Um, you know, so that's sort of the the general sense.

The way that we've provided that information to the applicants in the past is once the application period is closed and we collect all of the applications, we I have sent them an email to just let them know what to expect in terms of next steps. And so we could even just wait until at that time tell them whatever you all have decided. Okay.

Okay. And then in the past also we come up with a plan in case there's a round two, round three, round four. And the way that we've done that in the past is um round one is over, the council takes a vote to reduce the number of applicants who move on to round two and then you give them a question and let the applicants address the council um just on that one question and you give them two to three minutes to respond to that. Um, are you okay with that as a process for round two? Could we do some rank choice voting? Although Oh, rank choice voting might be interesting. Is it the same question for every applicant in round two? I think that's what we did last time. It is. It is what you did.

No, no, experience. We got different questions and I think that that is one of the things I would flag feels a little inequitable. Um, and I just wonder if there's a way like like I said, you can have one applicant step out, one answer, and then come back in and answer um, so that they're answering the exact same question because I know in the final round we were answering different questions. Yeah, that's Sarah. I believe Sarah

it might be worthwhile and I'm going off out of my lane but perhaps if there's an opportunity to pull the various questions so that you could determine which ones you want to ask as a group and have that consistency before the meeting. That would help. You don't have to share them with the public until you present them, but it would help with the congruence of all of you providing what you're interested in for the round two or the final round. I like that as an option. Customer Wharton.

So, this will be my seventh time going through this process and it is uh never uh flawless. Um and it's um almost always um we discover some kind of flaw from the previous pro way that we did it. I mean I think that one way to avoid that is to give some questions uh or give a list of questions and let the applicant select which questions they want to answer. Um and that might give us you know, we could have it some questions that we want everyone to answer and then some questions that it's like you can pick which one of these you want us to you want us to know. Um, and then that way we might be able to kind of get not be getting the same thing over and over, but also be getting new and and relevant information. Um, but I'm sure that there's probably some flaw in that as well. But, um, that's the best thing that I've thought of um to address this. What what about to just merge some of the ideas? We select some questions for round two and we let them pick uh

you know out of those questions to which one they want to address. Um sure I don't know. I I remember the the process that I went through. It wasn't I mean the flaw there that you guys didn't select me but um that was the biggest flaw. Chris looking at you. Um I know I um but uh I would never forget that. Um but uh the people the people of district 2 promptly informed us they disagreed. So I'm glad that they did because this is not this is the le this is the worst part about being on the council. No, no, no. I I don't care. Um so Dan,

my question we on round two, we're not giving them the questions until we give them the questions at round two. Right. Yeah. I think I think that's what we're asking here is that from Sarah's point, we we pick we can maybe pick out of a hat or we say we're going to select these questions to give them in round two and this question you've given round three. But isn't that what Sarah flagged as like an odd um process? But but we but we give them all the same question, but we don't tell them that question until we come to that round two.

Is that what you're saying, Sarah? So, I just remembered that there was a fishbowl and there were random questions that were in there and they drew out a question and I got to answer it and then they drew out a different question and another candidate got to answer it and at least from my perception and memory of it, I felt like I got an easier question and and I felt bad for the other applicant in that process. uh hearing some of these and I think maybe this was uh Council Member Wharton or maybe Council Member Young's uh suggestion. I think for round two, I like the idea of like here are recommended questions and then letting the applicant select um from that pool of recommended questions. That was your suggestion. I know it was somebody's idea. I'm trying to give credit trying to give credit. whoseever idea it was, I've aligned in that direction so that we hear a diversity of responses um and we are able to uh kind of compare answers across candidates for those who decide to answer the same question. Um I would like to suggest and this is my first rodeo on this so happy to defer to other council members. I imagine there will be around three and possibly around four. Um maybe maybe not. Um, I would like to leave subsequent rounds after round two open for more specific and tailored questions to the candidates.

I I will be okay with that. Um, what if we to throw a wrench in this whole conversation, the last five minutes? Who hates the idea of of rank choice voting? I mean, we, you know, that's how voters elect people. we just rank and you know we just use the process and it's just done in one ballot. Um it's a little harder for your side. Um potentially um

I the reason I would say I'm hesitant to do that but we do we do uh break it down and we need to look at the percentage year. If you have five candidates up there where do we break the line off for take the top two? Do we need unanimous respon unanimous or do is it you know you only need four.

So it it needs to be a majority but we also have to determine how the if a if it isn't a majority how the next segment next group of people would be um defined. That's part of the resolution that the attorney is preparing in response to the state legislation. So they asked that to be clarified before the process is defined. So what I can offer is that the attorneys are working on the resolution to outline that plan in respect of how you've done this in the past and we would circle a draft back to you for your review of that voting process so that we secure the reality that it must be a majority.

Okay. And the the other thing is in the past we've had some where uh we had two candidates that were neck and neck and we went through a couple different rounds and and it uh changed some uh votes there to make it. So I think that would have and we selected the right candidate uh but we may not have selected the right candidate if we had the right rate right. So that's that's why I'm always hesitant on that. It may shorten the process, but it may not be the the uh the best outcome.

Yeah, I'm okay if we don't do that and we stick to the process that we have in the past. Um we do it one round and then we have some questions that we we pre-select um and we let them decide for which one they want to answer. Um that sort of meets both worlds of issues here. uh to keep consistency but at the same time allowing us to some flexibility on some of the questions. Um and then we maybe to your point, Council Member Carlson, allow for some flexibility if there are more rounds. Um you know, anybody has any thoughts about that process? My only worry is having uh a a question come out that hasn't really been vetted from the rest of the council members. So that's and then directed to those. I think the questions that we ask, no matter where we ask should all be vetted and we all should agree to those questions, not have you know Dugan say, "Oh, this is my question now that we've gone all this stuff." It should be vetted by all of us and we kind of it's written and we just

So let's do this for round number three. We don't just get to throw a question out there. We coordinate what question we're gonna in the majority manner. Yeah. You know, four of us at least decide what question to ask if there is a round three and four. And then we ask that question. So we don't just throw random questions on there. It may be random questions, but maybe a majority of us agreeing to that random question. Okay, perfect. Um, clear as mud. Clear as mud. Great. I think most of it is clear as mud or is actually really clear. And then on this voting process thing, we'll report back to you guys. We'll probably take time in another announcement to just get really clear on that.

No, and I appreciate it is a very clear process. I I do appreciate the staff working on these. Uh I know that we're working through the budget, working through all of the things. It's a big deal. Uh I also appreciate the consistency that this council um you know is following uh with in this process um and following the the same generally the same process we always followed to to solve this this issue. So um I think that that means a lot to me and I think it should mean a lot to the community. So thank you.

Sorry just one more question um because that's the word of the hour. Um, I imagine that uh applicants may want may have questions about can I talk to current council members about their experience to introduce myself and what I'd like to do confirming that that is allowed in the process or are there any restrictions or um items we should be aware of when talking to applicants?

Sure. Thanks for asking the question. there's been a an adjustment in the practices in order to keep the relationships clear from your voting. Right? So there have been an opportunity generally what what has been followed in my recollection and Lehwa can correct me if I'm wrong it was that if someone wanted to speak to you or wanted to share more about their experience it was encouraged that they provide a recommendation letter or that they put something in writing so that it can be within within the public record and it could be directed it's essentially directed to the entire council on their priorities so that it's beyond the application. It's just a recommendation. It's not required. That's totally optional, but there is not a legal component about any relationship or discussion you have with any of the applicants as a council member. And I would refer to Mark for any legal guidance.

We're good. Okay. Thank you everyone. This meeting is journ. Thank you. Bye.