City Council - workshop

I don't know. I don't know.

Okay. Okay. All right we'd like to welcome everyone and call to order the study meeting of the West Valley City Council this July 14th, 2026. We're beginning our meeting at 4 30 p.m in the multi-purpose room of West Valley City Hall. All members of the council present. Councilmember Huynh is in person. Councilmember Northfeld is joining us online. Council Member Wood is in person, Council Member Whetstone in person, Council Member Harmon is online, Council Member Christensen is in person, myself. We're also joined at the table with our City Manager, Mr. Pealey, and our City Recorder, Ms. Kamik. We have our minutes of June 23rd, 2026. Turn those to the Council for discussion or a motion.

2nd, thank you.

We have a motion and a 2nd, all in favor. Please say aye. Any opposed seeing none of those passion unanimously. I'm sorry we have our regular meeting this evening. We do have 1 additional. One thing added to the meeting, and that is Craig Thomas will introduce us to members of the West Fest Committee for recognition. And then was there any other questions on tonight's agenda? We'll now move on to our awards and ceremonies, and we'll turn the time over to Mr. Thomas for our proclamation.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Craig Thomas, Department of Community Engagement Culture Director. I wasn't expecting to do the proclamation. Sorry. It's that time of year again. It's an exciting time. It's our National Day Out season, or as the Chief lovingly calls it, the National Month Out season. We are very excited about this year. Right now we're sitting at about 30 block parties, I believe, that are registered. That continues to grow on a daily basis. So we anticipate a really great year of block parties. As we usually do every year, we do a proclamation declaring August as National Endowed Day. It's always the first Tuesday in August. But also broadening it to Neighborhood Nights and West Valley City Celebrating all the great things that our neighborhoods and our organizers do within the city. We will have two safety wellness fairs. Connection with this, as usual, a senior safety fair, family safety fair. We will do our summer festival here at Fairborn Plaza at the end of the month as well. We have a Healthy Start event mid-August with the University of Utah. So a number of things that just keep evolving, but a lot of the normal, usual activities that we normally do. Great.

I saw we received our schedule, and it probably will be added to or updated?

You'll start getting those weekly on an update.

Okay. Because they change so frequently, we try to do that weekly.

Okay.

Yeah, we can do that.

We can make it bigger fonts. We have tried to condense it into one sheet, so we'll just make the sheet bigger. Yeah, we'll do that. Easy enough to do.

Well, and is there some of the information that we don't need? Sure. Because I think we all try to go to all of them. So in our minds, the one that says fire, police, council, whatever, their special requests, we probably don't need that. Do you want to know who is putting it on? But do you need their email or just their name? So I'm trying to scale it down for you even more.

They can organize their names. It's nice for you to have just so that you know who's there in case you want to connect with somebody that's helping organize it.

That makes sense. Any other ideas? Okay. And then you have the next item too. So now we'll go to our resolutions. We're going to start with 26. Next week. Who wants to read it? Thank you, Don. Good idea. Oh, you'll be here? Okay. Okay, so Don will read that one. Okay, now we'll go to resolution 2684.

This is an exciting opportunity that's been developing over the last few months, quite honestly. Salt Lake County and the state of Utah have a significant amount of opioid settlement funds that are available to the communities to use. Salt Lake County has recognized West Halle City as a desired recipient of funding from the settlement. Interlocal agreement with Salt Lake County basically is a three-year agreement, $100,000 per year, with an additional $10,000 per year.

So it equates to $110,000 per year. And I believe there was some language early on that after that three-year period we'd be eligible for another $50,000.

The money is used for opioid education and prevention within the community. We'll be hiring a part-time staff to help with the management of the grant. and to do the development of materials, as well as the outreach and everything that comes along with the grant. If you remember a few years ago, we went down this road with another grant. That grant resulted in that toolkit, a number of resources that were distributed to the city. Stephanie's here with me. She actually has one of the pamphlets that's was created through that first initial small grant that we received from them. Because the city did so well with that, with the outreach and the education, they really wanted to identify us as a good partner to proceed with this new funding. So basically, that's it. If you have questions on the grant specifically, I brought Stephanie with me.

So are you going to recreate the will or keep this and just use the other monies to get it out to people?

So the grant is very fluid in how we use it other than the employee. So we are required to use some of the money towards an employee. The rest of it's pretty fluid in how we actually use it, whether it be outreach materials, additional resources for individual residents. But most likely it will be a continuation of what was started a year and a half ago with this and just continuing that movement to do that education within the community. but also to keep providing resources like the locks and the other things along with the grant.

Did you say locks?

Locks them. Oh. You know, the little spray. Yes, the spray thing. I don't remember how many hundreds of those we distributed.

Over 300.

And something that the grant required along with the

and make sure that we're re-looking at the data, taking the feedback from Healthy West Valley specifically, and ensuring that anything that was created last year is meeting the needs of the community now.

Okay. Great. Any questions? Okay, we'll now go to Resolution 2685, turn the time over to Mr. Hales for our auditors.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Nick Hales, Deputy Finance Director. I can't believe we've reached that time of year again, but it's time for our annual audit of Citi Financials and that information. So you have before you the engagement letter from KNC CPA, our CPA firm. This represents, I don't even know the number of years they've been with us, but the fourth year of the current cycle of agreement with them. They've agreed to no increase in our fees for this year. We actually were able to simplify quite a bit the audit work that they will have to do because we spun off the arts foundation. We disposed of the extra audits we had. So this is just the straightforward city audit. And you have it before you.

Any questions? $88,500.

Okay.

Okay, doesn't look like any questions. Thank you. Okay, we'll go to resolution 2686 sometimes turn the time over to Mr.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Eric Bunderson, City Attorney. This is our, at this point, very standard franchise agreement for Forge Fiber this time. Just as a reminder, franchise agreement is the application and fee that the company will pay to dig holes in our streets. It's the same as all the others. And fill the holes up, exactly. So it's the same as all the others, and they didn't ask for any changes, and we didn't give them any.

Okay, any questions? So I have a couple. Yes, ma'am. Are they filling in where we don't have fiber? Or are they just willy-nilly picking where they want to cherry picking and putting it there?

I have no clue. I just do the agreement. Oh, you just do that part? Yeah. I don't want to put you on the spot, Dan, if you didn't know.

They think there's a market for them, and they want to come explore it with an investment. We don't know the details of why they're here and who they intend to sell fiber to.

Do they have to get a permit for each location? Yes, we charge them fees for each location. Because I know they went on private property, they took down a fence, went on private property. Somebody did. So will we be able to monitor where they're at when things like that happen this time?

Whenever we get complaints about them going outside of the right-of-way on private property, we have one of our inspectors go out and kind of chase those issues down and I normally don't get into a deep review of their right-of-way plans because oftentimes they're coming to us with a permit to work in the public right-of-way, and then if they go out of that for whatever reason without a permit, we'll chase them down because we know who they are and have relationships with them. Okay.

Because I don't think that detail happened on that last one. Okay. Okay.

For the record, that was Dan Johnson, Public Works Director.

Any other questions? Thank you. Speaking of Mr. Johnson, we'll go to Resolution 2687. He'll talk to us about a street sweeper.

Good afternoon, Dan Johnson, and I brought a friend. This is Dan Ward, our new fleet manager. I wanted to use this opportunity for us to come and tell you why we ought to buy a sweeper to introduce you to Mr. Ward. He's been a mechanic for a long time. He knows how to fix these sweepers. He's going to work on a different side of things and help us fleet-wide to manage the whole thing. So I'm excited to have Dan working in this role. And so if you guys come up with any questions you want to ask Dan, feel free. But I'm going to tell you right now about the sweeper. while you think of your questions. So we have a fleet of four sweepers that we cycle out. A few years ago, it used to be that we replaced them annually, and I didn't feel like we were getting the use out of them that we needed to to really make that happen. change to replace a sweeper every other year and so this is the second time we've kind of been working on that cycle so we run a company called timco sweepers and we've been pleased with their performance they they build a good sweeper and and uh So this one's about $400,000, and then we'll sell the older sweeper and cover some of that cost as well. Do you have any questions about this resolution?

Any questions?

Dan. If I get blamed for anything, I might point to Dan and say, well, Dan did it. If I hear that Dan did it, I'll say, well, Dan did it.

Well, when I read it, you said you rotate them so that we get higher value out of the sweeper we're trading in.

No, no. We're getting more use out of them before we trade them in.

So about how much are we getting on the trade-in?

Well, I don't know. We didn't get a quote from Intermountain Sweeper for this time. In the past, it feels like we probably got about half of what we paid for.

Okay. That's great.

Oftentimes, it's a contractor that will kind of run away to the ground.

Need to clean up the roads after their vehicles.

Yep.

I can't think of a good question. Sorry, Dan.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you both. It's nice to meet you. All right, we have our consent agenda and we just have 1 item for the July 28th and this is our usual purchase agreement acceptance of an easement. Did the council have any questions on this item?

I just wanted to note for the record that it looks like council member Harmon is no longer online. Okay. Thank you.

And Norfolk might leave as well? He's still there. But he's still there. Okay. Sounds great. All right. Of our four resolutions, are there any that you would like to move to the consent agenda? And just leave this sweeper. Okay. I see three heads. Okay. And there's the fourth over there. Thank you. So we'll move all to the one. All right. We'll now go to reviewing the special redevelopment agency meeting for the 28th and turn the time over to Mr. Springmeier.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Jonathan Springmeier. Redevelopment Agency Economic Development Department. Today, we've got an agreement for your consideration to give a $200,000 grant from the Redevelopment Agency to the Utah Micro Loan Fund, the UMLF. UMLF will then match this grant with their own independent funding sources, double the amount for $400,000, which would be available for small business loans to West Valley City businesses. They will, UMLF will issue all the loans, they will service the loans, and the loans will only go to West Valley City businesses. And this addresses a challenge that my department has had in the entire time I've been here that we can because our because our tax increment financing is geographically restricted and. requires an uplift in property tax, helping out a small business or a small restaurant that's going into an already existing space, we're left pretty powerless. And it's a hard no for me to give and my staff to give to these businesses that need a little bit of help and want a little bit of help. This is not grant funding, but these are loans for them. Most of these loans range in the $25,000 to $40,000 range, typically from the UMLF. So that's the proposal in front of you. Any questions?

Any questions for Jonathan?

Is Jim still on the UMLF board?

He is still on the board. He is specifically sitting out. the board meeting where this is being addressed to avoid any conflicts. But yes, this is something that Jim brought to our attention as a potential solution and an option for our businesses.

So about what is the interest rate for the business?

It varies. They'll do market plus a little bit depending Depends on the risk of the lending. But what I love about this is it gives us an opportunity to help these businesses while keeping us out of things that we have no business being in.

So they'll go through the same process as they would with a bank, the credit checks, the risk management. Yep. Yep. So we're not throwing money away that we'll never get back?

We're not throwing it away. And the intention is this is a revolving loan fund. As these loans are paid back, they just stay in circulation for as long as we can with the UMLF. So we'll be able to continue to keep recycling this money and keep loaning it out to businesses.

What is the qualification for the quarter five of the loan?

And what's the cap for that? I don't know what a cap is. I think they're probably, most of the loans I think are probably less than $50,000. For our purposes, the only qualifier that we're putting on it is they have to be a business located in West Valley City. Everything else we're putting on them is to do what they're more qualified to do than I am.

Yeah.

That might be $10,000 to $15,000, not $30,000 to $40,000.

Okay.

I don't see any more questions.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right. We'll now move on to our communications and our WestFest review. And we'll first invite Craig Thomas up to start off on the booth. And then we'll just have each to come out and march as they show up on the presentation.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. Greg Thomas again, Department of Engagement and Culture. We're excited to give you an overview of West Fest 2026. This year, we know that we had some challenges. that were met head on brilliantly by all the city departments. West Fest this year turned out amazing. It was a fantastic event. The committee worked tirelessly, dedicating a lot of hours to make this happen this year. My section is just kind of the overview of what our department helped with. The West Fest Committee is our ninth resident volunteers. They will be here later tonight. I believe all nine of them will be here. The committee has a $140,000 budget. They stay within that budget. This year they are under, I think they brought in more revenue than they actually spent. So they did break even. I believe we're in the black. We'll see how June statements turn out. But we should be in the black as far as I can tell. The money that we do receive for West Fest comes through sponsors, vendors, the carnival itself, and the parade. And then there was about $10,000 of in-kind donations that were made to the festival as well. Like Chick-fil-A donates roughly $5,000 in bills for the emergency responders while they're on site. So some great support from the community. The transition from Parks and Recreation Department to my department happened fully this year, so it was a massive learning curve for me and my department, but I think we did okay. We're still feeling a little bit bruised, but we're feeling okay. This kind of shows a little bit of our rebrand, our light rebrand that we wanted to do this year just to give the festival a little bit of a new look. Just one of many signs that were updated this year throughout the event. We wanted to increase signage at the event, wayfinding at the event, updated street banners. Some of the banners we had were actually brown. I mean, they were white vinyl, but they were brown. So it was a nice refresh this year, and we still stayed within budget even with making these changes. So hopefully you noticed some of those changes if you attended the event. A continuation of these wayfinding signs, we bought some new towers. So six wayfinding signs were located throughout the event to help people find their way through the event as well. So we listed the sponsors. We gave them a carnival map, a festival map, as well as the schedule for the entire event. Our community stage was programmed through two organizations, through Allen and Illinois, with the Utah Pacific Islander Chamber. They did Thursday and Saturday evening. And Jeanetta Williams with the NAACP took care of Friday evening with Juneteenth. So we had a great lineup of festival music. It was a fun night at the community stage every night. You did notice that we did change the hours this year as well. So we shifted. We shortened the hours Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. We ended at 10 rather than at 11. and we shifted Sunday's activity with the carnival over to Wednesday night. A little bit of scheduling change. We have heard loud and clear about the parade and festival start time. That was an experiment this year because we heard from vendors last year that it was dead and they didn't have anything to do for an hour after the parade. So we thought, well, if they're not doing anything, why should we sit there in the hot? So we'll go back to having the festival start right after the parade.

I think that was about it on that slide, right?

Yeah. So the festival itself, we had 60 vendor booths, 17 food booths. We had two stages that were running. The Juneteenth on Friday night. The city tent information, we updated that entire space as well this year. We had the two-eating contest, the butterfly releases, which are growing in popularity, the police and fire demonstrations, which were huge for the community to come and see. Those were on Friday and Saturday night. Yeah, Friday and Saturday night. And then... We had Family Fitness Center and Jamie's team did a few added activities with the corn hole, the skate jam, the movie in the park as well. So it was really nice. And then we did the Friday and Saturday fireworks as usual. The Westminster Parade, we had over 50 entries this year. Well, we had 50 entries. We had a few, a couple that didn't show, and we had a couple that did show. Surprisingly, we ended up with more floats than we had registered, so that was nice. It's always interesting when a float just shows up in your parade and you don't know about it. So we had more floats this year, which was really exciting. More city participation from neighboring cities bringing their floats to be part of our parade. In exchange, we will be in their parades as part of that exchange. We added the bagpipes this year, which was a nice addition. And then the Princess group that kind of went along the side just helping, you know, keep all the kiddos happy, you know, as they were waiting. You did notice that this year we had a single colored art. That was Brian with our Veterans Committee. It was a great honor for him to lead the parade carrying the flag, so that was a very nice opportunity for him to do that for the city. Our four announcers, they came from media groups. Janetta Williams helped arrange that. We had KUTV, ABC, Fox, and KRCL at the four announcer stations. And then, obviously, we had the communications department doing the live feed, the video, and the interviews. I think that, oh, no, our participation, City Tent. So... The City10, we did try to do an updated refresh on it, appearance-wise, give it a new feel. But as far as the city participation, you'll notice on this list, it's almost every city department. There is tremendous support from every city department to make this festival happen. This festival would not happen with nine volunteers. This takes a collective team. It takes the community to put this event together. And our city departments and city teams worked so well together. It was just an amazing experience just having all of us working together side to side. So deep appreciation from me and from the committee for all of the support from all of the departments. So it was a great honor for us to do this event with the West West Committee. They are an amazing, amazing volunteer corps. who have years and years of dedicated experience and they did a fantastic job this year.

Any questions for Chris?

One second.

No, thanks.

All right.

It's free to go.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Jamie Young, Parks and Recreation Director. I will say, yes, it was formally passed over to Craig this year, and I got growled out a few times this year. But in Parks and Recreation, we do a lot of the community activities and things that go along with West Fest. Probably our biggest role in West Fest is our park maintenance team and the setup and the ongoing operations, putting out fires as the power goes out and helping the vendors with a variety of things with their tent walls and everything. They stay around the entire week and clean up during the festival and every night afterwards. And then after Saturday night, they stay all night to get things taken down and put away. And there's obviously a lot of prep. We did some, we kept track of, we always keep track of the number of hours. And with the 17 staff members that we have in park maintenance, we had 420 hours in, mostly in the week leading up to it, pretty much Sunday to Sunday. They do have some expense related to it, just supplies and things. But as far as the watering, you know, we don't really use extra water. We use extra water before, but then the water's off for, you know eight or nine days during the festival obviously so that we don't have ruts in the grass from from the trucks driving on and then we water quite a bit afterwards and the Fertilization we typically hold off until after the festival so that it's a little bit more effective just helping the grass recover and Within within probably three weeks you wouldn't have known that the festival was there and trampled the grass and they do an incredible job keeping the keeping the recovering the park after the high demand and the high use Our recreation staff, like Craig said, we had a variety of activities. We did a pickleball tournament. We had a pretty good turnout there. We try to do some of these activities on times that aren't as busy for the festival to bring people in in the not as busy times and try not to take up too much of the parking and things in the park. The fun run has been really great. We used to do a 5K and a 10K, and traffic has gotten really bad, and we had several near misses, and so it was kind of scary to be running on the street. So we do the... the run, the fun run. We don't time it. It's just a fun run right on the parade route, right ahead of the parade. And it's fun for the runners, and that's the feedback we get from them is it's fun for them to have people watching them and cheering for them as they run by. So that's been a fun tradition. It's not huge. We'd love to have it be bigger because, again, it doesn't take a lot of staff. The road's already closed, and we don't time it, so it's really just anybody who wants to do it. And we don't care if you ride a scooter or rollerblades or whatever. We just want people to come and participate in that and then stay for the parade. As we've done in years past we did a skate competition And we rely on a vendor that we use to do our skate Camps through the summer and he he does an incredible job and has all kinds of different age groups and categories for these competitions and he judges them and and donates the prizes as well for For the participants and it's pretty cool when you see how well that group of people manage the space. They work well together, they yield to one another, they're kind to one another. It's really refreshing to see how great they work together when it's really, really busy and there are people going all different directions in there, how well they manage that themselves. We don't have to step in and have have guidance on which way they should be going or not. So it's just kind of a different activity with WestVest that's not kind of a standard. Some of our takeaways is just the incredible amount of work, again, that our park maintenance team does before, during, and after. We do have to water during the day right after because we've got to get a lot of water on those fields. The recreation activities don't cost us a whole lot extra because they do that within their normal work time. They're just recreation activities that we do. And frankly, if we didn't do them during West Fest, we'd probably find another time to do them because we enjoy those types of events. The costs are pretty minimal. Most of them are billed through West Fest, and that's covered with the sponsorships and donations that they get. And really, we just love being a part of West Fest. It's such a great community event, and so many people are so proud and have such tradition in their families of coming to West Fest clear back from the days that it was hosted at Granger Park in the 80s and 90s. We're really proud to be a part of that and continue to have a great festival, and we also appreciate the great work of the other departments. We can't do the things we do without all the departments to do as well, police and fire and public works and everybody who helps us with the fun run and the other activities that we have. Are there any specific questions about parks and recreation before we move on to the next?

No, I did notice today that the lawn has recovered really nicely.

Yes, it's still dry as we're working to conserve our 10%, but it looks really good considering what it looked like the day after West Fest. Yes, thank you, ma'am.

Okay, any other questions, comments? Okay, thank you.

Jamie, let me know that that is a tough act to follow. It definitely is. For public relations, we wanted to kind of give you a snapshot of the reach that we had just through the West Fest Facebook page. And that is the number. So the month previous to West Fest, we had about 53,000 unique viewers that saw one of our – posts about West Fest and 136,000 overall that saw it. And so this is just the West Fest Facebook page. This does not include our city page that we put out information on. It doesn't include police and fire, which we also did. And it doesn't include our Instagram, our city website. We put a banner on the front page to kind of highlight West Fest where they can click it and take them to the West Fest page. We get our city page gets anywhere between 1500 and 2000. visits a day. So it was just another way that we tried to reach out to the public. As Craig mentioned with the parade, with the help of Lance from Fire and Wyrick from Police, they did a great job at doing a live telecast of the parade, which was, it's always exciting. People come over to us while we're broadcasting live to talk to us. while we're on air, which is exciting. But we did that again this year, and we had thousands of people that, over the course of a week, went back and saw at least portions of the parade from our Facebook page when we did it live. So that was fun as well. So we appreciate the opportunity to be involved, and we'll continue to do it and find new ways to reach out to the public. Any questions?

Any questions for Sam?

Thank you.

So Public Works, we're happy to support West Fest. We definitely are in a supporting role. There's a lot of departments that do a lot of things, and we do a little bit to make life a little bit easier. We set up a barricade, very much Public Works, these kinds of things, and we provide our sweepers and And also we help with the float. So we kind of have been the go-to department for getting the float staff at the various parades that it's been going to throughout the summer. And the people that do that have a great experience. And in fact, Sarah, oh yes, Mary.

I was going to wait until comments, but since you brought up the floats. So the only other parade I've been able to attend was Magnus. And your guys were spectacular. I mean, they weren't just driving the truck in front of the float and behind the float. They were waving at people and being very interactive. I was really impressed. So tell them thank you.

No, thank you for the feedback. They really enjoy it. In fact, Sarah gave us some – she got some quotes. Sarah is my assistant. She got some quotes from different employees about their experience, and they've loved it. They love participating. They love going out there and representing the city and public works, and they have a good time. with that opportunity. So thanks for the feedback and thanks for the opportunity as well. That's Public Works. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening. West Fest from the police perspective was an incredible success. The resolution that was passed was incredibly helpful. Being able to be proactive instead of reactive was a game changer. So we had 43 ejections. You know, that was my 29th, 28th West Fest, and to go four days without a single fight, unheard of. So we're very pleased with that outcome. And then we did have one use of force from a young lady who didn't want to cooperate. This year we implemented a vehicle and pedestrian traffic management plan. Definitely improved the situation, but we have room to continue to improve it for next year. But that was a good addition. And then our staffing was definitely increased from years past. So I sent you all, or Ms. Kamak sent you all kind of an overview of a few weeks ago, just while it was fresh on your mind. So are there any questions for the police department?

I just had a question about the traffic light at the Y24. Did that help at all with this kind of traffic?

Most of the pedestrian traffic concerns were coming off of 3100 South. We found that that road was being utilized, and it was busy enough that they just weren't paying attention when people were hitting the button. So we just had officers out there to help pedestrian traffic across.

Quite a few people parked to the north, right? And just cut across 31? Yeah.

Yeah, they'd park up in those townhouses up there.

I saw a lot of people coming out of there and coming across.

I had a question on the loitering resolution. Was there a noticeable shift in activities in other areas of the city? Unwanted activities occur in those nights?

Nothing noteworthy. Yeah, we were definitely keeping an eye on that as well. We didn't want to just redirect the problem. We wanted to completely redirect it out of our city. It's good to know. It was a challenge for officers. People did not want to leave quietly. They didn't just say, oh, okay, we'll leave. So it was definitely taxing on the officers that worked, but it was well worth it. Okay, thank you.

I think I'm last. So here we go. For the fire and emergency management, I can tell you I've done West Fest for a lot of years. I do remember Granger when I was first on the department. So I guess you could say I've been there a while. This is one of the first years that we started planning This was the first year every department was together. We had one unified plan. And it went smooth. Everybody had their input. Police and fire. We had a command post that one of The supervisors were there the entire time. They didn't leave. They were joined with each other. That's never happened. I think the communications was probably the best it's ever been. Fire, we had medical staff both at the carnival and at the booths at West Fest. So we had staffing there all the time. The other thing we did this year with emergency management is the real-time crime center. We had my partner, Eric Funderson, he's speaking to me still, so we're good. He was there the entire time looking at cameras, giving us feedback back at the command post. So I don't think it could have went any smoother from a planning and a command standpoint. Like I say, it's We've been here a long time. That's the first. Is there any questions?

Thank you. I might want to do repelling next year.

What was that?

I said I might want to repel next year.

As long as nothing gets broke. So I didn't have one comment on the cloaks. Okay. Now that we have a discussion. Yes. Not to downplay the cloaks. But I think it would be nice to add a book for the recognition. Yeah. Agreed.

Okay.

We'll now turn the time over to Mr. Mulaney for supporting facility discussion.

Hello, Mayor and Council. I'm going to try and stick to my script so I can keep on time for you. I'm glad to be here today. We also are glad to have Clay Partain from Sports Salt Lake joining us today. So he's going to share some of his expertise as well. So today my objective is simply to provide you with an alternative option for the RDA-owned property by the Utah Cultural Celebration Center. That alternative option being an indoor sports facility. This is something our CMO team has been researching and wanted to provide you some information on. I just wanted to provide a little bit of perspective, my limited perspective within the city. So growing up here in the city, I wasn't ever given an opportunity to participate in competitive indoor sports such as basketball. Maybe I just suck at basketball. I totally get that. But also there just weren't any competitive clubs and or available space in the city to facilitate that. I remember my sisters that participated in competitive volleyball having to go outside of the city to participate and a lot of friends that played competitive basketball that had to travel outside the city as well. Later, as the head basketball coach for Hunter High School, I saw firsthand how the lack of training and competition space affected our athletes. Our strongest players were usually the few who had access to competitive clubs outside the city. Granite School District has facilities, but they are heavily programmed, difficult to reserve, and often expensive. It concerned me enough that I actually met with our lovely Mayor Lang a few years ago to discuss possible solutions. Unfortunately, there wasn't much that we could do at the time. Fast forward and now I'm a parent of two young athletes. My son who competes competitively in basketball has little to no opportunity within our city to play competitive basketball because of the same reasons. He plays with a competitive team up in Farmington, 30 minutes away. I actually tried to start our own little competitive basketball team here in the city, which was great while it lasted. However, we got shut down because Granger High School could no longer host us. So we didn't have a space to practice or play. We traveled to basketball tournaments all over the state, throughout the nation, all the while wishing there was something closer to home. Now, of course, sports and athletics in West Valley City isn't everything. It's the only thing. No, I'm just kidding. That's a Lombardi quote, by the way. But sports and athletics have been an integral part of the community since the founding of our city. We've had countless collegiate and professional athletes originate from West Valley City. Here are a few of them. If you don't know who these people are, this is Kairos Tonga, Jalen Warren, And then Xavier Goza, who I just recently found out was from West Valley City. He plays for Real Salt Lake. So that's pretty cool. So we have countless professional athletes and collegiate athletes from West Valley City, many of which may not have attended college at all without sporting opportunities. We should also keep in mind the many kids that are kept out of the streets and out of trouble because of sports. And everyone knows West Valley City has the best athletes. That's why everyone recruits our players to go play for their high schools. Sadly, access to resources, facilities, competitive clubs, and tournaments act as a roadblock to many families. Lastly, before I turn the time over to Clay, I just wanted to share some of the feedback we received from our Youth City Council members in a general plan discussion. And I'll just let you read through some of those. You can see that there is an appetite from our residents for something like this. Now I'm going to turn the time over to Clay, and he's going to talk about some of the economics behind this.

Hey, thanks, Harold. Mayor, council, thanks for letting me be here. This is fun. Clay Partain. So I oversee Sports Salt Lake. It's a division that visits Salt Lake. All we do is spend all of our time and energy and efforts on trying to attract tournaments and events into Salt Lake County. And I can tell you, West Valley City has become an amazing city. And I've really developed... I really feel like a West Valley city. I really embrace the city. The assets, the community, this is a sports town, and you've got world-class assets and amazing people, and it's a great place. I just wanted to share that. Also, I'm board chair of Sports Events and Tourism Association. I'm very involved nationwide when it comes to sports tourism, and it's led me to be able to be close to a lot of the data that's happening and a lot of the the intel and strategy that's going on across the country and a lot of the venue development that's going on across the country. So when Harold asked me to come and just kind of give my two cents on what an indoor facility might look like for West Valley City, I came up with some things that I'd like to share. Just to step back briefly, nationally, this is what sports tourism represents in the country. You've got $274 billion. This was out of the latest state of industry report released by Sports ETA in 2026. These are huge numbers. And when you think about what sports tourism can bring to a city and a community, it's monumental. And some people have asked me, what's sports tourism? I know what sports is. Um, is, uh, any, any, uh, um, any sporting event that can create a visitor impact. Um, so bringing in visitors, this could be participatory events. So like, uh, senior softball is happening at Jamie's complex and centennial this weekend. We have a senior softball tournament. bring in about 40 teams, or a spectator event like you'd have at the Maverick Center where we have gymnastics and all sorts of those cool events that happen over there. So those are kind of like what makes up sports tourism. Again, these are the numbers kind of broken down what it means nationwide. I think it's really interesting that when these families travel for these tournaments, they put a heavy emphasis on recreation and entertainment. Over 19 billion was spent across the country. So they really turn it into that vacation. You know, they really want to have that experience while they're in town. So they spend a lot of money at restaurants and they spend a lot of money having fun. So why would an indoor sports complex be a good investment? You know, if we consider what's around us, around West Valley City, you've got all these municipalities that make up Salt Lake County. And I spent a lot of my time analyzing, you know, what's going on in this greater county floor and what we can bring in in terms of tournaments. And one thing I've noticed is we are missing a large-scale dedicated sports, indoor sports facility. This would be a unique asset, and it would really stand out as a regional national hub for sports tournaments and events. Comparable venues in the country, and I'll show you a few that I just did some research and found at comparable venues. It's around $20 million annually that these venues can generate for their city. And a lot of these will do balance of... these tournaments on the weekends and local play on weekdays. So it can kind of be one of those where it can serve purposes. And the nice thing about an indoor facility versus an outdoor facility is you can operate 12 months a year, which is really nice. We have big facilities like the regional athletic complex that's out in Rose park. That is one of them in the West, one of the world-class soccer facilities, but it's closed six months of the year. So this would be a 12 months of the year operation, which is really cool. Um, And venues of these types, it brings a lot of civic pride, community well-being. It creates great PR for the city and the community. It's something that a community can really stand behind and be proud of. So who would want to book this? You know, you have basketball leagues, you have tournament operators that are literally fighting over limited availability in this valley. There is a vast shortage of basketball courts, and these high schools and rec centers are getting overran by not only locals that want to play, but also these tournament organizers. And these tournament organizers are oftentimes patching together courts all over the valley to put together a tournament. Volleyball is a similar situation. There's thousands of kids in Utah that play under ASU, USA Volleyball and AAU umbrellas. There's weekend tournaments most of the year. And courts are in super high demand. Again, these are the same courts that are often played on basketball courts. So they're often fighting over the same space. Wrestling, and I actually did a little research on this. I knew we hosted a lot of wrestling events in the state. There's over 100 tournaments and camps that happen in the state of Utah every year. So wrestling is actually a gigantic indoor space opportunity for a sport that we could go after. And indoor court space is also very versatile. You can do futsal, floor hockey, gymnastics, cheer dance, martial arts. It's really versatile. You can do literally a dozen types of sports. So what do benchmark comparables look like? So I dug out some that I think are great comparables to look at. One of them is in Anaheim. This costs about $20 million to $30 million to get it off the ground. It has 130,000 dedicated square feet. It produces $2 million to $4 million a year and a greater impact of $20 million a year. And then another really cool one that I found was in Frisco, Texas. It was about $15 million to develop. It's 145,000 square feet. and according to them, generating $5 to $9 million a year and about $30 to $50 million greater economic impact estimates. So, again, really, really big return for a community. This one is the closest one to us right now. This is in Davis County. It's a relatively new complex, the Western Sports Park, and they're starting to get their footing, and they're starting to lure in regional and national events up there. Um, and, and it's a remarkable, uh, venue, and this is one that Davis County has really rallied behind as a community. Um, and again, just shows really good return that they're expecting up there. So how do you bridge the gap? How does a city find a way to make this work? So I think the most common across the country, it's called a P3, a public-private partnership. So that's where the city goes into a partnership with a private investor or private sector investment company where the city will provide a land or some of the basic infrastructure assets. and then the private entity can step up with capital. And also, in many cases, they also step up with the ability to operate program and cover annual maintenance that can be kind of expensive. And they can help drive events, revenue, making sure it's utilized to the max. And then I also dug out just some, what are some of these that do this? I think the most popular one that I was able to find, and I actually have talked to a few people that work for this one, but the sports facilities company has done about 3,000 projects across the country. They're probably the most seasoned. And they have won awards and accolades. There's many projects that could be referenced that they've touched. A couple other big ones are Big League Dreams and Unrivaled Sports. So there are entities out there that specialize in this, and there's actually a lot of money out there in the space. And I'll turn it back over.

Thank you so much, Clay. So just to wrap things up, I just want to emphasize that we aren't asking you to make any decisions right now. But if there is any interest in this, the next steps would be for us to start meeting with potential partners just to discuss possibilities. So are there any questions for me or Clay at this time?

Yeah, I didn't have one question. So maybe this one for Clay. So what are your recommendations? You know, this piece is probably about 15 acres and you think that's going to be indoor for basketball, indoor for volleyball, indoor for wrestling?

I do think, like I said, I do think there is a shortage. We've been tracking this. Basketball, volleyball, wrestling, those are the main ones, but you could do a variety of them indoor. There is a need for this. We've had other community members and other developers and people talk about wanting to develop something like a large indoors facility in our area. So we've been kind of makeshifting our convention centers to do this and it works to a point, but those are designed for conventions. So it's really just a space filler at that point for them. And we've done a pretty good job with those, but having a dedicated indoor sports facility sort of really set your community apart. It's something unique.

So what size of building?

The ones that I was able to research, it looks like that, you know, that between a hundred and 140,000 indoor square feet. would give you kind of that sort of benchmark space that you would want. You'd want to really be able to host those regional maps a lot of times.

I mean, Clay had talked about like the sweet spot kind of being that 12 to 15 basketball court range. You can kind of picture that in your head. That's where a lot of the tournaments nationwide are really looking for space. So high demand.

While you're thinking about it, Think about the unsung heroes of wrestling and boxing and everything else that are called hockey players. Because there isn't a lot of ice in the county. There it's being used. I have a great-grandson who's playing not on a local team. It's Salt Lake Effect. So it's basically the northern part of Utah but they play tournaments where they can find them Calgary, Alberta to Cancun, Mexico and yeah I like to support the travel part of it but that's a lot of travel and you know if Cancun can keep a tournament going we should be able to even on these hot days but we've got ice in the city that we could you know if we worked with that and got it working we'll see tournaments that way too so thank you thank you will i i mean i do like the idea i do have many questions that i think more like

feasibility study could answer, and maybe this is where you're getting the feel of the council, whether or not to jump into a feasibility study. But I would truly be interested in learning more about the economics and what public-private partnership would bring and how the split of revenue, if the city were to donate infrastructure and land, would come to the city and how economically the city could benefit. Other questions I can think of, So if there are regional tournaments coming in, how would, like you mentioned, a West Valley City resident benefit? How many hours per week would they have if we were hosting regional tournaments every weekend? Would the average West Valley athlete citizen be able to go in and do their thing? So just questions like that that I think maybe I could dive into a piece of what you said.

Absolutely.

But I like the idea.

And to kind of answer that question, I think Clay talked a little bit about a lot of these regional tournaments will usually happen on the weekends, and then they'll have a lot of local stuff during the week. For me, and I know for Don as well, like when we're traveling, it would just be nice to have some regional tournaments here so that competitively we have sports teams from West Valley that can just compete right here in our own backyard. Yeah, those are all great questions.

And with that power corridor, how does that complicate ?

There's two sports I didn't hear. Football and baseball. I know there's a private person that has an indoor baseball practice range. But could any of this space go for either one of those? Or would it have to be 300 square feet? 300,000 square feet? Yeah. You hit on a good point.

So baseball is probably what we consider the highest probability of an accident.

a sport that's underserved right now in our community, but we know if we had a high level baseball tournament facility, those take a lot of acres though. So probably much larger than what this, this would be able to hold, but we do see that that there's a, in terms of the amount of events happening around the country, how many of our kids locally play baseball, we know that that is something that would be successful here. And that's been something I've been trying to spread the word of because I think that would be an awesome thing to have developed somewhere in the area.

Well, even if they had just an indoor practice range for pitching and hitting, it doesn't take the whole, you know, diamond.

They're the same thing to me. They're not the same.

and and there's a kind of softball and a baseball player well my girls both play played both so to me they're the same but yeah i mean just being able to practice indoor year round would take that skill level from here to here absolutely and they i was actually going to say that another sport that we didn't really mention is soccer which obviously is huge oh yeah

And so there are facilities that have interchangeable courts where they can change from a basketball court into a turf field. And that also would be huge in our city, having a practice space 12 months out of the year.

Because how much is, or how often is the indoor field down in Riverton or wherever it's at for the Rial's practice? Is it, or is it Harriman?

Yeah, it's high demand. We work with them. It is high demand.

And they do allow tournaments in, not just their own private?

Yeah, they do. It's kind of a mix.

Okay.

Yeah, we do some tournaments and events down there.

Okay.

Good to know. Well, I like it. I'm excited about it. When we've been looking at this piece of property, we wanted a showpiece welcoming to the city. And I can't think of anything that would be a better showpiece and a better welcome to the city. And I know the travel is ridiculous for Utah athletes. And if we could add another venue, another opportunity to keep our athletes here, I think it'd be great. financially and wanting to get all the, you know, legislatively and all of that. But I think it would be a win.

I really like the public-private combo. So it's not a burden just to the same. There's somebody else with something to lose.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Okay. Thanks. I should say lose or gain. All right. We'll move to our council calendar. Does anybody have any questions? No. Potential future agenda items?

I don't know whether this would be a potential future agenda item or a note on Council report, but I was at our South Salt Lake Valley mosquito abatement district meeting yesterday, and West Nile virus is hitting us about a month earlier than normal because of the weather. And they've put together a PowerPoint presentation about West Nile. It's just general stuff, not going into the deep causes or anything else, just what we can do to avoid it, things like that. I was just wondering if the council would like to see that. They sent me a copy that I can pass on to IT and get it up on the screen.

Interested?

Okay. It takes about five, six minutes is all. Okay. And just kind of follow up with that. In our abatement district, we've had two pools of where West Nile has been discovered mosquitoes already. We don't get the first one until August. And we've actually had In Utah, one case of human West Nile virus and nationally 56 cases so far this year, which is not a big number, but it's a number that we don't usually see.

So would there be an issue with putting that on our website as well?

I don't think so. I think it would be fine. If we get a pool of mosquitoes in West Valley, they will contact me immediately and they'll also send RPIO a notice saying there's been one. And he has a toolkit of stuff that he can put out. Sam, the only question they've asked is, before you put that out, Please let them know. They can modify it if necessary. Okay. Apparently we had one.

If there's new updates.

If there's new updates. New updates or whatever. Apparently we had one that put it out a little more strenuously than he should have.

Okay.

You know, we were having an epidemic of West Nile virus in that city. We'd had one pool, which meant one in 50 mosquitoes was identified.

Okay.

Okay.

Sounds good. So get that on a study session as soon as possible. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. Council reports? Okay.

So I went into the AWWA, which is the American Water Works Association Conference in Washington, D.C., and Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District is really trying to educate our representatives in Washington, D.C., So they arranged for some meetings with all of our representatives, and they specifically wanted some of our elected officials to attend these meetings. And so I was included in the meeting, represented from Senator Mike Lee's office, and then just presenting them information about Jordan Valley Water Conservancy's educating them. We service over 800,000 people in a large water district. And Corey Rushton, who used to be a city council member, he wanted to let them know of a conservation project that we're trying to work on in the Grand School District at Hunter High School, and use that as a prototype or something for water-wise landscaping. As you drive by Hunter High School, what do you see? Lawn, sprinklers, water. So the district is working with Granite School District to see if we can develop a plan to bring some zero-scaping into Granite School, and then use that as an example to other school districts and other schools in the district to try to conserve our water. Because every resident that was told cannot water, they see schools watering their lawn, and it irritates people. So I thought that was a really good thing. It was received really well by Senator Curtis, and he's a local politician to begin with, and so he likes to see local involvement, and I thought it was really good, and I'm glad I went. It was really good.

So when I talked about the Miss West Valley pageant did go really, really well. And then I also participated or went and watched the CRC that is over on 3200 West, which is the Whitehall CRC. They have a summer program for preschool. And it's one month. three days a week, and then they had a little recital after. And it was really good. And a lot of parents very grateful for the program. A lot of parents that live right around that CRC bring their kids. They had about 25 kids and it was very successful. We have retired teachers within our community that volunteer I was going to do it once and never again, but I'll be back next year. So it was really successful. So that was really nice to go to. No others?

I was at the first concert in the park over at the Cultural Center. Very good concert. were there, too. Oh, good. I didn't make last night's, but I sent my great-granddaughter instead. I asked her about it this morning, and she said, yeah, I had fun. Only two people sang, but they sang for a long time. But it was fun. So, you know, that's the target we're trying to get is have fun with the kids.

Yeah.

She did enjoy it.

Good. We do have need for a closed session for pending litigation. If somebody wants to make that motion. And then we'll have that closed session and not talk about anything else. ADJOURN AFTER THAT.

NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS.

NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. NEW SPEAKERS. Thank you.

I didn't know they came back. All right. We'll take a five-minute break.