What was said · Salt Lake City
Council Work Session Meeting
Tuesday, January 13, 2026 — the full transcript. Click any sentence to hear it.
Welcome to the January 13th, 2026 City Council work session. Our meetings are public and you are welcome to join us in person or by watching from the Council's agenda page Zoom or YouTube. We hope you'll continue to join us in whatever manner you feel most comfortable. This is a work session meeting during which there's no public comment.
Please join us tonight during our 7 p.m. formal meeting to share your comments. We of course welcome your feedback by mail at PO Box 145-476 Salt Lake City, Utah 8414-5476 by email at council.com. And so SLC dot gov or via our 24 hour comment line 801-535-7654 comments we receive on agenda item on agenda topics are shared with council members and posted to our website sLCcounsel.gov or sorry sLC dot gov slash council.
Our first agenda item is
hooray nomination of council chair and vice chair for calendar year 2026. Mr. Chair I move that we nominate council member Cooley for the position. Okay. Thank you. Is there a second? I'll wait. I can't. Second. Okay. I have a motion from council member or a nomination council member Dugan and second from council member Lopez Chavez.
Are there any other nominations or does anyone want to speak to this item? I will just speak for that. Yes. Go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, you know, I am humbled to have the opportunity to chair this council. I had a great privilege to working with you and over this last year. You know, past year I have grown as a human as a council member because of it.
I also, you know, have learned a lot and I learned that I need to learn more. And I will love the support of you as my colleagues. I also, you know, I am motivated and excited about the challenges ahead and how we respond to them. I want to lead all of us together with the mentality of let's get caught trying. That's, you know, this phrase that many of you have learned, you know, from the kids.
Let's get caught trying. Good policy and moving the needle in our city. So I appreciate the nomination on the second. Thank you. I'll just say it has been a pleasure working with you as vice chair. And yeah, I really appreciate all of your help over the last year. And I hope that it has will help prepare you in this role because these are exciting times.
Council member Young. Yes. Thank you. I too want to just voice my support for council member. I'm kind of similar to what I said about council member Dugan. We each have a different lens to our leadership. And I think one of the things that I appreciate most about you is that you look at the entire landscape. You truly bring a unique set of expertise to how we consider not just our individual districts and the city, but also how that city then also compliments our fellow municipalities and ultimately the state community to which we belong.
That is such a unique lens that I think we are, if there is ever a day or a time for that, it is today. And so just super excited to see you stepping into that role on behalf of council to be able to help us consider where we fit within the greater fabric and how Salt Lake City can continue to be a leader in the state.
Is there a motion to close nominations? The chair moves that we close on the issue. Okay. In the nomination. All right. We'll go ahead and have a vote on whether to close nominations and proceed devoting all in favor. Aye. Aye. All right. That is unanimous. Let's go ahead and vote. Okay. The votes for city council chair.
Ivalopas Chavez votes Alejandro Puiz. Dan Dukin votes Alejandro Puiz. Erica Carlson votes Alejandro Puiz. Sarah Young votes Alejandro Puiz. Chris Wharton votes Alejandro Puiz. Alejandro Puiz votes Alejandro Puiz. And online we have Victoria Picro voting for Alejandro Puiz as well. Congratulations. Thank you. And now I would like to hand the time over to you to chair for the rest of the meeting.
Okay. Well, you that was fast. You were excited. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I can do the vice chair too if you want. Fine. I can handle it. I think. You got it. You know, you know, since I joined this council, I was in leadership every year. And I learned so much from being by chair of the RDA, then chair of the RDA, then chair of the RDA again, then chair of the council.
And I just feel ready to learn more and to grow. So thank you for the opportunity. I really humbled. Now we have the election of the vice chair of the council. And we're open for some nomination. Anybody wants to make a nomination? Mr. Chair. Yes. Oh, look at your new title. Love it. I would like to take this opportunity to nominate council member Erica Carlson for the role of council vice chair.
Second. I have a nomination for Erica. Any other nominations on the table? Can we close the nomination? Mr. Chair, I move to close nominations and proceed to vote. Okay. We have a second. Second. Okay. So that's all I have to say is that all of us in favor of the close the nomination. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. And since I was in unanimous, I will.
Erica, do you want to say something? I just want to say thank you for the trust. My colleagues have placed in me. I don't take your trust lightly. And as the newest member of the council, I'm looking forward to bringing a fresh perspective, working with you and ensuring that we're delivering results for the people of Salt Lake City.
I'm not sure what you're called to do. So thank you so much for your expression of trust. Okay. We have an opportunity now to make it formal. So you have a little piece of paper. You know what to do. So get on it. Okay. For city council vice chair. Chris Wharton votes Erica Carlson. Dan Duggan votes Erica Carlson. Eva Lopez Chavez votes Erica Carlson.
Alejandro Puis votes Erica Carlson. Erica Carlson votes Erica Carlson. Sarah Young votes Erica Carlson and online. Victoria votes Erica Carlson. Congratulations. Congratulations. Mr. Jair I would like to switch chairs with Erica and move to not switch. Yes, sure. Let's do that. Let's get it done. Okay. Now that we have done that, I'm excited.
We have an agenda in front of us. Let's item number two of the work session as an informational one in the administration. I'm Dr. Weston Clark and Andrew Johnston will join us for that. It is your time. All right. Thank you. Congratulations chair and vice chair and welcome vice chair. This is the most exciting part of your meeting where I get to talk to you.
At least I think so. Go to the next slide. We are fully embracing shape SLC now. We encourage everyone to go to shape SLC and export if you haven't. It's a great place to find out what engagement opportunities there are going on in the city right now. Next slide. We've broken up a bunch of public lands updates by district today just to try to be organized.
Hopefully that works and we'll go through it quickly. In district one Riverside Park is complete with two new scoreboards that will be delivered and installed just in time for spring baseball. Construction at Steen Blick Park will begin in February and at Cottonwood Park the city will be contracting with a consultant to begin design work this year.
In district two several efforts are underway at Madsen Park. The project is nearing the end of design review with construction readiness approaching. At the Glendale Regional Park phase one officially opened the public to the public on December 6th delivering the new play amenities to the neighborhood which I heard was absolutely packed just this last weekend.
These two design is moving forward with 70% design drawing to be complete by the end of February and an RFQ for the Peace Labyrinth will go out mid-2026 with additional funding from public utilities this project will now include a lift station similar to what exists at Cornell which is pretty cool. In district three work continues on the memory growth cultural landscape report and maintenance plan.
The project is currently in the site analysis phase which will inform long term stewardship and preservation priorities for this important historic landscape. Next slide. In district four the three three seven pocket park the project recently completed its public survey with a very strong participation from nearby residents.
That feedback is going to inform the next phase of design development which will be contract which will soon contract to consultant. That Pioneer Park contractor has been selected for that project and construction will start there March to be completed this fall 2026. District five Jefferson Park the consultant team is developed two initial design concepts those concepts are currently under internal review and staff are preparing to reengage the public in an open house in February.
The Liberty Park cultural landscape and vision plan continues to move forward. The project team has completed its review of community feedback from the most recent engagement phase and that input is actively informing refinements to the long term vision of the park. Also at Liberty Park Rotary Park Rotary Play Park is still under construction.
Unfortunately there's been some material delays from the equipment being shipped from Canada so there is it is possible there may be a one or two month delay on that project being finalized with the team is working as hard as they can to line up project or line up timeline so that it will be all done in time. Currently in District five updates from the latest round of public engagement at Fleet Block are available and you guessed it.
On shape SLC so go check it out. Next slide. In District six several projects are advancing at Miller Park Bird Refuge construction documents are complete and project permits will be submitted in January. The Donner Trail project is going out for bid for construction in mid January with construction anticipated to begin shortly after.
The University of Utah Baseball Stadium and Sunnyside Park project staff has been meeting with the integrated design team this month to coordinate next steps and ensure alignment between campus and park improvements. That project is seeking site certification which is cool as well. Moving on to District seven at Allen Park the integrated design team met on December 17th at public lands to coordinate across departments and advance design development.
Similar fire line construction is moving along and the park will remain closed until early spring. Concept design is being finalized also for the Fairmont Park improvements. Next slide. We have one update from transportation. Curving gutter pavement storm drain utilities are complete Redwood Road to about 10th West. Construction is likely to slow the next this month and next month anticipating not the best weather for the construction.
In 2026 the project will complete paving install median islands and landscaping and those of you who have driven in the area know that the bridge on the Jordan River is closed and it will be closed for about six months. So that's going to be a bit of a hurdle for the Westside community. I drive my kid over to Slixie and things were moving fine this week so hopefully it continues to move decently well.
The website is 600 North SLC dot org for updates if anyone wants to share. Next slide. This is from the mayor's office. This is love your block update in 2025. Love your block mini grant projects engaged 495 volunteers who contributed 1,143 volunteer hours removed more than 34,000 pounds of trash across eight acres. Installed 145 new neighborhood features such as benches and little free libraries planted 13 trees and supported 17 public art displays.
In addition projects leveraged 284 over $284,000 in cash and in kind contributions. After closing the November 2025 open mini grant application cycle we're going to announce the approximately eight newly funded projects and a grantee orientation will be held on February 5th with project implementation beginning immediately afterward and continuing through the end of June of this year.
So pretty exciting year for love your block. And that is everything for me. You don't have any questions. Just more comments rather than questions but just wanted to publicly say how much I love shape SLC and how appreciative I am of the whole team behind the scenes who made such a project possible. So thank you for the effort that was put into consolidating all of the public engagement opportunities into one space.
I also would love to consider how we might capture some of the intangible benefits of love your block and I love seeing how many volunteers, the hours, would love to see do we see a shift in how people care about their neighborhoods or a sense of connection or feel a greater sense of agency and ownership over where they live.
And if it's at all possible to capture some of those intangible pieces of this program that I think benefit our neighborhoods. Thank you. Thank you very much. I will say a huge shout out to Amanda Greenland's team and IMS who has worked incredibly hard on shape SLC and it is whenever you implement a city wide software program it is a Herculean task and they've done some incredible work and it is operating very smoothly so far.
So thank you for those comments. And that's great feedback for love your block. I love that idea. I imagine that they've been collecting some of that feedback already but I would love to quantify it in some way so thank you very much. All right. I think next slide please. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on who you are I don't have any construction updates for homelessness unlike Weston and the positive things you can bring to the table about parks.
You do see here that our utilization rate in January has been 107.8%. You may be questioning if you understand statistics how we can go above 100% that refers to the number of beds used per night over the number of beds we have available. And so what we have is a very high utilization rate of the 24 7 beds year round probably 97% above that.
And then the flex beds every winter usually have more than one person in them per night sometimes and that's how you get that exceeding the total threshold on average. So high utilization clearly in need for shelter and more shelter so that's where that number comes from. Now in cam and impact mitigation work and rapid response teams this is our city clean up efforts.
And what you'll see there is EIMs those usually the bigger ones with the county support we just don't have a lot of big camps at this point. And there's a number of reasons for that part of it is more shelter beds. We've had more this year than last year and previous years. That's a big big piece of what we see there and a positive impact in the sense that when we have more shelter beds people will go into them they do follow the rules and stay in those beds consistently.
Unfortunately that means we also have a backlog in those beds we can't get them moved out into housing which is always one of our pinch points. But rapid response team work continues to go forward citywide you can see there where we're looking at right now. It changes week to week and it's based on what we're seeing and what reports from the community so that can fluctuate.
And we can actually flex more of those areas. These are just the general places that you'll be expecting that. Next slide. Code Blue is happening. This is a previous card on the left about those nights. They do unsheltered Utah doesn't need volunteers. They rely heavily on volunteers to run those. Those are not every night but they did call them last weekend and I'll just pay more coming forward so we encourage folks and if you want to use this on your social media or other distribution channels please do always need volunteers for those projects.
Those are two locations downtown at two different churches and they'll contact volunteers as they need them. The resource fair just happened last Friday at the Gayle Miller Resource Center ballpark neighborhood. You can see the number of people, large number of providers. Next fair is in February the Gerald E.D. King and then the Justice Court is happening on February 6th at Department of Workforce Services here on 7th South near the Gerald E.
King. The last piece is our annual point in time count is happening this month, 29th, 30th and 31st. We rely on volunteers. We in the collective in this county we only get the data we have if we have volunteers to do it. The more volunteers we have the more accurate it is and more thorough it is. The fewer we have the harder it is to get an accurate count of the unsheltered.
For those of you who aren't aware of this what happens is we do a statewide and nationwide count on those days and we take all three of those nice to try and catch everybody. We count everybody in shelters, permanent shelters and temporary shelters. We also count everybody who is literally sleeping outside someplace in vehicles around the street.
And between those two numbers is where our official state numbers come from the way we work off of. We rely on groups of volunteers going out. Now you'll have training before you go out. They always have you go with somebody who knows what they're doing. So even if you have no idea what you're talking about or what you're going, there's somebody who's experienced there.
They have a full online module and training for everybody. It's very safe. It goes between 4am and 6am those three days. You don't have to do all three days. You can do one night. And it's a wonderful experience if you've never gone out in the middle of night and tried to look for people who are outside. And you have a short interaction with them, ask some questions as they're willing to answer them.
And that goes into our database to inform both how many people add their needs that we see out there. So highly recommend that if you haven't tried that before, even for one night. And we can help through the city. We've always had a team in the mayor's office and other ethnic city councils had that as well to go out and experience it for yourself.
So thank you very much council. Any questions on anything here? Okay. I think we got an update. You know, on the point on time count, the best way to register is through that link, correct? Correct. I think it will be useful for all of us to maybe the council to share that as a whole with our network and see if we can get more people.
I know that many other stuff has done it before. Many of the council members are going to do it this year too. So I thank you for the update. The other thing on that is you can register as groups. So if you really want to go to a group of people, they love that. So it's okay to do sort of batch together and know if you're through friends, you feel more comfortable, that's totally fine as well.
Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. Moving on to item number three, Utah Open Meetings Law Training. This is going to be very exciting. The Code of Conduct on the Government Records Access and Management Act, which stands for Grandma Training. We are going to have our at the table, Mark Trel, the city attorney, Keith Reynolds, the city recorder to give us this important training.
It is your time now. Great. Thank you all. We are here today to present to you the training that council chair, if we discussed, that's required legally every year. But in addition to that, we'll be discussing items related to grandma. Those are tied together because those relate to how this body conducts the public's business openly and transparently.
In addition to those two items, we'll be touching on the council's conduct, which is a policy that this body adopted in December of 2023 that addresses how this body relates to each other, to city employees and members of the public to promote civility in discussion of policy moving forward. So with that, we can begin.
We will first hit the Utah Open and Public Meetings Act training, then briefly review the city council's code of conduct, and then hit some items on the Government Records and Access Management Act or grandma. So I don't know if the slides are available. While we're bringing those up, the key takeaways from the open training that we're aiming to achieve here is informing when OPMA applies, knowing what notice is required for a public meeting, knowing when you can close an open meeting from the public, and what records are meant to be kept in those close meetings, how to handle public comments, knowing how to handle a meeting that has been disrupted, knowing the consequences of violating OPMA, and knowing
about, so that's on OPMA. With respect to the code of conduct, our hope is that we can advise on the purposes, and I believe you may have the model of excellence acknowledgments before you, so having that ready for you to sign. And then with respect to grandma, takeaways will be knowing key provisions of grandma for the public meeting, and keep on presenting on some statistics from this past year related to grandma requests.
If... We didn't realize that the slides from the transmittal were the final set, and so we're just pulling them up. It'll take a second if you want to keep going. Okay. Yeah, we can keep going. I, you know, we don't have to do death by PowerPoint. I can sort of talk about various things. So generally speaking, meetings of a public body, the council and the CRA board, our public bodies are open to the public unless an exception allows that meeting to be closed.
I think this particular slide is near the end. We can go to slide nine, please. There we are. All right. Next one, and the next one, I guess, from there. So, okay, we already hit this one. Next one, sorry. So what is a meeting? A meeting is a gathering of a quorum of a public body. A quorum here is a majority of this body, four members of this body would constitute a quorum.
That meeting has to be properly convened by someone with authority to call that meeting, and it's for express purpose acting as that public body to receive comments, deliberate about a relevant matter, and take action on a relevant matter. So that is the definition of the meeting. Next slide. So which meetings are subject to OMA?
So maybe I'll hit the no side first. Chance meetings. So perhaps there is some kind of event where at least four of you attend, but it's not a something called for you to deliberate on or to take action on. It's a chance meeting where you all happen to be in the same place, not a meeting. A social gathering, similarly, where there might be at least four of you together, but you're not doing any of the public business.
That's not a public meeting. And finally, if there's no quorum, so we may be meeting in here, but there's only three of you here, that wouldn't be a public meeting. What are public meetings? An electronic meeting, right? Sometimes you may, I'm thinking back in the COVID days, you may notice up an electronic meeting where all you all appear electronically.
That is a public meeting. A retreat, which I believe you guys do annually. That is a public meeting. Same thing with workshops and field trips as well. It's questions arise for an event or something you may be planning happy to advise on those as you go forward. Next slide. Noticing public meetings. So every meeting must receive at least at a minimum of 24-hour notice.
You have to have an agenda, date, time, place. Next slide. You must also come up with an annual meeting schedule. So you publish your anticipated annual meetings, your meetings annually, right? The dates and times and places of those. If you want revisions, only if you add a new regularly scheduled meeting. Next slide.
Sometimes you may need an emergency meeting. That's where something may come up before your next regularly scheduled public meeting. There, you cannot hold it unless you attempt to notify all members and you have a majority of the members approve holding the emergency meeting. As far as notice, it's best notice practical, practicable of time, place and the topics.
And you can't take final action at an emergency meeting unless that topic is listed on the agenda. Next slide. Providing public notice, we're required under state code to provide class A notice for this body. So that means publishing on the Utah Public Notice website, posting on the council and CRA board websites and posting at a public location within the city that is reasonably likely to be seen by city residents.
Next slide. Electronic meetings. We see two types of electronic meetings. There are those with an anchor location and there are those without an anchor location. If you have an electronic meeting with an anchor location, it's a place where the public can join the electronic meeting. So perhaps all of you are electronic virtual, but we have the work room for members of the public to attend, listen and potentially participate if that's available.
If you don't have an anchor location, perhaps there is a health and safety risk that may prohibit making a space available for a member of the public. We have this during the COVID times. You can have an electronic meeting without an anchor location so long as a member of the public does not request an anchor location 12 hours before that meeting.
Next slide. Records that are kept for meetings. So here on this slide, on the left side, you see the types of records that have to be kept for an open meeting such as this. On the right side are the types of records that are kept for a closed meeting. Difference here you might see is that you have written minutes on closed meetings are optional and that a recording on the closed meeting if it deals with, and we'll get to one of the reasons why we might close a meeting, the character, professional confidence or physical or mental health of an individual or deployment of security personnel devices or systems, those are not, you don't make recordings of those.
And for closed meetings, those records are protected under grandma. They're not presumed public. We protect them. And unless there is, if there's a fight over the types of records, we would have a discussion with about whether there is a public interest in releasing such records. Next slide. So I think all of this is just to emphasize that generally meetings of the public body are open to the public unless we have an exception that allows for a meeting to be closed.
Next slide. So these bullets list the reasons why meetings can be closed. So a meeting can only be closed to discuss specified topics. The ones that we have seen commonly here before this body include pending a reasonably imminent litigation, real property purchase exchange lease or real property sale and advice of legal counsel.
Next slide. This slide just details the procedures for closing a meeting. So you have a meeting open like this and then there's a motion to enter into closed session. Two-thirds must vote to approve closing the open meeting. And you must publicly announce and enter into the minutes the reasons for closing the meeting.
So those previously listed reasons, the location of the meeting and have a roll call vote binding. Next slide. Public comment and participation. So sometimes there may be items where you might have a public hearing required and those might be defined by state law or city code requirements or customer practice. But then sometimes you might have other public comments like general public comment.
Those are to be allowed at the discretion of the chair. Comments may be discussed during a meeting if they're not on the agenda by this body but no final action can be taken if not on the agenda. Next slide. Meeting disruptions. So if you are in the middle of a public meeting and there is a disruption to the public meeting that prevents this body from conducting the business by which it's meant to conduct to do, an individual may be removed if that person is willfully disrupting the meeting to the extent that the orderly conduct of the meeting is seriously compromised.
So if there's a disruption that is preventing discussion, dialogue, votes, etc., that person may be removed from the meeting. Next slide. Consequences of violating openness. This is something that I think about as this body's attorney. Next slide. So members of this body or myself or others who participate in violating the Open Public Meeting Act can be charged to the Class B misdemeanor if those persons knowingly violate the closed meeting provisions of OMA.
Private individuals, those who believe that a meeting has been unlawfully closed, can bring a lawsuit for an alleged violation of OMA. If they are successful, that final action taken could be void. Such a lawsuit must be commenced within 90 days of the final action or 30 days of the final action concerning issuance of bonds and claimants or plaintiffs can recover attorneys fees and costs.
So we really work hard to try to ensure that we are correctly advising on whether a meeting can be closed or not. Next slide. The City Council Code of Conduct. Next slide. These bullets here are just a summary of the reasons why this body stated it adopted the Code of Conduct. It's to emphasize an atmosphere of participation and engagement in government that recognizes the individual contributions and perspectives creating an atmosphere of respect and civility and avoiding conduct which may be divisive or harmful to the interests of Salt Lake City or that may be reckless.
The last bullet references a model of excellence which is before you and that is an acknowledgement that is in the Code of Conduct that acknowledges that you've reviewed the Code of Conduct and agreed to what's in the model of excellence and to abide by it. I would add on this particular item, if there are ever any kind of questions about the Code of Conduct that my office can help try to answer, we're more than happy to have one on one meetings or small group sessions to discuss questions as they arise.
Next slide. Grandma, the Government Records and Access Management Act. Next slide. This is a very summary provision of grandma. I think I might add, this is where I'm going to get my, as I've gotten older I have to use reading glasses now, sorry. I think one of the things I want to take away from this is that a lot of the work you do in the public business means you're generating a lot of records according to law related to the public's business and there's a presumption under Utah law, under grandma that those records are presumed public unless an exception for protecting them applies.
So things like emails, text messages, voicemails, those kinds of things can be viewed as records under grandma and there's a presumption that they are made public unless an exception applies. The thought there is that it is meant to help foster transparency and openness in government. This was a law enacted in 1991, a huge title of the Utah Code 63G chapter 2.
We are always advising on grandma issues, nonstop for all of our city clients, always happy to advise on that as we, as you receive grandma requests or have questions about certain records. The record classification retention and sharing, if there are requests that come in, generally speaking there are 10 business days to respond five days for expedited requests.
Sometimes you'll see requests seek fee waivers and depending on the merits of those waiver requests will work with our clients to determine whether a fee waiver may be appropriate or not. But I think a lot of us are familiar with grandma just want to emphasize that the records that are generated from the public work that we do belong with the public.
There's a presumption that they're public. I think this might be the rest of yours. I'll take us across the finish line here. Market will break. The last two slides are just some statistics. This is the breakdown of where grandma requests go within the city. As you can see, most of them go to the police department. These are mostly for police requests.
That little wedge for the green and the blue is a little misleading, those are a little bit larger and more complicated requests. Which is to say the police department doesn't have complicated requests. They fall everywhere. But the police department does get a lot. Next slide please. Can I ask your question? And this, yeah, go ahead.
Just back on the other slide. I may have had an experience with this. So is it accurate that it took requests to copy of your police report that that is a grandma process? Okay. It is. So I think that is of note related to this. Because there's just a lot of processes that individuals experience where they need a copy of that police report.
I think that you could maybe without that understanding draw different conclusions about this. But knowing that a lot of that is going to be administrative, this makes a lot of sense to me. Go to the next slide again. This is just the breakdown of the last five years. Last year we had 16,277 grammar requests. Which is a little bit over the year before but still within the normal range for Salt Lake City.
And that's really it. That's what we have. Next slide. So thank you. If there are any questions now we're happy to answer them. Or if you have other questions at any other time, I'm always happy to chat with you all. In those press it seems like we have a good understanding of both Obama and grandma, what a consumer online Victoria?
No? Okay. It seems like we... Yeah? Just go ahead. In terms of the grammar requests that come into our office, there's times when it will either ask for communications or conversations between council members or documents that are official records. The recorder's office works really closely with our staff on that. And we have a couple of people as most of you know who help just sort through either your email or files or contact you about your text messages.
So staff is always very happy to coordinate with you and coordinate with the recorder's office and attorneys as needed. So just over with you. Yeah? Thank you for that information. We have been very good and the staff has been incredibly supportive of us and the attorney's office too. And you know we often break apart when we realize that we may be talking about policy.
So it's encouraging that we are following the rules to the T. And thank you for the update. The... The... The... The... Freshion up of this information. I think we're going to move on right now. Certainly you have made yourself available for any questions. So if you have any questions please reach out. Thank you. Yes.
Yes. What's your number for the fill that out? This is a appendix A you know if you have fill it up you can put it on the give it to Lehua. I put it already on the recorder's office over there. Now we're moving on to item number four which is an informational item. We're going to have the table Angela Price our policy director.
We are... Hello welcome. It's good time right before you. This is like you know all the kids turning on the assignment. So no no this is good. We're glad that we are you know ready to sign the model of excellence. Very exciting. Angela is your time. Great. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here this evening. Congratulations chair and vice chair.
Thanks for your service council member Wharton. I just want to quickly offer a moment of gratitude to my team. I think they're headed down. We are small but fierce and I'm so grateful for Michelle who. My deputy director Melanie Hall who oversees our federal programs and Dave Quayley who is the fearless attorney assigned to have me as his client.
And so thank you so much to my team. I don't think we've ever seen I'm going to just call it a tsunami of things that we are tracking both at the state and federal level. So I'm going to kind of quick hit on a few of the state things. I also just want to thank the lobby team that supports us both at the state and federal level.
We're so grateful for them and then mostly want to thank the council and the mayor for your support and the division. Your trust in me is the director and for many of you for being friends and lifting me up in those moments where it feels very challenging to report the things that I need to report to you. The pillars and the foundation of our division are truly based on the values of you as the elected officials representing Salt Lake City and the mayor.
And so we strategically are in the trenches year round fighting for those values. And so I just want to offer my gratitude for your trust in me. I'm excited to spend the next few weeks with you at a standing five o'clock time slot to update you on what's happening in the legislative session that starts next Tuesday. And I'm always available as you guys know at any time if you need anything.
So with that I just want to quickly run over the Salt Lake City priorities. Again these were identified back in April by our departments and then by the mayor and then further validated by the council. And those priorities are water helping our unsheltered individuals in the city maintaining local control, energy, transportation, Olympics, housing, public safety and the public safety plan implementation.
And those are not in a specific order. But those are the things that you know are kind of our core things policies that we're watching. I also want to quickly share some of the legislative priorities that have been communicated and established by both chambers in the House and the Senate. This is not an exhaustive list but just want to put a few of these on your radar.
So cost of living and how that's impacting Utah's limited government. Water, infrastructure, public safety, energy, advanced technology like AI and air taxis. Separation of powers meaning judicial and executive branches and then data privacy. And if you guys want I'd be happy to share both chambers and both caucuses priorities with you.
You can find those on the state website. I want to just also quickly talk through Salesforce which is the software that we use to track legislation. We already have as of this morning 378 bills. There's about 20 more ish that just got dropped this afternoon. We last so the state website has these really cool data metrics if you want to nerd out on those kinds of things.
And last year before the session there were 435 bills introduced but we still have one more week to go. I believe we are going to shatter records as we've seen this kind of steady uptick in bills over the past few years. We are currently tracking 143 bills which is congruent with where the Utah League of Cities in town is at.
And we've made a lot of changes to how we're tracking bills. One of the really big changes is that we have kind of a dual pathway now that a bill can either be an FYI bill meaning that I'll use I'll pick on police for a second like a criminal code change for example which is something that our police officers need to know about but not necessarily something that we would work versus a policy bill that is a bill that has a profound impact on city operations or city values and things like that.
So we can assign those as we are sifting bills and then departments can also change those designations. So we also are tracking public safety plan bills and if you remember from early and January of last year the city released the public safety plan those bills are interesting because we are not only tracking bills that would meet that would impact city operations around justice court or prosecutors or PD or you know the whole host of things that we do that encompass the policies associated with the public safety plan but it also could include things that would impact the courts that could impact corrections and other partners the health department.
So we are tracking all of those bills again kind of in an FYI but so that we know at the end of the session we passed you know X number of bills that impact the public safety plan and it helps us track that ongoing work that we're doing in the city there. Any questions on any of those pieces or I'll keep rocking. Okay.
For you and for the public you can see what bills that we're tracking on the legislative affairs website. We update that every Friday so that's a good place to see a comprehensive list of what's being tracked. Will you list that website? Yes it is SLC.gov. Backslash attorney backslash legislative slash affairs. The dot gov is this legislative affairs is this and I'd be happy to send that to you via emails.
Maybe somebody can put that in the chat or something for the public. Okay. I'm going to do a quick run through of some of the big areas that we're focused on right now. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I just want to give you kind of a quick hit on some things that will specifically be of interest I believe to the council.
There are numerous tax proposals. At the federal level our lobby is called this year the tax Super Bowl and I think we are also seeing that at the state level. A few things that are worth noting is HB 161 property tax modifications by representative Koford. This would change the residential property tax from 45% to 60% meaning that the tax exemption would be shifted to other property taxpayers like commercial businesses and other entities.
It also would require a constitutional amendment and that associated amendment is HJR7. SB 97 property tax rate amendments is Senator McKay's legislation that went through Revin Tax Committee in November. This would have a 5% cap on increase in city budgets and would also propose some changes to locally assess new growth that would have a pretty profound impact on our city budget.
HB 236 property tax amendments by representative Peterson this just came out yesterday. This addresses the truth and taxation process. Part of the problem and where we're seeing some of these challenges with the tax bills is that as you guys know as the council you pass your budget in June and then the truth and taxation process happens in August.
That is not a choice made by any cities. That is actually because of the new growth tax numbers that come out and not having those in time for the statutory required budget adoption process. I know you as a council hold many opportunities for the public to weigh in earlier process. So Representative Peterson is running a bill that would look at the truth and taxation process and also potentially require cities to have two budgets.
One if the truth and taxation process actually goes through and one if it doesn't. So I know our finance team is working diligently on that. The house majority is talking a lot about fiscal conservatism and government and transparency and government. They mentioned that the taxpayers conference yesterday that they want to look at a 5% budget cut to state budgets and I think we could see something similar in the political subdivision realm.
There was discussion kind of mirroring the higher ed legislation a few years ago that required that 10% reduction in higher ed budgets. So that's something that we're watching closely. And then also modifications to the gas tax. And this there's been a lot of conversations around this over the past few years. The gas tax is how the city and the county get B&C road funds that we use for infrastructure.
Certainly would potentially help residents at the pump pay less obviously helping our cost of living expenses for salt lakers but could potentially have impacts on taxes and things on exports to other states. So a lot happening in the tax space. Around land use we are tracking 20 or more proposals. I along with Nick Norris the planning director and Catherine Pasker who's the senior attorney assigned to land use participate in the land use task force.
We have many things that we're working on and have been working on the land use task force as a group that consists of municipalities and the property rights coalition. We get together every year and have they have for about 20 or so sessions and we hammer out the really hard land use things. And they're very challenging meetings but they're also very productive.
We have seen a few of the land use bills come out. There's a couple that just came out this afternoon. We're watching closely is HB 184 local land use revisions by representative ward. This specifically impacts the council because it would allow for a fast track for starter homes which is in theory what we want to have here in the city.
But it also limits the planning commission and city council's authority. And if the planning commission and city council doesn't make a decision on an application within 30 days or 31 days the application is automatically vested and it also requires some additional justification on denial of an application by legislative bodies.
So we're closely watching that. There's a lot of discussion around standardization of design around water sewer roads. Those pieces of legislation are always concerning to us because especially in Salt Lake being a built out city we worry about our infrastructure and if we put in very large projects how that can impact people you know downstream and I know you guys hear those please many many nights before you as you're reviewing land use applications.
One of the there's a lot of discussion just around land use preemption in general at the state level and to facilitate more starter home development and where we get concerned we always are concerned as a city around anything that erodes local control. And Salt Lake is uniquely positioned because you as a legislative body the mayor the planning division and our other departments are so forward thinking on how we handle land use in the city and with housing being such a priority of this body we have done some really innovative things in the housing realm and in the land use realm and so I'm always concerned and watching for things that would erode the legislative acts that you guys have already
done that would set us back from the forward progress that we're making there. So watching it from a local control perspective and from that lens as well. And then there's certainly additions around parking requirements around annexation around accessory dwelling units all things that we're watching and monitoring but may not have as but you have an impact on the city.
Un sheltered services and funding I think we constantly are seeing in the headlines in the papers here ongoing conversations around the campus and the tight budget that the state is going to have this year I think this will probably be one of those policies that is debated almost all 45 days if not until midnight on as the gavel strikes and so we're really grateful to the mayor and the council chief read and Andrew Johnston for continuing the engagement with the state on those conversations and of course we always support additional funding around housing and anything that we can do to support our unsheltered residents getting the services and assistance that they need.
Public safety is always an area where we track a lot of legislation our police department probably hands down has the most bills assigned to them right now. A lot of them are kind of FYI things that the officers need to know as they're resting as far as criminal code changes and citations but a lot of it is actually impactful to their day to day operations and things that our officers are doing on the streets.
We are certainly very engaged in the public safety plan and the implementation around that and ensuring that our officers have the resources that they need to be able to do their jobs and protect our residents here in Salt Lake. There's waters are very high priority always is and especially for Salt Lake City where we're a very unique water provider.
There's several bills already around the Great Salt Lake anything that we can do to conserve water to the Great Salt Lake is something that the city supports. We are always concerned about our water rights and extraterritorial jurisdictions and annexations that could impact our providing municipal services whether it's a city incorporation or a city absorbing in or an unincorporated area absorbing to a city or gravel pits or kind of high water users like data centers.
And then there's a lot of conversation around state the state water infrastructure bank and water rates as you guys have been hearing from many of your constituents. There's certainly a pinch that people are feeling from the recent water rate increase and the study that justified that. We don't want to have any undue rates put on to our ratepayers in the utility space especially where it wouldn't necessarily go to projects in the city it could be used for projects throughout the entire basin.
I'm close to being done and then can open for questions. SB 195 from the 2025 general session was the transportation amendments that specifically targeted Salt Lake City roads. We have made tremendous growth on this piece of legislation and I just want to give so much kudos to the transportation division and community and neighborhoods.
I think they have had staff working around the clock since February when this legislation was implemented. We do believe that we may see another iteration of this legislation but we're hopeful that the work that we've done both through the UDOT study through the city's written response that we provided by November 1st and that the mayor presented to the transportation interim committee on November 19th have paved the way to show that we're listening.
We hear that there are concerns around transportation and the growth that we're experiencing in the city and so we're hopeful that we can continue having a seat at that table and working on that legislation. And then the last thing that I want to mention from a policy perspective is when I'm going to tag social justice issues and these are always really hard bills for us as a city as they have a profound impact on the values that you guys hold as council members and have a profound impact on our residents here in the city.
I'm going to mention two bills and then just sort of start with flags. Obviously are the flag designation that we made earlier this year designating several city flags as of interest to the legislature and so I think we can expect to have some conversation around flags and government speech. HB 183 by representative Lee is sex designation amendments and this legislation could impact we're still going through a legal analysis on this but I want to raise this for you as the council because this could impact individuals that identify transgender from being able to work certain jobs within our city and so I know we have partners outside of the city that are closely working on this legislation and tracking this legislation and we're still doing an analysis
to see how this could impact Salt Lake City employees and then the other piece of legislation that I want to bring up is HB 196 high was designation amendments also by representative Lee which would rename a class C road specifically 900 South from Harvey Milk Boulevard to Charlie Kirk Boulevard. The city has issued several statements yesterday in opposition to this legislation as it erodes local control and I know as of a few hours ago some of our community partners have been working closely with the businesses on 900 South and businesses throughout the city and they've gathered over 5,000 signatures on this in opposition to this legislation so there's a lot of work being done in this space and I know these are issues that are important to you
as elected officials and then I just want to end with a few statements on kind of general sentiment the city and our partners will always fight for maintaining our local control and that may come to us in a whole host of different ways the naming of our streets how we manage our budgets how we train our employees and so I want you to know that we are that is one of our core principles that we hold true to and we you know strategically work with legislators on on bills that Woody Road local control one of the things that I value the most about you as the council and the mayor is your willingness to have a seat at the table and to do the hard work and oftentimes we are put
we have those really challenging conversations whether it's bringing hockey downtown or it's bringing baseball to the west side or it's what what makes it into the budget and it's really admirable to me to see the work that you guys do and how you continue to show up to those tables and I hope that over the 45 days that the legislature is in session we can continue to have a seat at that table and to have those hard conversations around policies that really impact salt lakers and Utahns we have people living on our streets that need help and we have you know an expansive need for services in the city with a shrinking city budget there are a lot of really big problems that we need to solve and I hope we can keep the conversation focused around those issues
and lastly for anybody that's listening online if you would like to contact your legislator about legislation it's important to know that the city we don't vote on legislation so the city council I'm sure you would maybe sometimes love to have that vote but you don't
that you can find your legislators on the Utah legislative website and we can actually put a link to that on the legislative affairs website as well for for folks so with that I'll open up to any questions that you may have and I hope I didn't go over too much time.
Please want to say thank you very much Angela for that and I look forward I really look forward to the next 45 days or 45 plus 7. Council Member or sorry Mr. Chair.
We can you tell us a little bit more about the bill that would like the representative lead that would impact city employees? Yes let me clarify we don't know if it impacts city employees we're still doing a a thorough review on on the provisions in the legislation so I want to be clear that we we can't say for certain if it does impact city employees but kind of the key provisions that that I think are noteworthy is that it it seeks to limit a provider from assigning an employee to a position that allows face-to-face interaction with a child for a period in excess of five minutes and that is specifically a provider is identified as a license holder certificate holder legally responsible person
that provides health and human services it changes gender with sex in the legislation so that's where it gets into into impacting individuals that identify as transgender and then it also changes the Utah Anti-Discrimination Act so it's something that our legal team and our departments are still analyzing but we will certainly report back if there are impacts to city employees but there certainly could be a profound impact to our our local businesses and our economy if individuals that identify with certain sex or as transgender may not be able to have direct engagement with customers.
Yeah I'm just wondering if that would include like police officers, firefighters, any members of the our social work team that they identified as trans and there was a situation where they were dealing with victims who are responding to calls for minors. I'm just wondering if that would be included in that. Yeah thanks for that question and that's that's what we're really kind of digging into from a statutory perspective of what how provider translates to city employees both frontline workers as you've mentioned individuals that are taking permits you know different different areas within the city so we will hopefully have more on that in the next day or two.
Okay thank you. Yeah any other questions for me? I do have you know a little thought I you know I
you know this 45 days or you know how long it lasts that's it's a tough it's a tough time for all of us because there's a lot of bills there's a lot of angles there's a lot of impacts to our city and to the community and we I appreciate your team and everybody every single director every single division director every single employee that helps administration the mayor's office and the council staff that works so hard to try to catch all these bills and to try to understand their real impact and what they're trying to aim at.
And it's unfortunately that we sometimes feels like in many cases not in all cases but in many cases we are the defensive to protect our neighbors to protect our institutions. And I wish for a time where we built better partnerships and that we can see each other eye to eye and solve the real problems in front of us. I I've been following a bill that I've been working with Senator Plums and a bill it's in a bill 76 that she posted and is a bill to allow as an opt-in for renters to disclose their rental
fees for credit you know to impact positively into their credit reporting and in my district and I think it happens across the city that is people that have been renting for 20 or 30 years and nothing to show for. This bill potentially will allow for those that want to to be able to report that with a mechanism that is created
and show that they are able they are worthy of credit for housing. So to me I solved a piece of the problem nor it doesn't solve all of it but I'm very excited to that this bill came to fruition so I'm very supportive of it generally. I don't know if there is any other. This is just more of a comment not necessarily to you but to any members of the public who may be tuning in right now to just say thank you to those 5,000 residents and business owners and other community members who are rallying around Harvey Milk Boulevard and a sense of pride and the city and in the place that we live in gratitude to them for expressing their civic engagement and perspectives. Thank you. And to finish I will say that and you mentioned this our residents
can always reach out to us with their thoughts about policy that is being discussed at the state level and the federal level certainly at our level but I will encourage everybody that is out there to reach out to our legislators directly and to make your voice heard. Many times it feels like it doesn't matter and many times we know that our current legislator may be supportive of our point of view and we should reach out to other legislators beyond our own if you live in Salt Lake City to share your stories to your share your position to make your voice heard and if you have family members of friends in other cities outside Salt Lake City please reach out to them to reach out to the legislators. Politicians respond to their constituents making their voice heard so
I I'm looking forward to helping activate our neighbors for for our benefits so thank you for the work that you're going to be doing. Yeah Victoria go ahead sorry. Angela with the pivoting away from former director Neder Hauser and with the future director Clancy not being installed yet finishing out his term. Is there homelessness legislation that's going to be driven if so do we know who's going to be point on that is that a niche issue that I should take up with you not when everyone is having to spend their time on it. Yeah thank you for that question and thank you for the kind words Council Member Pooey. The Nick Coleman is serving as interim director of the Office of Homeless Services while Representative Clancy is finishing out his term so if you have specific questions or
concerns about homelessness legislation as it starts to advance certainly you know reach out to me I know Chief Red I just saw all of his leadership team just walk in Chief Red and Andrew Johnston are are heavily involved in those conversations as well so we can certainly always facilitate conversations with Nick and others at the state around the Office of Homeless Services direction with the campus and where that where that's moving so always happy to help facilitate that.
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you and you know your thoughts are your thoughts are with you and your team and we feel the same way about you so good luck with everything we're here to work together towards a greater good. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Moving on to item number five informational 2025 roadway construction net maintenance. We're going to have Kate where it comes with policy analysts to conjoin in us Jorge Chamorro Director of Public Services and Julie Crockson Deputy Director of Public Services and it's your time. Great. Thank you. So public services submitted a report with an update on on some of the projects that were completed in 2025 and there's just a lot of different types of projects that are going on and because of this
they're going to start doing annual updates for you. With that in mind and all the new work that's been done they are anticipating a two percent increase request for their streets division budget and potentially three new hires to help with that maintenance that goes into there. For you and policy topics they may want to discuss after the briefing or as part of the briefing is the maintenance impacts that the work that they are doing which you can see on the streets as you drive around or bike around or walk. The maintenance impacts for the fiscal year 2027 annual budget and additionally you may want to discuss with the administration how recent legislation may impact decisions on future investments. With that I'll turn it over to Jorge and Julie.
Thank you Kate. Hello Council members. Today I would like to take the opportunity to introduce an initiative that has been a priority for our department for quite some time. The following report is intended to be used as reference in the perennial discussion around what is the long-term maintenance after these projects are completed and the goal here is it's not a budget request not today but what we wanted to bring attention to you is how much does the inventory of the streets
assets is growing with new projects. So sort of like an opportunity to take the polls and see how much our inventory has changed over the last few years with the completion of some of the most recent projects. All right. Julie will be walking you through a sample of some of those projects and what is the resulting change in the inventory of assets as I mentioned that will ultimately be maintained by the streets division. So with that I will pass it to Julie who will walk you through with his presentation. Thank you Jorge. If we could go to the next slide. As Jorge said this is really just a chance to kind of take inventory of the projects and their impact to our maintenance.
So a lot of these projects in the last five or so years have you know newer designs. We're adding new assets that maybe haven't been in the right of way before like floating islands or you know more protected bike lanes. And so that's leading to our increase in inventory and then we looked at a lot of projects recently and there once a project is completed in the construction phase there's a one year warranty period. And so ideally we want to create this yearly presentation once that warranty is up we come and present to you like hey these are the things that have recently been completed it's the impact to our inventory. So to explain a little bit about the methodology of how we went about this we know that you know some areas have a lot of assets added and
sometimes that means some assets are taken away. When you add a new asset maybe others are removed. So what we did is we broke our assets into all our different programs. So we talked about concrete which includes you know sidewalks but also concrete medians that are in the right of way kind of like this photo. Traffic signals all the street signs markings which is the paint on the road
the bike symbols. Surface treatments which are all are you know asphalt paving our potholes are crack seal and then the street sweeping we do and the snow removal. And so we developed a unit cost for the base unit of each of those assets and then for each of these individual road projects we looked at the plan sets in coordination with engineering and transportation and said how many assets have been added that were not there before right. So maybe we had 10 stop signs and now we have 12 so that means there was a net gain of two stop signs. So we didn't count what was already existing even if you know maybe the stop sign was replaced throughout the construction project. We then looked at each project individually and added up you know that
total net change for all types of assets and developed an analysis for the project as a whole saying okay it had a total net change of assets a total net change of maintenance cost meaning like the material and then we also looked at labor cost labor hours. A few caveats about this there are some assets that are newer like I said that are new to streets maintenance so we did our best we could by developing some of those unit costs but over the upcoming years as we start to maintain them more consistently we'll have a better idea of what those costs. So the report that you have represents the base minimum over the next few years you know some of those unit costs may shift for upcoming projects but it definitely represents the base minimum. So if we can go to the next slide
this is a map of the list of projects that we analyze for this report. So these projects were basically the last few years from about 2022 to 2024 is when they were completed. They were funded
by the bond the funding our future bond by some CIP projects a couple of them received some you know federal or state grants as well so that's how the construction was funded. As you can see we captured some traffic signals as well as like roadway segments and then also some livable streets zones. Transportation generally does those projects on a zone basis which is why it's a polygon rather than a you know point or a road segment. And if we could go to the next slide. So in the report we provided we broke it down by the individual project. We figured for this meeting we are going to provide a more high level summary but then we do have data on the specific projects if there's a specific project you wanted to go into. But on the high level summary as you can see this is a list
of the assets some of them you know or summarized like we put all white paint together in the white lines but this shows the net change we had for each of these types of assets. If it's red it means we have more assets to maintain. If it's green we have less. So as you can see the one asset we have less of is asphalt roadway that's mainly because of you know some concrete sidewalks that were added or you know some floating islands that's what led to the loss of some asphalt roadway. It's not that like we lost a road it's just you know maybe a lane was you know narrowed on a certain road or something like that. If we could go to the next slide. So this we summarized each individual project but then we gathered the data for all of those projects we showed on the map.
And so as Kate was mentioning the total net change in our maintenance cost would be about $120,000 and the labor hours is about 3FTs which generally would cost us just under $160,000 for those 3FTs.
In comparison to the cost of the construction projects so the cost of construction for all these projects was $111 million just under $112 million and so the cost of maintaining all those assets is just 0.25% of the total construction project. So maintenance is much less than constructing the actual project but it's vital that we continue to maintain these assets because otherwise in a few years this nice new road that was done won't be as nice and new anymore because we weren't able to maintain these assets. So as Jorge said this is not a budget conversation we're not sitting here asking for this money we just felt like these were good metrics to kind of give a pulse on how our maintenance inventory has increased and you know over the coming months we're going to be looking at
you know is there any of this that we can absorb with our existing resources but we wanted to make sure that we started this yearly conversation to show that you know our assets are increasing and so we need to be you know advocating to maintain them properly. So we have slides on each individual project if you want to go through any specific projects but we can also just answer any questions you all have at this time. Yes go ahead. Yes thank you. So I appreciate this because I think one of the things that I hear regularly for some of our constituents is how are we caring for assets that may be related to our roadway. There's a fence 1700 east happy to chat with you about it a million times over. And so I think that I appreciate looking at it in terms of what's the
new design and what's adding to it. I think one of the pieces that in a future presentation would be helpful to me would be to understand how needs that are identified from various sources in the community get prioritized against the existing resources. So I'm sure that there was a process it would be helpful for me to understand that process so that we're not just looking at how additional designs may contribute to the overall workload but then once we're hearing about some of those needs how we as a city are taking the available resources to meet them. So just a request for the future but I like that we're having the conversation. Yeah we could do some small group meetings or a presentation to council whatever you all prefer we can definitely dig into
that. I just wanted to highlight in the last slide it is too soon to throw out conclusion but in the future as we continue to incorporate the additional assets into our inventory we want to you the goal is is to create a picture in which we say for every dollar that goes into new construction the signing safer roads translates to X amount in ongoing maintenance and so far what we have presented here with the work of the team is a quarter of a percent so for every dollar that goes in a quarter of a percent is required for ongoing maintenance generally speaking but as again as we incorporate more projects that number could fluctuate a little bit. So this is one of those like important pieces where you know one time funding meets you know ongoing funding and you
know increases you know increases this that pie and so comes when we're doing. I appreciate that and I appreciate the you know that when you look at the hundred and twenty thousand dollars and the hundred and twenty million dollars I mean there's a lot of zeros that are moving there so I appreciate that the scale of this but we but we also when we look at the maintenance out of house we have a lot of streets that need to be reconstructed I know we just did us we're finishing up the study on the street conditions the OCI conditions and I look forward to that presentation because that also is an expensive maintenance cost and how does the maintenance of the
keeping the streets at the higher OCI with the the the chip ceiling and all that how does that
work into your presentation here. Yeah I can answer that I think it's a very insightful question because as you said there's some roads that are so deteriorated that the only maintenance for them is to reconstruct them and that's where you know the engineering division needs more funding to reconstruct some of those roads but especially for these new projects that have been completed in the last couple years the more maintenance we can do on them in their first seven years of life the longer they're going to last and hopefully we can prevent them needing reconstruction for another 20 30 years depending on the road so yeah things like doing some of those asphalt treatments like slurry or chip if you do a chip seal within the first two years
and a slurry seal within the first five or seven it extends the life of that asphalt a lot longer it's kind of like moisturizing your skin when you wear sunscreen your skin lasts longer same concept with the road rough analogy um long and then our other assets as we maintain them everyone's usage of the road is that much safer if we don't repaint you have to repaint every year and when you can't do it every year it fades faster and so then you know there could potentially be more accidents things like that um traffic signals we have a federal obligation in a lot of ways to make sure they're running properly and we want to make sure they're in the best condition they can be so that you know the lights go properly when
someone's trying to use the bike path or the crosswalk so there's a lot of maintenance components that go into a new project and for sure that asphalt component the sooner we can do it on a new project the longer it lasts and it then prevents that construction needing to happen some of our roads are in a point that are past that and so streets still does maintenance on them like you know crack ceiling or pot holding and repainting but they're living on borrowed time because of the structure of the base of the road and so there's kind of two different camps of maintenance needed and that OCI study will highlight which roads are in which camp right now I look forward to it because that death plate drives up that maintenance costs because of all the jobs that are in bad shape so I'd love to
get that on the schedule for recitation sometimes soon thank you so I mean in the future this information is great and I in the future this means to me that every time that we're going to be doing capital investment that we will like that number as part of the request for the you know so we know that we should just added a line item to an ongoing funding for that one time investment
so we are aware of the impact and I know that for us it will be very useful we sometimes forget about that piece and obviously this whole purpose of this one.
I just wanted to to note as well for the council that the same methodology here could also be applied to city parks and a lot of the open space and so maybe some of that information could come during the annual budget cycle especially as requests are made even to change out park equipment you know different types of equipment could create a net increase in the cost to maintain that as well so it's a phenomenon that is I think approaching many of the city assets and just wanted to flag that as well for the bigger. I agree and do you think that maybe the calculation that you know brought up here might be different for them you know for public lands so maybe this is a question for them to say which one is the maintenance labor cost for your most public lands maybe a little different
maybe a little less maybe a little more. Yeah especially because I think their their maintenance cycle is much different than some of the public services and street items so it's worth the question or maybe moving in that direction we could follow up with the administration to find out if that's available in facilities as well. I think it's something historically the city has not always been that great about even identifying new ongoing maintenance funds in general and so looking at it this way is really helpful. I'm sure. So thank you I think that this maybe sets the bar across the board you know to say if we're going to do an investment of one-time funding what is the ongoing cost to that
enable love to apply that this this approach across the board I think that will be useful. Yeah.
Any other questions? Okay. We're good. Thank you.
We're going to move on to item number six the ordinance for a budget amendment
number four for fiscal year 2025-2026. We're going to welcome well Kate is going to stay at the table and maybe with Thompson Chief Financial Officer my will join us and Greg Clary budget director will join us as well. So we're going to go ahead and start with the finance department giving us a really quick introduction and then the analyst team will we'll go through the items. So I'm going to let Greg and Andrew do the presentation but I did want to recognize Greg Clary tomorrow is his last day as the budget director for Salt Lake City. So I want to thank him for his service with Salt Lake City. We've enjoyed his time with us here. So I'd like to say thank you to Greg and best wishes. What are you going Greg? What are you
going? We're actually moving to Portugal. Oh so well you make what you wanted to be we wanted to give you some you know tell you about how bad of a choice you were making but I guess it's kind of hard right now just do that. Yeah and thanks again Mary Beth I really appreciate that. So we're going to jump into budget amendment number four. We wanted to bring a couple updates to you all on revenues updated fund balance and also just kind of look at the budget amendment at a high level to kind of set the stage and provide some context before we turn it over and dive into the item specifically. Next slide please. So this is a revised updated revenue forecast. We're hoping to bring these to you all more frequently and I'm going to let Andrew jump in on this one and speak
to the revenue forecast. Thanks Greg. Yeah so not a lot has changed since our last update. I think we were slightly in the negative on our last update so we've kind of swapped back to the plus which was good to see but you know the story is kind of the same. We're trending right around budget which I think is good. We're coming in right around where we've anticipated this year.
Not a ton has changed in sales tax. I think that number stayed the same and again sales tax is a good indicator of kind of where we're at but we're we still haven't seen how the holiday sales have come through. This is a projection based off of what we've received in December but it's majority of those sales that are received in December were sold in November. I guess is kind of how you can think of that November and October are kind of the majority of those sales that come in. So it's about a 60 day lag from when we receive the revenue. The downside from sales tax is what you're noticing is due to natural gas tax and basically from our research of doing this it's due to subdued prices because of high supply just out in the world. So there's just a lot of natural gas available so
it's kind of bringing down prices and also you know we've had a very mild winter so far so people are using less energy. Franchise taxes are in the plus. A lot of this is due to back payments so we anticipate this to really only be an increase for this year and so it's more of a one-time one-year revenue source. Charges for services that's the biggest negative. So we majority of this revenue decline is due to police reimbursement revenue so that's not coming into fruition as we anticipate it.
A lot of this has been cited to a contract that fell through which reduced the number of security staff members and then also another big chunk is due to reimbursement with the library and stuff like that and we're kind of dialing that into kind of similar to the gas tax. We're not getting as much like reimbursement from the library and places like that so I think it's a lack of them needing to pay as much in gas as maybe they did the prior years type of thing. Other big highlighted moves I think on the plus the permits are looking really good and building permits are looking really good which is a great sign for me. That kind of gets my economics background excited right because I think that that's going to flow into sales tax in the future but yeah so I think that that's a
pretty good highlight and then intergovernmental revenue is down and that one we might have overstated the decline there so we're been talking with police about some of the revenue that came through and that one could be more of a probably a negative 50k but yeah besides that we're really hovering around you know just just above budget which I'm feeling really comfortable about it seems like everything's coming into with how we how we projected it it's just not as great as what we've kind of seen in the past so open for any questions. Any questions? Yes go ahead sorry.
All right this is just a curiosity question so I'll be brief. So talk to me about the $272 on gains on property dispositions. We don't budget for that so that's one of those items where it hit actuals so I need to I'll maybe give you a better update on the next one. Okay. Really when we don't have a budget there that's a new one when we converted to Workday so I don't have the background on exactly what that is but I'll make sure to make a point and reach out to you to get that clarity. It's kind of one of those things that hey we have that much hitting in actuals in that category but we're not going to move it up or down anymore it's just the actuals are what they were. So I apologize for not having more. Totally fine. Curiosity
question for next time. Okay we'll go to the next slide. So this slide here really just summarizes the budget amendment number four as a whole. So as you can see the budget amendment will impact the expense side of the general fund by about 8.6 million. No adjustments to the revenues in the general fund. The budget amendment as a whole will impact seven funds read at about 16.6 and 16.8 million respectively and then there are eight general fund positions that are included in the budget amendment. Next slide. So this table here is an updated fund balance calculation. So we when we originally transmitted this I believe right before the holiday
the fund balance was sitting at 11.1 percent. Since then we have some more confident numbers with the close of our prior fiscal year and as a result the fund balance is now being adjusted and is sitting at 16.91 percent. So that's good news just as a data point this is about 20 million above and beyond the council target of the 13 threshold. Next slide. Chair. Yes go ahead.
Can I just confirm how much that is is it all one time money that takes us back up to that fund balance? Yeah yeah okay so none of those are ongoing funds. No. Thank you. Okay budget amendment number four itself does contain 25 items. Most of these are new items. We've been working on the best way to put these into a slide deck with 25 items.
It's a little challenging so bear with us. What we've done is just kind of highlighted the items so far. So on our next slide this will just at a high level present our new items and we'll turn it over as well to dive into each item here in the next bit if you could go to the next slide.
So again 20 new items on this budget amendment there on the next slide we do have a number of housekeeping items we'll discuss as well. On our next slide we do have one item in our grants section of the budget amendment and that is our presentation so I think from there we can turn it over and start diving into the items. Great thank you Greg and Andrew. Are there any questions before we dive into the individual budget amendments? Are there any urgent ones that maybe worth to discuss? I'm not sure we're going to be able to go through 25 of them today or we want to go through 25 today but are there any of them there a little more?
There are three that had straw pull requests due to the urgency to either order the item or to get the funding. Okay we'll go through those first. Okay let's do that. Okay so those those three first is A10 a backhoe for public services and streets division and a tractor for public lands A17 and then D5 so we'll go ahead and get started on an A10 if that works for you. A10 is on
trying to end up in through the transmittal. It's better thank you. Okay so with this the administration is requesting about $290,000 to replace these two items the backhoe and the tractor they both had catastrophic failures and cannot be repaired for less than their actual value. They were both scheduled to be replaced in fiscal year 27 so it's just bumping it up a little bit.
The reason that they are asking for the straw pull on this is because it takes about three months after you order it to make that. Do we have any questions about this? I do.
I think I still have a little PTSD from the word tractor and backhoe. So what are can you just tell me a little bit more about what those are going to be used for? I don't know or if Director Shelley is here. Hi Julie Crickston back again with public services so the backhoe is used for our concrete program so it's used to like excavate old concrete so that the team can then pour more sidewalk. Okay does that answer the question? Yep perfect. And then tractor is probably not the perfect word for this item for public lands. They add a lot of attachments to it so that they can use it for a lot of different things so it helps with leaf cleanup in the fall. It can help with mowing in the summer. They also use it for receding grass
in parks during the spring and then they also apply like a protective dirt layer on top of that seating. So it has a lot of different pieces that get put onto it that they already have but they need the tractor with the engine is the piece that broke and so they need that main you know drivable piece so that they can use it for all those. I think there's a few other things they use it for as well but those are like the big heavy hitters. Does that help? Okay yeah. Is there anything the concerns here? Have you played with tractors before? It's I don't even know what a tractor is. No I just I don't want us to as we are moving forward with the trails plan digging new trails. I don't want us to make a similar mistake from last time and I mean I think that that was done by a
contract contracted party anyway but yeah. Yeah this is more of a parks maintenance apparatus and they have a couple others that they already use and they just you know need them to cover all the parks in the city. So can we have a straw poll on this? Mr. Chair I move that we oh yeah the straw poll is on 810 to approve of the funding for the 810 for the back of the public service streets division and tractor for public lands park division. Okay show your feelings Victoria?
I raised my hand but uh I'm good for it. Okay next one thank you. The next one is A17 Council support to proceed with the appointment process for a six justice court judge. Other council? Yes go ahead Victoria, Council Member Pietro. Can I just ask how this aligns? I'm happy to start anywhere because this issue feels like a ball of twine and like a chicken and the egg but how does this allied with the other things we know we need to do to make space for that justice? Is this the justice and their support staff? Do we know when we'll hear something about like facilities? I just I'm just curious this is my priority this is what I want done with any money we have but can you just explain this one action in reference to all the other things we know we need to do?
So there is another budget amendment item that we will get to that covers um look where they will be housed um and it includes some improvements both PASA 349 and the old library which is also known as the Leonardo. Okay and and does that include um LDA improvements as well? It's a different item it's a different uh yes we're going to be talking about those.
Thank you sorry I'm not in peak shape I appreciate you thank you. Okay so this item A17 does include requests going towards the justice court the city prosecutor's office and the legal defenders association contract so the administration is requesting $201,749 which would support 11 FDEs across the justice system. Please note that the legal defender association contract is the the FDE supported in that contract are not city employees they're employees of the LDA. The amount being requested today represents only the amount needed to finish out this fiscal year the total impact to the budget for FY 27 would be approximately 1.5 million dollars ongoing. This proposal assumes adding a sixth justice court judge to the justice court and the appointment process for said judge is expected to
take approximately six months. The administration is requesting its rob poll to proceed with the appointment process. The addition of a sixth justice court judge is supported by the state judicial council. Other FTE editions in this proposal include a new clerk of the court position two judicial assistance three associate prosecutors and one paralegal. The increase of the LDA contract would support two attorneys and one case manager. Any questions? I have some but no I was just to say this is a vital for what we are doing here as far as the homeless side of the house the justice side of the house and making sure we can move people through the system quickly and without overburdening all the staff and judges at this time so I really appreciate the
effort here and this is the right direction we need to move. So I can remember young. So just a question related to timing because I agree with my fellow council members that this is a high priority need. I'm just trying to discern the timing of including in a budget amendment for as opposed to just waiting for the the traditional fiscal year. I understand the appointment process takes time. It would just help me to understand the urgency of the here and now we have the solution as opposed to as part of our normal budget process. I'll try my best holistically to answer it and then we do have some individuals if you want to speak specifically to the justice court or prosecutors.
So obviously it takes a long time to hire a judge. That's the biggest. That's the one they're requesting the straw poll for so they can get that out currently but the other thing is we have to have all this staff up and ready to go when the judge comes on board. So that judge if they start July 1st we need to make sure that all staff are trained and ready to move when the judge comes on board. Thank you. Okay my question. Oh go ahead. More of a comment as part of my onboarding to the council I've had the opportunity to meet and connect with different departments to further understand what they're doing and challenges and opportunities that are before them and in meeting with the justice court I was kind of blown away by the volume of cases that they're
seeing and it raised for me the real need to add an additional justice to both protect the constitutional rights but also process the cases as they're coming up. My question relates to the discrepancy between associate prosecutor and attorneys. There's three prosecutors and two attorneys from the LDA so I would love to hear from the LDA if possible if they have any thoughts about how that looks like for them that there is a prosecutor an extra prosecutor potentially versus there you know what is your case load. Richard Maram the executive director of the Salt Lake Legal Defender Association. We appreciate the cooperative effort being made by everybody's behalf. I mean one of the things one of the reasons we're here and I know I've talked to a number
of council members about this our case loads have increased over 200 percent. I looked at our numbers this week I mean we appreciate two lawyers it's probably not enough for the present time because we have open case loads on on average somewhere between a thousand and thirteen hundred per lawyer which is an unsustainable number of cases to handle. A lot of those tend to be lower level but the thing we're most interested in and we appreciate obviously the case worker because the case worker is going to help us. We've talked quite a bit about Project Rio. I mean one of the things we're trying to do and I think the justice court is ground level for doing this is trying to move people outside of this system into an alternative system that includes something other than incarceration
that includes treatment that includes permanent supportive housing. A number of us actually just returned from Miami to sort of look at their model. I know some people from the justice court were there for some people from the Salt Lake City mayor's office were there and we appreciate this. It's not enough at this point certainly we would say but certainly anything that we can get by way of relief is helpful to us and I'm happy to answer any questions. Specifically I'm curious about what apparently by the numbers and it may not be in reality it may be an imbalance. So three prosecutors by this budget proposal versus two LDA's from your point of view and you know you have your own we're going to go to you in a second through the attorney's office but what are your thoughts about
that? Well I you know I think our ideal ask would be to add at least an additional lawyer to every court that would be so we if we have two now with a new court that would be two that would be a five additional attorneys so we would have three lawyers in every court that would give us a degree of flexibility. A number of these folks we also have a lawyer that's assigned to familiar faces sometimes we have two lawyers that go to that and we have caseworkers that go to that too so it's a different court so a lot of times we'll be funneling people into that so any that that number is an appropriate number we think at the outset to be able to really reduce the caseloads that are that each one of our lawyers have to look like a manageable number I
mean think about think about going to court with a calendar that has 80 cases on it I mean those are you know you have to read 80 police reports and you have to kind of be up to speed and know many of our clients have several cases at one time but I still think you to protect constitutional rights you have to have be prepared to be able to do that. And that's what I worry that and again we're going to go to the other side of the aisle on this issue too but what I worry is that we from the prosecutor side we want to process the case faster but then your attorneys I'm not able to catch them as fast and you know ultimately you know we want to believe it's my value and I believe that we share this that we want to ensure that it's the same level of resources to support the
system like it should be so maybe Jill and maybe we can hear from the attorney's office. The A's. I share this with the risk of being tackled by all the attorneys in the room but all I can do is explain the rationale in our thinking here what we have been told that is the prosecutors touch every single case. LDA do not necessarily touch every case that is in no way disputing the need. We recognize the need. We were also very conservative in what we decided to do in the budget amendment. That does not mean that additional needs would not be addressed in the mayor's budget that comes to you in the spring but we've had kind of a long standing understanding between the council and the mayor's office that we don't add positions midstream especially contributing to the
structural imbalance that we're facing as a city but we really are facing a crisis. That's why we're doing this midstream but we tried to be conservative what can we do right now and it's getting this new judge on board and trained and making sure that the staff is there once the judge is trite. That makes sense. That's absolutely absolutely correct. Mr. Chair Will Carlson from the Salt Lake County attorney's office. We appreciate our colleagues at the legal defender association but there are three examples of cases where the prosecutor has to be there and LDA is not. The first is an arraignment which is the first appearance in court. No one has been appointed to represent anyone at that point. The prosecutor has to be there. The second is where private council has
been hired and the third is infractions of which there are many in which there's no possibility of jail and so the right to a public defender does not attach but in each of those three scenarios a prosecutor must be present. We think that this three addition for the prosecutors and two addition for legal defenders of course we would all love them anymore but we think that that is actually an equitable approach even though the numbers are different. Ultimately I have my own experience in the past for the legal defender association and my understanding of the structure of the state that you come with and the support of the state and the not support of the state necessarily from the other side. Generally in my experience I saw that this balance is a negative and I would love
to dig into your case numbers you know your attorneys and how do you measure case numbers in case in some of those examples and maybe you can share some of those numbers too and I understand that we're trying to be conservative about it. I just worried about speeding up the process but ultimately not giving the constitutional right to those and I feel you guys value that as much as anybody else. Those are all the questions I have I don't know if I don't have any concerns about the judge. The judge oh yes go ahead. I think the other thing I'd like to see and I hate I hate this it feels like you know when people are drowning and we're like hey can I have a landscape analysis but it does feel like there are a lot of us trying to do really similar things and we might
have redundancies and I would really love in particular because of what you were mentioning how the LDA has much more independence and doesn't have support. I would love to see as much of their money as possible going to their mission so I don't know if there's a mechanism a strategy some way we can encourage some kind of efficiency audit throughout the system to make sure that we're not inadvertently paying for redundancies like social workers or things you know food pantries, clothing closets, those sorts of things I appreciate especially after meeting with the LDA workers they're ridiculously amazing and possibly you know holding our society together at this point with their like kindness and like willingness to sacrifice but I really think when we're trying to make dollars
you know dimes do the work of dollars I really would love some kind of efficiency audit to make sure that especially as we're supporting the most in need that we're doing it in ways that aren't inadvertently redundant and are getting the most positive outcomes. Will the LDA will be willing to share you guys create a report a year report on the mission on where your dollars go maybe this gives us the information that you work me. Sure and I can tell you I mean I think one of the positives from this process and it really has been crystallized a little bit by the number of cases is really really a sort of renewed collaboration with the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Do we agree with everything that the police are doing? No we don't but we actually have an open dialogue with the police department about groups of people people that are most in need hopefully alternatives that we can develop for them you know including things like street diversion those are things that we're talking about, use of the Huntsman Mental Health Center, other kinds of things like that collaboration with our case managers that are doing on the ground case management and the council member Petros observation there's a lot going on in Salt Lake County through the Criminal Justice Advisory Council. We're actually trying to bring groups of people together including people in the city including treatment providers including folks that provide the services on
ACT teams and MCOT teams which has been for me and I opening experience because she's right there's some duplications and if we can think about ways and there's certainly efforts ongoing to try to reduce those duplications that are happening in the system we tend to be the sort of tip of the spirit because the clients for us are sort of captive audience people there are clients and we know them probably better than anybody just because we represent them we see them we collaborate with them we meet with them at the jail we help them with transportation and do other things and so there's sort of a level of trust and so even though we share and we collaborate with like the police social service Salt Lake City Police Social Services Department most of those clients really
sort of are centered in what's happening in our office but but that's a great observation I think we really need to do and I think we can do a better job at sort of not duplicating those services.
Any other questions? Just to express my thanks for the prosecution side of the defense side and the court unfortunately like some people their first their main interaction with the city might be coming through the justice court and maybe that's hopefully their only interaction with the court system but I think it's so important that that they have an experience where they feel like they are treated fairly and their case is heard whether it's a minor traffic violation or whether it's some of the more serious things that come through the justice court and you know due process is expensive and but it's worth it. Thank you. Okay thank you thank you we coming back to the to the mutual amendment and next item I think that is. Mr. Chair I believe there was a budget. So yes
who who can give me a straw poll? Mr. Chair I move that we for a straw poll I don't move. Mr. Chair I'd like to straw poll supporting the budget allocate for this for anything related to the justice court and the prosecutor in city attorney. Okay show your feelings then. How is that? Okay so that gives you the direction that you need to post the jobs and to to to ensure that we have those resources out there. So what is next? So the next item is D5 streets Geo bond interest reallocation for fiscal year 2025 2026 and Kira will take a look.
I would acknowledge the judge for coming here to to the meeting today. Thank you for your presence. I appreciate you. Sorry go ahead. Kira I got it. Thank you Kate. So this request is allocating 1.7 million dollars of the interest that was previously added to the CIP budget in budget amendment 2. This amount in particular is interest from the 2018 streets reconstruction general obligation bonds and it's being proposed to be spent for road reconstruction projects which is the purpose that the public approved the bonds for. The administration has requested a straw poll to allow for timely accounting for these funds since we run into trouble with the proceeds start earning interest at a higher rate than the bonds
issuance rate. There is a specific project that's been proposed for these funds although that generally the streets reconstruction bonds proceeds are spent according to the values that were discussed when the bond was placed on the ballot and according to the recommendations from the engineering's pavement plan. Okay those those funds are you know attached to the projects like you know those bonds usually are so any questions about this? Okay we probably need a you know a struggle who can give me one. Mr. Chair I'd like to propose a straw poll on item D5 and approve the streets geobahn interest real allocation. It's so important that we get our streets under control so thank you. Okay show your feelings. Thumbs up. Okay thank you. See you direction and if we can
go now next to the PD overtime item. Okay so the police department is requesting 3.8 million dollars in one-time funding to cover overtime expenses. As of fiscal year to date the department has expanded approximately 3.3 million or 83 percent of their allocated overtime budget and is trending towards 7.8 million in total overtime expenditures by the year end. The FY26 budget assumed overtime would be funded throughout the year while the availability of vacancy savings was evaluated.
The overtime FY26 estimate was based on year-to-date expenditure data at the time of budget submission forecasted across the remainder of the fiscal year. Prior years used vacancy savings to fund overtime overruns and the department does not anticipate these vacancy savings in FY26. The reduction of vacancy savings is attributed to a higher sworn officer fill rate and lower attrition. Just one piece up like fully support understand I would hope that there is a plan then to include the resourcing necessary for the overtime and whatever the proposed budget is as we look forward to like future fiscal years recognizing that they've done an incredible job of filling those vacancies just so that we have a plan moving forward to continue to support the
safety needs of the city. And I would like to take that to the next level you know I think that overtime personally it feels like it should be a thing that happens once in a while and it should be a thing that happens in certain circumstances that are not necessarily planned but you know maybe this comes to the question about the amount of officers that we have and that we might actually need to ask that question a little more directly because I don't necessarily want our officers to be working in mandatory overtime. There is a lot of
they need to rest as well. So that is a question that I would love to ask the administration.
So I will try my best and then if I answer it incorrectly then the chief can hit me upside the head and he can answer it instead. So one of the reasons for this request is a one-time funding. So one of the things that the chief has done is he has upscaled his staffing so that he doesn't have any vacancy savings. What he's doing with several different things right he used to do a flat rate he's no longer doing a flat rate overtime. He's bringing that back down so once he gets these people into the field he is hoping that he can bring his overtime down where he doesn't need to request a next year's budget that amount of overtime going forward. Chief maybe you want to share some thoughts as well. Maybe we need a bigger table there. The late.
Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you Council. So just a couple points. So we did we have been trying since I've been here to start looking at how we can reduce the overtime costs. So as Mary Beth mentioned we went from a flat rate for mitigation to time and a half to start because the rate we were going to have to charge was so high on a flat rate due to some FSLA rules. We also reduced overtime in 2025 for our summer mandatory overtime. We weren't we weren't we didn't need to do it mandatory overtime in May or June this year only July and August so we were able to realize the savings there. Salaries went up so overtime costs also did go up for that reason but but moving forward we are looking at our staffing and how to deploy staffing more efficiently so
we're piloting some 12 hour shifts I've mentioned before we think that we might get some efficiencies so that would basically put more officers out on the on the beat at the times that they're needed with 12 hour shifts we have to overcome some challenges there we want to be good for our officers and not not make them not wear them out on a 12 hour shift but we think we probably can bring down calls per shift per officer down with 12 hour shifts and so they may be working a little you know be going call the call the call. That's one thing that we're looking at. We also were trying to get a better grasp on how overtime is allocated and looking to see where we can start reducing as we become more fully staffed and so I just want to share my commitment to to doing what I can
what we can as an administration to bring down overtime costs knowing that we have some good momentum in the city and we want to keep the public safety at the forefront so we'll try to try to become as efficient as we can and come back to you with it we're always going to need overtime we had a summer of protests you know we're going to have that again probably this year and are experiencing some of that those are overtime costs that are that we have to we have to allocate that's an example you know we have we have the recent homicide in Rose Park that takes a lot of overtime resources so there's always going to be a need for overtime we'll try to be as judicious as we can.
Good truth. Good truth. Customer Duhan. I appreciate the conversation I appreciate that last portion right there because from the staff report you know we're fully we're fully staffed at this time right which is awesome and we haven't been there since I've been on the council and I think that's wonderful but we also you know sometimes in the overtime you just since you've always had overtime you tend to continue to use always you always have overtime and you never when you're fully staffed you still have the same amount of overtime and you like why we're doing that but I do like that in the staff report it did show that there's a 10% decrease in hours now of course the cost went up just because the salaries and other
things but the hours is what I'm looking at is as a good metrics the staff report is saying it's a 10% decrease which is positive that we're also looking at on the hours side of the house and basically what you're telling me here is that you're going to continue to look at that and that continues to she could continually decrease hours decrease but the service stays the same or even gets better exactly the balance right we we and I agree with you council member we don't want to wear our people out on overtime it's not healthy for them it's good for them to have time off so we appreciated the the raises that we got for their officers last year that that allows them to work less over time so that was really helpful but yes it's a we want to bring the hours down and
we want to make sure and as conditions change in the city we may need less overtime conditions may change where we need a spike in overtime but are we're committed to tracking it and being as efficient as we can moving forward we have to we have to do that chief I wanted to share quickly my
you know beyond the conversation that we're having right now about that and we should probably ask whomever is ready for a a struggle on this the service of the officers of Salt Lake City has shown the impact in the community I mean I hear from my neighbors I hear I see it myself it's it's incredible and please share that with your with your with your officers about the positive impact that I make I will I will share that thank you and and I share my appreciation for these officers as well and they feel the appreciation from all of you and the support you're giving them to do the job so they feel it from the community as well so thank you thank you for all the support go ahead thank you thank you chief I just wanted for those that are interested in police reform could you explain
to us how this would help better not just make the performance of our officers but also as we tend to recruit and making sure that we have longevity of service are you asking what we can do as a police department or I'm sorry maybe just no no just how this presents itself as a type of police reform I think for me what I see very clearly is this is the type of policy that helps deter as much stress as possible it's the type of reform that we want so that we the personnel get the chance to actually take time exactly advantage of the different types of contributions they may have whether that's therapy whether that's some you know recreational activity spending time with their family etc you could just expand on that yeah absolutely I mean the one of the most important
things now that we're getting to a point where we're fully staffed is retaining those officers and making sure they have good pay good wellness resources they feel part of the organization they feel like they're making a difference they feel supported by by the elected officials by the administration and all of those things are going to be a high focus for us as we move forward to retain the people that we have it is exciting that we have officers who retired a number of years ago that actually are going back through the academy full going through the full academy to come back and work at Salt Lake City and we've had two of those cases just recently and a lot of officers that are looking at coming back it's so it's it's exciting for us because they bring a lot of
years of experience but yes the wellness the retention is going to be a focus moving forward okay who's ready for a struggle Mr. Chair I'd like to propose a straw poll that we support the budget amendment request specific to the police over time as requested show your feelings um
since you're here the police mobile command center a 16 that's an item that is been talked for
you know probably since I was you know in high school and because that's how old your old one is uh and but I remember in the past we needing you know equipment that help our our police and our policing so can you tell us a little bit about that and maybe we can move that one absolutely so you know as a capital city we do need to have a mobile command post and many of the smaller agencies in the valley do you have command posts uh recently we had the uh incident Rose Park up there and we we had to utilize fires command post which we appreciate the fire department and sharing the resources but then the very next night we had to call fire out again we had a we had a protest and it's cold out so the the command post is going to be is needed to be deployed
all the time we had a actually it wasn't a pro it wasn't for the protest it was for a SWAT deployment that we had we had to deploy the command post because our people that were it was a barricaded subject and and our team was out in the cold and so we had to ask fire to come out on last minute so the police department does need their own command post with communications you know we have a many major events coming up with the temple open house that's going to be six months long we have the olympics coming in so this is just a tool that a capital city police department does need to have and it will be deployed on a number of occasions through the year
questions about this I mean this is dream to like finally being able to to get this going so anybody will like to make a struggle now they only need a struggle on this one so you can so we already get it so what about uh since you're already here a 15 police retirement costs since we're gonna squeeze your time since you're here so so this is something that I'm I'm learning about as I come here to the Salt Lake City to Salt Lake City so I might want Mary Beth to come up here and she's still here to talk about this but yes we have a number of retirements and my understanding is in the past we budgeted in the police department for these costs we did have you know a change over in administration so a lot of the high costs this year are because of that
administration change over but there was a question I think in to to the police department do we need to establish a budget for retirement costs and it might be something that we need to do but I also understand there's an in kind of a citywide retirement pool that can be pulled from so I guess the question is moving forward should the police department have their own or do we need do we tap in or increase the the cities but I'll let Mary Beth talk about this one she's probably better reversed on this so I think what we tried to do was we tried to work through to see exactly the same thing if vacancy savings could cover the retirements and the change over in administration and obviously it can't it's a fairly large number and so that's why we're putting
this budget request in I would say that in non-departmental we have about six hundred and ninety four thousand dollars that covers the general fund for retirements what we do is we allocate that based on a percentage by department but let's say the finance department doesn't have any retire in my my amount's very very small but let's say I don't have any retirees or I can absorb that amount then we would say okay police department you can use this portion of it so that it's flexible between departments and we work with the department so I think it's just going to be on a year by year basis on that retirement account and I would add just add to that that if all of the people throughout the city who are eligible to retire did retire the six hundred and whatever thousand
dollars would not come anywhere near it so it is like a looming thing out there that we've known for years is just an unfunded expense and so it's not unique to the police department either although because of their larger workforce it probably would hit them harder and let me say it's unfunded budgetarily unfunded right it does sit in our act for it is a liability inside our financial statements this year we had a new ruling which you don't care about but you know I dream about it gasby 101 which is our compensated absences that's both short term and long term so there was a new calculation this year which actually increased to increase our short term and reduced our long term based on that calculation short term is expensed directly to the department's long
term is not so what it is it reduced our long term debt that's what I call it or liability and increased our short term debt maybe too much information that was interesting any other thoughts
okay thank you thank you thank you I think we had one item for the legislative affairs the points okay so this is item d1 in your packet legislative affairs operations funding this is categorized as a housekeeping item so this is a 80 thousand dollar ongoing request this item was inadvertently omitted from the annual budget due to a processing error and this request just restores 80 thousand dollars in funding for the legislative affairs or operating costs which were previously provided for but not incorporated into the base budget any questions about this circle I don't think they need one but no but they've got trouble okay no I mean it's not a big item but you know I prefer that there are not many omitted items
please I have no questions about it how do we feel about taking making a pause right here and then picking it up next next meeting okay I think that's that's all for today thank you for helping us understand this and we may have more questions in the meantime
now we're going to move on to our standing items number seven which is report from chair and vice chair do you have any reports no reports mr chair yeah I have no reports myself and we have some announced lehua do we have some announcements from from your side of things and I think Nick is going to come up and address the first one it's just a reminder on the legislative subcommittee so we'll if I could go on to item b we do just a friendly reminder every january for council members to fill out there any conflict of interest disclosures and then submit that to us we file it with HR and the recorder's office as appropriate so just a friendly reminder if you need the form and want us to help turn it in it's attached to the announcements and I have one here
so we need a new one every year right yeah okay well you will be able to print it for all of us while we are in formal yeah absolutely yeah and then I'm going to interrupt Nick Tarrbet Nick Austin if you elbow him yeah he's just going to do the first announcement do you want this?
Nick Tarrbet staff last year the makeup of the legislative policy committee was changed to be the twofold between the months of january to march it will be the immediate past chair the current chair and the current CRH chair and then from mid-March to the end of the year it will be the chair vice chair and the CRH chair still you all had just asked that we come back in January to confirm that that's still what you would like in case there were some extenuating circumstances
I mean I think that the thought behind that was to ensure there was some continuance of knowledge and so I think I stand by by that process I think in middle of a sense
in addition to that for the ULCT legislative policy committee the council has one of the votes the city has three votes the mayor's office has one Angela Price is designated as one of the voters and then the council has one you had last year to agree that it would be the chair unless you guys want to appoint somebody else there's a good answer I think we should just yeah I think we should stick with that and finally the last reminder is tomorrow the fund begins the first legislative subcommittee begins tomorrow and they will meet Wednesday throughout the legislative session
okay we're good thank you Nick and his memory impressive there is no close session today so this concludes the select city council work session meeting for today so we're gonna be at the formal meeting at 7 p.m. so we have 30 minutes thank you for okay thank you everyone bye bye
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