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  • Arianne Mix, living in the Bridgeport subdivision, expressed concern over parking and over occupancy issues in her neighborhood. She also expressed concern with the dog poop throughout the city and asked if there was a cleanup plan.
  • Emilee Larsen, living in the Bridgeport subdivision, also expressed concern with parking and over occupancy issues. A discussion ensued.
  • Daria Evans, living in The Villas subdivision, thanked the city for the installation of the sunshades and thanked staff for attending their Homeowners Association (HOA) meeting. She asked about items on the agenda: Road striping Bid Award, Main Street Sewer Repair, Municipal Wastewater Fund Report, and why the city had not updated the capital facilities plans. She felt that the city was missing emergency plans for sewer systems. She also asked about the anticipated cost for the upgrade to lift station no. She expressed her disappointment with the community fair, held on Saturday, closing early.
  • Karen Cornelious, living in The Villas subdivision, asked about funding additional public safety with the opening of apartments in the Utah City development. She asked if a public safety impact fee would be charged before the opening of those apartments.
  • Tara Ewing, living in The Villas subdivision, asked about the civic center and the use of RDA funds and how it would impact funding availability.
  • David Lauret, living on Holdaway Road, asked about the RDA funding being applied to the civic center.
  • Mayor Fullmer responded to the public comments. She mentioned that staff were working on the public safety impact fees. She explained the name change of the civic center and how the funding would work.             CONSENT ITEMS1.   ApprovaloftheMarch12,2025,CityCouncilWorkSession Minutes2.   Approvalofthe March12,25,City CouncilMeeting Minutes3.   Awardof5-YearRoadwayStripingServicesContract(Resolution2025-09)4.   ApprovaloftheVineyardCity2024AnnualDrinkingWaterQualityReport (Resolution25-13)5.   ContractApprovalfortheMainStreetSewerLineRepair(Resolution2025-10)6.   Adoptionofthe2024MunicipalWastewaterPlanningProgram(MWPP)Survey (Resolution25-12)
  • Mayor Fullmer asked if the council wanted to pull any items off. She then called for a motion.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO ADOPT AND APPROVE CONSENT ITEMS1,2, AND4 AS PRESENTED. COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON SECONDED THE MOTION. ROLL CALL WENT AS FOLLOWS: MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.
  • 3.5 ContractApprovalfortheMainStreetSewerLineRepair(Resolution2025-10) Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to Environmental Utilities Manager Devan Peterson and resident Daria Evans. Ms. Evans asked how much of Main Street would be impacted. Mr. Peterson replied that it would be from0 North to the Vineyard Connector (800 North). Discussion ensued. Ms. Evans asked about the pipe deterioration. Mr. Peterson explained that the pipe and road had both settled. A discussion ensued.
  • 3.6Adoptionofthe2024MunicipalWastewaterPlanningProgram(MWPP)Survey (Resolution25-12) Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to Environmental Utilities Manager Devan Peterson and resident Daria Evans. Ms. Evans asked where the sewer funds were maintained. Finance Director Kristie Bayles replied that they were in the Enterprise Funds. Ms. Evans asked when the repair and replacement sinking fund be established and when they would put funds into it. City Manager Eric Ellis explained that they were completing the Wastewater Master Plan and that it would be included. Ms. Evans asked how much it was anticipated to reserve for the next and years. Mr. Petersen replied that it would be included in the study. Ms. Evans asked why the city did not maintain a plan of operations. Mr. Peterson replied that they were working on a plan for the25-2026 fiscal year. Ms. Evans asked why the city had not updated the capital facilities plan in the lastyears. Mr. Peterson replied that it was part of a budget proposal to get them updated. Ms. Evans asked if there were any plans for emergency response and sewer safety systems this year. Mr. Ellis explained that there were safety measures in place, and anything that was lacking would be included in the master plan. A discussion ensued. Ms. Evans asked when the city would have the SECAP (System Evaluation Capacity Assurance Plan) completed. Mr. Peterson explained the survey. Mayor Fullmer added that this was how all plans worked in the city and that they assessed and audited each plan and then phased them in. A discussion ensued. Ms. Evans asked what the anticipated cost was to upgrade lift station number Mr. Petersen replied that they were working on getting costs. Mr. Ellis explained that $850k had been budgeted for the project.
  • Councilmember Holdway asked about water and wastewater fund balances and if the repair would drop the funds lower. Ms. Bayles replied that it would affect the funds. A discussion ensued about the fund balances. Ms. Bayles mentioned that the funds had already been set aside for the repair.  3 Awardof5-YearRoadwayStripingServicesContract(Resolution2025-09)
  • Mayor Fullmer asked who would be presenting the road striping contract.
  • Ms. Evans asked about the bid and how much traffic control, sweeping and layout of roadways would add to the project. Mr. Ellis replied that road maintenance was a separate line item in the budget and would not be affected.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON MOVED TO APPROVE3,5, AND6 CONSENT ITEMS AS PRESENTED. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION.
  • Councilmember Holdaway wanted to discuss the striping services contract.
  • Amended Motion: COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON AMENDED HER MOTION TO REMOVE3 AND APPROVE5 AND6 CONSENT ITEMS AS PRESENTED. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION. ROLL CALL WENT AS FOLLOWS. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.            PRESENTATIONS/RECOGNITIONS/AWARDS/PROCLAMATIONS1.    Walkara Way Update SamBraegger, withthe UtahLake Authority,will presentan updateon the Walkara WayProjectanditsworkwithForestryFireandStateLands(FFSL)andlocal stakeholders, clarifying boundaries and trail alignment.
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to Sam Braegger, withthe UtahLake Authority.
  • Mr. Braegger gave a brief history and update of the Walkara Way project.
  • Mayor Fullmer mentioned that this project was important to the community and thanked everyone for their continued work on this project.
  • Councilmember Holdaway commented that he was committed to finding solutions. He noted that he did not speak for the family members who had an interest in the land and project. He felt it was inappropriate to discuss ongoing litigation in a public forum. He felt that there were good people working on the project. He said that the legal standing was between two (2) entities, the federal government, and the families. Mayor Fullmer clarified that nothing sensitive was discussed and that there was positivity in the idea that everyone was working together.2.    ArborDayProclamation2025-01 Themayor will ProclaimApril,25,as Arbor Dayin Vineyard City.
  • Mayor Fullmer read the proclamation.3.    MunicipalAlternateVoting Methods TherewillbethreepresentationsonMunicipalAlternateVotingMethods.
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to resident Adam Teuscher and Mark Midgely with Utah Approves.
  • Mr. Teuscher gave a presentation on Approval Voting and compared it to other types of voting. Mark Midgley with Utah Votes on the board of Utah approves.
  • Mayor Fullmer asked about the artificial voting percentages Mr. Teuscher mentioned in his presentation. Mr. Teuscher Adam explained how he felt ranked choice voting (RCV) worked. Mr. Midgley added his perspective on how he felt ranked choice voting worked. A discussion ensued.
  • Councilmember Holdaway asked about the process to get this voting method in the state code. Mr. Teuscher replied that the city would not be committing themselves at this point in the process.
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to Wendy Hart.
  • Ms. Hart presented on what she felt were issues with ranked choice voting and the backend (counting rounds).
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to John Kidd and Alan Parry.
  • Dr. Parry stated that the opinions expressed today were their own. He then gave a presentation on voting in general and reviewed the different types of voting.
  • Mr. Kidd concluded the presentation with information about how people felt about RCV.
  • Councilmember Sifuentes asked the presenters to explain “Ranked Pairs” mentioned in their presentation. Dr. Parry explained how it worked. A discussion ensued.
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to Mark Roberts, Brad Daw, and Nancy Lord with Utah RCV.
  • Mr. Roberts gave a brief background on his bid to get instant run-off voting in the state code as a viable voting method. He reviewed his views on the different voting methods and a survey that was done on RCV in19.
  • Ms. Lord gave a brief background on her bid to bring RCV to Utah. She addressed the arguments against RCV. There was a discussion about the RCV counting process. It was noted that as in any other voting type you do not have to vote for everyone.
  • Councilmember Sifuentes said that Vineyard had an exciting political atmosphere. A council seat had opened and there were several people interested. Lehi foresaw that they would have several candidates and were able to hold a primary for RCV. She felt that they were getting worn out and that it was hard on their community. A discussion ensued about having several candidates on a ballot and holding or not holding a primary.
  • Brad Daw gave his opinion on RCV. He mentioned a website called “Equal.vote” where they review different types of voting methods.
  • Councilmember Sifuentes asked about the ending time of the pilot project. Mr. Roberts explained that there was a sunset clause on the legislation.
  • A break was taken at36 PM.
  • The meeting resumed at54 PM.                 WORK SESSION There were no work session items submitted.                   MAYORANDCOUNCILMEMBERS'REPORTS/DISCLOSURES/RECUSALS (Reports were presented at the end of the meeting.)
  • 3.3Awardof5-YearRoadwayStripingServicesContract(Resolution2025-09) Mayor Fullmer asked if Councilmember Holdaway had any questions. He replied that he did not. Mayor Fullmer called for a motion.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER HOLDAWAY MOVED TO APPROVE CONSENT ITEM3 ON THE CONSENT AGENDA AS PRESENTED. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION SECONDED THE MOTION. ROLL CALL WENT AS FOLLOWS. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.                   BUSINESSITEMS1.    PUBLICHEARING:ParksandRecreationMasterPlanandImpactFee Analysis (Ordinance25-01) ParksandRecreationDirector,BrianVawdrey,isrequestingapprovaloftheproposed Vineyard City Parks and Recreation Master Plan. (Thisitemwascontinuedfromthe March12th,2025,CityCouncil meeting.)
  • Mayor Fullmer called for a motion to open the public hearing.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO OPEN THE PUBLIC HEARING AT56 PM. COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON SECONDED THE MOTION. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.
  • Parks and Recreation Director Brian Vawdrey and Laura Smith with CRSA gave a brief overview of the process and the master plan. There was a discussion about amenities. The presentation continued. A discussion ensued about impact fees.
  • Lee Johnson with Zions bank presented the impact fee study.
  • Councilmember Sifuentesasked if each household would be charged the impact fee, what the developers would pay, and if a significant amenity could go towards the impact fees. Mr. Johnson replied that as he understood it, they could pay in leu the impact fees through assets or other capital improvements.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for public comments. Hearing none, she turned the time over to the council for questions and comments.
  • Councilmember Holdaway asked about the scoring standards/methods. There was a discussion about scoring and HOA amenities. City Attorney Jayme Blakely stated that they needed to make sure the data was supported and felt that the facilities plan was written in a conservate way to support impact fees. They could not count the HOA amenities that were not available to everyone. The discussion continued. Mr. Blakely’s explained that the impact fees had to be spent on city amenities and must be used with six (6) of collecting the fees.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for additional questions from the council or the public.
  • Ms. Cornelous asked about the impact fee for new residents and if they could cut what they were offering and if they would cut the impact fee. There was a brief discussion.
  • Councilmember Sifuentes asked about the green space in her neighborhood. Mr. Vawdrey replied that he had already updated the plan.
  • Mr. Vawdrey proposed that in the IFA and IFFP documents list of amenities did not fully match the master plan. A brief discussion ensued.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for additional questions from the council or the public.
  • Mr. Lauret asked if this fee would be retroactive. Mr. Blakesley replied, no. Mr. Lauret asked how this would be applied to apartments. Mr. Blakesley replied that all housing units were counted the same. Mr. Vawdrey explained how the fees could be lowered. A discussion ensued.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for additional questions from the public. Hearing none, she called for a motion to close the public hearing.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO CLOSE THE PUBLIC HEARING AT52 PM. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.
  • Councilmember Clawson restated what he had heard about amenities. Mr. Blakesley stated that Councilmember Clawson understanding was correct.
  • Mayor Fullmer noted that she had items she wanted more information on and asked that the item be continued.
  • Councilmember Sifuentes asked if any of these would be retroactive, including green space already being programed. A discussion ensued.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for a motion.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO CONTINUE THIS ITEM. COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON SECONDED THE MOTION. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.2.   PUBLICHEARING-ConsolidatedFeeScheduleAmendment(Resolution2025-) UtilityBillingClerkMariaArteagawillpresentproposedamendmentstothe Consolidated Fee Schedule.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for a motion to open the public hearing.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER CAMERON MOVED TO OPEN THE PUBLIC HEARING AT57 PM. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.
  • Mayor Fullmer turned the time over to UtilityBillingClerkMariaArteaga.
  • Ms. Arteaga presented the fee schedule amendments.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for public comments. Hearing none, she clarified that they would be taking the Parks and Recreation Impact Fees off the fee schedule. She then called for a motion to close the public hearing.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO CLOSE THE PUBLIC HEARING AT:00 PM. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION. MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERSON, CLAWSON, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YEST. COUNCILMEMBER HOLDAWAY WAS ABSENT DURING THE MOTION. MOTION CARRIED WITH ONE (1) ABSENT.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for a motion.
  • Motion: COUNCILMEMBER SIFUENTES MOVED TO APPROVE THE CONSOLIDATED FEE SCHEDULE AMENDMENTS, RESOLUTION25-11 WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE PARKS AND RECREATION FACILITIES FEE ON PAGE. COUNCILMEMBER CLAWSON SECONDED THE MOTION. ROLL CALL WENT AS FOLLOWS: MAYOR FULLMER, COUNCILMEMBERS CAMERON, CLAWSON, HOLDAWAY, AND SIFUENTES VOTED YES. THE MOTION CARRIED UNANIMOUSLY.
  • Mayor Fullmer moved to itemon the agenda.    .            CLOSEDSESSION No closed session was held.    .            ADJOURNMENT
  • Councilmember Holdaway expressed his concern with getting the General Ledger and having a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and working with the State Auditor’s Office.   Councilmember Cameron left the meeting at:01 PM.
  • Mayor Fullmer appreciated the outline of the journey Councilmember Holdaway was going through and felt that the discussion ended with him hearing one thing and staff hearing something different and that was why a meeting was being called with the State Auditor’s Office. She felt it was not appropriate to discuss the issue before they could hold the meeting. Councilmember Sifuentes agreed to have a meeting first to clarify the outcomes of the emails. A heated discussion ensued. Mayor Fullmer explained that the city received a letter that was stamped “draft” and wanted clarity from the State Auditor’s Office. She felt that Councilmember Holdaway was stating things and making accusations against something that there was no clarity on and why they needed to have this discussion.
  • Councilmember Holdaway said that there was no city vote from last year on him getting a CPA (Certified Public Accountant). Mayor Fullmer stated that they had had multiple discussions on creating a financial committee that allowed Councilmember Holdaway to work with people and allowed the city to work with people on review. In their discussions they talked about, as a council, how one council person could not deputize or train somebody and give them documentation that was not public. They also talked about how they could formalize a committee. Councilmember Sifuentes clarified that the council did not have to vote on everything. The heated discussion continued. Mayor Fullmer asked Mr. Blakesley to weigh in on this discussion.
  • Mr. Blakesley felt that they needed to include the Auditor’s office. He said that there had been multiple requests for the General Ledger over time and that he had been to several meetings where the ledger had been handed to Councilmember Holdaway. The instructions were that as a councilmember, he had the right to view the ledger, but they had to balance the oversite with the obligations under records law not to disclose, publicly, information that would be classified as private or protected. He said the city’s ledger had information that the Records Officer believed to be private or protected. The instruction to Councilmember Holdaway is that when he has the full ledger, he cannot put it on Facebook or share it with a citizen who is not an employee or officer of the city. He noted that there were two (2) reports that were required to be filed with the state. He explained how those reports were generated. What he understood, except for the private or protected information which was small dollar amounts and individual names, was the revenue and expense reports provided a full snapshot of the city’s revenue and expenses and was available to anybody who wanted to see it. He mentioned that Councilmember Holdaway had asked for not only a paper copy but an excel export from the system which he was entitled to, but he cannot publicly share it or share it with someone who was not an employee or an officer of the city because they lost control of that data. He said that as far as the next steps, Councilmember Holdaway and Ms. Bayles had both reached out to Seth Oveson at the State Auditor’s Office and one of his roles was to provide guidance on financial bookkeeping, and what they would look at when performing an audit to help give instruction on what information could be shared and in what context. He mentioned the draft letter from the State Auditor’s Office and that he had sent a letter to Mr. Holdaway stating that he did not want to provide any more guidance or information to Mr. Holdaway until they could meet as a full group. Mr. Blakesly noted that they were in the process of scheduling a meeting and that Councilmember Holdaway was the only person that had not responded to the meeting request. He said that he wanted to get Mr. Oveson’s input on what the city did with the information and names. He was not comfortable putting that information out to the public. He clarified authority, that no one councilmember could deputize someone. Councilmember Holdaway claimed that he had the person he selected on a call with the State Auditor’s Office, and they went through a training. He felt that there was a song and dance happening. Mayor Fullmer explained they had a very collaborative meeting scheduled to make sure that Councilmember Holdaway would get what he needed, and that this conversation did not need to take place and that they were on his side to get him the information. Councilmember Sifuentes felt that this conversation was a show by Councilmember Holdaway and wanted them to have the meeting with the State Auditor’s Office first.
  • Mayor Fullmer reviewed the timeline concerning Councilmember Holdaway’s request for the General Ledger. Councilmember Holdaway changed his statement that the Auditor’s Office had not trained his person but went through the steps for them to professionally deal with the documents, how to treat them in a private and protected way, and what could be shared publicly and what could not be shared publicly. A heated discussion ensued.
  • Mayor Fullmer attempted to clarify why she felt the current public discussion was important. The discussion continued. Mayor Fullmer explained that the whole point in stating this issue was for the public to understand that the council was engaging in what councilmembers hoped would happen and that it was in fact being done collaboratively and being done in a way that would protect staff and ensure transparency to the community and the council.
  • Councilmember Clawson felt they would not come to a resolution tonight.
  • Mayor Fullmer called for additional council reports. After a brief discussion, she adjourned the meeting.                    STAFF,COMMISSION, ANDCOMMITTEE REPORTS There were no staff, commission, or committee reports.                 APPOINTMENTS/REMOVALS There were no names for appointments submitted.
  • Mayor Fullmer adjourned the meeting at:25 PM. MINUTES APPROVED ON:   April,25   CERTIFIED CORRECT BY:        Pamela Spencer, CIty Recorder
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Transcript

Event transcript
All right, all right. 00:00:03
Today is March 26th. 00:00:06
And we have a technical issue, so just give us one more second. 00:00:08
Are we ready? 00:00:13
All right, today is March 26th. 00:00:15
2025, the time is 6:00 and we're going to go ahead and start our Vineyard City Council meeting. 00:00:17
We'll start out with an invocation and the pledge allegiance by City Council member. 00:00:24
Brett Klassen. 00:00:28
Our Father in heaven, we're grateful that we can. 00:00:34
Gather together as a. 00:00:36
Community to discuss the business of our city, and we ask that we can. 00:00:38
The respectful and mindful in that we can discuss the things that we need to and come to the resolutions that we need to. 00:00:46
And this we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. 00:00:54
Alright. 00:00:59
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. 00:01:05
And to the Republic for which it stands. 00:01:09
Motivation under God invisible? 00:01:12
All right. 00:01:20
You now have time for public comment. This is a time to come and address the Council for things that are not on the agenda. 00:01:21
Please come up to the podium. Speaking of the microphone, state your name where you're from and we are excited to hear from you. 00:01:28
Can you give me a raise of hands of how many people think they might make public comments? 00:01:35
123. 00:01:41
Anybody else? 00:01:43
4 All right. 00:01:45
Go ahead, they'll put a 2 minute timer on. 00:01:48
Hopefully we'll have enough time because we only have four people, so come on up. 00:01:51
OK. 00:01:57
All right, I am Arianne Mix and I live in Bridgeport. 00:02:00
I actually attended the special meeting that was. 00:02:04
Called specifically to address parking needs in Vineyard. 00:02:07
And I just haven't seen any changes. 00:02:12
My husband sent an e-mail that wasn't responded to. 00:02:16
There is. 00:02:19
The people across the street from me, there are four single women. 00:02:21
And a family living in one home. 00:02:26
None of whom are related to each other and that is something that is seen throughout our neighborhood. 00:02:28
Which results in. 00:02:35
You know, you can imagine you have narrow streets and there are a lot of cars and. 00:02:36
Just worry about the safety and also it's inconvenient. 00:02:41
And then the second thing I wanted to bring up. 00:02:43
Was. 00:02:46
The. 00:02:47
Dog poop that is everywhere. 00:02:49
I'm wondering about if there's something that. 00:02:52
Plan in place or something to address the issue, because I know that it's something that I've heard a lot of people talking about. 00:02:54
Umm, when I'm on my runs on the trail in the morning to go down to the lake. 00:02:59
I can't look away from the trail for too long because. 00:03:04
I might step in poop. 00:03:08
And so that is just really sad. 00:03:10
Anyway, so those are the two things that I wanted to bring up. Thank you. 00:03:13
Before you go, I just want to let you know that your e-mail did make it over to code of our code enforcement at your husband's 00:03:15
e-mail and it is being processed right now. 00:03:20
If you could put your name on the list. If you didn't. 00:03:25
We will also. Oh, you did OK. They'll follow up with you as well. So. All right, perfect. They're working out a plan for your 00:03:28
area. So it's a little bit bigger than that would be so great. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead. 00:03:32
Support. 00:03:42
Hi my name is Oops. 00:03:52
Tip it over. 00:03:54
My name is Emily Larson and I. 00:03:55
I'm concerned about parking and rentals as well. 00:03:59
My best friend is actually moving because of the parking and the rental issues. She has an across the street neighbor. 00:04:02
And a next door neighbor that have six or seven men who are not related all living there. She has reached out to the sitting 00:04:08
multiple times and then shut down and she was told by the owner who does not live in the house. 00:04:15
That the city called and was telling him ways to get around it and so I'm just. 00:04:21
Really concerned. I've lived in Bridgeport for 7 1/2 years and I want to stay in Vineyard forever. 00:04:26
I, I want my kids to be growing up with kids around them and I want to be able to have them be safe as they're walking and 00:04:33
crossing the streets, but there's so many cars that it is concerning. And so I would, I have a quick question for you. Do you mind 00:04:38
for clarity, for clarity, you're looking for removal of parking or less parking like prevents, right? I would like permits and I 00:04:43
also. 00:04:49
Seven cars and some of these men have two cars, a truck and a car and so. 00:04:54
There's nowhere for them to park these. The landlord is not providing parking. You know they can. So we're looking at you're 00:04:59
addressing over occupancy, but this is in a short term rental. It's over occupancy. Yeah, overoccupancy in the two that I'm 00:05:06
referencing and the one that Arianne was is also long term with too many people living there. 00:05:12
Did you leave your name and number as well? OK. Will you put a little note next to yours that you're looking at over occupancy and 00:05:19
removal? Thanks, Emily. That's it. Thank you. 00:05:25
Daria Evans Villas residence Sounds like we need to get those business licenses for the rentals. 00:05:36
Going. 00:05:42
I just want to thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight. 00:05:45
It was it's. 00:05:48
First off, I want to say it's great to have those sun shades going up, especially since we've had some really nice weather today 00:05:50
and this week. 00:05:53
I also like to thank Maria Ortega Cash. 00:05:56
OK. 00:06:02
Nassim down Tower and Sarah Cameron for attending our community meeting. 00:06:03
There was a lot of questions were answered, so that was good. 00:06:08
I do have some questions about the agenda items that were not addressed. 00:06:11
And I'd like to pose those questions to you now. 00:06:16
The first one is about the road striping proposal. 00:06:19
The bid is 58,960 eight 916 dollars. 00:06:22
How much will traffic control, sweeping and layout of the roadways add to the cost of this project? 00:06:27
The Vineyard sewer repair will begin on March 31st. How much of Main Street? 00:06:33
Will be impacted? What sections? 00:06:39
And I believe it's probably a PVC pipe. 00:06:42
And I'd like to know. 00:06:46
How come? 00:06:47
This PVC pipe has deteriorated so quickly. 00:06:49
Since PVC pipe has a lifespan exceeding clay pipe, which is 50 to 60 years. 00:06:52
And I'd like to know. 00:06:59
Why it is deteriorating now? 00:07:01
Also the third of the. 00:07:05
Municipal wastewater planning program. 00:07:07
I'd like to know where our sewer funds are maintained and in what fund. 00:07:11
When will a repair and replacement sinking fund be established and how much are we going to put in it? 00:07:16
How much is anticipated that WE Vineyard will need in reserve funds for the next 10 years and the next 20 years? 00:07:23
And why didn't we not maintain the plan of operations? 00:07:31
And why have we not updated our capital facilities plan within the last five years? 00:07:35
It was last updated in 2017. 00:07:40
And it seems that we are lacking emergency and safety plans for our sewer systems. 00:07:46
Are there plans coming this year for emergency response and safety? 00:07:51
And why hasn't a CCAP, a System Evaluation and Capacity Assurance Plan been completed? 00:07:56
And when? 00:08:02
And what is the anticipated cost to upgrade the list #2 say that again? 00:08:04
What is the anticipated cost? 00:08:10
Those were all in the M. 00:08:14
The MMWP. 00:08:17
Part of our agenda tonight. 00:08:19
And lastly. 00:08:22
I was disappointed. 00:08:25
On Saturday May 20, March 22nd, 25 about our Community Fair. 00:08:26
Held at Freedom Preparatory Academy. 00:08:31
I arrived at 11:20 AM and everything the vendors displays were already dismantled and removed. 00:08:34
The community. 00:08:41
Was scheduled from 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon. 00:08:43
I felt this displayed a lack of commitment to the community. 00:08:48
It should have remained until the scheduled end time. 00:08:51
Who knows if someone else showed up after me and found the doors locked. 00:08:55
It was disappointing and disheartening. Thank you. 00:08:59
Thank you, Daria. 00:09:04
Good evening, Karen Cornelius. 00:09:15
Villas Vineyard. 00:09:18
I have a question about public safety and. 00:09:19
At our HOA meeting that we had such great attendance from the city leaders to. 00:09:23
Share with us the things that are going on in our city. 00:09:28
Sarah shared that the tax increase that we experienced last year. 00:09:32
Was 100% the vineyard. 00:09:37
The amount going to be in your city. 00:09:40
With 100% going to public safety. 00:09:42
And I think that's wonderful because we need our public safety. 00:09:46
But my question to you is. 00:09:49
Within three months, I would imagine we are going to fill those units. 00:09:52
That have been being built in Utah City. 00:09:58
Which will obviously increase the population of Vineyard by a lot. 00:10:01
And they're not done yet, so. 00:10:06
About a year ago, I talked to Marty at length on the phone about a public safety impact plan because I asked about public safety 00:10:09
impact fees. 00:10:13
And she let me know that we had to have a plan in place. 00:10:17
And that helped me to understand why we were not charging them at that time. 00:10:20
And then in July of that year. 00:10:24
There was an article. 00:10:27
Voices of mayors in Utah City where? 00:10:29
Mayor Former shared that a public safety impact fee. 00:10:32
Was a high priority for this fiscal year. 00:10:36
When I asked Chance about cash about that at our HOA meeting. 00:10:39
He told me it had not been begun. 00:10:44
So my question to you is. 00:10:47
Will there be any public safety impact fees charged before? 00:10:49
Occupancy takes place. 00:10:55
Over in. 00:10:57
Utah City. 00:10:58
Because we know that that's going to increase our public safety needs. 00:11:00
And if that doesn't happen, you know that our taxes will be increased again. 00:11:04
So that's my concern. Thank you. 00:11:08
Thank you, Karen. 00:11:12
Any other comments? 00:11:13
OK. 00:11:17
Does he have a comment? 00:11:21
OK. 00:11:23
Terry Ewing. 00:11:25
Phyllis, President. 00:11:27
Since the City Hall has now been rebranded and expanded. 00:11:28
Into a Civic Center. 00:11:33
Can you clarify why? And was this change influenced by funding considerations, particularly the potential use of RDA funds? 00:11:35
If so, how does that impact the overall strategy? 00:11:44
The financial strategy for the project, I'm sorry, say that last part. 00:11:47
I missed the funding portion of your question. 00:11:51
But how does this change from a Civic Center to? 00:11:56
Or to a Civic Center? How does it change the funding? 00:11:59
That will be available for this I know we're talking about. 00:12:03
Bonds. But does this change from a City Hall? 00:12:06
To a Civic Center, make RDA funds available. 00:12:11
All right. Thank you. 00:12:16
And what's the impact? 00:12:17
All right, any other comments? 00:12:19
CS GO. 00:12:23
Thanks for the opportunity to. 00:12:36
Address you. 00:12:37
My question is to do with the RDA funding. 00:12:39
That's being applied to the. 00:12:43
Civic Center so far. 00:12:44
I understand. I've been given to understand that as $1,000,000. 00:12:46
Has been, is being. 00:12:50
Allocated towards the planning and there's two more million besides that you reserve earmarked for that process. 00:12:52
I'm just wondering, well, this center be funded? 00:12:58
Almost exclusively by RDA monies. 00:13:00
What? What proportion of this 30? 00:13:03
Our portion, whatever our portion is of the 33 million or whatever it is going to be. 00:13:07
What will come from RDA monies? 00:13:11
And how do we and what's the justification for that? I'm just curious what? 00:13:13
What? What? How are we defending that when people ask? 00:13:17
So those are my questions. Thank you. 00:13:21
All right, any other comments? 00:13:24
All right. If not, I'm going to go ahead and close out the public comments. I'll take time to answer a few of them. Sorry. It 00:13:26
looks like your questions pertain to some of our consent agenda items. So Council, you'll have an opportunity to pull those off so 00:13:30
we can get some answers. 00:13:35
For you there. 00:13:39
Let's see, I believe the RFA is in a big process, so we have a lot of requests for. 00:13:42
What is it called proposals. Our piece request for proposals that have been going through so. 00:13:51
Cast might not be working on the one for public safety, but it is in movement right now. And so we'll see that come forward. So 00:13:58
you don't need to worry about that. 00:14:02
And then branding expansion. 00:14:07
Of the city center. 00:14:10
So since the beginning of our negotiations and goals for creating an opportunity that provides space for both our city and other 00:14:13
entities that are joining with us, we've been planning this for the last two years with them. 00:14:19
Now, why do you feel like it expanded? That's the question. It would be because the name. 00:14:27
They named it. 00:14:32
And so something we were just Rupert, my time zone. 00:14:34
Something we were referring to as our space, we gave a name and so that's why it feels like it expanded. But it's actually always 00:14:37
been this way. And David, your question was, are we spending? 00:14:43
Of the funding for building this center on with RDA dollars and it will not be with RDA dollars. 00:14:50
And so that is the answer. We'll go ahead and move on to consent items. There were a few that came up in Daria's list. I don't 00:14:56
know if you guys want to pull those off. You talked about the striping. 00:15:01
Talked about I would say probably 3.33 point 5 and 3.6. 00:15:06
Does that seem? 00:15:12
All right, Devin is here so. 00:15:14
I don't know if you guys right, Yeah, just. 00:15:17
Pointing out Devon, Devon is brand new in this position, but he has some of the answers that were. 00:15:23
Questioned. 00:15:29
And the scene will be here shortly and anything else we could defer to the scene. So I'm going to have you come up to the 00:15:30
microphone and put you on the spot. 00:15:34
Yeah. Yeah, we will. 00:15:39
But I need to ask the Council, are you OK with us pulling 3.33.5 and 3.6 off? 00:15:41
OK then I just need a motion for 3.13.2. 00:15:48
3 point. 00:15:52
4/4 I move to approve consent items 3.13.2 and 3.4. OK the first by Marty. Can I get a second? 00:15:54
Second Second by Sarah. Any comments? 00:16:04
We seem to have one chase. 00:16:08
Yeah, I have some concern. 00:16:10
I don't think it's drinking water. I think it's sewer water line. We are taking that one off. 00:16:17
OK, all in favor. Oh, this is done by resolution. 00:16:22
So, umm. 00:16:26
Shape I. 00:16:27
Right. Aye, Marty. Aye, Sarah. Hi. All right, we'll go ahead and start with striping. 00:16:30
Actually, can you answer our questions on striping as well? 00:16:37
OK. We'll start with. 00:16:41
3.5 which is the. 00:16:43
Contract approval for the Main St. sewer line repair resolution 2025-10. 00:16:46
OK. 00:16:52
Did you guys have questions? Otherwise, sorry, I'm going to have you come and repeat what you said and you'll share a microphone. 00:16:54
What's happened? And then Evan will stand next to you and answer. 00:17:01
Thank you. 00:17:05
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to ask these pertinent questions. 00:17:06
A first question about this. 00:17:11
Sewer repair is. 00:17:12
How much of Main Street will be impacted? 00:17:14
Is it straight from the Zinfandel drive all the way up to the connector 800 N? 00:17:17
Or is it just sections? 00:17:22
So it's going to be 600 N. 00:17:24
To the to the connector on Main Street. 00:17:27
Yes. 00:17:31
The contractors are trying to, I mean, that's the area affected. They are. 00:17:34
Do traffic control to keep. 00:17:40
Some flow going there might be a little bit of detour because it will take out. 00:17:42
That intersection during a part of it. So does that mean it's going to go through the villas? The traffic is going to go through 00:17:47
the villas? 00:17:51
606 hundred N is quite the thoroughfare. 00:17:59
From the preserves and lakefront. 00:18:03
And if we're not getting through to Main Street there, they're going to go down through the Villas or third W to 4th North and up. 00:18:06
This computer OK. 00:18:14
Thank you. We would make them go down 3rd West. 00:18:16
They can go down 3rd West. 00:18:18
OK. And my next question. 00:18:20
Why is that pipe deteriorating so quickly? 00:18:26
Can you make sure you're speaking another microphone a little bit more Daria? 00:18:31
Sorry, the pipe, the set is being deteriorating and it's only 18 years old because it was installed at 2007, correct? 00:18:34
So what we got going on with the pipe is. 00:18:45
It's settled a little bit, so it's laying flat. So what it's doing is. 00:18:48
It's the sewers. 00:18:53
Kind of starting to backfill up into it. 00:18:55
So, uh. 00:18:58
We don't know the main reason why it settled, but that roads really settled big time right there too. 00:18:59
So there's going to be a little bit of investigation during this project. 00:19:04
I said we don't know if it has. 00:19:09
If it's the Seward that's caused the road to settle, or if it's. 00:19:11
What Rd. is it? 00:19:15
What's that? What Rd. are we talking about? It's it's Main Street between 6 N. 00:19:16
And the connector, is it just on the east side of the road, is it just northbound or is it both like how much are we? So they will 00:19:21
repair the road because of settling on both, but they will not close the floating down all at once. 00:19:29
And the expectation is not that the PVC pipe has deteriorated, rather that. 00:19:38
The material, the the media below it has compacted and it's allowed that pipe to lower a little bit and create that flat spot on 00:19:43
the road. Yeah. 00:19:47
That's that's, that's good. Thank you. You're talking about the rush to put that. 00:19:53
Fill in wasn't conducted, Yeah. 00:19:59
There's a lot of those areas of how quick it was done. 00:20:01
OK. Can you answer my other? Is that is that under warranty? It's not under warranty. 00:20:05
18 years later. 00:20:11
Will he will you be able to answer my wastewater questions or does that someone else that? 00:20:13
Yeah. OK. So that is for. 00:20:19
3.5 Counselor than any other questions on 3.5. 00:20:22
3.5. 00:20:28
On the sewer line, yes. 00:20:30
Let me look through my notes. OK Pam, I was planning on bundling these, but you need me to prove them after we finish discussion 00:20:34
on them. 00:20:37
I don't think it matters as long as you. 00:20:42
OK. All right. 00:20:45
Hold for just a minute. 00:20:47
No, I don't have any questions. 00:21:04
And 3.6, we're going to move on to that discussion. 00:21:06
This is a VA adoption of the 2024 Municipal Wastewater Planning program, the MWPP with Daria mentioned earlier. Survey Resolution 00:21:09
2025, S 12. Sorry, go ahead. 00:21:15
OK. Make sure you're talking into the mic. 00:21:22
Where are our sewer funds maintained? What fund is it? 00:21:25
Christy. 00:21:31
Can you give her a microphone? 00:21:33
Fund 52 is an enterprise fund just for the wastewater. 00:21:35
Thank you to Enterprise Fund. OK, thank you. 00:21:40
OK. 00:21:44
When will? When will it? 00:21:47
Repair and replacement sinking fund be established and how much are we going to put in it? 00:21:49
I wish the scene was here for that question. 00:21:59
I'm, I'm not 100% on that. We'll get back to you with that one. 00:22:02
You have, I would just point out that we're, we're completing our, our wastewater master plan. 00:22:06
And. 00:22:12
That would be definitely a consideration within that plan and I'll make sure that it's not there that it is. 00:22:14
That that is considered. 00:22:19
As part of the plan. 00:22:22
OK. How much? 00:22:23
How much is anticipated that WE Vineyard will need to reserve funds for the next 10 and 20 years? 00:22:27
The wastewater, you're saying? 00:22:35
So that also will be part of the study that we're that we're doing so. 00:22:38
Why do we not maintain a plan of operations? 00:22:44
So we do have. 00:22:49
In our budget proposal this year. 00:22:51
Going forward. 00:22:54
Do one of those. 00:22:58
OK. So that would be the 2526 fiscal year? 00:23:00
Is that correct? The school in here? 00:23:04
2526. 00:23:06
Why have we not updated our capital facilities plan within the last five years? It was last updated in 2017. 00:23:10
Man, you're really putting me on the spot. 00:23:23
I said that. 00:23:27
That is, another part of our budget proposal is getting some of these. 00:23:28
Contracted out to get them updated. 00:23:34
It's. 00:23:41
Are there plans coming this year for emergency response and safety systems, safety sewer systems? 00:23:43
Are there plans coming this year for emergency response and safety because we are lacking safety plans? 00:23:53
Emergency response plans now. 00:24:00
Just just to clarify, are you referring to safety plans associated with our sewer or safety plans associated with Emergency 00:24:03
Management? No, it's in that MC part of the agenda and that survey the questions and we are lacking in one of those plans. 00:24:11
So that's why we do not have that yet. I would say that it is not a have or have not question. We have SCADA systems in place to 00:24:19
monitor our sewer systems. 00:24:24
There may have been a lacking. 00:24:30
Element of that that is being incorporated through this master planning effort that revises our. 00:24:33
Plans going forward, yeah, I, I feel like that's an important aspect of many of the questions that happened here. We we do have so 00:24:38
many of these things, but this request is going out and these discussions are moving forward to. 00:24:44
Improve the plans that we do have and update the plans that we do have because they were working up until the years that we've 00:24:51
been going and now we're saying, hey, we need to improve upon them. 00:24:57
This was just 2024. This was a survey of 2024, right? 00:25:03
So. 00:25:07
When will we have the CCAP? 00:25:09
Plan completed. 00:25:12
The system evaluation capacity assurance plan. 00:25:15
So. 00:25:21
Once again. 00:25:23
These are just all part of the plan. So this. 00:25:24
Maybe this will help explain a little bit with this. 00:25:27
2024 Survey. 00:25:31
So what what it is is it's a. 00:25:33
It's a state. 00:25:35
Send out survey. 00:25:37
And what they do is. 00:25:39
Kind of try to focus on municipalities and where they're at and some of the things that they might need to improve on. 00:25:41
So it's just kind of kind of set where we're at. 00:25:49
And I want to expand on that. I think it's important for all of us to know. 00:25:53
This is kind of how. 00:25:57
All plans work within the within the city and you're going to have to pay attention to this as we put in our master plans. We 00:25:59
can't do everything at once. 00:26:03
And we assess and reassess and get audited to show where we need to grow and how we need to phase in. And so we do these surveys 00:26:08
to show, OK, next step in the phase is this incremental step. 00:26:14
And that's what you're talking about when we say that's how we're adding on to it. Yes. And and one thing with the state with 00:26:20
especially water and sewer. 00:26:25
As they're always coming up with. 00:26:30
Your requirements. 00:26:31
That that, you know, they're putting on us. So. 00:26:34
Umm, it really. 00:26:38
It's really hard to. 00:26:40
Do everything at once. 00:26:42
This is why we're trying to budget for it and get help is they're so expensive. It's a bunch of new stuff coming on. 00:26:44
And so we're just trying to do. 00:26:51
The best that we can as far as. 00:26:54
Umm, getting in a. 00:26:59
People on the board like. 00:27:01
Sorry, contracts to help us get these up to date. 00:27:03
Then one last question. 00:27:06
What is the anticipated cost? 00:27:08
To upgrade lift #2. 00:27:10
So right now. 00:27:14
We've had, we've got 3. 00:27:16
Engineers that's looking at that, getting us some costs we don't have. 00:27:19
Those costs back to us yet? 00:27:24
I'm trying to think, do you remember when it closes? 00:27:26
Where is list #2. 00:27:31
Left #2 is over by the new. 00:27:33
The public works department. OK, so. 00:27:35
Left #2 is the last lift station before it goes to TSSD. 00:27:38
So it's we just put that in like 4 or five years ago. 00:27:43
No, no, that would been lift #3 we have 850,000 budgeted for that. 00:27:47
For next year. 00:27:56
50,000 total. 00:27:59
For everything that he's. 00:28:00
We have 8. 00:28:01
$850,000 budgeted for Lift Station 2 upgrades. 00:28:02
OK. We don't know what that bids come in at, but that's what. 00:28:06
Budgeted. 00:28:09
Thank you very much. OK, Any other questions from the Council on Item 3.6? 00:28:12
My my question is on both of those and I know we were talking both about. 00:28:17
Water and wastewater. 00:28:22
On wastewater, we only have oh point nine months left in the fund when it's recommended to be 3 to 6 right. 00:28:25
And also with the water fund. 00:28:32
We instead of being three to six, we're at 1.3 as well with those. 00:28:35
With that problem on. 00:28:40
The water issue. 00:28:43
Is that going to draw that fund lower or do we is that? 00:28:45
Emergency fix is that where that money is going to will drop even lower than that. 00:28:49
The emergency fix, he's talking about an operational reserve and would you be able to use saved money on us and would it draw down 00:28:55
on saved funding and then would it take away from whatever operational reserve we're trying to maintain? 00:29:03
As a department. 00:29:11
Can you guys respond to that or do you have any, do you have any comments on that? 00:29:12
And so often when we have projects come up that require additional funding. 00:29:18
We are taking down some balance. 00:29:25
But that's not always, you know. Some years you could save, some other years you have to spend what you save. 00:29:27
Right, I don't have an exact. 00:29:32
Is that is that problem and the shutdown of the road can be taken from? 00:29:34
The water fun. 00:29:39
Or the wastewater. 00:29:41
Yeah, that would be so right now we've got. 00:29:43
400 five 100,000 Account. 00:29:45
I mean, I'm I'm probably a month old on this so I don't have it. You're my data. 00:29:49
OK. So I don't, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers. 00:29:55
That just as an example, we had 2.8 million. 00:29:58
In the wastewater at the beginning of fiscal year 25. 00:30:01
Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, at the beginning of the year, but we're clear to the end. 00:30:05
Right. But we've had money come in. I don't have it. We're currently working on figuring out a cash flow analysis. I've got Zach. 00:30:08
Our treasurer working on that, right? I don't have that that I can quote. 00:30:15
I'm just doing a math based off probably months that have gone through the years. That's how I'm getting that 400,000 number of 00:30:20
like roughly that's where we would be if we were a month to month. 00:30:24
But is that where the money will be coming? 00:30:30
From when that road breaks. 00:30:33
That the money was budgeted for. For that we have money plans set aside as part of our budget for that. It's not an additional. 00:30:36
If it was an additional funding requirement, we would have to come to you as a council. 00:30:46
Request the budget amendment. 00:30:50
Sorry, I didn't understand the question. Yeah, I was like, is this break going to be? Yeah, I'm like, we're really low on that. 00:30:52
The issue with the road has we've been aware of this for over a year. 00:30:57
And so at last year's budget, it was budgeted in to take care of this road issue. So it doesn't dive into the reserve or anything 00:31:01
like that. It's just planned into the budget. 00:31:06
OK. Any other questions? 00:31:14
All right, that leads us to let's see 3.3 with the striping services contract. 00:31:19
I don't see Naseem and Kevin is not going to answer our questions here. Eric, will you be answering the questions? 00:31:26
Remind me what the question was? Sorry, did you have a question on striping? 00:31:35
Council, did you have any questions or? 00:31:39
Can I reserve the time for Daria? 00:31:41
OK, sorry. I come up to the microphone please. 00:31:44
OK, the roads dripping. The bid is $58,916. 00:31:57
I would like to know how much traffic control, sweeping and layout of roadways will add to the cost of this project. 00:32:04
Because that's not included. 00:32:13
In the bid. 00:32:14
Yeah, Rd. maintenance, sweeping and so forth has is, is a separate line item in our budget under transportation and so that won't 00:32:15
have any additional fee associated with. 00:32:21
The striking project itself? It's right. 00:32:27
So how much will that cost though? How much will the traffic control, the sweeping and the layout? 00:32:30
So, Dario, since it doesn't have anything to do with this current request, what I'm going to do is reserve time for you guys to 00:32:36
talk offline about that question. OK, OK, thank you so much. If there are no other questions from the Council, I need a motion to 00:32:42
approve 3.33.5 and 3.6. 00:32:48
I move to approve. 00:32:56
3.3. 00:33:01
I move to approve 3.33.5 and 3.6. 00:33:03
Consent items as presented. 00:33:07
Excellent. Can I get a second? 00:33:10
All right. Thank you. First by Sarah, second by Brett. 00:33:12
I'm going to go ahead and call for a roll call, Sarah. 00:33:15
Jake, did you have something that I would rather talk about the striping services because I'm a little bit concerned about the 00:33:19
warranty on it? 00:33:22
So we just started talking about them. What other questions do you have? 00:33:26
It just. 00:33:30
I've got I. 00:33:32
Just for Naseem, I wanted to go through and understand like why it's failing on a few different areas. 00:33:34
Do you have an area in particular that you're talking about with striping? 00:33:42
Or just normal wear and tear that happens overtime and This is why we have a budget to restripe or what are your questions on it? 00:33:46
Uh, you know, I can, I can take it offline on those issues. 00:33:53
OK, did you want to split up these? 00:33:58
Items and vote on them or did you still feel comfortable moving forward with? 00:34:02
These striping service contract. 00:34:07
I don't feel comfortable knowing enough about the striping services contract just with some of the issues that I've seen around 00:34:09
the city and I wanted to ask more information on. 00:34:14
I was hoping for a presentation on it. Did you want a? Did you want to make another motion? This would be the time for another 00:34:18
motion to approve 3.5 and 3.6 and take 3.3 off, right? 00:34:24
It would have to be accepted. 00:34:31
As a friend language, would you? 00:34:41
You just say that we're going to separate them, so 3.5 and 3.6. 00:34:44
Will be your amendment is what will be approving and then we'll approve 3.3 separately. 00:34:49
I move to amend my. 00:35:00
My motion. 00:35:02
To just approving 3.3 perfect. 00:35:06
And approved 3.5 and 3.6 consent items as present that so yes, OK. 00:35:09
I'm going to do this by roll call Drake. 00:35:17
Aye, aye, Marty, Sarah. All right. I need a motion for 3.3. 00:35:19
How are we going to postpone it? Is that what I Yeah. Could we vote to postpone that? I'd like to talk. 00:35:26
Yeah. Does that affect anything with our contract? 00:35:32
Should we just wait and see if Naseem comes? 00:35:36
And is able to explain we could come back to it. Yeah. OK, let's come back to it. Great solution. 00:35:39
All right, let's go ahead on to our presentations. We're going to have a. 00:35:45
Short presentation on our WellCare Way update. They're moving along and Sambreger will come up and from the Utah Lake Authority 00:35:49
and give us a quick briefing. 00:35:53
Excited to hear from you. 00:35:58
Thanks, Mayor. 00:36:01
So I'll hit on just a couple of high level items that walk our way. Effort right now is in the middle. 00:36:06
Of some sensitive negotiations. I'm not going to dive into any specifics for the City Council at the moment. 00:36:11
But wanted to take a step back and just tell him some history of the project, his background for anybody listening that might not 00:36:16
be aware of it. 00:36:19
So this is an effort that was started actually with Jake Holdaway and Eric Ellis when he was the executive director at the Utah 00:36:21
Lake Commission. 00:36:25
Really a collaborative effort that ended up bringing in over I think 30 different government entities, a variety of land owners to 00:36:29
try and find a way. 00:36:32
To conserve and protect this section of the shoreline of Utah Lake, which more or less is referred to as the Powell's Flu, moving 00:36:36
from Vineyard down to Provo. 00:36:40
So that effort kind of evolved over the years. 00:36:45
And there's been a few hang ups. 00:36:47
And so last year, the Lake Authority and the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands. 00:36:48
Brought on a facilitator. 00:36:54
To try and work with the government partners that are involved and also with the land owners to try and find resolution and see 00:36:56
where we could find wins and directions. To me, they'll move forward. 00:37:00
So, Susan Fazia. 00:37:05
I know she's been in touch with a few of you. 00:37:06
Is who we brought on for that contract and she's worked diligently. She did a assessment interviewing over 30 different 00:37:08
individuals. 00:37:12
From the land owners and also the various government partners to understand what some of the pain points were, some of the things 00:37:16
that need to be addressed and such. 00:37:19
And then since then? 00:37:23
Has worked with the government partners to try and analyze what the best options are moving forward. 00:37:25
The goal of the project is to protect the shoreline. As I mentioned, there was also discussion of things like having a trail, 00:37:30
because there's a goal to have a trail go all the way around Utah Lake eventually. 00:37:34
And some other amenities for the public in the area. 00:37:39
So we've worked diligently on that over the last several months. Things have gone very well. 00:37:42
Umm, right now, it's been really great to see how collaborative everybody's been. We've had a variety of meetings both with land 00:37:48
owners and the various families, and also with everywhere from federal agencies, state agencies, and local governments trying to 00:37:53
talk through what options there are. 00:37:57
And everyone has expressed support for that approach and is really appreciated. 00:38:02
The direction of trying to be collaborative on that. 00:38:07
Right now we're meeting with the various entities that. 00:38:10
Are the various parties that are involved in the dispute over the. 00:38:14
Land boundaries. 00:38:18
And trying to find resolutions. 00:38:20
Our goal is that in the next several months, and we hope by the end of June to be able to wrap up the facilitation process. 00:38:21
So that involves discussion with the various land owners, trying to determine what trail alignment might work best for the various 00:38:29
interests of ownership, trying to minimize the impact on the lake, but also trying to provide public access and good amenities. 00:38:35
But Susan, our our facilitators contract ends in June, and so the Utah Lake Authority's role is trying to help wrap up this 00:38:42
process. 00:38:46
Hopefully with all the Landers involved by that. 00:38:50
Deadline. Uh. 00:38:53
Which was already an extension. We'd hoped to finish it by the end of the calendar year last year. 00:38:54
But if all goes well. 00:39:00
We hope to try and have resolution on all of those agreements by that deadline at that point. 00:39:01
Utah Division of Force you find state lands. 00:39:07
Will be making a determination on how to move forward on the project. 00:39:09
So a little background I may have skipped on that. The main contestation is that the Bureau of Reclamation claims land and some 00:39:14
private land owners claim land and there's even a couple government agencies that are there that claim that land. 00:39:19
UR has been great to work with and is very amenable in trying to transfer this land into forestry, fire and state lands ownership 00:39:24
that needs clarity on those boundaries. 00:39:28
And so Forestry Fire and State Lands has been a great partner in this, has been very supportive and worked very closely with our 00:39:33
facilitator. Their attorney general has been very supportive and spent hours. 00:39:37
Drafting agreements and working with us to try and facilitate these conversations. 00:39:42
And we're hopeful. We think the project can be a great amenity for the lake. It can do a great job of protecting and preserving 00:39:47
this section of shoreline and providing some wonderful amenities and educational resources in the area as well. 00:39:52
Umm, the only other thing. 00:39:58
That I had on that. 00:40:03
Oh, no, I did that on it. It's just that at the end of the facilitation timeline that'll be up to FSL on how to proceed forward. 00:40:06
If we're able to move forward with the project at that point, if we secured the necessary agreements or if not, what next steps 00:40:11
need to be taken in order to be able to find a path forward so. 00:40:16
Again, just reiterating, we've appreciated how collaborative the process is. We're hopeful to have more updates soon as things 00:40:21
wrap up. 00:40:24
But really appreciative of support from the various cities from the county. 00:40:28
From Forestry Farm State Lands Grill, Reclamation and all the families that are owners here in the area and all the conversations 00:40:31
that have had. 00:40:34
Thank you so much, it's been so great. 00:40:38
As a community, this amenity has been so important for us, so we've appreciated the calls from Susan and the work that you guys 00:40:40
have done on it to keep this project moving forward. 00:40:44
Just for clarity for the public. 00:40:49
Sarah is our council liaison that sits on it and we appreciate the work that's gone on by the the family and by Eric from the ula 00:40:52
when he was there. So thank you so much. Thank you. 00:40:58
We're going to go ahead and move on to our Arbor Day proclamation. Arbor Day is coming up. Do you mind if I make a comment on 00:41:04
that? I just want to make sure. 00:41:08
Yeah, I always want to make sure I'm the peacemaker. 00:41:14
But also set expectations before Caraway. 00:41:18
You know, six years ago I was the one that had the. 00:41:23
Idea and starting it, and I'm glad that Eric was also played a role. 00:41:26
And I'm, I'm always committed to. 00:41:31
Finding solutions. 00:41:34
And that's why, you know, I initiated that process. 00:41:36
That said. 00:41:42
Umm, I don't speak for the family members that own that property. 00:41:45
I don't own the property. 00:41:48
Nor do all of my great uncles or aunts. So I have a. 00:41:50
Bias and a conflict of interest in that. 00:41:53
The lawsuit that started that with Bor. 00:41:57
Started at statehood in 1896. 00:42:00
And. 00:42:04
That still remains today. 00:42:06
I I think it's inappropriate for for us to discuss publicly the ongoing or possible litigation between families and the federal 00:42:11
government. 00:42:16
In a public forum. 00:42:21
They're sensitive. They're two party matters. 00:42:23
You know, formal meetings are happening and there's great. 00:42:27
Agreements or ideas? 00:42:30
And to imply any resolution or to speculate any potential outcome. 00:42:32
Of possible federal litigation would be. 00:42:38
Extremely premature. 00:42:42
And unwise and potentially harmful for. 00:42:45
The integrity of that process now. 00:42:49
The state is incredible. 00:42:52
Joel Fairies are awesome ula is also awesome. 00:42:54
And there's some really good people. 00:42:58
Especially even here at the city. 00:43:01
But ultimately. 00:43:03
The legal standing in the matter are two entities. 00:43:04
The federal government and the families. 00:43:08
And those two entities have to come together to find. 00:43:10
Resolved because they're the only ones that have standing in court. 00:43:15
And I just wanted to publicly say that I. 00:43:18
Try and help foster. 00:43:21
Agreement. Like Sam, he's also been wonderful. 00:43:23
Another and I just want to say that I do try to find. 00:43:26
The way and I love the presentation where I'm saying today, but. 00:43:30
Let's let them. 00:43:33
Work through that. 00:43:35
To try to find resolution. 00:43:37
For clarity for the public, I just wanted to make sure everybody was aware none and nothing was discussed when we talked about 00:43:38
sensitive negotiations that are going on that weren't discussed. And I think there was positivity in the idea that everybody's 00:43:44
working together. I know there are a lot of stakeholders involved. 00:43:49
If you have more questions you can talk to FFSL and the ula to get. 00:43:55
Any of those questions answered? 00:44:00
Umm, and I'm going to leave it at that. Thank you. OK, we'll go ahead and move on to the Arbor Day proclamation. 00:44:02
Unless you wanted to add anything else. OK, thank you. 00:44:09
All right, I'm going to go ahead and read this proclamation. 00:44:13
Whereas in 1872, the Nebraska Board of Agriculture established a special day to set aside for the planting of trees. 00:44:17
Whereas Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and the world, and whereas trees can be a solution to combating climate 00:44:25
change by reducing the erosion of our precious topsoil, wind, water, cutting heat cooling costs, moderating the temperature and 00:44:30
cleaning the air producing. 00:44:34
Life giving oxygen and providing habitat for wildlife. 00:44:39
And it goes on, and I'm going to go ahead and save this for you guys to have a really good read when you go watch the posting. But 00:44:44
I'm going to say we find Arbor Day to really be important and I'm going to. 00:44:49
Go ahead and proclaim April 25th, 2025 is Arbor Day. 00:44:56
And invite Vineyard residents to celebrate Arbor Day with us. And we'll have an event coming up to celebrate that. We hope you all 00:45:00
come and join us on. 00:45:05
Thank you. 00:45:10
All right. We will move on to the municipal alternative voting methods. We have quite a few presentations today. 00:45:11
And they're going to talk about some that are on the pilot. Umm. 00:45:20
What is it called? The pilots? 00:45:25
For the state that allows us to vote that we've been using ranked choice voting and Vineyard and then one that is not currently on 00:45:27
the state's approval for that pilot process, but we're still going to hear about that today. 00:45:32
And so I'm going to go ahead and invite Adam to Sir up to speak about one of the motive methods and then I will go through the 00:45:37
presenters and have them come and talk to us about these different forms of voting. 00:45:43
So, Adam, you're welcome to come up. 00:45:50
Let's see, this one is going to be actually 2 new SO. 00:46:16
I do have an HDMI. 00:46:21
Oh, wait. 00:46:38
Thought about this, you know it's a problem when you have a 10 year old laptop, right? 00:46:40
Yeah. 00:46:51
We need to connect to the work program. 00:47:02
Yeah, I think I'm on that. 00:47:06
I I. 00:47:12
Clean up out of the little circle. 00:47:22
Funnest part of the day. 00:47:33
I don't like cast or anything, is there? 00:48:19
OK. 00:48:27
Just make sure there's no like this. 00:48:31
It's not recognizing for some. 00:48:35
Okay, well. 00:48:55
You want to switch to one of them and I can fiddle around with seeing if I can just plug it directly to one of these TV's with my 00:48:58
HDMI clip. 00:49:01
That's OK. 00:49:06
As long as you guys can see the information, I think it's alright. 00:49:07
I've got a cable. 00:49:15
Which one are we OK with? This one? 00:49:22
If you guys need a break now, I'll be a little bit sorry. 00:49:47
Yeah. 00:49:52
So. 00:50:15
While you get going, we're going to just take a few minute break and then we will come back. 00:50:27
Anyone. 00:50:32
Make it work. 00:50:49
Very close. 00:50:52
Is that OK for you? 00:50:59
OK. 00:51:10
You know, sometimes I feel like old stuff. 00:51:13
Pretty. 00:51:15
All right, go ahead and get started. 00:51:57
OK. All right. Well, thank you to the council and to all the residents came to listen tonight. My name is Adam. 00:52:01
I am Vineyard resident in the Windsor neighborhood, and I'm also a volunteer for Utah Proof, which promotes approval voting here 00:52:14
in Utah. 00:52:18
And I'm joined tonight as well by Mark Midgley, who is on the Board of Utah Groups. So my goal tonight is to kind of give you a 00:52:24
brief explanation of approval voting. This is the method that is not currently a part of the pilot project, but we have been asked 00:52:29
by the state legislature to. 00:52:33
Go around and make presentations to cities and towns that might be interested in using this method so that they can request the 00:52:38
state government to add it to the pilot project. 00:52:44
There's a few cities who've already done this. 00:52:49
I think, I believe. 00:52:52
Couple up near Ogden. South Ogden. 00:52:53
Plain City Provo was one of them. One of the original ones actually. 00:52:56
And a handful of others that I actually can't remember right now. So. But if you need that information, definitely feel free to 00:53:02
come ask me. 00:53:05
But the basics is it's really about saving simplicity and security. So let's just jump right into it. 00:53:09
What is approval voting? The simple answer is you're just voting yes or no for each candidate, rather than implicitly yes to only 00:53:14
one and then no for all of the rest of them. 00:53:19
Like our current method and so it's very simple how it works, you just add up all the votes and whoever has the most wins. Just 00:53:25
like our normal method. No rounds, no nothing like that. 00:53:29
Umm, let's move on South. We can compare these. This is very helpful because we have experienced. 00:53:35
Both of the two systems here in Vineyard. 00:53:41
So with the old system, which is called plurality. 00:53:44
This is, you know, where you just make your one choice and this election primarily based on exclusive support. 00:53:47
And it tends to favor candidates like with a passionate base of support because as long as you can get to. 00:53:53
Let's say 40% of the vote if everybody else is splitting the rest of it at like say 30/20/10. 00:53:58
Then the person with 40 is going to win even if they didn't have an absolute majority of support, right? It also works well with 00:54:03
races with two candidates. 00:54:07
Our current system RCV it is a little bit. 00:54:11
Depends on. 00:54:14
It elects a little bit based on different factors, right? Because of the way that the rounds and ranking mechanics work, it can 00:54:16
result in a lot of unexpected events. 00:54:20
It does tend to pay for candidates who can strike alliances. I think we've seen this in the past both here and in cities around 00:54:24
the country. 00:54:28
And then it does work well with races where there are fewer than 5 candidates. If you are able to rank 5, you know there's 00:54:31
different types of RCV. You may only be able to rank three, you may be able to rank 10, whatever, but 5 is typical. 00:54:37
Approval voting tends to work with. 00:54:43
Tends to elect based on favorability, so this is really like. 00:54:46
How broad of an appeal can you have as a candidate? 00:54:49
And it's great for any number of candidates. 00:54:53
So I won't read through everything on this slide, but this is kind of like in general what I want to cover tonight. 00:54:57
It's really it accomplishes a lot of the same objectives that rank choice voting does. 00:55:03
But in my opinion, it comes with a few less of the drawbacks, including. 00:55:08
You know, some security issues that I know are important, so let's just hop right into it. 00:55:12
This is an example kind of drawn from. 00:55:18
The 2020 election. 00:55:21
For, sorry, the primary election for the governor of Utah, as you can see here in the red, this is Spencer Cox won that primary 00:55:23
election and this was under obviously a plurality system. 00:55:28
With 36% of the vote, next in line was John Huntsman junior with 35%, right. And so it's kind of interesting because you don't 00:55:33
really see like a very strong mandate here. It's like. 00:55:39
He got by because he had the most, but it was only 36, right on the right side. Here is an approval election that was done in 00:55:45
Saint Louis. So there are some cities around the country that do use approval voting right now. Saint Louis is one of them. 00:55:51
And you can kind of see. 00:55:57
It's a lot more clear where that mandate is and who the most approved candidates were. You can see even the third place candidate 00:55:59
in this Saint Louis mayoral election had a higher approval than. 00:56:05
Or, sorry, a higher general vote share than Cox did under the plurality system. And so there's really no strategy to try to game 00:56:12
the system of approval voting. All you have to do is appeal to the most voters as possible. 00:56:18
You want as many people to mark your name on the ballot so that you can say hey. 00:56:25
I was the most broadly liked and well accepted candidate. 00:56:29
Umm. And so showing the true levels of support, I think is meaningful both to candidates and to voters. 00:56:33
And this is a simulation that was done by computer so. 00:56:39
Take that for what you will, but it kind of gives you an example of there's kind of this double axis thing we've got going on, 00:56:42
right? There's how simple is the voting method? 00:56:47
And how satisfied are the voters at the end of the day? 00:56:52
And at the end of the that's just kind of like how, how satisfied are you with the results of this election under these different 00:56:55
methods? 00:56:58
So you can kind of see. 00:57:01
All that. This is a good thing to point out. All the methods are the same. There's only over 2 candidates. That's probably pretty 00:57:03
unlikely for most. 00:57:06
Most elections in our city, right? 00:57:10
Plurality is simple, but it doesn't really have a lot of voter satisfaction because you get these people who are like, well, I 00:57:12
don't really like either of these two candidates, so I guess I just have to pick the one that I. 00:57:17
Like, only slightly more, you know, because I don't want the worst one to win. 00:57:22
So there's a small range there, but not much. 00:57:25
RCV, it can have higher voter satisfaction, that is true. It's definitely in general better than our current, than the plurality 00:57:29
system that we're accustomed to using for federal and state elections. 00:57:34
But it can be a lot more complex, and with that complexity comes additional voter education that is required. 00:57:40
Approval voting is actually really simple. 00:57:47
It requires only that one change to the ballot to say instead of choose one. 00:57:49
You choose any or approve. 00:57:53
Any mark, any that you approve of. And so it's a really quick simple change and candidates don't have to spend time. 00:57:56
Explaining the voting method, they can simply focus on the issues at hand and the voting method will, you know, make sense to 00:58:02
voters. 00:58:05
Here's where I'll get into the security topic. So I won't go too deep into this, but if we do want to talk about it, I'm happy to. 00:58:10
I'm happy to send some questions to Mark as well. So there's a concept called precinct summability. 00:58:16
You may have heard of, you may not what this means. This is a common critique levied at RCB, which is basically. 00:58:21
It's not. 00:58:28
If you're printing symbol, it means that if votes were to be collected in different locations around the city. 00:58:30
You could tally the votes at those locations rather than bringing them to a centralized location because if you add up. 00:58:35
Plurality votes or approval votes in different locations, it will all be the same in the end. Whereas RCB needs to go through that 00:58:41
process of the different rounds and the eliminations, so. 00:58:45
This can be a security concern. 00:58:50
The county clerks in general have stated that approval voting is the only alternative that they are comfortable with the audit 00:58:52
trail for. 00:58:55
And then fewer spoiled ballots is another thing to point out sometimes with. 00:58:58
Ranked choice voting, you get some people who are like, you know, putting somebody as their second and third choice or their. 00:59:02
I don't know, just under filling in the bubbles, there's a lot of things that can happen there. This is nearly impossible with 00:59:08
approval because you just select the ones you. 00:59:12
OK, with and you leave the ones blank that you're not. 00:59:16
Cost effectiveness. 00:59:19
So again, this is just based on some costs that we gathered from other cities in the state. 00:59:21
I wasn't able to pull in your numbers unfortunately, but I'm sure you all probably have a better insight onto this. 00:59:27
You can see here that as more cities participate in these programs, the cost does go down. 00:59:33
But we have been seeing, I mean, there's a little bit of back and forth, right? But even in Utah County, we've seen some cities 00:59:38
have had a little bit of motivation recently to pull out of the program. And so if they're pulling out and new ones don't replace 00:59:43
them, the cost will go up to administer that because. 00:59:48
There are fewer cities participating. 00:59:52
So that's the costs for RCV, but for approval voting the cost is minuscule to nothing because you're basically keeping the ballot 00:59:55
almost exactly the same as it is before, other than that one change where it says select as many as you approve of rather than 01:00:00
just vote for one. 01:00:04
The voter education aspect is also extremely simple because you can tell people, hey, this is. 01:00:09
Just the same thing, just select all the candidates that you like rather than only one. 01:00:16
But what we get out of this is we get a lot of the same. 01:00:20
Benefits that RCV provides, which is getting rid of the spoiler, in fact, getting rid of that problem where it's like hey I. 01:00:23
Really want this person but I don't want this person on this. I guess I have to do this one. 01:00:30
Option C You know so. 01:00:33
And no additional cost for administration. This is why the county clerks have also expressed an interest in approval voting 01:00:35
because it is very easy for them to administer on their end and the costs are negligible. 01:00:40
Umm, so where is approval building been used? You can see it's been used in a lot of these, like international places, the Greek 01:00:46
legislature. I thought that was funny, The UN secretary General. 01:00:52
And then Fargo, ND, and St. Louis, MO, have used it here in the United States. 01:00:57
And it's received very positive feedback in general. I think that goes to show, you know what, we can do as many computer 01:01:02
simulations as we want. But the real life reality shows that people do tend to like this method. 01:01:08
Umm, And then again, I'll just come back to this slide. This kind of is just a. 01:01:13
Covering a briefing about. 01:01:19
You know all the topics that we've discussed today. 01:01:21
Where you know? 01:01:23
Any of these things could be considered important to a city or a municipality that's. 01:01:26
You know, doing elections. 01:01:32
Right. Cost matters. Voter satisfaction I think is extremely important and that's why I would support, you know, moving to an 01:01:33
alternative method than the one that we currently use at the state and federal level because. 01:01:39
In most cases, you know, most people I've talked to, I've been out on the streets. I go to farmers markets. I talk to people 01:01:44
around here and they say, yeah. 01:01:47
Had that experience where I have to basically vote for the lesser 2 evils and I don't like it. 01:01:51
And so in my mind, I advocate for approval voting simply because it is the simplest. 01:01:55
Alternative that solves most of these issues. 01:02:01
There is a moderate level of voter education, yes, but I think that's a lot easier to overcome than the education that we have had 01:02:04
to do with. 01:02:08
Choice voting. 01:02:12
So I think that's basically it. And if you have any questions you can ask me now, I may. 01:02:13
Go to Mark on a few of those, but I don't know if you wanted to wait till the end of all the presentations but. 01:02:20
I just had one clarifying question you had. 01:02:25
Said that rancher's voting had. 01:02:28
Artificial winning percentages, yeah. 01:02:31
Let me go back. Was that on this slide or Yes, right here. 01:02:35
Yeah, so. 01:02:39
To kind of explain that, it's a little bit of. 01:02:40
The process is that kind of goes back to what I was saying where it's a little bit random, right? Because like, let's say you had 01:02:43
like. 01:02:46
7:00 or 8:00. 01:02:49
Candidates running, but you're only able to rank five of them. 01:02:50
Then you're kind of not able to Give your opinion on two of them. And so first of all, that throws things through a loop a little 01:02:53
bit. The second issue that comes up with these artificial winning percentages is. 01:02:58
You can. 01:03:04
Just the way that the votes transfer, right? So like, let's say that you are. 01:03:05
Really. 01:03:09
In favor of a certain candidate, but yours gets eliminated right at the beginning. 01:03:10
Then like you may not be able to have like let's say you only put 3, for example, you may not be able to have a say in the final 01:03:15
voting if your candidates, if your ranks just didn't make it to the final round, if that makes sense. So it's still kind of making 01:03:21
you strategically vote. And it's somewhat artificial because those folks don't get to express the same amount of preference as 01:03:27
somebody would for an approval where they literally get to say yes or no to every single one. 01:03:34
So I don't know if Mark, if you want to also give a, you have to come to the microphone. 01:03:41
Thank you. 01:03:47
We just want to keep. 01:03:49
Yeah. So I would, I would add for the perspective on how the majority of. 01:03:51
And the voters that are leftover at the end of an RCV election is somewhat of an artificial majority is because. 01:03:58
Often when you're dealing with. 01:04:05
Candidates are getting elected round after round. 01:04:08
That you're going to be having plenty of voters that have their ballots exhausted because all of the candidates that they had. 01:04:11
Ranked on their ballot. 01:04:18
Had all been eliminated and so their ballot becomes technically exhausted and therefore. 01:04:19
Excluded from that calculation of that artificial majority. 01:04:25
And so when you are looking at. 01:04:30
What the overall percentage of the electorate that voted in that election? 01:04:32
Those majorities when you look at. 01:04:36
Let's say they report something like this. Winner won 51% of the majority. 01:04:40
If you look at the actual percentage of all of the ballots that voted, it might end up being more like. 01:04:45
48 or maybe in 42% of the original voters that cast a pellet in that election and that's why it's. 01:04:51
Kind of being referenced as an artificial majority, that's not a true majority of the electorate. 01:04:57
Another way to wrap your head around this is kind of like. 01:05:02
If if this system, if you were able to rank every single candidate, then this issue would to some extent be mitigated. 01:05:06
But. 01:05:14
That would result in these huge long ballots that a lot of people are fed up with. From what I understand from ranked choice 01:05:14
voting is that every candidate can be ranked and is ranked. 01:05:19
And so if we have 7 candidates, 7 candidates are ranked. If we have 8, all 8 are then ranked so. 01:05:25
Yeah, that does help. 01:05:34
All right. Thank you so much. We're going to go ahead and move on to Winter Hearts Group. 01:05:35
So because it's not actually on. 01:05:41
The Municipal Alternative Voting Methods project. Right now our main ask to use is that you're interested in ever trying out this 01:05:44
method as a city. 01:05:48
The primary directive or thing to do would be to write a letter together as a council to the state legislature with that 01:05:52
legislature requesting that they add this to the project. And we can give you kind of examples of that Provost done that. We can 01:05:57
get them, we can give you their letters. You can take a look at what it looks like. This is not saying we're going to use it. This 01:06:02
is just saying. 01:06:07
We'd like the option and then you would later on vote to opt in to it in the future if it were to be added. 01:06:12
Thank you. Thank you. So to ask a question real quick. 01:06:19
The state hasn't authorized us to be able to use this form. We would need to go and the legislature would need to vote to have 01:06:23
this as a form of approval. 01:06:27
So we first to start that process off. 01:06:31
We need to send a letter. 01:06:33
And then run a bill. 01:06:35
And then that bill needs to pass. So. OK, Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So you wouldn't be committing yourselves to it. You would 01:06:37
just be saying we're interested in, we're interested in you would have a separate vote. 01:06:41
Thank you. 01:06:47
All right, Wendy Hart's group, come on up. 01:06:48
Thank you so much for coming. 01:06:52
Thank you for inviting me. 01:06:54
I can get this to work, do you want me to try and move this back? 01:06:57
Wendy, did you have anybody else joining you today? No, no. 01:07:12
Let's see. 01:07:17
OK, thank you Mayor, for inviting me and City Council. 01:07:33
I normally have like this really long presentation so I'm going to try and just run through as quickly as I can and feel free to 01:07:38
stop me. 01:07:41
The the main issue that I'm going to focus on is that ranked choice voting, a lot of what you'll hear that's presented is the 01:07:47
voter experience. What you need to understand is the back end. 01:07:53
And some of the anomalies that come from the algorithm and things like that. 01:07:58
Umm, the biggest. 01:08:03
Focus that I want to give you is that ranked choice voting, as far as I'm concerned, is not one person, one vote. 01:08:05
And that that's that level of political equality that that we want. And so I'm going to go through some of the concerns. 01:08:11
Especially things that are on the back end. 01:08:19
The first issue is that complexity favors the well connected, so rank choice voting is complex. 01:08:22
Especially the algorithm on the back end, and so money and neighbor recognition will dominate. 01:08:29
Of necessity. 01:08:34
Voters do like the ability to weigh in on each candidate. 01:08:36
But once you get into the math again on the back end, you lose control of how your vote is actually used. So an analogy that I 01:08:39
like to make is that you know, you're, you're sticking your, your ballots into a river and you're hoping that they end up. 01:08:45
The way that you intended them to. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but you won't know that till till the end of 01:08:52
the election. 01:08:57
And finally, currently there's a lot of concern with transparency in elections. 01:09:01
And the complexity that we have calls into the results when people start to look into it, You're trusting the algorithm. And so 01:09:06
with election integrity concerns at a high level, people want something simple, transparent and straightforward, and ranked choice 01:09:11
voting does not do that. 01:09:17
I would have added approval voting stuff in here, but I didn't realize you're doing that as well. 01:09:23
I'm going to try and address all of these. 01:09:28
It is unfair and multi seat races like City Council. 01:09:31
Umm non. It is a non condorcet Condor say means that it is. 01:09:34
Who the voters like the best when you compare them head to head. 01:09:39
Umm, non monotonicity is a fun word. This is the paradox of causing your least preferred candidate to win by ranking them higher, 01:09:44
or your most preferred candidate to lose. 01:09:50
By your yeah. 01:09:57
Your least preferred candidate to win by ranking them higher and your most preferred candidate to lose by ranking them. 01:09:59
Higher it's It's backwards. 01:10:05
There is a lot of voter disenfranchisement and ballot confusion, and it does redefine A majority, as the previous gentleman 01:10:07
mentioned. 01:10:11
So it is. It is not one person, one vote. 01:10:15
What you need to understand is the reason why some of these anomalies occur is because the order in which things are eliminated, 01:10:19
voters are eliminated, can change the outcome with. It's like a lever system. It takes very little input over here to make a huge 01:10:25
change. So it's kind of like. 01:10:30
Order of operations with math you if you add first you get a different answer than if you multiply. 01:10:36
So some voters are more equal than others with rank choice voting. If your first choice is never eliminated, you never get a 01:10:43
second choice. So if you have two council seats open in a traditional election. 01:10:48
You get to vote for two separate people. Now in a ranked choice vote scenario, you are going to rank everybody on down, but what 01:10:54
the algorithm will actually see may not. 01:11:00
Give you more than one person that is tallied at the end of the day. So in Vineyard in 2019 there were 25% of the electorate who 01:11:07
only got one choice. 01:11:13
For their City Council tabulated in 2021 that was 21% and in 2023 it was 16%. 01:11:20
And again, this is not the voter making any mistake, this is the algorithm and you will only see it. 01:11:27
At the back end. So here's an example from 2019. 01:11:34
If you look, Tyus Flake got 277 votes. Is that the first round? 01:11:38
That's 25%. Those 25% will only ever get that first choice vote for Tice Blake counted for both City Council seats. 01:11:44
So if you look, he comes in, I believe it's a gentleman, comes in second in seat 1. 01:11:53
Then Miss Welsh is her first choice. Voters are redistributed. 01:11:58
Mr. Flake picks up a handful of more votes. 01:12:04
From Walsh. 01:12:08
But again, and he does end up winning, but those 277 people that voted for him only voted for him. 01:12:10
They never got anybody else tallied in that. 01:12:17
Scenario. Umm. 01:12:21
And some people say that's a feature and not a bug. I suppose it depends on, you know, if you're 1 of that, those 25%. 01:12:23
Here, just briefly, Lehigh City Council, same thing. Michelle Miles. 01:12:31
In this case it was only 12% of the electorate. She comes in second, but she never. 01:12:36
Makes it on to the City Council. 01:12:41
But her voters only ever voted for her. They didn't get 2 choices. 01:12:43
This leads us to the next thing, which is the Condorcet winner in a head-to-head matchup against all the candidates. 01:12:48
The Condorcet winner is the one that people prefer over all others. 01:12:54
Here's a very simplified example. If you assume that people ranked Mark, 35% ranked Mark and then John, and then Tom, and then 34% 01:12:58
Tom, John, and Mark. 01:13:04
And so forth. In an RCV race, Mark wins. 01:13:09
But if you look at. 01:13:13
John versus Mark. In all of those scenarios, 65% of the people prefer John over Mark, whereas only 35% preferred Mark over John. 01:13:16
This occurred in Moab in 2021. If you look at the fourth line down, LW Luke W has. It's like a Polish name. Can't pronounce it, 01:13:26
not going to try. 01:13:30
He is the the head-to-head winner against all of the other candidates. 01:13:35
He won a, you know, these are his, the people who ranked him compared to everybody else. 01:13:39
But the first choice City Council winner was A Man by Jason. 01:13:45
I believe. Thomas, JT. 01:13:49
So again, there is a Condorcet failure. Whether or not that's important to you, it's just something to understand. 01:13:52
The next thing is non monotonicity. This is a known flaw with ranked choice voting. 01:13:59
Your first choice ranking can hurt your candidate. 01:14:05
Or your last choice ranking can help them win. This again comes from Moab in 2021. If you notice the people that rank JT, who was 01:14:08
the winner? 01:14:13
He was. All it takes is these three people. 01:14:18
There was a 45 point spread in the final round between JT and I believe it was Josie Kovac JK. 01:14:22
Umm, these three people that ranked Jason Taylor as their last choice or second to the last choice? 01:14:30
If they had elevated him to their first choice. 01:14:36
He loses. 01:14:40
And so. 01:14:41
This is a major problem in my opinion because if my ranking someone higher causes them to lose or my ranking them lower causes 01:14:42
them to win. 01:14:47
That's not how our our brains work, right? 01:14:53
And three voters you know. 01:14:57
That that that there should be a greater than 45 point. 01:15:00
You know, if you change 45 votes, that should be the change, not just three. But again, that order of operations, that change of 01:15:04
three votes can can totally change things. 01:15:08
The other thing is these three votes. 01:15:13
If these people had just simply not shown up again, it was a 45 point spread. 01:15:16
But if these three voters don't show up? 01:15:21
Then JT loses when the new winner is LW that loop. 01:15:23
Wachovia. 01:15:27
There is great amount of ballot confusion. As was also mentioned, this would be that Weber County 2020 general Election ballot. 01:15:28
And Governor Jerry Brown, with whom I don't share a whole lot other than I came from California as well, his last he vetoed the 01:15:36
expansion of rank choice voting in California because he says, I believe it deprives voters of genuinely informed choice. 01:15:44
And I believe that that's the case with some of these analogies and analogies. 01:15:52
Umm Fair Vote, who supports ranked choice voting, said the prevalence of ranking three candidates or more was lowest among African 01:15:57
Americans, Hispanics, voters with less education than those whose first language was not English. 01:16:03
In a 2018 Maine congressional midterm, 26% of people said they stayed home. 01:16:09
Over confusion of the ranking system. 01:16:15
So there are problems there. This is from the 2021 election. There were 17 ranked choice voting ballots. 01:16:18
Elections and that Utah County conducted seven of those had greater than 10%. 01:16:26
Confusion. So that's where the voter makes a mistake on their ballot. They showed up to vote. 01:16:32
And they made a mistake. 01:16:39
The most egregious with Genola in seat one, they had a total of 58% ballots that were confused. 01:16:40
And in seat 2, because you're using the same set of ballots. 01:16:47
That went up to 74.7%. 01:16:51
Which is a huge, huge number. 01:16:54
Those elections outlined in red that you see highlighted in red. 01:16:57
That's 10% or more. 01:17:02
Total ballots that were confused. 01:17:05
Umm, so that's kind of a problem. The standard ballot confusion rate where there's some, you know, they, they have to be discarded 01:17:09
to some degree is usually 1% or less. 01:17:14
Here are a handful of places that have repealed it. 01:17:20
Umm, I would point out the level by which the repeal takes place. 52 percent, 62 percent, 65% and 71% of voters repealed it in 01:17:24
these different areas. 01:17:30
And we're seeing the same thing in Utah. Vineyard and Payson were the first two that implemented rank choice voting in 2019. In 01:17:36
2021, there were 23 cities who did it, 21 of which were new. 01:17:42
And in 23 only 12. 01:17:48
Umm, up Cities implemented it, so that's almost a 50% decrease. There was one new. 01:17:51
But of those 23 cities, more than half chose not to do it. 01:17:57
In 2023, so it does seem to be weaning. 01:18:01
Finally, this was alluded to the. 01:18:06
Mayor race in Sandy in 2021, the final round of balloting. There were only 21 votes that were different. 01:18:09
The difference between the winner and the second place. 01:18:17
Runner up. 01:18:20
But there were 4000 exhaustive ballots, meaning there were 4000 people who chose not to rank. 01:18:21
Either one of the final two candidates. 01:18:28
Which means that the out of the ballots cast, it was only a 40.6% win. 01:18:30
I personally think exhausted ballots are fine because it's transparent, but it does not always guarantee you a majority. Here's 01:18:36
another scenario. This is kind of the the spoiler effect. We hear about the spoiler effect. 01:18:43
The spoiler effect is actually good because if you have somebody who can fund a lot of different people. 01:18:49
Umm, you can overcome a fairly significant win if you look in round one. Mr. Perrotta, this is Oakland. I believe in 2010 Oakland, 01:18:56
CA, he's like 21,000 votes ahead of the next. 01:19:02
You know, level competitor next, next runner up. 01:19:09
And it takes nine more rounds. 01:19:13
In order to get everybody else to overcome his win by by 2000 votes. So you're allowing people with a second or third or fourth 01:19:15
choice ranking to overcome those first choice. 01:19:21
Ballots so. 01:19:27
You know that that's just a feature, but it is a concern. So again, one of the other things that I don't have that I, I think I 01:19:28
have at the end here. 01:19:33
Again. 01:19:38
Complexity favors the well connected. Voters like to weigh in, but you don't know how that vote is going to turn out. Transparency 01:19:39
is a concern. 01:19:43
And then I just want to take a moment. Yes, one of the benefits of rank choice voting is that you can save money and not doing a 01:19:47
primary election. 01:19:51
But primary elections, kind of like trash collection, I believe that they're worth the cost. You could save a lot of money by not 01:19:55
collecting the trash every week. You could go to once a month or every two months. Save a lot of money on that. 01:20:02
But there are some things that are worth paying for and with elections, I think some of the benefit in primary elections is for 01:20:08
the electorate to get to know people and also if you're a grassroots candidate that's just getting started out. 01:20:14
You know, sometimes you need, you need that experience to be able to take the time to meet with people and things like that. 01:20:22
So at the end of the day, there are a lot of mathematical problems on the back end of this and it is not one person, one vote. And 01:20:29
so I would recommend that you. 01:20:33
Vote against adopting. 01:20:38
And if there's time I'm having to take questions. 01:20:40
Thank you so much. 01:20:44
We're going to hear, I think the other side of it. So maybe we'll have questions. Are you going to be I can, I can wait for a 01:20:46
little bit. 01:20:50
Well, does anybody have any questions for clarity purposes right now? 01:20:54
No, but I want to add context while I was laughing because you used an example of. 01:20:59
Taking out the trash. 01:21:03
And electing public officials like. 01:21:05
Needs to happen more often. 01:21:10
I used to, I used to use, you know, police and fire as well. And that's. 01:21:13
That's become, but yeah, yeah. 01:21:17
Thank you. 01:21:20
All right, we have John Kidd and Alan Perry. Are you guys here? 01:21:21
Hiding behind the pole. 01:21:26
I was worried my laptop was too new for a moment. 01:21:38
Hi, thank you for letting us address you today. My name is Doctor Alan Perry. I'm an associate professor of mathematics. 01:22:25
At Utah Valley University, this. 01:22:32
You guys might know him. This is Doctor John Kidd. He's an assistant professor of statistics at Utah Valley University. I only 01:22:34
mentioned our affiliation, just so that you guys know where we're from. Certainly our opinions are our own. We're not representing 01:22:38
anything from Utah Valley University. It's just our own, getting our own research. 01:22:43
We want to talk to you today a little bit about ranked choice voting and just voting in general. 01:22:48
One of the things that kind of gets a little lost, I think when talking about voting is sort of what is the point of why we do it? 01:22:54
What, what is the goal with voting for a candidate? 01:22:59
And if you were to sum this up, the idea of voting for a candidate. 01:23:04
Is to attempt to accurately determine the collective opinion of the people about which candidate is actually preferred by that 01:23:08
group of people. 01:23:12
That's the goal. 01:23:17
And you could only have a hope of doing this if, for one thing, everybody actually communicated accurately what their own 01:23:18
individual preferences were. 01:23:23
And so one thing you might want to incentivize as part of this is that people actually express their actual preferences to to the 01:23:27
when they vote on their ballot. 01:23:32
It also would be nice if we could incentivize. 01:23:38
Civil elections, that's something that we kind of are missing, I think sometimes these days. 01:23:40
But just as a goal of voting. 01:23:44
And we also would like to disincentivize what's called strategic voting. 01:23:46
So strategic voting is the idea when a voter. 01:23:51
Misrepresents what they actually who their actual preference is in order to vote for a candidate that they think would produce a 01:23:54
more likely but maybe less preferred outcome. So for example, if I am looking at a pool of candidates and my favorite candidate is 01:24:00
this guy over here and I really want that person to win but. 01:24:06
They don't really have a high likelihood. Instead of communicating that preference, I might instead say my actual preference is 01:24:12
for this person over here who I don't like as much, but they have a higher likelihood of winning and I would like to have an 01:24:17
influence on who that decision is. That's a strategic vote. It does not communicate that voters honest opinion about who they 01:24:22
actually want. It misrepresents that. So that's an example of strategic voting. There's lots of different ways in which this can 01:24:27
be done, but that's just as an example. 01:24:32
So let's talk a little bit about plurality. This is the pick one voting method that we typically are familiar with that we use. 01:24:38
To just give a quick description of what it is you guys are familiar with, it's to give some context. 01:24:45
Votes your talent. Everybody only gets to pick one person, and the candidate with the largest number of them is declared the 01:24:50
winner. 01:24:52
And so let's talk about does that actually satisfy the purpose of voting? 01:24:55
And so, and maybe this could be a question of like, why would you want to change from plurality, which also is something I feel 01:25:01
like it's lost in this discussion. Everybody's talking about new voting methods, but nobody's talking about why should we even 01:25:04
change from the 1:00 we have. 01:25:08
Well, florality does a couple of problems. First, we've already talked about spoiler candidates. Previous person did. Spoiler 01:25:12
candidates are common in in easily influenced. 01:25:16
And spoiler candidates. 01:25:21
Can dramatically impact how people vote and the likelihood that a particular candidate can win. To be clear what a spoiler 01:25:23
candidate is, A spoiler candidate is a candidate that wasn't going to win the election, but by their presence in the election they 01:25:30
change who the winner was going to be. So if they had not been in the election, the winner would have been a different person. 01:25:36
In either case, would it be them? 01:25:43
That's what a spoiler candidate is to. Also, I use the word consensus here because I didn't want to use the word condensate since 01:25:46
that was already used here. I'm going to I'm going to mention this. So plurality has a problem. Not only is it a non Condorcet 01:25:51
method in which it can, just like rank choice voting, also fail to elect a Condorcet winner. 01:25:56
Conversely, winner is a winner who would win in every paralyzed runoff that they're in. So if you ran 5 candidates and you did, 01:26:01
you know, A versus BA versus CA versus D and so on, and did it with every possible pair, if there's somebody who wins in every 01:26:06
possible case, that's a Condorcet winner. 01:26:11
Both plurality and rank choice voting can fail to elect converse a winners. In fact, quite regularly the opposite also exists. A 01:26:16
converse a loser, somebody who could, who would lose every pairwise runoff that they're in. 01:26:23
One curious thing about plurality is that it is capable of electing the converse a loser. 01:26:29
So the current voting method that we use right now can elect somebody who would lose in every pairwise runoff to every other 01:26:34
candidate. 01:26:37
It also highly incentivizes strategic voting and strategic campaigning. For example, it results in things like voting for the 01:26:42
lesser of two evils, which is a form of strategic voting. You are misrepresenting what your actual preference is. 01:26:48
Because it's not advantageous to do so, so the system incentivizes you to not tell what your actual preference is. 01:26:54
And then finally. 01:27:02
Final How do I go back, John? 01:27:04
OK, finally, it also has been shown to induce the two party system so that matters to you. This is a natural game theoretic 01:27:07
consequence of using plurality voting. It naturally forms A2 party system over time. 01:27:13
It can take a long time for these kinds of events to occur. For example, the United States didn't devolve into a two party system 01:27:20
for about 80 years after its after inspiration, even though it had been using plurality voting for a long time. This is mainly due 01:27:24
to the fact that you don't vote very often. 01:27:28
So it takes a little while for you to figure out what the optimal strategies are. 01:27:33
To give an example, here's a plurality election where you have two candidates, R1 and R2, who have similar political leanings, and 01:27:36
then a third candidate, D, who has maybe opposite political leanings, and they run in this election. And you can see that if you 01:27:43
were to run plurality, everybody gets to vote one. The people in the party for R1 and R2 are kind of split on who the right one 01:27:49
would be, and so they vote that way. You get 30% for 125% for the other and 45% for the other side. 01:27:56
In a plurality election, D would win, but you kind of begs the question, should D win? 01:28:03
Because if you look at the makeup of the electorate, you have two candidates from roughly the same political, basically the same 01:28:08
political party if you want to put similar political leanings. 01:28:13
Making up 55% of the electorate. 01:28:18
Plurality cannot capture that. It cannot see that because that's not what it calculates. And so a plurality election would think 01:28:21
that that the other candidate is the most preferred, even though 55% of the populace is saying I would like a candidate from this 01:28:25
party. 01:28:29
Or from this group. 01:28:34
So in divergent laws, the idea of two party split, which by the way is kind of where where this comes from. Like you might say, 01:28:35
you might look at this and say, well, the party of R1 and R2 ought to just run one candidate. 01:28:40
And that's precisely what causes the two party candidate A2 party system thing. They're going to try to consolidate and run one 01:28:46
candidate so they have a higher likelihood of winning. 01:28:49
That's what divergent laws about. 01:28:55
On the other hand, instant runoff voting RCB. 01:28:57
What it does is, as we've kind of seen it, it has everybody rank order all the candidates and then it looks at everybody's first. 01:29:00
Highest ranking and sees if any, if any candidate has a majority of highest ranked votes. If there is, they get elected. If not, 01:29:07
the person with the lowest first place votes is eliminated and all of those votes are now distributed to their next the next 01:29:11
candidate that they indicate. 01:29:16
And the process is repeated until a candidate obtains a majority of the remaining votes, Not necessarily, as you pointed out, 01:29:22
majority of everybody. 01:29:25
So to give an example, here's here's back to that same. 01:29:30
Plurality election If instead of just voting one, everybody was offered a chance to rank order the candidates. Let's suppose that 01:29:33
it looked like this and you can see that R1 and R2 are very similar politically and so everybody. 01:29:39
Who listed them? Listed them next to each other. This is a type of candidate that we call a clone. Basically, they're acting 01:29:46
similarly in the election. 01:29:51
In the sense that if either one of them were gone, the same thing would happen in this case. Here, if you look, nobody has a 01:29:55
majority of first round votes. 01:29:59
And so the person with the least amount of votes is eliminated, which in this case would be R2. 01:30:04
And So what you do is you eliminate R2 from everybody's, I'm sorry, Star Wars fans, but you eliminate R2 from all of the listings 01:30:09
there and you would get this resulting. 01:30:14
New list of what everybody's preferences are, which you can then recombine. 01:30:20
That'll do it. 01:30:24
There we go. And you'd see that R1 would win with 55% of the vote, which is more accurate in terms of like what the people wanted, 01:30:26
because that is showing that the people actually wanted a candidate from that side of the political spectrum. 01:30:31
So R1 would win in this case. 01:30:38
In this case here I want to point out a couple of things. First off, R1 actually was the Condorcet winner in this particular 01:30:40
election, so this is an example of plurality not electing A Condorcet winner. 01:30:45
In fact, D is the Condorcet loser in this election. Both R1 and R2 would have beaten in 55 to 45, so plurality elected the person 01:30:50
that would have lost head to head against every other candidate. 01:30:56
Moreover, as we point out, there are two one and R2 were clones and IRV avoided that kind of spoiler effect. Now there are lots of 01:31:03
different kinds of spoilers, so let's talk about. 01:31:07
Does RCB actually fix the problems that we addressed with plurality? 01:31:13
First off. 01:31:16
RCV is immune to a particular type of spoiler called a clone. 01:31:18
There are other types of spoilers, and it is incredibly hard for a voting method to be immune to all types of spoilers. Almost 01:31:21
every voting method out there is is susceptible to some kind. 01:31:26
But this particular type of spoiler is high pluralities highly susceptible to. But our CV is immune to other types of spoilers RCB 01:31:31
can follow victim to, as was kind of pointed out. 01:31:36
RCV will not elect A Condorcet loser. It's impossible for that to happen. 01:31:41
Mathematically impossible. 01:31:46
However, it can fail, as was pointed out, to elect a Condorcet winner if there is one. 01:31:48
It also, while strategic voting is still possible in RCV, it provides considerably less benefit than it would in our in in 01:31:52
plurality. 01:31:56
In plurality, voting for the lesser of two evils is a common strategy, enough so that we almost feel like that's the right way to 01:32:01
do it. 01:32:03
And so that provides a lot of incentive. 01:32:06
Strategic voting in RCV is possible, but it's not as useful and so there's less utility in doing it. 01:32:09
It also can resolve different outcomes than plurality. That, some people were worried, does really make a difference. It does, 01:32:14
especially in cases where plurality presents a problem where it's not representing what the people want. 01:32:20
However, RCV is does have some problems too. 01:32:25
It can fail to elect the Congress a winner, as we pointed out. It can fail to be monotonic, which was described. This is if you. 01:32:29
All right. This is the idea that if you increase support for your candidate, you can potentially make that can't hurt that 01:32:36
candidate's chance of winning. And it is precisely the point that you pointed out that it can change who was eliminated first, and 01:32:41
that dramatically changes what happens later on in the election. 01:32:46
Also, I take a little issue with the idea that it's kind of confusing. 01:32:52
I think it's important to recognize that people will learn things as time goes on and you use it. It's a little difficult to 01:32:55
compare RCV, which we've used for like 3 election cycles, to something that's been ingrained in American soul for 250 years. 01:33:02
Of course it's going to be a little bit different. It takes a little time to use. If you look back at things like how long it took 01:33:09
people to get used to using seatbelts, it took a long time for people to recognize the reality and intelligence of that. But 01:33:14
seatbelts are a good thing. So that's not necessarily something that I think we should be too worried about initially. If it were 01:33:19
100 years from now, people were still confused, then maybe it's an issue. 01:33:24
And of course, like I said, new voting methods take time to change voting behavior for people to find out what the right strategy 01:33:30
is inside there. 01:33:33
I'd like to take just a quick minute though and talk about this because we've talked about several different voting methods here. 01:33:37
So the idea of voting methods, there's two parts to 1, there's a. 01:33:40
Voter opinion data collection portion, which is the ballot. 01:33:45
And then afterwards you take that data and you have to interpret it somehow. And the question of whether or not this interprets it 01:33:48
correctly is important. So the different types of ballots that you can talk about are things like single choice ballots or a rank 01:33:53
choice ballot, or as was talked about, an approval ballot or a score ballot or some popular types of voter data, opinion data 01:33:58
collection. 01:34:03
Methods that you can do. 01:34:09
On top of that though, as soon as you collect that data, that's just information about what the people's preferences are. 01:34:10
Now the purpose is, how do I correctly interpret that data so that I can accurately represent what the people are trying to say 01:34:16
collectively? 01:34:20
And there are lots of different ways in which you can do this. Plurality is one way where you just take the first choice vote of 01:34:25
everybody and you can actually calculate the polarity winner off of a single choice or a ranked choice ballot. Curiously, one of 01:34:29
the examples that you provided. 01:34:33
Showed when when the RCV failed to elect the Congress a winner. 01:34:37
In that election that you that you described, plurality would have elected the same person. 01:34:41
So really there wouldn't have been much difference in some of those kinds of scenarios. 01:34:44
But anyway, so that's one type. You can also talk about instant runoff voting. That's the actual name of what most people refer to 01:34:49
when they say rank choice voting. 01:34:52
But there's more modern forms of rank choice voting. 01:34:56
For example, something called ranked pairs which has only been around since about the 80s. What it does is it actually compares. 01:34:59
Each pairwise runoff and looks at how strong the victory was between each pair in order to try to determine what the people are 01:35:05
actually saying in terms of how much they preferred one candidate to another. And it turns out that it is far more robust against 01:35:10
certain kinds of problems that we've talked about here. And so the question becomes what method is actually best? Which method 01:35:16
actually satisfies the purpose of voting better? 01:35:22
One way that mathematicians actually try to understand this is by looking at things called fairness criteria. 01:35:55
And what a fairness criteria is. You can see here. I've listed several. These are ideas in an election that should make that we 01:36:01
should. 01:36:04
Argue that a good election method should be able to do so. For example, we talk about Condorcet winners. 01:36:07
If there's a Condorcet winner, an election method ought to pick it. It means that person is going to be every other person in a 01:36:11
head-to-head matchup. It's hard to argue that that's not the favorite candidate in that pool. 01:36:16
So that's one fairness criteria. If there's a converse thing winner, it should pick it. You can see plurality and instant runoff 01:36:21
both fail that, but rank pair satisfies it. Score voting fails it. 01:36:26
Condor say a loser. If there is a condorcet loser you don't want to elect that Plurality can elect A condensate loser. Instant 01:36:31
runoff won't. Rank pairs won't. 01:36:35
Clone invariants. That's that special type of spoiler that we talked about. Florality is highly susceptible to. In fact, it's 01:36:40
actually referred to as being strongly clone negative. If there's a clone presence of a clone, it's significantly impacts that one 01:36:45
of the clones ability to win. 01:36:49
Instant Runoff is immune to that type of spoiler. On the other hand, you have monotonicity, which plurality actually does satisfy 01:36:54
an Instant Runoff fails. 01:36:57
Ranked pair satisfies that one too, and you can see there's a few more. These certainly isn't an exhaustive list of. 01:37:01
Of fairness criteria. But certainly I think it gives you an idea that there's more to this question than anything else. 01:37:06
I think personally it would be a mistake to just stick with plurality because you can see it's kind of one of the worst ones there 01:37:12
are. 01:37:16
Mathematically, like most mathematicians would agree, plurality is probably one of the worst ways that you can try to actually 01:37:19
really represent, like figure out what the people want. It has the worst mathematical properties of almost every voting method. 01:37:25
Instant Runoff is a slight improvement. It's not great, but there are other methods out there that are possible and available that 01:37:30
are far more robust. 01:37:34
And I think it's more important to keep the conversation going, keep talking about this stuff. 01:37:37
And I'll turn time over to John. 01:37:41
And so a couple of final. 01:37:43
Couple final last little things. 01:37:45
We also have a little bit of information about how people feel about this. 01:37:47
In the last couple of years. 01:37:51
The pilot study has been going on in Utah to determine how RCB is going to work. 01:37:54
We have access and I've been able to analyze data from a survey that was conducted by Y2 Analytics in 2021 and 2023. 01:38:00
Now, there were some guidelines. Most of this data was designed to see how voters felt about, you know, throughout the entire 01:38:08
state. There were mathematical procedures done so we could try to focus on voters that were in ranked choice communities. 01:38:15
And also some weighting criteria so that we had a better representation of. 01:38:21
How this would look if it was applied to the entire state. There's mathematical and statistical procedures that have to go through 01:38:27
when we're talking about sampling, we have to get random samples. We have to collect the data accurately. We can't just put a link 01:38:33
out on Facebook and say, hey, answer this. We also need to make sure we're answering our questions correctly, that we're making 01:38:39
sure people are aware they're answering so that we're not biasing who is answering the survey in any way. 01:38:45
And they did a very good job of this. 01:38:52
And from this I have some results from the state of Utah. 01:38:53
So in the state of Utah, various questions were asked. 01:38:57
One of which being, hey, are you more or less likely to vote for your favorite candidate? 01:39:00
And a vast majority of people indicated they vote. They were more likely to vote for their favorite with RCB than they were with 01:39:04
other methods. A fair number said yeah, maybe, maybe not. 01:39:09
But definitely much more likely to than not. So we see more. 01:39:14
More of that honest accounting for their votes. 01:39:18
Additionally, most people do feel that the instructions are clear. 01:39:21
We see from this that the majority felt that the instructions were very clear. Quite a few felt that they were somewhat clear and 01:39:26
maybe somewhat unclear. 01:39:29
But we do see. 01:39:33
Quite a few people understand and for those that don't, hopefully we can, like seatbelts, continue to learn about this procedure 01:39:34
and help them to better understand. 01:39:39
Most people felt that RCB was easy. 01:39:44
All right, either very easy or somewhat easy. 01:39:47
Additionally, most were satisfied with the election form that they used. 01:39:50
And a couple of final ones. Most felt that they were very confident. This one I actually like just beyond RCB as we know that 01:39:57
there is some concern. 01:40:00
Most people in Utah are still indicating that they are confident in the results of their election. 01:40:04
And then as a final one. 01:40:10
The question was asked and this one was, you know, across 2021 and 23. 01:40:12
How do you feel about? 01:40:17
RCB in the future. 01:40:18
They asked would you prefer more elections, maybe keep it only in municipal or to eliminate it entirely. And while there is a 01:40:19
little bit more of a split here. 01:40:24
We do see that a majority, and statistically we could see this a majority preferred more, or at least keeping our CD elections as 01:40:28
they were. 01:40:33
Now. 01:40:38
The fun part about the fact that I live here in Vineyard is I got to delve into the data and I could look very specifically at 01:40:39
results for those that indicated they lived in Vineyard. 01:40:44
Now, it's not an exhaustive. 01:40:49
Set. These are not a lot of participants, but once again, they were selected randomly. There's not bias in who was selected for 01:40:51
this and of those that participated in the in this survey. 01:40:56
There were 19 and 2021. 01:41:02
Almost over 90% indicated that. 01:41:05
Was easy to use. 01:41:08
Most indicated that instructions were clear. They liked RCV. They liked that a majority needed to be. 01:41:09
Voting for a winner. 01:41:16
And that they were very satisfied with the elections. 01:41:18
And 57 percent, 58% indicated they wanted RCB not only used in municipal elections, but used more and an additional 31 1/2%. 01:41:21
Want to get used at least in municipal elections? 01:41:32
In 2023 we got five more people. 01:41:35
And the numbers stayed roughly the same. 01:41:38
But particularly at the end, we see. 01:41:42
Half of these wanted. 01:41:44
More RCB used in more elections. 01:41:47
Plus an additional almost 17% that wanted it to at least stay in the elections. Now again, we don't know for certain that this is. 01:41:50
Perfectly representative of Vineyard. This is a small sample size. 01:41:57
But I do wish to say that there is some evidence here as these are randomly selected individuals. 01:42:01
That there does appear to be some evidence, not just throughout the state of Utah. 01:42:07
Here at home that individuals are not as opposed to. 01:42:10
RCB has. 01:42:15
Loud voices may indicate. 01:42:16
That is all for us. If you have any questions for. 01:42:20
All of the above, we can step aside. 01:42:23
Continuously, can I ask the question? Yes, thank you. 01:42:25
Can you explain ranked pairs a little bit more? Because. 01:42:30
Sure, I'd be happy to so. 01:42:34
The so the idea, let's go back to the idea of a Condorcet winner, right, which is the notion if I take every possible pairwise 01:42:37
runoff and I try to see if they win. 01:42:41
If there's if there is somebody who wins everything, they win rank pairs as well. So that's great. It'll elect A Condorcet winner. 01:42:45
The problem is, is that sometimes. 01:42:49
You get a sort of. 01:42:53
Rock Paper Scissors scenario where the electorate indicates that they prefer candidate A to candidate B, they prefer candidate B 01:42:55
to candidate C, but they prefer candidate C to candidate A. 01:43:00
And that's not translated. So how do you determine who they actually prefer? 01:43:06
And So what ranked Paris tries to do is it says when you run into this thing, it's called a conversate paradox, but it's rock, 01:43:09
paper, scissor problem. 01:43:13
It says when you run into this, how do you break that chain in order to determine a ranking that is most accurate? 01:43:16
And So what it does is it looks at the strength of victory of each of those. Maybe Canada Day was preferred to candidate be by 01:43:22
like 70 to 30. 01:43:26
Maybe candidate B was preferred to candidate C, you know, 55 to 45 and candidate C was preferred to candidate A only 5151 to 49. 01:43:29
The weakest victory there would be the last one and so it would throw that victory out and and rank it ABC. 01:43:38
So is that something because you said that? 01:43:44
So we know that approval. 01:43:47
Voting is not something that our legislature allows and we know that rank choice voting only has instant runoff voting from my 01:43:49
understanding, so rank and truth voting would be paired with. 01:43:54
Sorry, paired. 01:44:01
Oh, I lost it. 01:44:02
Right, right. Thank you. 01:44:04
But that's not something improved by our legislators, right? So, so here, yes, you're right, this is a little tricky. In fact, as 01:44:06
I understand the law that that set up the rank choice voting pilot, it's specifically specified instant runoff voting in its 01:44:11
description of what method was approved for use. 01:44:16
If you wanted to use another form of rank. This is why I hate the notion the term rank choice voting because anything that uses a 01:44:22
ranked ballot is a rank choice voting method, not just instant runoff. 01:44:26
But if you wanted to use a different interpretation method for a ranked ballot. 01:44:31
You would require just like approval voting something from the legislature that would that would say that but. 01:44:37
That honestly, I think that's something that that hasn't even really been brought up with the legislature, that there are other 01:44:42
ideas. The conversation has almost been unilaterally between plurality and instant runoff voting. Most people I don't even think 01:44:46
are aware there are other ones out there. There are. 01:44:50
Dozens of election methods, all with varying levels of robustness. Rank pairs effect. If you want, you can check out a Wikipedia 01:44:54
page, You can Google rank pairs. Go to the Wikipedia page, Scroll down, there's a whole list of. 01:45:00
Two dozen different voting methods and two dozen fairness criteria that shows you which ones satisfied which. It's all very well 01:45:06
understood mathematically. 01:45:09
But anyway, so. 01:45:13
Yeah, there's a lot of out there. Ranked pairs is my favorite because of all the methods that are out there. It seems to satisfy 01:45:15
the really most important fairness criteria. 01:45:20
While still being relatively easy to explain that it's an important balance there. 01:45:24
The other, the other issue is that there's some mathematical theorems that show that you can't really find one that satisfies 01:45:30
everything. And so it's kind of an unfortunate mathematical problem too. And so this kind of optimizes. How can you address the 01:45:34
possibility? 01:45:38
Thank you. All right, I'm going to invite up our next speakers. 01:45:42
Mark Roberts, Brad DA and Nancy Lord, come on up. 01:45:47
Thank you so much for being here. 01:45:55
Thank you for having. 01:45:58
So I'll just guess I'll start off by saying. 01:46:02
If you're tired of hearing about rank choice voting talking about this stuff, I'm to blame. 01:46:06
It's my fault. 01:46:12
I served in the Utah Legislature from 2012 to 2020. 01:46:13
And in 20. 01:46:17
Actually 2013 was my first session. 01:46:20
2014 the Legislature changed how we do primary elections. 01:46:22
So that you could have multiple people on a primary ballot that we've seen the last several years. 01:46:27
And when that happened? 01:46:31
They promised us when this whole deal went down that hey, we're going to fix this plurality issue now that's going to exist on the 01:46:34
primary ballot. 01:46:38
And I looked around and nobody was offering anything up. And I've always been a big fan of instant runoff voting or ranked choice 01:46:42
voting. 01:46:45
I have a real hard time with the current plurality method. 01:46:49
For many reasons that were just stated by both the approval and the ranked choice voting people here. 01:46:53
It's mathematically it's worth worth worse method. 01:46:59
I hated getting in the situation where I'm stuck trying to pick between the worst of two evils right and like playing this game or 01:47:03
thought well if I vote for this person. 01:47:07
That I really like. It's going to pull votes away from this person. I'm going to end up with this person that I really don't want. 01:47:11
So for me, ranked choice voting always solved that in a perfect world. 01:47:17
We would all show up. 01:47:21
And we would all vote, right? 01:47:23
And and if nobody gets 50% or more, we drop off the last vote getter. 01:47:25
And we all stick around in a perfect world, and we vote again. Everybody votes, right? 01:47:31
And we repeat this process until somebody gets 50% or more. 01:47:36
In a perfect world. 01:47:40
Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world, right? So how do you best approximate this right? 01:47:42
And there's no, you know, you did your little finger things. I don't know if you're talking about money, but there's no time or 01:47:47
money to do this. 01:47:50
So what best approximates this? And so in my opinion, it's been ranked choice voting. 01:47:53
And that's how you can best approximate this perfect world of. 01:47:59
Multiple rounds where we get together, we cast our vote, nobody gets 50% or more, we're going to do it again. 01:48:02
There's a lot of talk about the algorithm on the back end. Essentially, that's how the algorithm works. 01:48:09
You rank your choices and so you say hey in the first round with this. 01:48:15
Field of candidates. 01:48:19
This is who I would vote for. This is my preference, OK? 01:48:20
Now if my candidate doesn't get through the first round. 01:48:23
And we move to the second round and nobody's made it 50% or more. Who would I vote for out of who's left? 01:48:26
To represent me right on the legislature or the City Council or whatever it is. 01:48:34
That would be my second preference. 01:48:39
And then if there's more people on the ballot, I would say, all right, if these two people aren't in and I have to choose between 01:48:41
these three people, in a perfect world, that would be the situation, right? Three people left. 01:48:47
And I have to choose between these three people. Who's my preference in that scenario? 01:48:52
So that's exactly how the algorithm works on the back end. 01:48:57
It just does it with the algorithm instead of in real time with people dropping people off. 01:49:00
So. 01:49:05
I proposed this to the legislature, ran the bill, and the county clerk's don't like this. 01:49:07
They don't like a lot of change. 01:49:12
They put a big fiscal note on it. It was going to cost millions of dollars and so. 01:49:16
I worked with them for several years. 01:49:21
And went back and forth. At one point we had it passed all through, all the way through the House and Senate, and we were going to 01:49:24
have ranked choice voting, the primaries and the general election. 01:49:28
And it fell by one vote in a Senate committee. 01:49:33
So at that point they started working the county clerks and came to a compromise in which we said, all right, let's try this thing 01:49:36
out. 01:49:40
Because you guys keep saying that it doesn't work. People don't understand. It's going to be hard for people to do, It's going to 01:49:45
be hard for clerks to administer. This was the argument always going on. 01:49:50
And so I said, alright, fine, let's try it out. Let's make it optional at the city level. It's not force anybody to do it. 01:49:55
And let's see what happens. So they agreed. 01:50:00
We passed the bill. 01:50:04
Made it optional for cities to do it And thank you Vineyard City. You guys were one of the first cities to do it the first year 01:50:05
along with Payson City. 01:50:09
Unfortunately. 01:50:12
Even though the county clerks said, OK, let's do this, let's compromise, let's see what really happens. 01:50:14
They then went out and refused to administer this for any of the cities. So any of the cities. 01:50:19
Only Vineyard and Payson did it that year. There was more that wanted to, but the county clerk's refused to administer it for him. 01:50:24
Fortunately at this time. 01:50:30
Million Powers was the county clerk for Utah County. She agreed to administer and do it. And so Payson and Vineyard. 01:50:32
We're able to do it and then. 01:50:38
From there, more cities did it in the future. So that's how we ended up with this. 01:50:39
That's why it ended up as a pilot project. 01:50:44
And the reality is when I first ran this. 01:50:46
It actually did include approval voting, so approval voting was part of the original bill. 01:50:49
And it was amended out on the Senate floor on the last day of the session. 01:50:54
Because I wanted to have kind of a. 01:50:59
Sandbox environment of hey let's try these things out. The cities you know are good place where you can test these things out not 01:51:01
at like. 01:51:05
A general election where we're electing the governor and stuff cities is a good environment to try these things out. 01:51:09
If they want to. 01:51:15
I would love to see actually the option for approval. 01:51:16
You know some of these others on there? 01:51:19
And see what that looks like. But we ended up with ranked choice voting and. 01:51:22
That is my personal bias. 01:51:26
Just so we're on the same page, so. 01:51:29
We ran it. It works. It's not complicated. People understand it. We did education campaigns, but. 01:51:32
Even without the education campaigns, we went to some senior living centers and said hey, rank the five national parks. 01:51:38
And we're going to see which one everybody prefers. We can explain to them how ranked choice voting works or anything. They're all 01:51:45
able to do this. 01:51:48
So. 01:51:52
Anyway, one person, one vote. We've talked about this. 01:51:53
Maine was one of the first states to do ranked choice voting. This was challenged. A federal judge already ruled that it's 01:51:57
constitutional. And if you just think about how this works. 01:52:01
Multiple rounds of voting. 01:52:06
It's what you get one vote each round. There isn't more than one vote. You're not casting more than one vote. 01:52:08
I had a list of a bunch of advantages, but before you move on from that. 01:52:17
Could you explain why that's important? 01:52:21
The one person, one vote. And why if we're getting one vote on each candidate, why they're constitutional, right? You, you get one 01:52:23
person, one vote. 01:52:28
And people like saying choice voting is not one person, one vote. 01:52:33
And like I said, this was challenged by some people in Maine, went to a federal court and they ruled on the constitutionality of 01:52:38
it that. 01:52:42
That it is one person, one vote and. 01:52:46
And if you just think about how it works, in a perfect world, we'd show up. 01:52:48
First round of voting. Everybody votes once you get one vote. 01:52:51
And if nobody gets 50% or more? 01:52:56
We gather everybody back again, we vote again, Everybody gets one vote. 01:52:58
It's the same way you know ranked choice voting works, you just do it all at once. 01:53:02
And you count everybody's first choices, and if nobody gets 50% or more, you drop off the ballot. 01:53:07
That answer your question, yeah. So is the in this for clarity purposes so was the ruling that. 01:53:14
The one person, one vote constitutionally is one person has to get the same fairness and vote as the next person. So if you're 01:53:20
voting for each candidate. 01:53:26
Then everybody gets to vote, has the opportunity to vote for each candidate, and that's why it's one person voting method. 01:53:31
I believe the challenge was people are claiming that. 01:53:39
People are able to vote for more than one person. 01:53:42
Right, So if you want to get into the weeds of this too, right, like you look at approval voting and other things and, and even 01:53:46
the current plurality method, we say, hey, vote for three, right there's. 01:53:51
I don't know how it is here, maybe there's two seats open and so it says. 01:53:56
Five people are running vote for two, right? So everybody's voting for more than one, especially in a plurality city situation. 01:54:00
But the argument was. 01:54:08
For like the main. 01:54:10
Umm, primary. 01:54:12
That people were able to vote for more than one person instead of one person, like my vote was counting more than once. 01:54:14
And that was ruled that. 01:54:22
No, in fact it doesn't. And RCV fits the constitutional requirement for one person, one vote. 01:54:25
Thank you, but this is another problem with the current method that I've always felt like at the City Council level. 01:54:32
I've had people tell me, hey. 01:54:39
You know, a bunch of us were running for City Council, several of us, and. 01:54:42
We all have this opinion about this zoning thing you know you get. 01:54:46
Issues that people run on in cities, right? 01:54:50
And a bunch of people had this issue about the zoning thing of five people running or four people running, and then they have to 01:54:53
get in a room and get together and be like, alright. 01:54:57
One or two or three of us has got to drop out because we're all going to cancel each other out if we all win. And then this person 01:55:01
who wants the other type of zoning thing. 01:55:05
Is gonna win, and so you see these scenarios happen. 01:55:10
In pace in one year. 01:55:13
A guy was disqualified, so we have Melon. 01:55:15
Ballots, right? That ballot goes out early. People cast their vote. Well, guy was disqualified after the ballot had already gone 01:55:19
out. So now you have all these people that have cast the ballot. 01:55:24
Their votes. You can't go back and change this rake choice voting solves this. 01:55:29
Because now you just go to their next choices after that. 01:55:34
So there's a number of ways that it solves. 01:55:37
You know, issues that happen at the city level. 01:55:40
And then you get scenarios where. 01:55:42
It's hey, vote for three. 01:55:45
Or vote for two right? There's five people on the ballot. 01:55:48
And I've had City Council members in other cities tell me that their friends and neighbors and. 01:55:51
And people who really support them will tell them. 01:55:56
Hey, I'm only voting for you. 01:55:58
Because they're worried about diluting their vote if they cast all three of their votes. 01:56:00
And so they're really disenfranchising themselves because they can't participate fully in the election. 01:56:05
With ranked choice voting at this level. 01:56:10
It's it's a majority winner for each seat and so everybody gets to participate each time and maybe you only. 01:56:13
Vote for one person each time as was brought up. 01:56:19
That's a real possibility, but in a real life scenario? 01:56:22
If we all sat here and did it. 01:56:26
And we're we're filling these seats. 01:56:28
Well, I may be voting for Jacob every single time and he's just struggling getting through each, you know, each round and then 01:56:30
finally on the last round he gets in. 01:56:34
Or maybe he doesn't. 01:56:37
But every single round we do that. He's my choice and I'm going to be voting for him every time. 01:56:38
So that's what ranked choice voting does for us here. 01:56:43
So. 01:56:46
We've got this some. 01:56:47
This survey that was done. 01:56:50
After the first year, the vineyard. 01:56:53
Did the. 01:56:55
Use rank choice voting. 01:56:57
And it was done by the elections division of Utah County. 01:56:58
So turn out. 01:57:01
1100 voters. 01:57:04
Umm, 31% is good. So this is a little bit on turn out. 01:57:06
And so there's been questions about, hey, people are confused, they don't know how to do this. 01:57:11
300 office calls to the office from Vineyard. Only two or about RCV. 01:57:15
Full response is 618 emails sent out, 111 responses came back. 01:57:21
86% of the respondents favored using RCV. This is just Vineyard. 01:57:27
Data next slide. 01:57:34
And so this is the results. 01:57:36
From that election, most of the voters. 01:57:39
Citizens in Vineyard. 01:57:43
That participate in the survey. 01:57:45
Said they're confident in how it worked and how their vote was counted and how it was intended. 01:57:47
110 respondents here. Next slide. 01:57:53
Could you clarify what year was this? 01:57:58
What was the first year you guys did this? It was. 01:58:00
19 Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is 19. 01:58:04
Yeah, because. 01:58:08
That's when we did. 01:58:10
The data on how many calls would come in because you're gonna have all kinds of calls and people confuse people, others. 01:58:11
What was there 2/3? 01:58:18
So did you find ranked choice voting easy to use? 109 respondents. 01:58:21
And overwhelmingly, people said yeah. 01:58:25
It works. Wasn't hard, uh. 01:58:28
Next slide. 01:58:30
And how much did you like using rank choice voting? Great response here as well. 01:58:32
And I think that's it. 01:58:36
Oh, how satisfied was your voting experience so overwhelmingly? This is a survey with Vineyard citizens after doing the election. 01:58:39
In 2019. 01:58:47
And how they felt about the experience in using ranked choice voting. Is there another one? 01:58:48
I think that might be it. 01:58:52
Yeah. And do you think it should be used in future city elections? 01:58:54
And this was. 01:58:57
86% said yes, it should be. 01:58:59
And yes, now that's the last one. 01:59:03
So bottom line is, you know, we can get into all these numbers and crazy things and theoretical scenarios that might happen a very 01:59:07
small percentage of the time, if ever. 01:59:12
Right but the but the bottom line is. 01:59:18
Do we prefer using this method? 01:59:20
Versus the current method. 01:59:23
Right. Or do we want to just stick with the existing method, unranked choice voting? 01:59:26
So that's all I have. 01:59:31
Got questions? We can do questions later. Thanks, Tony for the slides. 01:59:34
And tell Jeremy hi. 01:59:38
I haven't seen him for years. 01:59:40
Thanks, Mark. 01:59:46
Hi, my name is Nancy Lord. Just a little background on me. 01:59:47
I'm a lifelong Republican activist. 01:59:52
And I'm actually one of the people who originally one of the original conservatives within the Utah Republican Party. 01:59:55
That brought rank choice voting into Utah. 02:00:02
And I can tell you I've never received any money from any outside group. 02:00:05
Or Liberal Group, except for the $50 we got one year to have a booth at the state convention because we called them and asked for 02:00:10
it. 02:00:13
So. 02:00:18
I have been. 02:00:21
A supporter of ranked choice voting for over 20 years. 02:00:22
And uh. 02:00:26
I'm really disheartened at a lot of the arguments that are currently being used to oppose it. 02:00:27
Because I think. 02:00:33
To some degree, they're specious. 02:00:35
And their. 02:00:37
Kind of straw man arguments honestly. 02:00:39
So I'm gonna address some of those and then I'm gonna. 02:00:42
Pretty much the reasons why I support it you've already heard. 02:00:45
But I'm I'm going to specifically address some of the. 02:00:48
Arguments against it. 02:00:51
First off. 02:00:55
There's an argument that. 02:00:56
Somehow rank choice learning. 02:00:58
In ranked choice voting money. 02:01:00
Dominates and it favors the well connected. 02:01:02
I can tell you. 02:01:07
That if that were true, if. 02:01:08
Then the state Republican Party would be pushing it big time. 02:01:11
Because that's where the well connected people are. 02:01:16
But I can tell you that once we got it in place and the rules in the state party constitution, it was the well connected who began 02:01:20
fighting us. 02:01:24
And bringing out these arguments against it, even though the delegates loved it. 02:01:29
And wanted to use it more and that's why we did not continue to use it in the state party convention. 02:01:36
Until COVID when it kind of had to be used. 02:01:42
And because. 02:01:45
There were some very well connected. 02:01:47
Incumbents who did not want rank choice voting to be used. 02:01:50
Another argument that was. 02:01:56
Used is that some voters are more equal than others. 02:01:58
And at the voters who ranked the second choice winner in your City Council. 02:02:04
Race in 2019. 02:02:09
Did not get a chance to weigh in on. 02:02:11
The first choice. 02:02:14
I mean on a second. 02:02:16
I'd like to speak directly to that because if I'm first blush. 02:02:18
That sounds like a reasonable argument. 02:02:22
Oh, and by the way, I have a degree in accounting and I worked as an auditor. 02:02:26
In recent years until. 02:02:31
Retired so I do have a little bit of knowledge about numbers. 02:02:33
OK, so. 02:02:38
The 277 voters that voted for what was his name? 02:02:40
Yeah, OK. 02:02:45
So that was their first choice on their ballots. 02:02:46
So the claim is that they never got to weigh in on a second candidate because by the time they got down to those first choices on 02:02:50
those ballots. 02:02:54
Now you have the two winners. 02:02:59
OK, think about it. There were 4 candidates, OK? 02:03:00
If those voters who voted for ties. 02:03:04
Had ranked all the other candidates. 02:03:07
Let's assume they did. 02:03:10
OK, then their second. 02:03:12
Or third or fourth choice would have been. 02:03:16
The guy that went first, right? There was actually 7 or 8 candidates that year. 02:03:19
OK, but. 02:03:24
Yeah, OK. 02:03:26
So the point is if they had ranked that person second. 02:03:27
They already got one of the people they wanted. 02:03:32
Because. 02:03:35
He was already elected. 02:03:37
OK. And then if they would have if they ranked lower ones? 02:03:39
Those candidates were eliminated. 02:03:43
And so they did get to weigh in. 02:03:46
It's just that it doesn't show itself on the surface. 02:03:49
Does that make sense? 02:03:54
It actually doesn't to me. I'm really. 02:03:55
Yeah, I know. It's I'm sorry. It's embarrassing. No, it's OK, because this is. 02:03:58
It is a little complex. I think it's important. Well, I want to make sure I understand because, umm. 02:04:02
OK, this is I actually really like ranked choice voting. If you hand me a piece of paper, I like to tell you the order. I like 02:04:08
things. 02:04:13
But runoff counting is where I get. 02:04:17
A little bit. 02:04:21
A little bit disappointed in some of the scenarios that can happen and I like your argument of the straw man. 02:04:22
Where these aren't always going to happen, but I still. 02:04:30
If I vote if there's two seats. 02:04:34
And I vote my ranks and my if. Let's say I voted for Tice. 02:04:38
That surprises me that. 02:04:43
My second. 02:04:45
Never got counted. Right there it did in a way. 02:04:47
Like it was definitely registered in the accounting, but. 02:04:51
Essentially, I only got to vote for one seat, right? 02:04:54
That's how I understand it. 02:04:57
No, I would suggest that you did get to vote for the whole range. 02:05:00
The only difference is that if you chose that candidate, who? 02:05:05
Acquired The Who acquired the majority first? 02:05:11
In the first round of counting. 02:05:14
You got that person, you voted for them down farther, but you got the person you voted for. But it wasn't by any action I made 02:05:19
that got them that win, right? Like I just want to clarify, well, it wasn't technically counted in because you didn't choose that 02:05:25
candidate first place, OK. 02:05:31
OK, but you chose the second winner first place? 02:05:37
And there were no other candidates that could have won. 02:05:43
Because and even if you had chosen them, you chose them lower as well as all. 02:05:47
The other voters in the city? 02:05:52
So. So it's not like your vote was ignored. 02:05:55
And it's not like it was unfair because you all got the same ballot and you all had the same opportunity. 02:05:59
To rank all of the candidates or less than all of the candidates. 02:06:06
And it's very important. 02:06:12
And, and I believe you do this and you're, you have done this in your city. 02:06:14
With. 02:06:17
To let the voters know that they do not need to rank every candidate. 02:06:19
Because you would not want your vote to count. 02:06:25
For someone who you can't stomach. 02:06:28
Right. You know my husband won City Council in Bluffdale. 02:06:32
Two years ago. 02:06:37
And he actually went on a non ranked choice voting ballot. But the reason is because the opposite side. 02:06:38
Of the issues we were dealing with in the city at the time. 02:06:45
Had four candidates for three seats. 02:06:48
And we only had two good candidates for the three seats. 02:06:51
So I said, when I heard about that, I said. 02:06:56
They chose not to do ranked choice voting. 02:06:59
They could have won had they chosen rank choice voting. 02:07:02
But now they're going to split each other's votes. 02:07:06
And so we don't want to support somebody we can't support on these critical issues of taxes in a referendum. That's that's right. 02:07:09
So it's important that our people know they are not required to vote for three candidates. And so that is an issue that applied. 02:07:17
My point is that's an issue that applies in. 02:07:24
Both. 02:07:30
Single choice elections. Plurality elections. 02:07:32
And rank choice voting elections you should never. 02:07:35
Feel like you have to vote for a candidate that. 02:07:39
You don't support. 02:07:42
And so they're they're similar in that way. 02:07:43
And anything that makes them do that is wrong in my opinion. 02:07:47
I think that was my first frustration with ranked choices. It wasn't really clear, you know, and so I, I thought I had to place 02:07:51
everyone. 02:07:56
And there were people that I didn't want to support at all, right? So so it's important that that be on the website on the ballot 02:08:01
talked about. 02:08:05
Absolutely. 02:08:10
Very important. 02:08:11
Yeah, and, and most people don't understand that issue though as I said, even in a. 02:08:13
First past the post plurality. 02:08:18
When they don't, they do not understand that. 02:08:20
So, umm. 02:08:23
This idea that the ballot is going to be longer if you have ranked choice voting. 02:08:28
No, it's not going to be longer. It's going to have the same number of candidates, which determines the length. 02:08:32
Of the ballot, it might be wider. 02:08:38
Because you're going to need more columns. 02:08:41
For the number of candidates you have. 02:08:44
But it's not going to make it longer. 02:08:47
Ballots are already crazy long, but you know that doesn't even really apply so much when it comes to your city. 02:08:50
Because you only have. 02:08:56
The mayor seat and the City Council seats at any given and or the City Council seats there are no. 02:08:58
Down ballot issues. 02:09:04
That it will affect. 02:09:06
That it will umm. 02:09:08
You know, sometimes people claim that it tires people as they go down the ballot. 02:09:10
I'm hearing you correctly. What you were saying is you want to understand. 02:09:19
How it counts? 02:09:24
If there's two people, or let's say there's five people you want to understand and there's two seats open. 02:09:25
You want to understand how you got to vote for the PC's? 02:09:32
Right now. 02:09:36
If I heard your question is that you understand that you only voted for Tice. 02:09:37
Because he was your first choice. 02:09:43
But that your counting never went back into play. 02:09:45
For the second seat. 02:09:48
That's your question. 02:09:50
Yes. Can you come up and explain it? 02:09:53
Yes, come up and explain it, because we actually did a counting. 02:09:55
We actually did like a little. 02:10:01
What is it called? I'm losing my words tonight. Simulation. Thank you. A simulation where we got to watch the counting. But I 02:10:03
think it would be good to have. Yeah. So the way the law works is. 02:10:08
If there's. 02:10:13
Let's just say two seats available. Is this the scenario? 02:10:15
In Vineyard 2. 02:10:18
Let's say three seats available. 02:10:20
Think of go back to my scenario where we all show up and we vote and it's multiple rounds. 02:10:23
So we're gonna fill the first seat. 02:10:27
First. OK, so we all vote. We fill the first seat first. 02:10:30
That seat is full. 02:10:34
That seats been filled. 02:10:36
And let's say Brett won that seat. 02:10:39
Now we're going to. 02:10:42
Good job, Brett. We start over again, OK. 02:10:43
Now, Brett's not up here. The rest of you are up here. 02:10:46
And so we all vote again and repeat this process again, the way the law works. 02:10:50
For the second seat. 02:10:56
And so you do vote for the second seat. 02:10:57
OK, so you. 02:11:00
And you're if you had voted for Brett. 02:11:02
He was your first choice, like you want him no matter what. 02:11:07
Then the second round, he's not an option, so we're going to look at, OK, who's left up here. That's your choice and that's what 02:11:11
your preference was. 02:11:15
So you do that, then you fill the second seat. 02:11:20
Then we start over again. We say OK. 02:11:22
Brett and Jacob filled the first two seats. 02:11:25
And now we're going to fill the third seat, OK? And everybody participates in the third round just like we would do in person. 02:11:28
But the ballot does this for us by your preferences. But what happens if my number one pick was the third person? They got the 02:11:35
seat. 02:11:39
So let. 02:11:44
So I guess it still takes me back to the taste situation, yeah. 02:11:45
If I voted for Tice as number one, that was the only yes. Yeah. 02:11:49
Weighted vote that I had. 02:11:55
For that first round, so so. 02:11:57
But but Tice was it was for the first, Yeah, so. 02:12:00
This is correct and they are correct in this scenario. I acknowledge they're correct in this scenario where. 02:12:04
If time says your first. 02:12:10
Let's just say. 02:12:12
The mayor is your first option. OK, And we'll go back to the three of these guys run. The mayor is your first option and so on 02:12:13
your ballot. 02:12:17
You've got. 02:12:21
Julie, Brett, Jacob, right, that's your order. 02:12:23
Well, she doesn't. 02:12:26
Win the first seat, Brett does OK, so we go to the next round. 02:12:28
You still have. 02:12:32
Julie Brett. 02:12:33
Jacob Well, Brett's not an option now. So now you have. 02:12:34
Julie Jacob. 02:12:38
But think about it in a real life scenario. 02:12:41
You're going to stand there. 02:12:44
The second round. 02:12:46
You're probably gonna vote for Julie in a real life scenario anyway. 02:12:48
Right. Like you only get one vote, one person. 02:12:52
So in a real life scenario, you're going to vote for Julie? 02:12:55
On the ballot. 02:12:58
You did vote for Julie. 02:12:59
Twice. And that's the only person you voted for for each seat. 02:13:01
But. 02:13:05
Julie wasn't very popular. 02:13:07
So she didn't make it through, right, even though you may have had her? 02:13:08
You know, first choice, there was only two seats available and they filled those seats. 02:13:14
So they are correct from the perspective that. 02:13:18
You may look at that and say, well, I only ever voted for one person. 02:13:22
Well, if. 02:13:26
We go to the real world scenario like we all come up here and vote and we fill the seats. 02:13:28
In multiple rounds, that same scenario would probably play out. 02:13:34
And that's what this approximates. Does that help? Yeah. I just wanted to make sure you had your hand raised. Did you have 02:13:38
something you wanted to add to that, or did you feel like you got to come to the mic? I'm not a mathematician. He's much more 02:13:43
intelligent than I am. 02:13:48
If you wanted to, yeah, feel free. 02:13:53
So I, I think that the point was the points well made that if you were to, if you're just trying to simulate sort of what would 02:13:56
happen if you just ran multiple plurality elections, like you know, or multiple instrumental voting, that that's kind of what it 02:14:01
would do. And because your person doesn't keep winning, you'd keep. 02:14:06
You know, keep voting for that person because you want that person there. But I think your concern is, well, like, you know, two 02:14:11
other people, one before him. What if I had a preference between them or maybe there was another close vote or whatever because 02:14:17
I've locked in my position on this other person. I'm not getting to register a preference on those. 02:14:22
Now that is a valid concern with this. It's also a valid concern with using a plurality method too, right? I think that the issue 02:14:28
here is. 02:14:32
When we run into these problems. 02:14:37
We sometimes have this like either my way, my idea is all right and if I identify something wrong with this, then the other one 02:14:39
must have been right. In this case, they both kind of suck. Like the you know, the issue is like if you were to do like a vote for 02:14:44
two or vote for three. If you have like a three City Council race, you only get to register those three people. What if the only 02:14:50
person that. 02:14:55
That had a chance of getting sort of top round votes was was your tice person and then the other two. 02:15:00
You know, the ones that you really wanted aren't likely to be up there. So you're still kind of making that sort of juggling 02:15:06
strategic choice of how do I pick those things? It's still going to miss some of your other preferences as well. So you're going 02:15:10
to run into problems like this. 02:15:15
Regardless of whether you use a vote for free method or you use an instant runoff method. 02:15:20
Ranked pairs helps a little bit with this. You know, in that it would actually. 02:15:25
Because what it would do is it looked like at each possible pairwise thing. And so your preference between any two of them would 02:15:29
be looked at every single time and it would look at everything that's down the ballot. And there are other methods that kind of do 02:15:35
that. But I think that's kind of the issue here is that we're running into a discussion about, hey, this method sucks this way 02:15:40
this, but we're not realizing that it's also meaning the other method sucks that all of these presentations. 02:15:46
I'm like, well, we're screwed. Marty, Marty, quick question for clarity. 02:15:51
Were you concerned about the preference and the ranking, or were you concerned about the? 02:15:57
Rounds of counting and how they attributed your ranking to the seats available. 02:16:03
Both I have several concerns about instant rental. I, I really don't I, I have concerns with what we just talked about, right. And 02:16:10
I felt like you did a great job explaining and I agree that there are issues. 02:16:17
Across the board with and I actually am really sad because I mean, I, I would write a letter maybe about the ranked pairs because 02:16:23
that sounds like I'd be all over supporting that. 02:16:27
But another issue I have is. 02:16:32
I I don't know if this is a great argument after hearing all of yours, but in the past I have. 02:16:37
I feel like it's very easy for people to understand how to vote. Like it makes sense to me that the elderly community had no 02:16:44
problem voting that way, but I feel that they don't always understand how their vote is weighted. 02:16:51
And it's taken, it took me a long time and I've spent, it's embarrassing how much time I've spent on these different boating 02:16:58
options. And I still was talking to Sarah the other day and I was like. 02:17:04
OK. And if you didn't vote for someone and your ballots exhausted, you're taken out of the statistics, I'm pretty sure. But let's 02:17:09
make sure to ask John next time we see him, right? 02:17:14
And so that one's one of my concerns is I feel like it. 02:17:18
You start to go through and your your votes taken out. But I like the arguments that in plurality it's the same problem. You vote 02:17:22
for one person and you're done. 02:17:27
But my concern just specifically for our City Council election that's coming up is we will have three seats we're going to have. 02:17:31
To Canada or two seats that are 4 year term and then we'll have a two year term because of our change of government. 02:17:39
We'll also have a mayor up for election and so for me, I have. 02:17:45
Concern for my own ballot when I'm voting, if I'm picking maybe the third most popular person, then yeah, that does bring me 02:17:50
concern that maybe my voice won't be heard to the top 2 candidates. And so that's just my personal concern. Yeah, no, I, I. 02:17:58
If it's OK if I address that like the I think, I think your concerns. 02:18:08
Are warranted, there's there's some issues. 02:18:13
Sort of that are going on like. 02:18:16
Yes, it's easy to understand how to rank candidates, right? But like you said, how do I know how it's going to calculate? And 02:18:17
something pointed out to like there's a transparency issue with how it's reported. I actually wrote a paper for the Herbert 02:18:22
Institute because I was frustrated. We were trying to do a study on the Sandy election, and the way they presented the results 02:18:27
didn't allow us to recreate the election. And so we couldn't do the study. And so instead I wrote the paper about like, hey, we 02:18:31
need to. 02:18:36
Present the results in a better way so we could actually so the voter could go if they wanted to and recreate the election and see 02:18:41
how it went. That is a significant transparency issue which I think is resolvable. 02:18:46
By presenting it better, RC Biz tries to do this, but it's it still has some issues. I think that's a a problem that we could talk 02:18:52
about. 02:18:56
One thing I worry about too, is the idea of abandoning something that might be good simply because we're running into logistical 02:19:00
problems initially. 02:19:04
And you know, because we haven't figured it out or or I don't know what the right strategy is yet. 02:19:08
The thing is, it takes a long time for a random walk through a strategic game to figure out what is the best option for me to do 02:19:13
or what is the best way I should vote. 02:19:18
The problem with plurality? We've been playing that game for 250 years. 02:19:23
All the strategies are well worn out. We know what they are. They've become ingrained in our soul. We're taught that's how you 02:19:28
vote. You vote for the lesser of two evils. That's a strategic voting strategy. You vote for one of the two parties. But it's 02:19:33
ingrained in our hearts because that's where it led, that it's been doing that for over 100 and, you know, 200 years or whatever. 02:19:37
So we just accept it. 02:19:42
But that took 80 years for us to figure out. Right from the inception of the country until we got to a two party system. It took 02:19:46
80 years to optimize the plurality game. 02:19:51
We've been doing ranked choice voting, you know, in Utah for like 6. 02:19:55
3 or 4 election cycles. You're not going to optimize the game within that. 02:19:59
And it's really complicated if you try to analyze it mathematically, what the right strategy is. So honestly, a better way to do 02:20:03
it is John Will like this statistics or a stochastic way of just walking through and trying to figure things out. You'll try 02:20:08
something and maybe it doesn't work this time, so then you try a different strategy next time. That's kind of how it works. And 02:20:13
eventually you find a strategy that does produce the results you want. 02:20:19
It's inherent in any system. You're gonna change. Now that doesn't probably make you feel very confident in like the next 02:20:24
election, right? Because. 02:20:27
What do I do with that one? 02:20:30
And so you kind of have to decide, like, do we keep with a system that's making everybody sort of already be dishonest about who 02:20:32
they want? 02:20:35
And so we can't have any hope of actually representing the people because who knows? I mean, it bugs me when, when politicians are 02:20:38
like, well, I've got the mandate of the people. So no, your, your election system doesn't indicate that that you're, you're tying 02:20:43
people's hands. And so nobody's even telling you what they want. How can you claim that you're doing what people want if you've 02:20:47
constantly tied their hands? 02:20:52
And so I guess the question is, do you spend some time trying to? 02:20:57
To fix that, maybe muddying through that. 02:21:00
But yeah, I agree there are issues with Instant Runoff and that's why I presented other ideas. I just want to kind of open that 02:21:02
discussion up a little bit more. 02:21:06
I would hate what what I'm most worried about when I see these kinds of, you know. 02:21:10
Attacks on RCB I I agree, I think there are legitimate concerns with RC with with instant runoff voting too. 02:21:15
What I worry about is people who attack it, who are then saying that plurality is better and we should just stay with what we had. 02:21:22
That is also bad. 02:21:30
And it's worse to do that, to just stick with the status quo, something that's already a problem. 02:21:32
Than it is to try to solve the problem that we see. 02:21:38
And that's the danger with just accepting sort of the the the criticism without actually trying to go in and solve that problem 02:21:42
that you have with it. And see if there's maybe a better method or something like that that can improve on the thing that you're 02:21:46
seeing. Because remember. 02:21:51
We're starting with a problem. 02:21:55
We're not starting with something that was working and we're trying to change it because somebody didn't like that. 02:21:57
Like it didn't work. It doesn't represent the people. That's the thing that I kind of think it's lost. And, and this might be more 02:22:02
of a question. Tell me your name again, Nancy or Mark, 'cause this is a politically driven question. 02:22:08
But Vineyard is a very. 02:22:14
We'll call it exciting political atmosphere and we just had a seat open up and we had 20 applicants. 02:22:17
And. 02:22:24
I-17 Originally I had 20 resumes or application we did and then they and then it kind of filtered out. 02:22:26
But there were a lot of people interested. I know Lehigh last election I believe, had several candidates. I don't want to 02:22:34
exaggerate their number, but they had a. 02:22:40
A surprising amount of candidates and luckily they first saw maybe and they put in a primary election, which typically ranked 02:22:46
choice voting part of the. 02:22:50
Or I can thank you. Thank you. Is that it's more affordable so you don't. 02:22:56
There's Sorry, you're all standing. 02:23:02
But I worry that Vineyard is getting worn out. 02:23:07
Were like, I feel like we are a very progressive city. We love to try new things and we're. 02:23:12
We're really cool in so many ways. I'm very proud of Vineyard and how progressive we can be. 02:23:20
But I feel like we are getting a little bit worn out from being somewhat of the Guinea pigs and we get a lot of attention 02:23:26
politically and I think ranked choice voting. 02:23:31
Is really great, like I love it, but then my concerns. 02:23:36
Draw to. 02:23:41
Voter fatigue, There's a lot of candidates, there's a lot to search through, and then you kind of throw your hands up in the air 02:23:43
at one point and then it's just hard on our community. Go ahead, Nancy. I said your name first, kind of. 02:23:48
So just tell me a little bit about this. So you already have this election where 17 candidates? No, no, we had it was an 02:23:55
appointment for the City Council. Oh, OK, so let's say it was an election. 02:24:00
I mean if it would have been done under. 02:24:05
Plurality. 02:24:09
But for one, it would have still been long. 02:24:10
Yes. 02:24:16
You would have had a primary and look at the incredible vote splitting. 02:24:17
That would have occurred because you would have only had two people end up at the end. 02:24:21
Now it'll be 3, but yes, OK, yes. 02:24:26
So so. 02:24:29
We would have had So we would have. Let's let's pretend we have 7. Let's say this November we have 17 people running for our three 02:24:31
council seats. 02:24:34
During the primary, which would last over the summer, we would go through this political chaos of 17 people knocking on my door. 02:24:39
Let's be realistic, maybe only six or seven that are that interested. 02:24:48
But there would be so much chaos and how many people are trying to get their message out there? It sounds exhausting to me. And so 02:24:52
then. 02:24:56
You will weed it out. It's one summer, we can get through it and then we go and have our final or after our primary we're down to 02:25:01
only 6 candidates. And to me I'm like OK. 02:25:06
Now I can really look at those six candidates and I can feel more confident that I know each one of their missions, I know their 02:25:12
statements, I know what their priorities are. And then come November. 02:25:17
I'll be able to confidently vote right. That's that's just. 02:25:22
How I saw Lehigh situation I do believe we can vote in a primary if we wanted to and I guess that's one of my questions and I know 02:25:26
that's a possibility that's what I'm I'm wanting this to be a part of the conversation. Well, I don't I don't know that you have a 02:25:32
need for a primary if you use ranked choice voting because. 02:25:38
A ranked choice vote is like a primary and a general election in one. It's like multiple balloting at a. 02:25:44
State party convention or county party convention in one ballot. 02:25:51
So it. 02:25:58
Originally, the law didn't allow you to do in the primaries. 02:26:00
Lehigh wanted to do in the primary, so the Lieutenant governor's office is like, well, this doesn't make sense to have it in the 02:26:04
primaries if you're doing rank choice voting because of what Nancy just said. 02:26:08
We have want to do the primaries, we change the law. 02:26:13
You know, I think it's perfectly reasonable if the city says, hey, we still want to have a primary, but we want to have our 02:26:16
primaries ranked choice voting, just narrow it down a little bit more and then we'll we'll do it again. So. 02:26:21
The law allows for it now. 02:26:26
OK. Well, that I didn't realize that. So that's fantastic. Yeah, because then you eliminate the vote splitting factor, which I'm 02:26:28
not OK with. 02:26:32
Some people here tonight have suggested that they think it's great. The spoiler effect is great. 02:26:36
I think anyone who believes. 02:26:42
That the will of the people should be able to be heard in an election implies that that should. 02:26:45
At least strive to get as close to a majority as possible. 02:26:53
Not a minority, and certainly not a tiny minority. 02:26:58
When you have a huge field like that and and, you know, consider also that. 02:27:01
And. 02:27:06
Mark Roberts touched on this. 02:27:08
There is a tremendous pressure and incentive to. 02:27:10
To force candidates out of the race. 02:27:15
I mean, you hear about that all the time on a national level. 02:27:18
This person's got to get out of the race because they're gonna mess it up for. 02:27:21
Ross Perot's got to get out of the race because he's going to mess it up for Bush. 02:27:25
And maybe he actually did. 02:27:29
You know, and enabled Clinton to get in. I can tell you that Neil Love probably lost her first run for Congress. 02:27:31
By 768 votes. 02:27:38
Because the Libertarian got around 10,000. 02:27:41
Votes, but because a plurality vote does not allow the. 02:27:44
The voters to to give us more data. 02:27:49
Like these gentlemen mentioned, it doesn't allow us to have more information about voter preferences. 02:27:54
We have no way of knowing. 02:28:00
But we can guess that libertarians probably would have shifted towards near love. 02:28:02
As their second choice more than the Democrat candidate. That's just one example, no? And I've heard the political games that are 02:28:06
being played like. 02:28:11
I don't there are so many. Yeah, I've. I've talked to experts that are like, oh, well, these are the candidates, let's make sure 02:28:16
we get a third candidate. Exactly. Sometimes they are recruited to. 02:28:22
Create the spoiler effect. I do see a lot of issues of plurality. I I sincerely do. 02:28:28
It's just. 02:28:34
I lost my other question. It actually was keep thinking. 02:28:37
Well, remember you have two choices. You can either have a plurality. Well I guess now you have 1/3. 02:28:41
You could have a plurality election for and that would by nature require a primary if you have more than. 02:28:46
6 candidates. 02:28:52
For three seats. 02:28:54
And then you, or more than you know 2 for the mayor's race. 02:28:56
Umm, or you can have ranked choice voting and justice one at the general election. Or you can have ranked choice voting for your 02:29:01
primary. 02:29:05
And then you you're down to your. 02:29:09
6 for the general election, but you've avoided the spoiler effect in that primary, so I don't know. I think that's a great option. 02:29:11
All of these other ideas about ranked pairs and approval voting, I think it's great that we're thinking outside the box more. 02:29:18
But those aren't absent under the current state law. 02:29:26
So you have these three choices, so which one is? 02:29:30
Best among those 3. 02:29:33
And I think he probably hit on it with the ranked choice voting in the primary. 02:29:35
So you get it done sooner. 02:29:40
So that it minimizes the time that you have voter fatigue. 02:29:42
And candidate fatigue. 02:29:46
I I really do see that. 02:29:48
Right. I'm sorry. That's OK. I was thinking, are you also going to present brand? 02:29:52
Couple minutes, all right. 02:30:00
I'm gonna have us wrap up this conversation, then we can ask any clarifying conversation. 02:30:02
Questions right after to help everybody get to the house. OK, that's great. I'm trying to think if there's any. 02:30:07
I just think that ranked choice voting, you know, maybe it's not perfect, but it's so much more fair. 02:30:12
Than plurality voting. 02:30:19
It minimizes the spoiler effect. It's kind of an elegant way to deal with it, even though it may not be perfect. 02:30:23
And. 02:30:30
I just, I've loved it for a long, long time and I really. 02:30:32
Think that we need to continue the pilot. 02:30:36
Program to. 02:30:39
To play it out and to learn more about how we carry it out. But your city has carried it out. 02:30:41
Quite well. 02:30:47
You know, I think your city recorder has been really good about. 02:30:49
Helping people understand how it's supposed to be done. And you can continue that by educating your voters. Thank you. Thank you, 02:30:52
Nancy. 02:30:56
Thank you, Miss Brad. I'm here on behalf of Rank Choice Voting. 02:31:00
My goal is to keep eye contact and not see your eyes drifting over to the clock, which at this stage of the game is very 02:31:07
understandable. 02:31:11
I could talk about this on there. And you know what, maybe we should, maybe we should grab. 02:31:17
Lunch somewhere and do that. Bring whatever you want, but. 02:31:23
When you're approached by. 02:31:27
One of the more conservative members of the legislature in Mark Roberts. 02:31:29
And one of the more liberal members of legislature and Rebecca Chavez Houck. 02:31:33
And they're both united on an issue. You need to be one of two things. Terrified or excited? 02:31:38
And possibly both. 02:31:43
Anyway, they proposed this pilot and I thought about it and I thought, you know what? This seems like a good idea. 02:31:46
Right choice voting for me personally. 02:31:52
I like it for the simple reason that it's how I think. 02:31:55
In other words, when I look at a ballot of candidates, there's not one that's like, OK, he's great and everybody else sucks. Or 02:31:58
she. 02:32:01
They're great and everybody else sucks. That's not how I think. Usually unless, well, sometimes it is, but usually not very often. 02:32:05
But it's how I think that, OK, this one's the best, this then this one. And then and then there's a couple. It's like, OK, they do 02:32:13
suck. I'm not going to rank them at all, right? In other words, it fits my thinking and and it's a more natural way to vote now. 02:32:19
If you want to get into the. 02:32:25
Another couple things that kind of go along with that was the first time always I like the legislature. 02:32:27
Right after elections and before they're certified, we have what's called leadership elections. 02:32:33
And obviously the Republican caucus gets together and they elect their the speaker and so forth. 02:32:38
And in that room, there was a person who had. 02:32:43
Quote UN Quote Won a seat in Salt Lake Valley. 02:32:47
Well, it turns out they actually hadn't won, because when the votes were all tallied. 02:32:51
The Libertarian had taken more votes than the gap, and the Democrat had won that seat. 02:32:56
And so the fact is that in that case, plurality I think really failed to reflect. 02:33:02
The will of the people. 02:33:08
Now, there's been a lot of talk here about the Condorcet method, and I call it Condorcet because I looked in Wikipedia. That was 02:33:10
the pronunciation. 02:33:14
It's a French word, who really knows, right? 02:33:18
Yeah, anyway, like I said, Wikipedia says Condorcet, but. 02:33:20
If you want to really dig into the nitty gritty, there's a website called Equal Vote. 02:33:26
Equal dot vote. You go there and they'll go down the list. 02:33:32
And all that tell you is they don't like they don't. They don't tell you like an instant runoff of rank choice voting either. 02:33:36
They like their own Condor set or condorcet method Condor set. 02:33:42
Which there's a couple different methods that fit that criteria, but they're all pretty uniform on one thing. Plurality is the 02:33:47
worst. 02:33:50
Priority is the absolute worst method for voting because it most consistently fails to reflect. 02:33:54
The will of the people. 02:33:59
So if you're interested in trying your best to actively reflect the will of the people, which in all but. 02:34:01
Some edge cases where the will of people is very fuzzy. 02:34:07
It's going to work very well. 02:34:11
So, and I will say this, I am aware. 02:34:13
In my home city of Orem, at least one. 02:34:17
City Council member who no longer served. This is years ago, but this City Council member encouraged. 02:34:20
Her followers to only vote for her. 02:34:28
And she won consistently, so for her it worked really well. 02:34:32
But does that really reflect the will of people? Or is that again gaming the system so. 02:34:35
Fact about gaming the system there's there's lots of different ways to game the system, but I do believe that. 02:34:40
Rank choice is less susceptible to gaming than others, and again, plurality is the worst so. 02:34:45
I would say you know what, you've tried it. 02:34:52
Your your electorate, by and large, from the polls that we've seen like it. 02:34:54
I think it is understandable. I don't think it's that difficult. 02:34:59
To mark a ballot that way, they're already used to it. 02:35:02
And I would say, you know what, stick with it. I think it works really well. Thank you. 02:35:05
Thank you. 02:35:10
So listen. 02:35:12
To my thoughts on this, unless there's any clarifying questions where we don't know something. 02:35:13
I'm going to give a 5 minute break to just go and speak to these people and say hi really quick and thank you. And then. 02:35:19
We will come back to the meeting because we all need to stand up. I have one question that we didn't talk about the for 02:35:26
clarification sake, Mark, you might be able to answer this. 02:35:31
Umm, the legislature. Legislature. 02:35:37
And voted to end this or they didn't renew it and so it'll go up through vote. 02:35:41
Right, next session next year. Yeah, there was a sunset closet I didn't negotiate with with. 02:35:47
Senator Bramble. 02:35:54
On the floor of the Senate on this thing passed to put a sunset date on the legislation. So it did. 02:35:57
The sunset was not renewed, so this is the last year. 02:36:03
Unless we. 02:36:07
Pass, you know, Yeah, we passed another law next. 02:36:09
Next cycle. OK, Thank you. 02:36:13
OK. All right. We're going to take a 5 minute break. 02:36:15
Thank you so much everybody that presented. 02:36:18
I said you. 02:36:21
All right, we're rolling. We're going to go ahead and get started. Please take your seats or your conversations to the hallway. 02:36:26
All right, we're going to go back to our consent item 3.3 that we pulled off Nissim is here. So Jake, you, you said you had some 02:36:34
questions on the striking services. 02:36:38
Yeah, I actually was able to go through everything on the document. I'm good. 02:36:45
Sorry I went through everything OK perfect because we have been here for a long time and but we love your presentation. 02:36:49
No, I. 02:36:57
Just for the record, I emailed my presentation to Pam, so if you would like to read it, it's only 23, only 23 slides. Go ahead and 02:37:00
e-mail it to all of us. 02:37:04
I mean missing my incredibly stacked as well so. 02:37:09
All right, let's go ahead and get a motion then. Jake, do you want to go ahead and make that motion? Yeah, I make a motion to. 02:37:14
I do. Uh, yeah. I don't have the language. 02:37:24
I make a motion to approve 3.3 on the consent agenda. 02:37:28
As presented. 02:37:33
OK, we have a first date date. Can I get a second? 02:37:36
Second, second by Brett. I'm gonna do this by roll call, Jake. 02:37:38
Aye. 02:37:43
Aye, aye, Marty. Hi, Sarah. Hi. All right, great. We're gonna go ahead to our business items. This is a public hearing for the 02:37:44
Parks and Recreation Master Plan and impact fee analysis. 02:37:49
What we're going to do is we're going to go into a public hearing and then we're going to hear the presentation. 02:37:55
And then we will close the public hearing have. 02:38:01
The deliberation by the Council and then make a determination, so I need a motion to go into a public hearing. 02:38:04
Marty, did you want to do that? Oh, Boo, Marty. 02:38:14
All right, can I get a second? 02:38:17
Second Second by Sarah. 02:38:20
All in favor. 02:38:22
All right, we're now in a public hearing and I'm going to turn the time over to Parks and Recreation Director Brian Battery. 02:38:24
Okay, good evening. 02:38:48
OK, so. 02:39:00
Yes, we're here to present the Vineyard Study Parks and Rec Master Plan partnered with. 02:39:03
Impact the analysis. 02:39:09
And I want to recognize Laura Smith here with Criss. 02:39:11
Has done a lot of work. 02:39:16
On the consultant side to help get the necessary data. 02:39:18
To make this what it is so. 02:39:22
Also want to recognize Lee Johnson, who's here with Zions Bank Public Finance, who will present. 02:39:25
After this. 02:39:32
A quick rendition on. 02:39:34
The impact we're studying. 02:39:36
What that looks like. 02:39:37
So, umm. 02:39:40
Let's just jump right in. 02:39:42
Laura and I will contact team this but. 02:39:45
Umm, to give you a brief overview on the executive summary of what all. 02:39:48
Went into play with this Parks and Rec Master plan. 02:39:54
We really established it into five steps, so. 02:39:57
We established the goals of the project. 02:40:00
We collected. 02:40:04
Inventory of the existing amenities across the city. 02:40:07
Who owns it, whether it's Vineyard, city, HOA or state land? 02:40:11
ETC. 02:40:16
We also did an evaluation. 02:40:18
Laura and and her team did a lot on this of investigating into the National Recreation and Parks Association. 02:40:20
Metrics where they provide. 02:40:29
Recommendations based off of. 02:40:31
Population and cities. 02:40:33
Based off of what population will populate. 02:40:36
Or necessitates a specific amenity. 02:40:39
From there we did a lot of needs assessment from. 02:40:43
Public outreach so. 02:40:46
We had a. 02:40:48
Survey that umm. 02:40:50
Went out, we fired the city. 02:40:52
We had a booth at Vineyard Days last year. 02:40:55
We had, I think a couple. 02:40:58
Town halls. 02:41:00
And in that we got a lot of public feedback. We had like over 1000. 02:41:01
Surveys submitted for. 02:41:05
That survey, so that was that was exciting. We felt like we got a lot of good feedback. 02:41:07
After addressing that, we also had staff. 02:41:12
Provide their recommendations. 02:41:17
And then we evaluated the cost of. 02:41:21
How much everything is going to cost with the recommendations and how that's going to be funded? 02:41:25
Yeah, thank you for having me tonight. 02:41:32
So one of the. 02:41:35
First things that we've done with your your group was. 02:41:37
We'll do some, you know, some soul searching to see, you know, what were kind of the guiding principles. 02:41:41
That should should lead this effort so that we can always go back and make sure that the decisions we are making were really 02:41:48
reflecting the values of your community. 02:41:52
And what we were finding was that, you know. 02:41:57
The the sense of community and the sense of family and like creating. 02:42:01
Spaces for your growing community. 02:42:05
To grow in a healthy way under the right Wellness was was really key. 02:42:08
Also conserving the open space that you have and the beautiful. 02:42:13
Access to the mountains and the and the lake. 02:42:18
Is something that that was very important to you. So it's sort of this, this. 02:42:22
Triad of of, you know, community. 02:42:27
Wellness and and conserving your natural space as you grow and so we we all work together to land on. 02:42:30
You're in Parks and Rec mission statement which is vineyards. Parks and Rec mission is to phosphorus sense of community, promote 02:42:38
health and Wellness. 02:42:42
Conserve the national beauty of the year by creating inclusive, safe and enjoyable spaces. 02:42:46
And inspire an active lifestyle and lifelong memories. 02:42:51
OK. Getting into the inventory portion of the project. 02:42:59
We sent master plans over to our consultants to. 02:43:04
Really dive in to understand them and what open space is available. 02:43:08
So this is a list of various master plans existing in the city. 02:43:13
Umm just posted there on a map. 02:43:18
Yeah. And so the the intent of that is we know that you guys are, you know. 02:43:22
Currently you have one of plans that you're actually implementing. You have plans that are in place. 02:43:27
And so it's kind of an art because you have a lot of. 02:43:32
Private development, then you have public open space and so we are just really trying to inventory. 02:43:34
What are those connections that are already existing with your trails in transit where there's opportunities for open space? 02:43:40
And how can we kind of just pair? 02:43:46
You know the entire picture. 02:43:48
With, you know, the feedback that we get from the community. 02:43:51
To create. 02:43:54
You know, a connected network of, of trails and and open space that everyone can use. So, so that's why we went through this 02:43:56
exercise of. 02:43:59
Gathering an inventory of what you have. 02:44:03
Under the lens of your. 02:44:07
Your implants. 02:44:10
So so then we went through and worked with Brian and. 02:44:12
And team to see. 02:44:17
You know where your existing city parks are, where your existing amenities are. 02:44:19
Where you have open space. 02:44:24
And where you have. 02:44:26
Potential space for future parks. 02:44:27
And this data rolls into. 02:44:30
The recommendations that we make from the NRPA. 02:44:33
By looking at the amenities that you have and looking at what you'll need. 02:44:39
And so one of the things that we. 02:44:42
Struggled with but we we we landed on a solution that we that everyone feels comfortable with was. 02:44:46
You already have some amenities that are HOA. 02:44:51
That our HOA amenities so. 02:44:55
For example, if you had a pool. 02:44:58
Umm, that is not a public pool, but building another public pool would be redundant. 02:45:00
If it's already being supplemented by the situation, So what we chose to do is if it's an HOA amenity like playground or dog park. 02:45:06
We chose to give that half a point. 02:45:15
Because we know that. 02:45:18
Some of that. 02:45:19
Useful be will be used there, but again, it's not a public amenities. So we we that's how we kind of balance that. 02:45:21
Situation, so we make our own scoring. 02:45:28
On that I didn't know that when. 02:45:32
Like when you say we gave our like. 02:45:34
So this is not the NRP 8, this is how we counted. 02:45:37
The existing amenities. So if it's a public amenity, we gave it a whole point, right? 02:45:41
But if it's an issue, a amenity, we gave it. 02:45:46
Half of a point because we know that some of your population will use that, so you might not have a need for a whole nother. 02:45:50
Tennis court, for example. 02:45:57
Isn't there a national, there's no national standard for how that is counted. So it's not a law, it's not a national standard. 02:46:00
It's just kind of a recommendation and there is no recommendation for private. 02:46:05
Facilities. 02:46:11
So it's all for public facilities is what the NRPA is. 02:46:13
So that's kind of how we took that into account because we don't want you to have to build. 02:46:17
So what would the scoring be if we didn't count all the Hoas? We would be really bad. 02:46:22
Have you done not necessarily because of some of the future. 02:46:27
Future amenities better and better planned. 02:46:33
But you can dig through this and and look at it. I think that I, I, I think both arguments have. 02:46:36
A little bit of standing ground, but I do think that a lot of the amenities within the HOA was part of a negotiation, also part of 02:46:43
some of our city's codes and requirements, so. 02:46:48
Like open space specifically. So I do like that we are recognizing them. 02:46:54
We can keep talking about it. 02:46:59
Great. 02:47:02
Just make sure. 02:47:05
OK, so this is just in a table format, all of the parks and open spaces within the city. 02:47:07
It's organized by acreage and then we also have labeled who owns that specific area and if it qualifies for the impact fee. 02:47:14
That's what the IFE stands for, Impact Fee Eligibility. 02:47:23
And then on the right hand side page it just goes through various parks and also on to the next couple pages. 02:47:27
That are used within Vineyard City and what amenities are currently existing at those specific parks. 02:47:35
The next section was in regards to land acquisition. So there's 8 areas of focus. 02:47:44
Of where Parks and Recreation can be potentially expanded. 02:47:51
Within the city. 02:47:55
So just to quickly highlight these #1 is. 02:47:57
Vineyard City owns about 1/3 of the park at Lakeside Park. 02:48:02
But due to an agreement. 02:48:07
Entered into years ago. 02:48:09
Were unable to. 02:48:10
Program at the park and. 02:48:12
Orem pays for the maintenance of that park. So essentially. 02:48:15
Vineyard is not paying any cost for that park, but we have about 10 acres of land there. 02:48:19
That, umm. 02:48:26
Would be worthwhile to revisit. 02:48:27
With Orem and the contract there to figure out an agreement of how we can utilize that space? 02:48:30
Or acquire. 02:48:36
Similar amounts of space elsewhere nearby. 02:48:39
#2. 02:48:43
This is Vineyard City owned land. It's well known as the Pumpkin Patch and Vineyard. 02:48:45
Located adjacent to Gammon Park. 02:48:51
So this is about 11 acres and is a great opportunity to easily start building. 02:48:54
Parks and recommendities there. 02:49:01
#3 is a privately owned land, about 10 acres. 02:49:03
An idea from Orem was that we potentially. 02:49:08
Purchase that land. 02:49:12
We sell the Lakeside property. 02:49:14
By that #3 property. 02:49:16
We put soccer fields or baseball and we then partner with Orem to recruit tournaments. 02:49:19
And due to that we could qualify for T tap grants. 02:49:26
Which actually could allow us to finance those fields with those grants. So it essentially wouldn't. 02:49:30
Be costing the city any money, but we're getting those amenities that. 02:49:36
That we're looking for. 02:49:40
So not only does service the Vineyard City recreation programs, but it's also a revenue source for. 02:49:42
For renting out with Orem amenable to buying Lakeside? Yes in that contract. 02:49:48
Oh, sorry, just to clarify. 02:49:55
Is Oram interested in buying that plan? Yeah. 02:49:59
I don't know if it states in the contract, but in our. 02:50:02
In your conversations, yes, they're very interested in that. 02:50:05
And then we we could potentially buy the three acres. 02:50:09
The 10 acres or sorry, the 10? 02:50:13
It's probably the most important thing. That's huge. 02:50:17
Yeah. 02:50:20
Yep. 02:50:20
OK #4 This is also privately owned land. 02:50:23
There's about 20 acres. It's. 02:50:27
There's potential to. 02:50:30
Get that land if that's of interest. 02:50:32
#5 is the wetlands area. So just kind of having a focus on how we can. 02:50:34
You know, help enhance the beautification of that area. 02:50:40
Number six has been your beach with the Lakeshore. 02:50:45
Projects coming in that could potentially be a good opportunity to recruit that land. 02:50:49
Just so that we have more freedom to offer programs and events. 02:50:54
Kind of how we want to do them. 02:50:59
#7 is Geneva Park. 02:51:01
Established within Utah City. 02:51:04
So that would likely not be built out for, you know, 15 to 20 years, but it's good to plan ahead and. 02:51:07
You know, ensure that we can have some land on that northern side of. 02:51:14
The Vineyard connector to ensure we have. 02:51:18
As much balance across the city and park space as possible. 02:51:20
And then the eighth option is. 02:51:24
Currently the Linden Marina. 02:51:26
Which is within Linden city limits. I believe it's privately owned. 02:51:28
And run. 02:51:34
But potentially, if that's of interest, to Vineyard City. 02:51:35
That could allow us to host water sport activities and also be. 02:51:38
An added revenue source to the city. 02:51:44
OK, so we had a booth with. 02:51:49
Parks and Rec. 02:51:53
Vineyard Days. 02:51:55
And we also we paired that with a survey that. 02:51:57
That Brian sent out. 02:52:01
That was digital, but we asked people these questions. 02:52:03
What gets you outside? What's most valuable to you? What's your favorite natural feature? 02:52:07
Your favorite park? Your favorite amenity? Why? 02:52:12
And what's missing in Vineyard? 02:52:16
And what we found was that these were the top three choices of each group. There are other. 02:52:19
Other options to you, but these were the ones that came in. 02:52:25
1st and so again, people really love your walking trails. They love the access to nature. 02:52:28
They like to go to the parks because they like to spend time with their family. 02:52:34
The splash pad is very. 02:52:39
Popular because. 02:52:43
You know people, people like to keep their kids entertained. 02:52:45
And then there is a lot of input on. 02:52:50
On that desire for. 02:52:54
For more amenities with the wreck and the. 02:52:56
Right center around Jim. I'm really impressed with the results how many people participated. I think that along shows how much 02:52:59
interest there is in these open spaces Yeah, and we got a lot of. 02:53:05
Really specific feedback where people said oh they like this and the playgrounds, but they. 02:53:12
You know they don't like this in the playgrounds like they have. 02:53:16
Sufficient. 02:53:18
You know, they want to see more pickleball courts. They are excited about seeing baseball fields because as their kids. 02:53:21
Or older they're going to want that kind of thing. So we got like very, you know, specific on the ground kind of feedback about 02:53:29
what people are interested in. But yeah, everyone was really excited to to get. 02:53:34
Voice out there. 02:53:40
So then this again is your plan trails and say what we are doing is prioritizing where those missing links would be and so. 02:53:45
Connecting umm. 02:53:55
That network would be a top priority. 02:53:57
And say you can dig into this a little more, but really completing that network so that people can. 02:54:00
Access all of your open space without having to drive if they want to, you know, go for a run or, you know, ride their bike or use 02:54:06
public transportation. 02:54:10
We are trying to complete that network of trails. 02:54:14
And then I will let you come and talk about these crowns. Yeah, this one is a little bit more added to the last one. This just 02:54:21
includes transit as well across the city and various projects that. 02:54:26
Are in the works. 02:54:33
Now, getting into the NRA standards. 02:54:37
So this is where Laura and her team really did a lot of research and work to identify the metrics and. 02:54:42
The standards that NRPA has, do you want to expand on that at all? Yeah, yeah. So again, this is not codified anywhere. It's just. 02:54:48
It's just a recommendation by the NRP A about you know what. 02:54:55
You know what population in your city would qualify? 02:55:01
You know, to recommend different amenities, you know, just to kind of keep up with with the national standards. 02:55:05
And so. 02:55:11
We then measured you know your current amenities to. 02:55:13
What we would recommend based on population growth, we gave it a, you know, a buy of the next. In the next year, you would want to 02:55:17
do this. In the next 5 years, you would want to do this. In the next 10 years, you would want to do that. 02:55:23
And so that's kind of how we we use this national standard to to make those recommendations paired with. 02:55:28
Plans that you already have in place and paired with input that we got from the community. 02:55:35
OK. 02:55:43
So this is based off of the NRP A data that they got. 02:55:45
The table on the right page just shows. 02:55:51
With the inventory that we currently have. 02:55:54
That is the number of additional amenities needed by the specified year. 02:55:58
According to NRPA recommendations. 02:56:04
Umm, it has the population threshold on the right column. That just explains, you know, when there's that many. 02:56:09
Residents umm. 02:56:14
There should be another one of those amenities built. 02:56:16
Because Vineyard is a unique. 02:56:19
Community and. 02:56:21
You know our community doesn't. 02:56:24
Has uh. 02:56:25
Their wants and desires aren't exactly matching this. 02:56:27
We have our own recommendations that we're providing based off of. 02:56:31
This information, their feedback, staff input and our master plans. 02:56:35
So we'll get into that here shortly. 02:56:39
But this is also. 02:56:42
Something important on the left. 02:56:43
Page includes the population estimate for the next 10 years, so that's that's how. 02:56:46
Also, these numbers were were based. Can I ask a clarifying question on the table? Yeah, when you've got population threshold on 02:56:52
there. 02:56:56
That means I'm going to have. 02:57:01
I'm going to pick the multi use basketball, volleyball, courts, indoor. 02:57:04
And it has 14,577 population and it says. 02:57:09
You need one at each of those points. 02:57:14
Does that mean that? 02:57:16
Every time we get another 14,000. 02:57:19
577 people. We need another one. 02:57:22
That's it. That's what that means, yes. 02:57:26
It doesn't mean that OK, we got to 14,577. 02:57:29
We got what's on the list. 02:57:33
Now we're done. 02:57:34
Right, exactly. 02:57:35
Yep, good question. 02:57:37
OK, So maybe I'll expand on this one as well. So after getting that information and like I said, the public input staff input 02:57:42
master plans, this is what was. 02:57:47
Recommended that Vineyard City implement. 02:57:53
So it's categorized by time frame. So in 2025 you can see what. 02:57:57
The recommended priorities are for this current year. 02:58:02
Umm, you can see it for the next 5 years, 10 years and then also 20 years. 02:58:07
All right, so then we went in to look at, you know, again, places on the map and look at where the locations are and where we 02:58:17
might. 02:58:21
You know, locate these these suggested amenities and so this is a comprehensive. 02:58:26
List of what's existing. 02:58:31
The places where you have recommended. 02:58:34
Additional amenities and it what? 02:58:38
At what? 02:58:42
What stage fail, whether it's this year, in the next 5 years, 10 years? 02:58:44
Or 20 years and it's all color credits, so you can dive into that. 02:58:47
A little more and then we took that information. 02:58:51
And looked at these open spaces that we know are currently being looked at and planned. 02:58:55
And made recommendations. 02:59:02
Based on, you know, what would fit in these spaces and where we would locate them. So for example, in Veneer Grove Park. 02:59:04
We have suggested you know your pickleball courts and your mountain bike. 02:59:11
Park down on the southern side. 02:59:16
And then this on the right is the Utah City Master Plan. 02:59:22
And it shows all the amenities that are planned out for that master plan. 02:59:25
Then we have the current, you know, this, this land here. And so we looked at the master plan that you guys have already put into 02:59:31
the works and that will cover your Ninja Warrior course in the next five years. 02:59:38
For pickleball courts in the next 5 years at the skate park. I'll stay on the next five years. 02:59:45
Pull the way fields. 02:59:50
Can accommodate additional tot lot playgrounds and pickleball courts. 02:59:52
And then Gammon Park will accommodate A rectangular field and overlay field the next five years. 02:59:57
And all abilities park by 2035. 03:00:04
Community Center on that site and then. 03:00:08
Tennis courts. 03:00:11
And then Ryan can talk about the cost analysis. 03:00:15
OK, so on this table a little bit hard to see from back here but. 03:00:20
It itemizes each amenity and what the unit cost would be, and then again it just has in each column how many of that amenity is 03:00:25
recommended for the specific time frame. 03:00:31
And then it also specifies in the furthest right column. 03:00:37
If it's needing to. 03:00:41
Be paid for by Vineyard City or if that is a developer funded amenity. 03:00:44
Or if it is already funded. 03:00:50
And in the works to to build. 03:00:53
And then again it puts a map to. 03:00:57
To each of those. 03:01:00
Location across the city. 03:01:01
OK, so then um. 03:01:06
Just to lay it out even more clear. 03:01:09
This just lists the amenities that are recommended. 03:01:13
To be built in each time frame. 03:01:17
As well as what the focus is. 03:01:19
Umm, so maybe just as an example. So the one to five year plan. 03:01:22
The focus would be get. 03:01:27
Grant acquisition and build amenities. 03:01:30
And so the recommended amenities to be built during by the end of 20-30 would be those bolded items. 03:01:33
The source of financing. 03:01:41
For those as an example, dog park, Aquatic Center, basketball court, volleyball court. 03:01:43
And performance amphitheater are planned to be provided within Utah City at no cost of Vineyard. 03:01:49
The Tot Lot playground for ages three to five and four pickleball courts are to be provided within the Holdaway Fields development 03:01:55
at no cost of Vineyard. 03:01:59
And all the other amenities. 03:02:04
Listed aside from that would likely need funding through Vineyard City. 03:02:06
Of those that would need funding through Vineyard City. 03:02:11
The estimate is just under 5 million. 03:02:15
And then underneath that is explained how that would be paid for. 03:02:18
So it's recommended that Vineyard City obtain $500,000 through grants. 03:02:22
We actually just applied for a $500,000 grant. So if we were to get that, that already fulfills that requirement. 03:02:28
Umm getting $2,000,000 in T tab grants, which is going back to the potential agreement with Orem. 03:02:36
Of uh. 03:02:43
Selling the lakeside portion and buying a 10 acre parcel nearby. 03:02:44
Using $1,000,000 from the Wrap Tax Fund. 03:02:48
$500,000 from the parks impact fee that we will explain in just a little bit. 03:02:52
And then the remaining almost million from. 03:02:58
The Vineyard City Capital Projects Fund. 03:03:01
Now that's not. 03:03:03
Final I mean that can be moved around if we. 03:03:04
Make more in parks impact fees. That's less of a burden needing to come from the capital projects fund. 03:03:07
And then just total in the bottom right. 03:03:14
Corner. This goes over more of the. 03:03:17
The bigger numbers, right? 03:03:20
Of over the 20 years of the recommended amenities at totals to just over 7 million. 03:03:23
And it's important to note that. 03:03:30
That does not account for the the trail connection costs needing to. 03:03:34
Be had. It also doesn't include unforeseen projects or repairs that are that are needed. 03:03:39
It's really nice to have this impact free study done because. 03:03:48
It identifies that we need about $9 million. 03:03:51
For parks. 03:03:56
And just under. 03:03:58
I guess just over 6,000,000 for for trails. 03:03:59
In order to meet. 03:04:04
The recommended needs over. 03:04:05
The next 10 years. So in total it's about 15,000,000. 03:04:08
And I apologize, I actually have the wrong number I have in there for trails, 5.9 million, it's actually 6.1. So I'll ensure that 03:04:11
we get that fixed. 03:04:15
Before this is final. 03:04:21
Anyway, so the goal is to have that 15,000,000. 03:04:24
And then this next last. 03:04:27
Slide. 03:04:31
Includes our specific funding. 03:04:32
Opportunities. 03:04:35
So. 03:04:37
It's projected that by June 30th of this year. 03:04:38
Will have about $500,000 remaining and the wrap tax fund. 03:04:41
And then our current wrap tax goes through 2029, so it's recommended that. 03:04:48
We put the rap tax on the ballot again in 2029 for residents to vote on. 03:04:54
So that we have the potential to renew that revenue source for an additional 10 years. 03:05:01
The RAP tax revenue of 2.15 million that is considering between July 1st of this year. 03:05:07
Through. 03:05:16
December 31st. 03:05:17
Of 2029. 03:05:19
Sorry I lied. July 1st, 2025 through December 31st of 2035. So that's a. 03:05:23
A10 year period. 03:05:30
Grant money earnings projection 3,000,000 I've kind of already explained that a little bit about. 03:05:34
The 2 million from T tab, that would really make that more feasible. 03:05:39
But I feel like that is realistic. 03:05:44
Specifically if we get those T tab funds. 03:05:47
And then knowing all of that. 03:05:50
That essentially puts us needing about 9 point. 03:05:53
$5,000,000 in impact fee revenue. 03:05:56
In order to cover the rest of our projected cost to match our recommendations. 03:06:01
Umm with the impact fee that is about to be presented on. 03:06:08
Vineyard City. 03:06:13
Can charge $3422.88 per household. 03:06:14
New incoming development. 03:06:19
To help fund these different amenities and parks. 03:06:21
And so if we take. 03:06:25
The needed nine point. 03:06:27
5 million. 03:06:29
And divide that by the cost per household, it ends up being about 2800 new households is all that would be needed. 03:06:31
Paying that full fee. 03:06:40
To reach that amount. 03:06:42
He said it's 2700. 03:06:43
It doesn't decipher between right? 03:06:47
Correct. So Lee will explain that a little bit. Currently we just have one fee for all house types. 03:06:51
Umm. So maybe we'll just turn the time over to. 03:06:56
Right, that's correct. 03:07:01
Yeah. 03:07:04
So like right? 03:07:08
Yeah. 03:07:18
What are the rent? Yeah, what are the rent? 03:07:20
So maybe can we turn the time over to? 03:07:22
So this specific question it would be. 03:07:25
I'll pull up your presentation as well if you want to. 03:07:32
Sounds good, but with this particular issue we see that we have the calculated impact fee of around $3400. That would be a blanket 03:07:35
fee for all new new households not. 03:07:41
Not distinguishing between certain household types or for rental versus. 03:07:47
Like OK. 03:07:52
Sorry, if a developer built 500 units type of a situation they would be paying 500. 03:07:54
Houseful, even if they continue to own it. 03:08:00
Correct. Yes. 03:08:03
Thank you. 03:08:05
OK, Sounds great. Thank you. 03:08:12
All right, So thanks Brian and Laura for presenting the master plan this. 03:08:23
The impact fees and impact fee facility plans are more or less legal documents. So I'm presenting to you today are. 03:08:27
Take into account that master plan. 03:08:33
So that's how those work together. For those who don't know me, my name is Lee Johnson. I'm a science, public finance. If you're 03:08:35
familiar with who Susie Becker is, I worked with her on these impact fees. 03:08:39
And I'm excited to present the information to you today. 03:08:43
This presentation is by number means absolutely comprehensive, doesn't have every detail that will be found in the legal documents 03:08:46
that were provided the IFFP and IFA. 03:08:49
I'm more so here to. 03:08:54
Answer questions and to give you a. 03:08:55
More or less overview of what we accomplished and why we did it. 03:08:58
So one thing that I think is always good to do real quick before we get into the nitty gritty. 03:09:02
Is to talk about. 03:09:08
To define what we're talking about. 03:09:10
So I always like to ask what is an impact fee? Luckily, this slide answers that question. 03:09:12
It's a one time fee charged to new development to offset the capital costs associated through development. 03:09:17
So when all this new development comes in, they bring people. Those people are going to use roads, they're going to call the 03:09:21
police, they're going to use water, sewer, all of that. 03:09:25
And that comes with the cost that puts more stress on the system. Impact fees are a way for new development to pay their. 03:09:29
Fair share to maintain the current levels of the city is experienced that the city is providing right now. 03:09:35
So in terms of the Parks and Recreation fee, this can only cover the cost of system improvements, not project improvements. 03:09:41
So it was. 03:09:49
Touched on a little bit between, you know, HOA parks and I guess system parks. 03:09:50
And how it's defined in the legal documents is a system park or improvement is something that benefits the whole city, not just 03:09:54
one or two developments. 03:09:58
So a little pocket park that. 03:10:02
Is in between one big like 1 little development. There's no parking, there's just little top lot that that can't be used. 03:10:04
In the calculation of these impact fees. 03:10:10
And finally, all of this is governed by Utah Code Title 11, Chapter 36. 03:10:13
I will be using the acronym very regularly, IFFP and IFA. These are the legal documents that will tell you step by step how we 03:10:18
came to the these fees and these amounts. 03:10:23
So for the IFFP, the impacting facilities plan, if it's your first time going through these documents, really what you want to 03:10:28
look for is the service levels. 03:10:32
This is. 03:10:36
How we define how the city is being serviced right now with their current inventory and how that's going to be maintained 03:10:37
throughout the future. 03:10:41
So that serves as the basis for calculating these fees. That's what you'll find the IFFP. 03:10:45
Among it, you also find a man creating a new development impact on existing facilities by new development, new facilities needed 03:10:50
and cost. 03:10:53
And there is some overlap between the IFST and the IFA. 03:10:56
But when you're looking at the IFA, what you want to be looking for is something that's titled the Proportionate Share Analysis. 03:10:59
This is specifically mentioned in the Utah State Code. 03:11:04
And this is more or less just saying. 03:11:08
We're taking the qualifying expenses that we can apply to new development and dividing it proportionally and equally. 03:11:10
And there's some other elements here that can be found in the infection analysis as well. 03:11:18
So going over all of that, a quick little crash course on impact fees. 03:11:22
This is the population projections that we have over the next 10 years taken from Mountain Association of Governments. The study 03:11:26
period for the impact fee analysis was from 2024 to 2034. 03:11:32
These same numbers were found in the master plan. 03:11:37
Now using these numbers, what we're going to be getting the levels of service both existing and proposed. 03:11:41
And this you can find in the IFFP. 03:11:48
So how do we identify these service levels and in this case for Parks and Recreation? 03:11:51
This is going to be identified as acres per 1000 residents for. 03:11:56
Improved parts. 03:12:01
And for trails it will be miles per 1000 persons. 03:12:03
So we have a blue section and yellow section of some columns on this table. So what you'll see on the left on the blue? 03:12:06
Is when the first column. 03:12:12
In 2024, these are the current service levels. 03:12:14
So there's 2.56. 03:12:17
Improved acres of Parkland for every 1000 residents. 03:12:19
.0112 concrete trails, so on and so forth. 03:12:23
And if nothing is done, more people move into the city. No new assets are required. What we're going to see is that service level 03:12:27
dropping, which makes sense. More people are using the same number of facilities. 03:12:32
In the yellow columns on the right, we more or less just took those service levels and. 03:12:38
Converted them to a dollar amount. 03:12:44
And this was done by taking the entire current existing inventory in 2024, calculating how much it would cost to replace in 03:12:46
today's dollars, and dividing it by the population in Vineyard. 03:12:51
So we can see the same effect, right? More people move in if nothing is done that. 03:12:56
Cost that has been spent per person will go down. 03:13:01
So this has already been touched on by Brian. 03:13:05
The park improvements projected are around 9,000,006 million. For trail improvements for total cost around 15. 03:13:08
We take all of these improvements. 03:13:15
And divide them per the number of people coming into the area. 03:13:17
And we get these numbers per capita. So for park improvements 707, for trail improvements 475 and for consultant cost for people 03:13:21
like me and Laura, we divide that by the anticipated growth over the next 10 years. 03:13:27
To get a total cost per capita of nearly $1200. 03:13:33
So the final step is what we were discussing a little bit earlier was how do we determine the impact fee to charge each additional 03:13:37
household coming in? 03:13:41
And what we did is we took the average household size from the 2023 ACS American Foodies Survey from the US Census Bureau. 03:13:45
And multiplied that cost per capita by the average household size in vineyard. 03:13:53
Now there was a lot of discussion and. 03:13:58
I guess questions on why we're just doing 1U fee rather than discerning between different household type or? 03:14:01
Other variables. 03:14:08
And the reasoning behind that is because this is the most. 03:14:09
Transparent and verifiable source that we could find. 03:14:13
We had a meeting where we include a different stakeholders and some members from the city, some representatives from the city to 03:14:17
go over this and. 03:14:20
Make sure we were on the same page. 03:14:25
So that's why we only have one fee. 03:14:27
Now naturally when you see fees like this, you ask yourself where you are relative to peers. So. 03:14:29
Looking at this next slide. 03:14:35
This is for Parks and Recreation impact fees. 03:14:36
And all those red bars represent the city in Utah Valley and the fees that they charge. 03:14:39
So Vineyard currently does not have a Parks and Recreation impact fee, but with implementing this impact fee, they would be right 03:14:45
under the average that is being charged in Utah Valley. 03:14:49
And all this information can be found from these individual cities, but in this case it was collected from the Utah Valley Home 03:14:54
Builders Association, which collects that this information regularly. 03:14:58
So going to the next slide, when you Add all of the. 03:15:03
The fees up. 03:15:07
This might be a little. 03:15:08
Bit of a noisy graph, but the Gray bar represents just impact fees and the red bar is what developers are going to be looking at 03:15:09
when they're developing in an area. 03:15:14
Because that includes everything that they're going to be anticipated to pay. So that includes hookup fees. 03:15:18
Impact fees from special districts and other entities like that. 03:15:23
The yellow bar represents the average for the total fees that the developer would be expected to pay. 03:15:26
So this can give you an idea of where Vineyard would stand relative to its peers. On the left you have the green bar that 03:15:32
represents where a veneer is at right now. 03:15:36
And on the right is where it would go. 03:15:40
With this new impact fee. 03:15:42
So, umm. 03:15:44
I know that was a lot of information that was a very quick little crash course through the IFFP and IFA, but I'm here to answer 03:15:45
any questions or just any concerns. 03:15:50
You have any? So I just wanted to clarify my question. 03:15:55
That I had earlier specifically, and I think you already said this, but I just want to restate it so it's clear. 03:16:00
Each household would be charged. 03:16:08
For $3400 roughly, yeah. But then if a developer or if the developer is building a significant amount and a significant amenity, 03:16:10
that could go towards that amount. 03:16:16
Her household that they're building. 03:16:23
Yeah. My understanding is that they can pay in lieu of impact fees through assets or other capital improvements. Thank you. I 03:16:25
wanted that clarify. Thank you. 03:16:29
Before we take questions from the Council, I'm going to ask the public. 03:16:38
Are there any questions from the public? 03:16:42
It's a lot, All right. I'll let the council deliberate a little bit and maybe that'll spur some thoughts. So I'll leave the public 03:16:49
hearing open. Go ahead. 03:16:54
So I get a little bit leery when people create their own scoring. 03:16:59
But if there's no standard, I guess we have to create our own, right? 03:17:06
Why isn't there a scoring standard in the state? 03:17:09
I can't answer that question. I don't know. 03:17:13
So I do know that when we've done these fees throughout the French states, we do work with the city to kind of determine what 03:17:16
their. 03:17:19
If everyone creates their own scoring method for doing it. 03:17:23
But it has to be defensible, legal. 03:17:27
Who's the one that's going to find out if it is defensible or not? 03:17:30
Typically it's the developers and they'll challenge it, and the process of challenging and impacting can be found in the Utah 03:17:34
State Code. And then it'll go to court and say is this constitutional or not? 03:17:38
At that point, I actually don't know. 03:17:44
But I would imagine some sort of process that means we have a lot of leeway then if there's no standard, there's leeway, but it 03:17:46
can be policed by people that are paying the impact fees, right? Yeah. I mean, they could come and take you to court and say this 03:17:52
is too high or whatever. And there have been challenges that have been successful and unsuccessful. 03:17:58
My experience sitting on these. 03:18:05
Plans across the state. 03:18:08
Typically there is. 03:18:10
A group that comes together and makes scoring. Maybe we could talk about the purpose for the scoring. 03:18:12
Just for the public. 03:18:17
So that they could understand why we score or why that makes sense. 03:18:19
Well, I do know that when Susie and I worked on these impact fees, I think that our scoring was a little bit different than what's 03:18:25
in the master plan. 03:18:29
Umm, I don't. 03:18:33
I don't believe we use those metrics. Those are. 03:18:34
They're kind of in different lanes, if that makes sense. OK. 03:18:37
Is that scoring different? Probably that you use primarily because of what you were saying earlier that? 03:18:42
If we have private amenities or smaller amenities. 03:18:48
Serve a subset of the community? Yeah. The argument is because they only serve, you know, one or two developments. There's no 03:18:51
parking. 03:18:54
The umm. 03:18:58
My concern is the complaint that I get a lot from residents is the. 03:19:00
Heavy burden that we have on HOA's and. 03:19:05
How entries do kick out the public, you know, don't allow them to use their and that it is, even though they're like, hey, we're 03:19:08
elect. 03:19:10
You can be here but. 03:19:14
Don't use any of that. They'll say, hey, do you actually live here? 03:19:15
And I worry about scoring it as half because it's like, it's really not public. I mean, I get that. 03:19:19
People go and. 03:19:24
And visit the that's the only thing that I see that kind of I can see like. 03:19:26
It's there's value to it. 03:19:30
But if there's no national or state standard that says score it that way, it's like. 03:19:33
I see the complaint a lot. 03:19:38
Around the county, where Vineyard is just so heavy, heavily, we're just all HOA, you know, for the most part. So I worry about 03:19:40
that. 03:19:44
Does anyone, does anyone have any comments in the gallery? I'd love to hear thoughts. Marty, go ahead. 03:19:48
Pro or against? 03:19:53
Like around the county? 03:19:54
Yeah, I'm just curious what that means. 03:19:57
Well, just, uh. 03:20:01
If you have an HOA park or whatnot, no. I mean like who's complaining about us having a lot of HOA's? Like what do you? 03:20:02
All the conversations that. 03:20:09
Like. 03:20:11
I just was wondering what it like the context of it when you have HOA parks, it limits the ability to do public recreation and 03:20:14
then so. 03:20:18
If we're counting them towards tax dollars or whatever they're, I mean, they're great for dog parks and different things like 03:20:22
that, but. 03:20:26
At the end of the day, they don't put on recreation. 03:20:29
Like organized recreation and so. 03:20:33
A lot of the complaints that. 03:20:36
Are in the sporting world like soccer softball, baseball all that that type of world of like hey let's get down to the venue and 03:20:38
it's like. 03:20:42
We don't have any enough to complain. Well, I don't, I don't think we have big enough HOA spaces that would actually even be able 03:20:48
to be a baseball. That's what I'm saying, like to raise. 03:20:53
Like this is our opportunity to set that and go, man, I wish if it wasn't scored that way, I'd really like to take that out of the 03:20:58
scoring so we could up the impact speed and get some more baseball fields or base soccer open fields, you know? 03:21:04
For a little legal perspective, yeah. 03:21:11
Oh, please go legal and then I'll go. 03:21:15
I think Councilmember Holder Way makes a really important point. 03:21:19
And your impact fee facility plan is you're walking a tightrope and you have to make sure that your data has some support. 03:21:23
So I believe the facilities plan and. 03:21:31
Our consultants can speak up if I'm wrong, but it's written in a conservative way. 03:21:35
So that we can fully support the impact fees that we're assessing. 03:21:40
But your point about HOA amenities not being available to the public is absolutely true. Yeah. So if you're doing. 03:21:44
The math on what does our community demand? 03:21:50
For pickleball courts, Basketball courts. 03:21:54
And if you're counting the HOA amenities, they're truly not available to everybody. 03:21:56
And so. 03:22:01
I I get where you're coming from. I think the reason why it is included in your impact feed facilities plan is so that you can 03:22:03
support. 03:22:06
That figure if you're challenged. 03:22:10
Because you're requiring as a threshold. 03:22:12
To development that a developer pay. 03:22:15
Into our systems. 03:22:19
And so you have to have the support for that if you were to. 03:22:21
Strip out all the HOA amenities and I think you might have a little bit more. 03:22:25
Difficulty supporting that figure. 03:22:28
At the end of the day. 03:22:31
So what I wanted to say is I like where we're landing on the graph. So you are different opinions and I'd love to hear from the 03:22:33
public. 03:22:37
But I like where we're landing on the graph when you compare us other cities. 03:22:41
In part of why I want to be conservative in this number is I want to make sure that we're asking for enough from our developers, 03:22:46
but I also want to make sure this does add. 03:22:51
It's per household, right? Like these? 03:22:57
These developers pass that cost on to. 03:22:59
Earn new residents. 03:23:03
And so I don't want to go too heavy. I really like kind of picking that middle ground. 03:23:04
Umm, just to help with. 03:23:10
Being able to go forward to buy here, right? It's just one more. 03:23:13
Fee and we have we'll have a lot of fees as we try to grow and it makes sense I mean completely supportive of that. I just want to 03:23:16
make sure that we're. 03:23:20
I like the idea. 03:23:23
Landing in the middle. See me? 03:23:24
You know, going back to your legal explanation. 03:23:26
So would one of their opportunities to challenge it be that they are putting in these parks that are serving the public in the HOA 03:23:31
realms, even though they're not serving the greater public? And so if they're paying too much and we're not conservative on it and 03:23:37
then we're not, if we weren't accounting for those things, then that would be them being able to come back and say, look at what 03:23:44
we've done for your entire community that you negotiated. Yes, yes. And to put a little finer point on it, you. 03:23:51
When you're doing the legal analysis on a new development and what they provide the constitutional analysis is whether. 03:23:57
What you're demanding of a developer is roughly proportionate to the impact that they. 03:24:05
Create. 03:24:11
And it also has to have a direct relationship to their development. So those are for the development specific amenities. 03:24:13
And then when you look at impact fees, you also have to look at. 03:24:21
Proportionality, but that's really the math of the underlying study. 03:24:25
And the documents that you're considering today? 03:24:30
And then what they're paying into for that are not the amenities that they bring forward, but this the systems. 03:24:33
Systems is a word that lends itself better when you're talking about. 03:24:41
Sewer and water. 03:24:45
And transportation. 03:24:47
It's a little bit harder sometimes to understand with parks, but. 03:24:49
We still consider any of the park amenities that would serve the broader. 03:24:52
Community, not just a specific development to be your park system, OK. 03:24:57
Thank you. 03:25:01
All right, any, any other thoughts from the public as we keep going, just raise your hand when you I have one clarifying question. 03:25:03
So this pot of money. 03:25:07
That we raise even though we score half a point for HOA. 03:25:12
The money can't then be used to build an HOA, it would only be for public parts, right? Just to be clear. 03:25:17
Correct. It has to be spent on things in your. 03:25:23
In your plan document. 03:25:27
And so we write the plan document to be. 03:25:28
To have expansive language right? So that if you decide. 03:25:31
In three years that you need more tennis courts than pickleball courts. But they listed the HOA's and the doctor. That's why I was 03:25:35
scared. It's like they're the HOA's are used to to determine what your needs are in your community. 03:25:41
And they factor that in. 03:25:48
You cannot use impact fees for. 03:25:50
Non public amenities. 03:25:53
And HOA amenities are by definition non public. 03:25:55
You also have a limitation on the amount of time. 03:26:01
You can hold the impact fees, you have to spend them within six years. 03:26:03
On systems that are included in your documents. 03:26:07
That's meaningful, OK. 03:26:13
Any other questions from the Council? 03:26:15
Any questions from the public? 03:26:18
Karen, come on up. 03:26:21
You gotta come to the microphone. 03:26:23
Thank you. 03:26:28
Can you get my name and everything? 03:26:34
Yeah. 03:26:38
Cornelius Vineyard. 03:26:39
I'm just curious about Marty's question. You know, being concerned that that's a high amount for each. 03:26:40
New residence. 03:26:46
No, I'm not concerned that it's a high amount. I just want a balanced. I want a reasonable amount. 03:26:48
Then what we're offering so that the. 03:26:55
So the balance is there because it seems like monetarily. 03:26:58
We can't have everything and cut 2. 03:27:02
So, well, I mean, I've. 03:27:05
I want to understand your question but from my understanding. 03:27:08
We have a list of everything we need and then we made a number. So if we want to increase that number, then we would add things 03:27:13
that we want to add to the list. If we cut the list down, then we can cut the impact fee down. 03:27:19
So what is your goal here? 03:27:25
I just would hate to see us. 03:27:27
Keep everything that's on the list and cut the impact fee. 03:27:29
OK. I was just curious if that's what you were suggesting. No, no, I. 03:27:34
I guess I'm, I guess what I'm trying to say is I like the plan as a whole so far. I feel like we're balanced. OK, thank you. 03:27:39
I do have a question as we as we take our vote on this, if we vote on it today. 03:27:50
For the little corrections here and there, like some of the things Brian noted. 03:27:55
Do we need to? Would we need to? 03:28:00
Yeah, we'll put in the stipulation for it. OK. I had one question, Brian. Did we figure out my my neighborhood's green space? 03:28:03
Thing it's listed as an HOA, but I think it's actually public property. Just to know, yes. Yep, and that is included in the. 03:28:11
Oh, in the new one, I think I have this is the newer one. OK, cool. Yeah, thanks. 03:28:19
So and one note that I would. 03:28:23
Want to propose to before this is voted on is. 03:28:25
In the ISA and IFFP documents. 03:28:28
It lists a number of amenities. 03:28:32