We are ready to get started. Today is tuesday, june 18th, 2024.
this is the city council's regular meeting and I'm calling it to order and giving notice That the city
council may vote to go into executive session, which will not be open to the public for Discussion and consultation with the city's attorneys for legal advice on any item listed
on the following agenda. Can I have roll call mayor daggett here.
vice mayor aslan, present. Council member harris here. Council member house.
council member matthews here. Council member mccarthy here. Council member sweet.
here. Chief musselman, could I have you lead us in the pledge of allegiance?
thank you. Mayor. I'd be honored. Please stand if you're able.
thank you, chief.
the mission of the city of flagstaff is to protect and enhance the quality of life for All.
the flagstaff city council humbly acknowledges the ancestral homelands of this area's Indigenous nations and original stewards.
these lands, still inhabited by native descendants, border mountain sacred to the Indigenous peoples.
we honor them, their legacies, their traditions, and their continued contributions.
we celebrate their past, present and future generations who will forever know this place As home.
thank you. All right, next up, we have open call to the public.
this enables the public to address the council about an item that is not on the prepared Agenda.
comments related to items that are on the agenda will be taken at the time the item is Discussed.
we have two open calls to the public. One is at the beginning of the meeting, the other is at the end.
our first call to the public is limited to 30 minutes, and additional comments will be Held until the second call to the public.
if you wish to address us during open call to the public or for an item that's on the Agenda, please fill out a comment card that is in a speaker's card that's in the back.
you have three minutes and there is a timer here.
and during open call to the public, the city council cannot interact with you.
we can't respond to you or ask you questions. So we are very honored to have with us today, secretary of state adrian fontes.
mayor and members of the council. Thank you so much for having me. And I will precursor a little bit of congratulations to the guy who was standing up here A minute ago, because I may have to leave before anything else happens, but what I'd like
to do is draw everyone's attention to the copper star that represents arizona's mineral Legacy.
it flies in the middle of our flag. The blue portion represents the field on the american flag and the colorado river.
the red and yellow rays represents inform the state's sunset and in color, the spanish Flag, which is part of the heritage of the state of
arizona. This flag was commissioned by colonel harris back in 1910 because he was needing A banner for a shooting
competition in ohio. He was to take arizona's team across the country to compete.
and the first flag that looks like the one hanging behind you was designed right here in Flagstaff, arizona by may hicks.
now what I'm calling the may hicks house stands at 13 larue south larue street, just up The way.
the lot has been sold and the house is set for demolition.
sadly. But we are not without hope.
we have a series of historical preservationists who I first met in tucson at the annual Conference that those folks have down there.
they told me about this, and I said, myself and my office will do whatever we can to help Preserve this important part of arizona's heritage.
so that old may, which is what I like to call our state flag and the heritage behind it, Will be preserved.
now we have understandings based on some of the studies, environmental studies that I Have in my hand that hopefully we'll be able to get in your hands discussions with a
variety of different city staff. And of course, council member mccarthy was there with us this morning earlier at the Mayor's house.
there's a variety of different plans and proposals that are on the table.
I am committing to you today to put the full force of the arizona's department of state, Our state archives, and our state libraries who fall to my charge to
make sure that this important piece of arizona's heritage is preserved. I hope and pray that you, mayor, and the council will utilize whatever power you have Here in the city of flagstaff and the resources that your staff may bring to
bear to help us do whatever we need to do to preserve this house.
now, one of the proposals is to put it on the site of the murdock space, which is a Community gathering space already.
there is some land right there that's plenty big. It's only an 800 square foot house, by the way, and there's already a lot of folks around The state who are looking at this and looking to help out.
I know my time is just about up, but I'm here to ask you to please engage with our Office.
we will designate a staff member to make sure that we can make this thing happen. And we hope and pray that the city of flagstaff will be able to host the mayor's house Somewhere, so that we can make sure that we preserve this very important part of arizona's
history. She is, after all, arizona's betsy ross. Thank you very much. Mayor and council.
thank you, secretary fontes. Thank you. Staff.
I'm sure that we will get an update from those who have been talking to the secretary's Office and working on this.
indeed, mayor. Thank you, thank you. Dennis gibbons.
right. Thank you, mayor daggett, city council staff, the good citizens of flagstaff.
hi, I'm dennis gibbons of the south side and lead reporter of justice news.
seeking justice is in one's best interest. I just want to go around the room and say a couple of nice things about everybody.
lori matthews, I appreciate your conservative values and your fiscal responsibility to The taxpayers.
deb harris I like how you never forget about the low economic status people and Minorities in our community.
you also like to speak your mind, which is awesome. Vice mayor austin aslan you are very punny, smart, and have peace in your heart more than I.
mayor becky daggett, you're an excellent leader who's full of knowledge. You run the meetings well and you ask questions when no one else has one.
jim mccarthy, you are wise, caring and your engineer mindset is an asset to the council.
miranda sweet. You are a nice person and you're always very thankful of everyone.
and you are the hardest working person in flagstaff. I see you all the time at events and meetings around town.
good job! Kara house. You are extremely intelligent person.
you speak, read and write good. You ask in-depth questions and talk better than me.
staff. You're all expert professionals and flagstaff is lucky. Lucky to have you all.
as you know, the sunshine mission was closed for a month or so.
there was nothing but peace and quiet on south san francisco street. Now there are people loitering, littering, public urination, more police presence.
a fire was caused by an unsheltered person which almost burnt down a house.
the tenant suffered smoke inhalation and burns putting out the inferno.
and there's a lot of self-medication going on on the streets. Do we want south san francisco street to turn into san francisco?
the city? I would suggest paying someone minimum wage to be a neighborhood watch who Always helps the surrounding area of the mission at all hours.
I know a lot of niu students are walking by the mission to and from school all the time.
remember, if you build it, they will come. I also want to declare every day international health awareness day.
let's do it for the health of it. And also, I think we should create mandatory exercise camps where citizens can exercise, Learn about nutrients, and reconnect with nature.
since I have a little bit of time. I wanted to sing a song. It's called kumbaya. If you know the words, please join me.
kumbaya. My lord. Kumbaya. Kumbaya.
my lord. Kumbaya. Someone's hurt, my lord.
kumbaya. Oh, lord. Kumbaya. All right, everyone together now.
no, I'm just kidding. But thanks a lot, everyone, for having this time with me.
and good job, everyone. I really appreciate you all. And yeah, you guys do a great work and it's an honor to be here today.
thank you so much. God bless america. Thank you. Dennis. Jeanine. Kelly.
jeanine. Kelly. French. Canadian. Scandinavian. Irish. Flagstaff.
let's dance. Raise your hand if you've seen any, please address the city council.
raise your hands if you've ever seen any episodes of bridgerton, smile.
if you've read any of jane austen's novels, how about pride and prejudice?
sense and sensibility, mansfield park husbands and boyfriends.
aslan. Jim. Mr.. Galliard, greg.
chief officer, please address the city council. The last time you took your wife dancing, were you going to have a chance?
july 6th.
like dickens and shakespeare, jane austen is for everyone. Her wit and warmth touched the heart of the youth and the young at heart.
o jane austen's characters love to dance, and often a dance is that prelude to the all Important first kiss, true love, a proposal and
ultimately a happy marriage between dashing duels? The jane austen society of north america is gifting all students in high school, Community college, university and graduate school free membership from now to december
31st because we're celebrating jane austen's 250th birthday. Hello, I'm jeanine kelley, and I'm the new regional coordinator for the jane austen Society from flagstaff to phoenix.
many of us are sadly aware of the skyrocketing depression of students through the Negative influence of social media.
so jane is hosting student friendly events to encourage students to put down their cell Phones and to experience life face to face.
we're going to have a rapping jane austen contest and on saturday, june 6th, july 6th from 1 to 3:30 p.m.
at flagstaff federated church. Pastor pat dimond, who is a jewel, is with us and hosting a free, fabulous english Country dance workshop.
it's multi-generational. I drop off fliers to peaks senior living residents this morning.
no experience is necessary. As jim, you can come as you are.
light refreshments will be served and I hope to see the mayor and city council members There, as well as flagstaff, dashing firefighters and the knightly officers from the
flagstaff p.d.. Jane austen has a big umbrella. All in our community are most welcome to come to the dance.
and who knows, you just might meet your true love while dancing on july 6th.
and to give this to you. Thank you. Thank you. Alicia.
formanek.
okay. Good afternoon. Mayor, vice mayor and city council members.
my name is alicia formanek and I am a proud member and the current president of high Altitude roller derby flagstaff's local roller derby league.
high altitude roller derby has been a part of the flagstaff community since 2012.
our league has 45 active members and an internationally ranked travel team, the dark sky Starlets.
we are dedicated to sustaining roller derby by promoting athleticism, empowerment and Sportsmanship among our league members and the community.
beyond our athletic pursuits, high altitude roller derby enriches the flagstaff community Through charitable donations and service.
each year, the league chooses a new local nonprofit to support through monetary donations, Drives, and fundraisers.
coconino casa for kids is the nonprofit we are supporting this year.
in the past, we've supported flagstaff shelter services, 1 in 10 and over the rainbow Butterfly garden, just to name a few.
so you might be wondering, where do we practice roller derby and flagstaff?
well, recently we've lost one of our practice spaces at flagstaff junior academy due to Its closure.
currently, we practice at mount elden middle school, sharing the space with other local Sports leagues.
since the closure of the available rental spaces through fsd are becoming increasingly Limited.
while fsd has been a supportive partner, the increasing demand for their gymnasiums from Various sports leagues and clubs means our practice time will be significantly
reduced. Currently we practice for 12 hours over the course of four days, but this will Be cut nearly in half this fall.
this reduction severely impacts our ability to accommodate all skill levels, from Beginners to a level travel team.
we urgently need your support. Flagstaff is in dire need of a multi-purpose indoor sports complex that can accommodate a Roller derby, flat track, among other activities like
pickleball, volleyball, indoor soccer and roller hockey.
given our climate with cold temperatures, snow, rain and smoke from wildfires, an indoor Sports complex would allow the community to stay
active year round, regardless of the weather. So we are asking you to hear our voice and consider the development of a multi-purpose Indoor sports complex as a future agenda item.
we are confident that other sports groups would join us in expressing their need for such A facility.
thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to your support.
thank you. Joanne kean.
good evening, mayor and council. I just wanted to take just a quick opportunity to introduce somebody to all of you today.
this is amelia krajeski. I said it correctly.
amelia was with us all day yesterday.
learning about the city. She's currently interning at coconino county, and she's an aqma marvin andrews fellow, Which is a really big deal.
she's a graduate of niu, and this fall will be going to asu and working on her master's Of public administration and will be a marvin andrews
fellow, where she's actually assigned to work at a city.
anywhere around the state, there's several cities she can choose from, but they're going To be choosing her.
so I just wanted to take an opportunity. Definitely somebody that you will see again.
she's a real up and comer. Ask some great questions yesterday, and we are really lucky to have her with us Yesterday.
so welcome. Thank you. Thank you.
joanne. Dapper. Dre.
mayor. Vice mayor, council staff. Good to see everybody again.
I probably have to be at another meeting. I'm in between meetings right now, but I know they're having the cmp.
update carbon neutrality plan. And what kind of that integrates?
I hope I can make it back to see their information and what they're sharing.
I guess I always kind of try to talk in the observation of just a concerned citizen Person who likes to walk around the city and, of course, bike around the city.
we all know that in the fact that even if your carbon neutrality goals are to 20, 30 most Of any
kind of infrastructure or things that would help be people and get people less car Dependent won't be built until like 2030.
so just the consideration of the information that you're getting from them, what can we Do to speed up that process?
I mean, I know the city council declared the climate emergency, what, five years ago now?
something like that. And then from what I understand of the word emergency, it's usually like stuff should be Happening rapidly to change our course or to make different
things. But as a person who observes, I still see just mostly things being built Primarily for car use.
anything that is built for bicycle or pedestrian use or extension is often poo pooed.
complained about. We don't have funding, we can't make it happen. But yet. Lone tree overpass, bula roundabout j.w.
powell extension. They somehow all have budgets and mass amounts of money to get done.
and yet, how can we reinforce for people to be less car dependent by not helping to think Strategically?
how where is the most use of pedestrian and multimodality and reinforce that?
it's all pretty much downtown within these three blocks.
but the sidewalks aren't wider for people. The bike lanes aren't more distinct for bike riders.
you have pretty much a really distinct corridor from fmc to north campus on beaver in san Francisco.
if that was really reinforced and really inviting to multimodality, maybe you would see People use it.
but yet the concern is always, always, always. How do we get cars through level of service, level of service, level of service, and Maybe we'll get a little bit of amenity help when you do the downtown mile and we have
some pedestrian underpasses. But again, how do you strategically invite the community to be less car dependent?
you, I don't know, close down streets sometimes like first friday art walk.
wouldn't it be awesome if aspen was closed and people could just walk?
again, strategize and not just consider these bigger plans, but small steps to make Larger things happen.
thank you, thank you. Jasmine jewell.
hello, everyone. I'm mayor, vice mayor, council staff.
my name is jasmine jewell and I was born and raised here in flagstaff, arizona.
I am a third generation now alum, and I care very deeply about this place and the people Who live here.
I don't know about you all, but I am getting incredibly tired of courts and legislators Coming for my body.
we have clearly all been involuntarily engaged in a battle for the most fundamental of Universal human rights the right to do what we want with the
body that we inhabit, specifically with reproductive health care.
I currently work for arizona list as a part of the nonpartisan coalition arizona for Abortion access, and we are trying to get initiative on the ballot in november that, if
passed, will enshrine safe access to rowe standards of abortion, meaning until fetal Viability in the state constitution as a right,
as I believe it should be. Please join me in our arizona for abortion access in standing up to protect our fellow Human beings.
I hope that you will tell your constituents cis women, trans, non-binary, your mother.
everyone knows someone who has a uterus, loves someone who has a uterus, and that makes This issue their business.
that makes helping out in this effort their responsibility too.
I know everyone's busy, but they need your signatures. We need your signatures right now.
your constituents signatures. Roe was overturned two years ago this sunday, and we should not let this anniversary pass Quietly.
this is a call to action. You've heard we have more than the necessary 383,000 signatures we need.
but the truth is, we need to keep our collective foot on the gas. We expect at least 20% of those signatures to be invalidated due to poor handwriting Addresses, not updated, and other things.
no one can sign this petition online. I need you to tell your constituents please sign it in person.
time is running out. I need them to act quickly. Please let me tell you where you can tell them.
they can do this monday through friday in the flagstaff ice house, suite six, from 10 A.m.
to 2 p.m.. Yes, that is the coconino county democrats office. But please let me say again, this is a nonpartizan coalition and independence.
you are more than welcome republicans. You are more than welcome. I would be so happy to see you there.
this can be a nonpartisan issue if we all decide that it is one.
we are also at the flagstaff farmers market at city hall on sunday from 8 a.m.
to noon. We are also going canvasing to knock on doors for signatures this saturday.
just show up at 10 a.m. At the ice house. I have petitions with me.
you can find me afterwards. And I would love to meet you.
please, let's make these rights also unalienable, because abortion is health care.
thank you, thank you jasmine.
all right. We're moving on to proclamations and recognitions.
we have two proclamations today. The first is waste and recycling workers week.
the second is juneteenth. So we'll start with waste and recycling workers week.
and everyone who is here for this proclamation, would you please join council down here?
do we have everyone? Okay. We're we'll take a photo after this.
and then if there's anyone who would like to say a few words, we will give you the time To do that.
the nation celebrates the week of june 17th as waste and recycling workers week.
the city of flagstaff solid waste section plans, implements, coordinates and directs Programs for the safe and compliant collection,
recovery and disposition of the solid wastes and recyclables incurred, including the Operation of the cinder lake landfill hazardous
product hazardous product center. The men and women employed by the city of flagstaff solid waste section makes significant Contributions to the safety, health and welfare of our
20,000 solid waste customers and countless visitors of flagstaff.
the proper collection and disposal of waste and recyclables is vital to preventing Disease, litter and dump heaps.
according to the center for disease control, the eradication of many diseases in the Western world is due in large part to higher public
sanitation standards resulting from effective garbage disposal.
the city of flagstaff values and celebrates the refuse collectors, dumpster haulers, Landfill staff, and all others employed in the sanitation and
sanitation industry to serve residents and local businesses.
now, therefore, I, becky daggett, mayor of the city of flagstaff, arizona, do hereby Proclaim the week of june 17th as waste and
recycling workers week.
I'd like to say a few words.
you got? Thank you mayor. Thank you council I appreciate the recognition tonight.
this group here works every day, 70, 80 hours a week, day in, day out, out there Collecting trash, making sure that our streets are clean, that our
alleyways stay clear of debris and other solid waste operating our landfill, just Ensuring that we keep a good, clean, sanitary environment.
and they do it without any hesitation every day. So I appreciate everything that you all do.
the many, many hours that you put in seven days a week. We're truly grateful for everything that you do for this community.
thank you.
and do we have representatives here for the juneteenth proclamation?
okay. Come on down.
it is my honor and privilege and pleasure to read this proclamation on behalf of the Mayor.
whereas juneteenth. You start again. Whereas juneteenth, also known as juneteenth, national independence day, Jubilee day, freedom day and emancipation day, recognizes the anniversary of the
events of june 19th, 1865, when union major general gordon granger.
gordon granger led some 2000 union troops into galveston bay, texas, to read the order Announcing that the more than 250,000 enslaved black persons
in the united states, in the state, and other states in rebellion against the united States were free by executive decree.
and whereas juneteenth is the oldest known public celebration of the end of the slavery In the united states, and celebrates and commemorates both the legacies of
black liberation, endurance, and joy, and the broader legacy of american freedom.
and whereas juneteenth marks both the end of most black american enslavement and the Start of an era of great hope, resiliency, uncertainty, and continued struggle for newly
freed black persons in america. With it comes a call to reflect, remember, and never repeat the historic, dehumanizing Impacts of slavery, segregation, racial violence, voter
disenfranchisement, or other historic and persistent examples of injustice witnessed Throughout african american history.
and whereas, collectively, juneteenth reminds us all of the invaluable, inalienable Rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the precious promises of
freedom, equity and opportunity core to so much of what our nation holds dear.
and whereas, as stated by the naacp, we have recognized that the fight for true freedom Since the days of the emancipation proclamation is delayed and admittedly
incomplete, promises have been continuous and full of barriers.
we join them in declaring that freedom is a thread and a fight woven through this Nation's history and current political climate.
we join organizations like the naacp and flagstaff's own lived black experience community Project in celebrating the resiliency of black americans who continue to
thrive in spite of attempts to limit voting rights, continue in spite of continued Attempts to limit voting rights, economic advancement, and
basic civil rights historically and into the present. And whereas we take up and extend the call to action to celebrate and ensure true freedom For all, doing our part to collectively strive to close gaps of immeasurable
distance between us. Affirm the promises of the declaration of independence that all people have the right to Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, reject acts of violence, and expand
opportunities to understand and learn from our frank yet compassionate, challenging, yet Courageous conversations.
now, therefore, I, austin aslan, on behalf of mayor baker becky daggett, respectfully join Municipal leaders across the country
in spirit and solidarity and by proclamation in declaring june 19th, 2024, juneteenth, National independence day and encouraging all citizens to
honor this day as a day of reflection, cultural and public education, earnest assessment, Planning and commitment to end systemic racism and all forms of
dehumanization which threaten equity and freedom for all.
I just want to say thank you to mayor and the city for this proclamation.
the juneteenth celebration has been in this community for probably 60 years, if not more.
currently, the south side community association and its lived black experience project, Along with the coconino county african diaspora advisory council,
sponsors this yearly event. And so thank you to everyone who came out and who celebrated.
all right. We are moving down to a very special and significant recognition of police Chief dan
musselman.
thank you, mayor. Council. Indeed. It's a special recognition.
chief musselman joined the flagstaff police department in 1995 as a police officer.
he served as corporal, detective, police sergeant, police lieutenant and deputy police Chief.
in 2020, he was promoted to police chief and has served in that capacity since that time, A promotion that was well deserved and
well performed. Prior to joining the city. It's notable that chief musselman served in the coconino county sheriff's office and in The united states army reserve.
he has dedicated over 30 years to public service.
so to tell you a little bit more about our chief musselman here standing to my left, he Has certainly encouraged community engagement, as you can see by the
many pictures here on the screen, whether it's the toy drive every year it's Participating in the special olympics cocoa with the
po po or pizza with the police or coffee with the cop.
all of those fun rhyming opportunities in order to make sure that our police department Is engaging with our community on a regular basis.
he's been incredible at supporting the team's growth, encouraging training, bringing Training here locally so that we can ensure they're still getting developed even though we
might be short staffed. And focusing more on wellness to make sure that our police officers have the support that They need.
there's been a tremendous focus on retention through compensation, through providing Additional resources, by making sure that our resources are cutting
edge. Those are things that help us keep our officers here in the community.
and he has certainly had a lot of focus in that particular area.
he's established additional support for crisis calls. One of the newest items is actually getting to crisis individuals within the dispatch Center.
and as you know, the implementation of the care unit, we're now in year three.
he was instrumental in helping the community understand what a benefit this type of Alternate response model would be, and how it would help address calls with the right
types of individuals to help those in need.
the high country police academy. That's the picture at the bottom left.
it was a partnership with our northern arizona law enforcement agencies, as well as our Coconino community college has been a huge success and allowed us to train our
officers here locally. There's been a reduction in property and violent crime during his time as our police Chief.
he served on united way of northern arizona on their community investment team, so Helping identify areas of need enhanced customer
service. You may have seen the most recent notice about spider tech, a new technology That's going to allow us to better inform customers who are calling
911 as to the status of the officer and what's happening with their particular concern.
and most recently, I know you know this, but in order to also share it with the public Chief was recently recognized by northern arizona
university by an mpa public service award.
so huge accomplishments over his time as chief. And we're so very proud of him.
so again, appreciate your dedication and service. And we have a short video if we might be able to share that with you.
it's with sincere. Gratitude and great appreciation that we recognize chief dan musselman For his 28 years of service to the
flagstaff community. He has served as police chief since the year 2020, leaving a very positive and profound Impact upon our police department.
dan, I want to thank you for your amazing leadership and the positive mark that you have Left upon flagstaff community.
now let's hear from a few others. Hi, chief musselman, I just want to say thank you for your years of service to the Flagstaff community.
we're going to miss you, but I know that you'll still be involved.
and I look forward to seeing you around town. Hey, dan, just a short note from your fire chief.
that we're all very excited about your retirement. We're very grateful for your service and grateful for having the opportunity to work with You and wish you the very best in
retirement. Thank you so much, chief musselman.
I just wanted to express my sincere joy in having had the opportunity to work with you Over these many, many years.
congratulations on your retirement and happy retirement.
thank you for everything that you've done for flagstaff, 1980. All right, chief, well, you did it 28 years.
now, this is your leadership team and all your servants and sport managers here.
hebrews, all the way through the ranks just started as in the detention facility over 30 Years ago.
he rose to the rank of chief of police. You worked at the patrol division?
you were in the criminal investigations. You got into as a sergeant. You were internal affairs sergeant, select enforcement sergeant.
you were a lieutenant. You were one lieutenant. That was all over all of us for a long time, making sure we were doing things right.
and then as deputy chief you ran operations at support services for several years, did a Very good job, and set us up in a good direction.
2020 became our chief during coronavirus, you led us through a very difficult time in the Pandemic, and you left us in a place where we reduce
crime and victimization by over 30% over your term as chief.
so on behalf of all your employees your command staff your leadership team, like you'd be A big thank you.
everybody got to.
thank you all. That's pretty. Pretty moving. I couldn't have done it without my lovely wife behind me.
my parents, who are here today.
and the rest of city hall. The rest of my employees, they made it easy on me most days, so thank you.
my plan is to stay in flagstaff, be a better dog walker, get in a little more cycling Volunteer so you will see me around.
so thank you flagstaff for a very rewarding career.
I appreciate you all.
I didn't want him to run away.
so the city manager's office wanted to give chief musselman a memento to recognize your Service and just express our appreciation.
so we have this.
thank you. Thank you. Perhaps a photo with the chief and the the award.
and then we're at your pleasure, mayor. About a reception.
his wife too. And of course, his wife.
so yes, please, let's take a photo and then let's take a 15 minute break and everyone can Share their
congratulations and then go in the bathroom and cry. Yeah. Thank you.
mayor. Maybe if we could gather in the front, we'll grab a quick photo. Thank you.
all right. We are ready to get started again.
that was a lovely little reception. Thank you, everyone, for being here to celebrate chief musselman.
next is our council liaison reports, and I'm going to start with council member.
sweet. Thank you. Mayor. I don't have a lot. I will say that this thursday there is the water commission 4:00 here in the chambers.
council member mccarthy. Thank you. Mayor. I attended the transportation commission meeting and it was a very Short meeting.
and then I also attended the bicycle committee meeting, which was a couple of hours.
thank you. Vice mayor some upcoming meetings later this week and next week, but nothing To report right now.
council member harris. I just want to say thank you to city council members who attended the juneteenth gala on Friday night.
we had a great time and the juneteenth festival on saturday.
and so thank you all very much. And that's all for me.
council member matthews. Last week was our cdgk meeting where we started the celebration of saying goodbye to Chief musselman.
it was a nice meeting, as always. And then I missed the notes on the indigenous commission.
but I did meet with a youth group from the indigenous circle of flagstaff regarding the Future planning of the indigenous
cultural center. Just really great to to talk with and work with our younger activists in our city and see All their enthusiasm and their
great ideas and just I'm anxious to see them participate in whatever level and that Future location.
all right. Nothing from me. So we will move on to number seven.
liquor license, public hearings. Welcome up.
but first, I will open the public hearing, and then we will have the staff presentation.
okay. Good afternoon, mayor, vice mayor and council.
my name is nick almendarez. I'm a sergeant with the flagstaff police department. I'm before you today to present a new liquor license application.
this is for a series nine s liquor store sampling license for cinders liquors at 5620 North highway 89 here in flagstaff,
arizona. The application was filed by jacob polk, who is the agent and controlling Person.
in my investigation, I discovered no derogatory records on the applicant and no current Or historical liquor violations on the business.
I found evidence the applicant had taken the mandatory liquor license training, and a Representative for the business was invited to be here today.
thank you. Council. Do you have any questions?
all right. Do we have any public comment? No, mayor, we do not.
all right. Thank you. I'm going to close the public hearing and council.
I will entertain a motion to either forward with a recommendation for approval or forward With a recommendation for
denial. Mayor, I'd like to move that we forward this application to the state with a Recommendation of approval.
is there a second? I'll second. Just.
yes. Council member mccarthy, just for clarification, there's two applications.
I presume the motion was for both of them. Is that true? No.
no, because we only got a presentation on the first one.
I apologize.
any further discussion. All those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed?
all right. Next. Oh, I will open the public hearing and we will have the staff presentation.
okay. Once again, I am nick armendariz, a sergeant with the flagstaff police department.
before you today to present a new liquor license application. This is for a series 12 restaurant liquor license for route 66, located at 2620 north Seas boulevard here in flagstaff, arizona.
the application was filed by jamie thousand, who is the agent and controlling person.
judy hill, who is the premise manager, and hayden kennel, who is the premise manager.
my investigation, I discovered no derogatory record on the applicant and no current or Historical liquor violations on the business.
I found evidence the applicants had taken the mandatory liquor license training, and a Representative for the business was invited here today.
thank you. Council. Do you have any questions?
do we have any public comment? No, mayor. All right. I'm closing the public hearing.
and I will entertain a motion.
mayor. I move that we forward the application to the state with a recommendation for Approval.
thank you. Is there a second? I'll second any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you very much.
all right. We're moving down to the consent agenda. All matters under consent agenda are considered to be routine.
unless a member of the city council expresses a desire at this meeting to remove an item From the consent agenda for discussion, it will be enacted by one
motion approving the recommendations listed on the agenda. Unless otherwise indicated.
expenditures approved by council are budgeted items council.
are there any items that you would like to pull from the consent agenda?
all right. Do you have. Okay. I will entertain a motion to adopt.
mayor, I move that we approve the consent agenda, which is items eight a through h.
thank you. Is there a second? I'll second. Any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye aye. Any opposed?
all right, moving down to item number nine, routine items, a consideration and adoption Of resolution number 202422.
and ordinance number 2024-16.
all right. We've do we have an additional.
we have nothing additional on this, right? Correct. Mayor. Okay, so we are looking to read the ordinance for the final time.
council mayor. Oh, looks like you're going to adopt the resolution first.
yes we are. Does anyone have any questions before I entertain a motion?
did you want to motion? Make a motion? Yes, please.
please go ahead. I move, we adopt resolution number 202422.
second. Any discussion? All those in favor?
aye, aye. All right. How about a motion to read ordinance number 2024-16 by title only for the Final time.
so moved. Second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye aye aye aye. Any opposed? City clerk.
an ordinance of the city council of the city of flagstaff amending the flagstaff city Code title two.
boards and commissions. Chapter 2-03. Parks and recreation commission two.
dash 13. Tourism commission two dash 14 beautification and public art commission and two Dash 20 open spaces commission and title three business regulations.
chapter 3-06 hospitality industry tax revenues by adopting by reference that certain Document entitled 2024 amendments to chapters
two, dash 032, dash 13 two dash 14, two dash 20 and 3-06 of the city code related to the Parks and recreation commission, tourism
commission, beautification and public art commission, open spaces commission and Hospitality industry tax revenues providing for repeal of conflicting ordinances.
severability, clerical corrections and establishing an effective date.
sure. Thank you. All right. How about a motion to adopt?
I move, we adopt ordinance number 2024-16.
I second. Any discussion? All those in favor?
aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right.
moving down to be consideration and approval of ratification of contract.
this is a cooperative purchase contract with motorola solutions.
good evening, mayor, vice mayor and council. My name is kristen decker. I'm a special services supervisor for the flagstaff police department.
I'm representing the department here today. And our request for the purchase of these motorola portable radios.
yes. Okay. Thank you.
there you go. Thank you. So a little bit about the history of our portable radios.
in 2010, we had a $4.7 million bond that was approved for public safety communication Radio system.
in that bond, motorola was awarded that contract, and our city first partnered with any You as a part of that purchase in
2020. Asu joined when we did an upgrade to that particular system.
last year, the flagstaff police department worked to replace all our mobile radios.
so those are the radios that go in our police vehicles.
at the same time, we also replaced 20 of our handheld radios.
over time. These radios are the particular radios we are proposing to replace.
our were last purchased in 2012. And so they are aging, and we are seeing an increase in the failure of these radios, Which is one of the reasons that we're
requesting to begin the process of replacing them bits at a time.
so one of the reasons that we are interested in motorola in particular is because of our History with them.
one of the benefits of using motorola radios is we already have in place the battery Chargers, the
microphones the batteries themselves, and they're interchangeable with the different Models of the motorola radios.
we have a 20 year history with that particular brand.
and plus to the motorola radios that we are currently using and that we are proposing to Purchase is that they have encryption,
which keeps I'm trying to think of the right word.
information that should not be made public and secure and safe.
we do have good longevity with the motorola radios. And let's see.
as I mentioned before, we are planning for the future and eventual replacement of all These radios.
but at this particular point in time, we are just requesting for the purchase of 20.
the contract specifications are. We are requesting $183,072.68 for this purchase.
it will get us 20 portable radios. They're motorola apex 8000.
18 of these will go directly to our regular patrol officers, and two will go to our bomb Team.
they are special radios that are considered intrinsically safe.
we went to procurement for this particular request.
they found a state contract already in place and requested.
we requested a ratification of that particular contract.
we are we learned of the availability of arpa funding which is dedicated for Communication equipment.
we learned that this funds needed to be utilized by the end of this current fiscal year, Which is the reason that we are here and asking for this ratification.
the soonest time that we could get on the agenda for this request was this evening.
do you all have any questions? Council questions.
thank you. We do have public comment. I don't see any online comment, but we do have a comment card.
kelly cullen.
hi, I'm kelly cullen, 1602 northeast street, flagstaff, arizona.
I'm here to express my concern over the city of flagstaff's ongoing anti local business Practices in regards to this purchase.
anti local business because this is a sole source purchase and does not allow any local Bids.
it's a straightforward issue that needs to be resolved.
over the last two years, this council has approved nearly $5 million in related purchases Without going through a competitive
bid. Now.
the justification that the city is using for this purchase is that.
you need specific. You need this specific brand radio.
they want because they want to use old existing batteries with these brand new $9,000 Radios.
now just keep in mind that motorola provides a five year lifespan with these radios, and They consider them outdated.
the additional justification that they have. The additional justification is that they have encryption, which is not which.
I want to point out that all major manufacturers provide the identical p25 encryption.
the reasoning also mentions some unknown survey that's not attached to the package for Review.
now the city purchasing justification is that the items are on the arizona state Contract.
please be aware that all major radio brands are also listed on the arizona state Contract.
there's nothing special. In my opinion, this is not this is insufficient reasoning to bypass local vendors from This opportunity.
one comparison that I want to point out is that the surrounding county.
the surrounding tribal lands to surrounding cities page, camp verde, winslow, williams.
they all use a legitimate competitive bid process when purchasing their communication Equipment, and they use other manufacturers.
and generally at a substantial savings.
this purchase needs to be tabled until it is processed through an acceptable bidding Method.
win or lose, I'm only looking for the opportunity to bid.
that's the only reason I'm here. Give me a chance to bid. Now, if there's some kind of good guy deal that for some reason gets to reason, gets to Sidestep, sidestep the process,
then please just state. This as your stated as such for your justification.
thank you. Thank you, mr. Cullen.
could staff come back up here? So that we could ask a couple of questions.
would you mind going back to the slide where you talked about?
y you went through the state procurement.
process versus doing our own.
partially because it was already in place. Partially because of the immediacy of the need to make this purchase before the end of The fiscal year.
and the need to do the end of the fiscal year is because of the arpa funds.
do the arpa funds pay the entire cost of the radios?
I believe so, yes. Okay. Do we have plans to purchase additional radios?
not in the immediate future, but yes, within the next few years.
and what type of procurement process do we expect to use for that?
mayor council emily markle, purchasing manager.
with given amount of time of about three years, we can actually do a formal solicitation To ensure that we can.
get any unit that we need that my department is utilizing.
so if we will go out for a formal solicitation that will offer everyone the ability to Bid and or propose, what we were doing right now
was handling the standardization of our equipment, of equipment that our staff required For safety.
okay. Thank you. Council member matthews. Then council member. Harris.
thank you. Mayor. When did we become aware that we needed to use this arpa funds?
before the end of our fiscal year, which is the end of this month or july, right?
end of june? Yes. I believe it was about a month ago.
our chief at that moment decided that he needed to put the request in immediately to Utilize the funds, and the other reason we did it so quickly was.
like all technology, the price increased monthly, and so rather than paying a larger sum, We wanted to get down right away and
then also take care of it in the fiscal year. And I have rick tadder.
well, I have one more question. So don't go away because you might be able to answer it.
how long does it. Can I clarify a statement that's being made, please?
rick tadder. Management service director. Hello, mayor, vice mayor and city council.
it's been referred that this is arpa funds. Related. It is not.
just as clarity is really a budget expiration decision we're talking about, we did not Carry over to funds.
the budget is in the current year, and we're trying to spend that within the budget year That they had the funds available.
if we don't do it now, we will have to carry it over. We have to rebudget it in 2025, perhaps 2026 fiscal year.
so it was a timing to get it spent with the budget like we do for council initiatives. We want to get it done and spent by june 30th.
that was the reason we wanted to get this completed.
so just declaring. So in pure procurement.
what's the current time frame to put something out for bid and get it back?
let's do this. The timeline of a formal solicitation usually takes about three weeks In-house to develop, and then we have to do the legal amount of time of
open to close on a platform of about a month.
usually it takes a little bit longer, especially with something as complicated as radios.
so that's why we will often utilize an already set up agency contract, and we call it a Cooperative I piggyback.
there. He did the hard work and the footwork to set this up for us to go through the Formal solicitation process.
so what you're looking at is anywhere from.
a month and a half to about three months. And then there's the process of two weeks till we get to council to get approval.
thank you. I just I'm disappointed that our timing and decision making, because our local Businesses
do struggle a lot with all the stuff that we put in front of them, from rate increases to Minimum wage to other taxes,
and then to miss out because of our timing process are whatever is impacting that is just Disappointing.
I understand that this is something that now all of a sudden we've got to spend in three Weeks, two weeks it just doesn't feel like a really great way to do
business. I just wanted to say that out loud.
council member harris, then council member mccarthy.
okay, so I'm not sure who gets to answer this question, but whoever just jumped right in There.
so let me see if I understand this correctly.
so the state. Did a procurement process, is that correct?
you are correct. Okay. In that procurement process, is it open to any and every business in the state?
everybody okay. All right. So I'm just trying to think this through.
so if every business in the state can go through this process.
then they could if they won the bid.
I guess that's where if they get the bid, then they could they could purchase.
I mean, they could go, they could come back to the city and say, we got the bid, and if You need anything, you come to us.
is that correct? Yeah. Okay. Do they have to do that for every state agency that has a need?
no. Okay.
so I am going to make a suggestion and I'm just throwing it out there.
we have a business organization. Heidi hansen.
are you in here somewhere? Do we offer assistance or any support to our businesses to help them be more competitive Around the state?
I don't know if that's an appropriate question or not. City attorney, you can tell me if I'm asking.
I'm fine with that question. I personally reach out to businesses and recommend them when there are open solicitations That I think that they would be great at proposing
at, or if I'm able to do it where I can just ask for quotes because it's under 100,000, Because that's our cap.
then I go out and I go to personal businesses. When I am asked for something, I'm not to ask them exactly why or that my my question is To how.
how do I legally and fair procure equipment and or services for departments?
okay. And so what I did was a legal fair procurement of going through a cooperative to Get them exactly what I was being asked of.
I do agree with you. I would like to go out and do a formal solicitation, because that is one thing I've been Working on with every department is a formal solicitation to allow us to work with all
vendors around us and give them the opportunity. Okay, so it kind of makes sense to me.
it's that if the state is continuing to do this process, then it might be to our Advantage to encourage our businesses, if possible, to reach out
to, to reach out so that they can be more competitive and not just depend on us.
but they could they could maybe get business from around the state. Correct? Okay.
all right. I just wanted I just I'm just curious as to how that kind of works, being Transparent and open with businesses.
that's what I do. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Council member mccarthy.
it seems like we had the same discussion maybe two years ago.
one year ago. Okay. So do you have any reflections on that conversation a year ago and how that interplays With what's happening tonight and
procurement 101.
oh, I'm not afforded an opinion. My reflections is I'm just moving forward to make sure that my police department has the Equipment they're requesting and what they need.
I'm trying to do it in a fair process. And if would you like another reflection on maybe procurement?
it it probably makes sense to approve this tonight, but I guess I'm just thinking about For next year.
I guess one thing we do is encourage local businesses to apply on this state wide Procurement.
and, you know. I don't know if there's anything else.
yeah, it looks like their procurement agency contract should be expiring soon, which Means they'll be going out again for a formal solicitation.
just like we will probably be going out for a formal solicitation to see about getting Products through local and or.
how do I put this national? Purveyors. Thank you.
mayor. Patrick has his hand up.
thank you, mayor. I guess I'm used to teams meetings. Always put my hand up. I should have put a comment I see in the comment.
my apologies. Honorable mayor, vice mayor and council patrick brown, your purchasing director, just to Respond to what council member mccarthy was just
asking about, there was reflection back at that time that we needed to develop some Specifications of what
radios and standardizations we needed. We didn't anticipate the need this soon in the process, and in order to accommodate the Pd's needs for these radios
and spending, the funds utilizing the cooperative contract was the most expedient way to Do so.
otherwise, they would not have been expended through a formal procurement process.
but we always want to strive to do our own solicitation and have our own contracts in Place, as they have our terms and conditions specific to the
city. I hope that helps. Thank you, city manager.
thank you mayor. Thank you for the discussion. A little bit hazy on this, but I do recall one previous discussion at the dais on this Topic.
also involved services, repair services with certifications involved.
and it wasn't an outright purchase of radios. That's about as much as I could remember on it, but I don't know that it all of the Previous discussions have been directly on point with the purchase of radios as we have in
front of us tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Council member matthews.
I'm just curious and maybe rick can answer this. Or maybe you can answer this on the state procurement for a business to go through them.
are businesses that go through the state and apply their.
do they typically be a size that could handle a statewide ask?
or is it just random? They can either apply through them or wait and see if a city just sends out an rfp Individually.
like, what does that mean? Am I bothering you? No, no, no, I'm okay.
going through my words. So what it would go through is a request for statement of qualification.
this is what allows us to determine what is a company and or vendor that has all the Qualifications needed, including licensing and ability to sell
within arizona. So this is a bit of a larger project process and a rfp, which is a request for proposals.
that's usually more for the idea of how to move a project forward. So what they would be doing was a request for statement of qualifications.
and part of that, it has a area of what you will be graded upon and what the evaluators Will be reviewing.
and some of it is can you go to sell for a grand scale, or are you able to provide the Exact product that we're asking for at a small
scale? It all depends on the exact formal solicitation that's being done for us.
we tend to do the are you able to provide to us in a legal, fair manner with licensing That we're looking for in the product that we're what that we need and require?
so I think you answered my question. So for a local company to be.
in the states bucket. They really have to be able to service on a statewide level.
so that's not always the case. I knew I'd get rick up there.
I know, right, that was good game.
thank you. No, I don't think it's always a case that they have to surface everybody and Everything.
they just have to respond to what the state is requesting for the services or goods.
and then, you know, they have a decision whether somebody from lake havasu calls and Says, I want these products.
they say, well, I can't do that right now. I don't have the capacity. They can say no to others.
but there's language in the state, as we do for our contracts, that says you will allow Other municipalities, counties and so forth to utilize the
same bid and response as you provided us. And that just allows people to directly go to those cooperative type agreements.
they don't have to. Agree to them all and do everything, but they have the option and they don't have to Accept the bid when it's reached out to them.
thank you. Yes. And hopefully we won't have this discussion again.
right. Vice mayor.
thank you. I'm not sure I have a question here or not. I did want to make a comment. I share the public comment.
there's frustration. Mr. Cullen. I do remember you being a part of this conversation last time we had it, and I'm very disappointed that you're feeling the same frustrations and coming to us
with the same concerns. I find myself weighing the.
perhaps conflicting values of helping a local business.
is buying local versus the expediency and the safety need of our police department.
immediately, I would like a little bit more clarity on how urgent, on a scale of 1 to 10, It is that we get these radios now.
because I would like to weigh getting them, getting our local businesses into a Competitive process over getting these
radios now. If we can afford to do that from a public safety perspective, maybe we can't.
the other thing I just wanted to say real quickly is I'm not sure what we can do about This.
I'm not questioning the numbers, but there's a little bit of sticker shock to buying 20 Radios for $183,000.
I just want to throw that out there. No one said that. But that's that's incredible to me.
good evening. I'm allison hughes, support services manager for the flagstaff police Department.
so the urgency specifically is because we do have funding now to support this purchase That will expire at the end of this
month. That is the highest level. So it's not a public safety issue.
it's a financial expediency. It's both it's hand in hand.
we do have several radios that are like we've mentioned that are failing.
they're old. We purchased them in 2012 or later. We're making due we're doing a really good job of getting our our patrol staff up and Fully staffed.
and part of that includes having radios at our academy and everybody having one in hand.
and so that they are familiar with the tools that they are going to use for the job.
and so it's it's twofold. We do have radios that are failing. We do have radios that are older, where parts are hard to come by and hard to replace.
and we do not have a large supply of these radios on hand in case one does fail.
it may not be an emergency today, but tomorrow we could have three radios go down, and I Not have a single one to give to officers on the road.
so that, to me is an emergency. So having these in hand immediately is a big deal for us and making sure we have enough On hand in case something does happen.
and part of the reason we went with motorola specifically is because that is what our Officers have.
it's what they've been using. It's what they're trained on. And not even our officers only also our fire and public works.
other city entities also use these radios. So if there were emergency to happen and something a radio needs to be picked up and be Utilized everybody is trained and knows how to use these motorola
specific radios the same. And they have the encryption and the security that is required for for our needs.
thank you so much for your response. I'm not frustrated with any of you.
specifically I think I know where you're coming from. I still find myself frustrated with the position that we're in.
I think. I think I might echo and share council member mccarthy's perspective, that it may make Sense for us to move forward with this tonight, but I really don't want to see mr..
colin come up here again with these same frustrations.
I. What's going to make a comment? I'm forgetting what it was, so I'll leave it there for now.
maybe it'll come back to me.
city manager and then council. Vice mayor. City manager.
council member mccarthy. I just wanted to add that I do understand and recognize that even if we did a competitive Bid locally, the the local bidder might not win the the
bid. And I think kelly recognizes that, too. He just wants the opportunity to participate in the bid.
I just wanted to clarify that. City manager.
thank you mayor. Thank you council for the discussion.
vice mayor, for your comments just now. I thought that was a nice summary of of things.
you know we have had this discussion and I think almost always when we're in the realm of Fire or police, there's an
element of urgency attributed to it. And there's also an element of the inequity of the product that's being sought.
we have. Not real similar discussions, but somewhat parallel discussions when we're Talking about acquisition of vehicles.
and that's been in front of the dais recently as well. Specific to radios, we have heard the comments.
I will take accountability here and assure council that in the future, we will do Everything possible to make sure that
acquisition of radios like this will be brought through a competitive process initiated By the city and not not at the benefit of tapping onto a statewide
contract just so that we can allow local businesses to bid.
and again, as the vice mayor just noted, there are no guarantees. We do not have a local preference criteria, but we want our local businesses to have an Opportunity.
and I think that's what's been requested. And that's what we will certainly adhere to.
we apologize to you that it's coming to you in this late fashion.
I don't know what else I can add, but that assurance. Thank you. Thank you.
and to clarify something that you just said not only do we not have a local preference, But it is not allowed under arizona law.
okay. Council member mccarthy and then council member harris. Thank you. Mayor. So it sounds like there's two basic issues tonight.
one is when do we need these radios? And the other is, well, this money, we only have it right now.
so my question is, if this isn't hooked to a grant or something, can't we just roll this Money over into the next year?
I see mr. Tatter is getting up.
in a short while. You'll be approving the budget for next fiscal year, so we don't have Time to adjust next year's budget.
so we'd have to roll it over to fiscal year 26. So it would be the next budget process where we take it from fund balance and make it Available for other needs in the following year.
it's a timing issue, or we've got to find what we're going to cut out of the budget and Delay, possibly from other things that have been requested through the long process
we went through in providing a balanced budget for you. So that's how it works.
so the money that's in this year, it just disappears if we don't spend it right?
it doesn't disappear. It rolls into your fund balance and becomes available for for Expenditures in next year's budget.
and we talk about those every february. Well, right.
it's just not a manager. You have any comments on this? It would seem if the money's there and it's not going to evaporate, that we could move it Three weeks so we don't have time to make an amendment.
it's a matter of authorization to spend budget expenditures.
we don't have that line item in our budget next fiscal year. It wasn't rolled over, carried over like the council initiative funds we spend in the Current year.
if it's not spent, it rolls into the fund balance and is available for next fiscal year.
I'm kind of new on council, so I don't know all this stuff. That's all right. There's just timing issues.
council member harris. I was going to say that the cities are.
checkbook doesn't work the same way. My checkbook works. So. So I get it.
the other thing that I was going to say specifically to city manager is that I don't Think any of us up here are blaming you, so we don't want you taking responsibility.
wait, let me finish. We don't want you, you know, sitting there, taking responsibility for for this stuff Happens all the time.
and we are not purposely we're not purposely trying to cut our local businesses out of Anything.
you know, we all know how difficult it is for them in this time.
and so we understand that. So we're going to do our best to make sure that we give them as much opportunity as Possible to compete.
and then it's going to be up to them. I would encourage them encourage them to compete everywhere, not just in flagstaff, Because there's no way that we can
support every business in flagstaff to make sure that they don't lose any, any revenue.
and so I'm just. So anyway, but thank you very much anyway.
okay. So I will entertain a motion to
ratify the cooperative purchase contract.
and authorize the city manager to execute all necessary documents.
who would like to make that motion? So moved.
and a second. I'll second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye.
any opposed? No. All right.
moving down to item number c. Consideration and approval of preliminary plat.
mayor, I'm sorry to interrupt. Could I just get a clarification on that last vote?
did I have an a in there? Yes. Thank you.
oh. Was there anything more you were saying? Okay, cool. Hello.
thank you. Council. My name is wesley with city flagstaff planning department.
I'm here to present the preliminary plat for ghost tree two down in pine canyon.
so just a little overview. It's from tlc, pc land investors, llc for a preliminary plat approval for ghost tree two.
it's 3201 south clubhouse, circle b, a single family subdivision with 12 single family Home lots on 7.87 acres in the r1 zone.
staff approved the plat on april 8th, 2024, and the planning and zoning commission Recommended approval on may 8th.
here's a little vicinity map for you. So it's right towards the entrance in the clubhouse area. This has been an area that was reserved on the initial pine canyon plat for future Development.
a little bit of a background. The final plat for ghost tree two, if anyone was here a few years ago, was originally Approved january 3rd, 2023.
was unable to be properly recorded. There was a lot of scrivener's errors, so this plat is to clean up some minor errors.
so it's 7.87 acres r1 zone 12 single family lots resource protection.
so here's a little overview of the plat. This should be attached to the staff agenda.
I'll leave it here for a second to look at it. I can come back if you have any questions.
so there's three findings that has to meet in order to be approved. So the one is that it meets all of our zoning code regulations.
it does meet the r1 zone standards. Minimum density in the r1 zone is two units an acre lot design.
it meets the minimum lot size, width and depth requirements. And then due to the unique topography of the site, individual building envelopes are on Each site as opposed to the classic setbacks in the zone.
so here's just a little overview of the resource protection standards. You can see for trees. They're required to save 50%.
they've saved 50.47. So they hit that steep slopes. There is a little bit of a deficiency, I believe, in the 17% to 24.99%.
so that's going to be a 1.5% deficiency. Our zoning code allows the director to approve up to a 5% reduction of the 70%, and the Commission to approve up to 10%.
we let the commission make that decision for this one. So the applicants are requesting a reduction of the required slope.
so 70 and 85, as I just said, reductions up to 5% may be approved by the planning Director.
10% planning and zoning commission was approved by them with the recommendation on may 8th.
so also the item for resource protection. It identifies four items that need to be addressed for the commission to grant the Reduction.
the why they're described cannot be retained. There are no reasonable methods to implement the resource protection proposal for Mitigation, and that mitigation proposals should not create future fire problems and have
approved by the pfd. So here's a little overview of the resource protection plan.
it's got the building envelopes on there. And then kind of shows the different slopes and the trees to be removed.
as you can see, there's just right here. And I can come back to this if you need me to.
here's a little zoom in a little closer. This is an overlay of the originally approved building envelopes and then the new Building envelopes in the green.
so there was some topography sites once they started kind of getting on the site and Developing it, instead of doing side loaded garages, they wanted to do front loaded
garages. So that changed some of the some of the driveway envelopes.
so the other relevant standards of the code is that the historic and cultural resources. This was approved by our historic preservation officer.
parks. Open space. Pedestrian and bicycle facilities. Pine canyon development contains ten foot wide paved foots through foot trail throughout The development.
finding number two is that it meets the engineering standards. Public systems analysis was conducted.
compliance was confirmed with the civil engineering plans after the preliminary plat. Approval, access and traffic.
traffic impact analysis is prepared and approved for the entire pine canyon community, it Says.
a private street with a cul de sac track day, which provides direct access to the rest of The lots.
water and wastewater. There will be a new water line for the subdivision as well as a sewer line.
storm water analysis has been completed for pine canyon. Applicant proposes to add several basins within the subdivision and just outside of the Subdivision on the golf course.
finding three is that it meets the subdivision standards. Title 11. So the preliminary plat procedures and application requirements, minimum Required subdivision improvements just identified on the previous slides and the
subdivision standards and regulations, lot design, street design, easement and block.
so it meets these. So here I am telling you the planning and zoning commission recommendation that city Council, based on the findings of the recommendation and the planning zoning commission
seven zero, approves the preliminary plat with the following conditions and that is Granted the 1.5% reduction from the preservation requirement of 70%.
I'm here if you have any questions. The applicant is also here virtually if you'd like to ask them some questions.
thank you, vice mayor. Yeah. Wesley, can you reassure me real quickly where the arizona trail is in relation to This development?
and if it's if it kind of gets close to here, if there's any consideration for that.
so I believe it's just the foot trail. I don't know as much on the arizona trail for this.
I can pull it up on our gis if you want me to, just to make sure. Yeah, I'd like to just be sure that.
there are other questions while that is being looked up.
we'll see if. We'll see if I can multitask. We'll try it out. Council member mccarthy.
well, it's kind of a related question. This is a gated community, is that correct?
yes. No. There is a gate. It's open during the day. Yes. So my question is, are the foot trails open or there's.
are they closed off to the public or how do you.
you see where I'm going? That's a great question. I believe the foot's trail will need to be open to the public at all times.
I don't know that for a fact. I'm not sure if the applicants on here and they know more about the access in the Community itself.
I signed in once and got blocked. So she's going to grab her surface and we'll pull it up for you.
and it looks like lindsay is on the.
is in the meeting as well. Lindsay, do you want to speak to the access?
is she trying? Oh.
cool. Here we go. Mayor of council. Wesley, can you all hear me?
yes. Yes. Perfect. Lynn.
for your record. Lindsey chubby with law firm of gammage and burnham.
all. Phoenix, arizona. So thank you so much, vice mayor. Great question. So first question.
no, there is no negative impact to the arizona trail with this development.
again, as wesley said, there was an approved final plat that was approved in january of 2023.
it we had some some scrivener's errors as well as some, some lot modifications that we Had to make.
and therefore that is why we're going back through the plat process.
so no negative impact the arizona trail. You'll be seeing that when we talk about the the gwp right of way and future development In this corridor.
as for the the development, it is open during the day. So it is a gated community, but it's open during the day.
if anyone comes, they are welcome to come in and those foot trails are open to the Public.
so as a follow up, the foot's trails are open just at the same hours that the main gate Is open to the public.
in other words, they'd be closed at night. Mayor. Councilman mccarthy.
correct. They are closed at night, but they are. Frankly, there are a lot of citizens of flagstaff and residents, part time residents, but Some full time residents who do live in pine canyon and
are taxpayers and voters, and they will have access to the to the foot trails 24 hours a Day.
and just to clarify, the foot trail that this is near is actually outside of the pine Canyon development.
there's only one portion of the foot trail that goes through, and it's up in this corner Over here.
thank you very much, wesley. Thank you lindsey. Thank you lindsey.
additional questions. Comments. Vice mayor.
thank you. Yeah. I suppose the important thing is that someone who's not a member of that Community can get can navigate the foot system from one end to the
other using public trails after hours.
I think that would make a lot of sense to make that available. And also, just for context, I know the arizona trail in this region where john wesley Powell development is happening, there's talk that it's going to
be moved at some point. So my question is not necessarily is the arizona trail going through there now, but is it A viable candidate for where the arizona trail might pass through once
those changes are made? This is an important conversation.
the arizona trail is 800 miles of connected right of way that the public can use any time Of day.
and it it comes through flagstaff and it needs to continue to come through flagstaff into Perpetuity.
so just want to make sure maybe the developer can reassure me that whatever that Conversation looks like as it develops, that you guys are open
to responsible stewardship of the arizona trail resource if it happens to fall in your Lap.
yeah. Mayor. Vice mayor. First to address the foot's trail. As wesley said, the majority of the foot trail is outside of the gates.
so, absolutely, we're committed to the foot trail, and anything outside of the gates is Open absolutely.
to the public 24 hours a day as far as the arizona trail.
and we can have further conversations. This this flat tract, 23 of the original pine canyon does not have a negative.
and plotting this in these additional 12 lots and 12 homes has no impact on the future of The arizona trail.
and mayor, vice mayor and members of council. Rest assured, we're having very productive, great conversations with members of your Trails community, your parks department and the private developers, the private,
large landowners, as we like to call them in the gwp corridor. About. You have a commitment that stl 405 right now, where is the current placement will Accommodate the arizona trail?
we think it's a very important part of future development. And if there is any relocation, it's done.
so out of respect for the topography, the trail. And really frankly, I feel like a teenager lean in to to the natural beauty and what we Have going on there.
so any any relocation of the trail is only to for the natural beauty and for the natural Topography in the area
as opposed to having it maybe go through a more, you know, sub traditional subdivision.
so, mayor, vice mayor, council, you have a commitment at least from all of my clients in The area that that the arizona trail is something that's very important to us and in
future. Development and we are working with staff on that.
thank you lindsay. Council member mccarthy.
so when the trail is closed during certain hours.
how is that done? Is there a does someone go over and close the gate, or is it just have A sign that don't go in here after a certain time, or how is it handled?
mayor. Council member mccarthy. We have a gate. So there's a there's there's a physical presence at the entrance of pine Canyon, and there's just a, you know, a an arm.
I, I'm used to being in front of you. So I'm making hand motions that you cannot see, but just an arm that goes up and down, Like if you were entering any type of parking area.
but that's just to pine canyon. The foot trail that is on the exterior of pine canyon is open to the public.
it's open to the public 24 over seven. Is that correct? Through the mayor.
councilman mccarthy. Correct. The foot trail that is exterior to the pine canyon development is open to the public.
I just like to point out there's also a public parking area off of lone tree, that it's My understanding that that area is a place where the public
can go park and then utilize the foots in this area.
that would mean that even if that gate is closed, that you can still park somewhere and Be able to access that trail.
I would think theoretically 24 over seven, you should have access to that trail.
and the trail doesn't actually go through where the gate house is.
there's an area further to the east where it goes through the subdivision and kind of by Kind of a waterway, a
low area where kind of their facilities building is that that's where that foot's is.
so that that is accessible to the public at all times.
mayor. Vice mayor, council member. Mccarthy. Alex is correct.
there is a parking area that's open to the public. Alex and wesley, thank you. Thank you both very much for your additional contributions.
so on this map that's on the screen right now, could you point out the parcels that are Being considered tonight?
be this location right here, mr. Mccarthy. Right where?
parcel. Sorry. If I click on it it does that. So it's this outlined right here.
you can see it even has the address points for the lots right now.
right, I understand, thank you. Of course. Council member harris.
okay. So the the the trail is it's near the subdivision, right?
yes. Council member. And so the trail is public land, right?
anybody can walk up and down that trail. Correct? Correct.
so if I'm walking down the trail, when am I on private property and not public property?
and how do I know that? So I think the trail is going to go along the sidewalk on gwp in that area.
for most of the time, that area we were looking at in the upper corner, this would be the Area where you start to go onto the pine canyon development.
it's kind of hard to see, but it's this brown line which goes along the sidewalk right Here.
so you won't be off the trail on private development until you're into that one corner, Until you win, until you're up in this corner to connect you over
to the fisher point trail. Okay. I'm not going to be walking the trail, but I'm just curious.
any other questions?
all right. I don't see any public comment.
so. Yes.
please. So, mayor, I move that we approve.
item nine c the preliminary plat with the conditions as approved by the planning and Zoning
commission. Thank you. Is there a second?
I'll second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye aye. Any opposed?
all right. Thank you, wesley. Thank you, mayor and council. All right. Moving down to item number ten.
consideration and adoption of resolution number 2024-30 and ordinance number 2024-19.
we will open the public hearing at this time and have presentations from staff.
good evening, mayor, council members erin young, water resources manager.
and as you just read the topic, we're here for the first read consideration of a changing Water, reclaimed water and
wastewater fees and charges. We don't have a formal presentation.
we're available for questions. We have some slides prepared just in anticipation of any questions.
and we have stantec online for technical questions. So I'll turn it back over to you, mayor.
all right. Council. Additional questions of staff or our consultant?
council member. Matthews. Thank you. Mayor. Karen since we're not seeing the exact.
plan. In the past, we've talked about that 5% after five years.
that's just on there because the the model uses that. But we're not doing that.
so is that in the written document that we'll be finalizing at some point that that Information is dropped off of there.
mayor council member. Matthews. The red line to the code is in your packet, and all the red lines are for five years.
the formal adoption reads, I believe five year time period.
not beyond that. And the stantec technical reports you know, state that we're in a five year adoption Plan, even though
the financial model is made, assumptions beyond that time.
and then shannon said he explained to us in one of your presentations that shannon, you You
review every three years, water, wastewater.
you talked about throwing stormwater in the mix just so we could have a better overview of Where we are.
and I don't know, besides just saying this publicly, but you know, I'm still not real Comfortable with the increases that we're
going. You guys did a great job of reducing and making some concessions, but it's still a Huge impact to our community.
I'd like some kind of. General understanding or agreement.
if the rest of the council agrees with me that in three years I'd like to see some Progress reports, I know that inflation, costs of construction
different you know, impacts to our successes.
but I'd really like to stay transparent. And I hear from the community a lot that we make these, you know, significant changes not Water department, but
just in other city business. And then a lot of stuff happens, and then we don't we don't deliver.
and I think this is as a huge project or list of projects, and I think it would be great To
be able to tell the community that we're going to monitor the progress and make sure We're able to deliver, and if not, pivot and do make another just have another
discussion on, okay, were we are we ahead of schedule, were we not able to deliver, you Know, 50% of the projects or whatever and
have a discussion in three years instead of just, you know, once we sign on the dotted Line, it's just out there regardless of what happens.
and so I don't know how to just say it and agree to it or have it in writing.
carol smiling. Thank you, carol, for being on, but I just think that we owe it to our community to let Them know that we're all in agreement, that we're going to watch these things, because
there's so many outside influences that can impact these plans that are out of our Control until we get into it.
right. So I just wanted to say that out loud and see if you guys have an agreement or any Thoughts on that.
mayor council member matthews. Thank you for that. I think two things. One, I think a majority of the work that was done, I would say was done by council.
we were here listening, taking the direction. I feel council did a good job of of navigating and looking for the best outcomes results Within that.
and absolutely I say water services committed for that.
that reporting back I believe there's already functionality where that occurs.
and we can be more intentional on highlighting that through that process is the annual Budget review through the annual budget review is where we look at the both the
short long term plans, the cost of service that we pin down to commit to do every three Years.
that cost of service study is not a rate increase. It's not a rate study. The cost of service is again, just that metric where we look at how much revenue is being Collected and who's it coming from, and making sure that we're staying on course, that
that's proportional across the classes. That making sure that we don't deviate from that and that.
so I also feel when that study is completed, that would be something that brought forth To council as an informational item saying, we did the check.
this is where we're right on point. This is where we're deviating. But it doesn't always trigger a rate increase.
it's there's more factors than just the cost of service. So I think that's two things the cost of service.
and then that annual budget annual review of our financials and how we can point that out Of what's, again, what are the things being accomplished?
what are the things being carried forward if they're delayed? That's our that's our mechanism for that communication.
and we're happy to to highlight and emphasize that. No problem. Sure.
mayor. Council member. Matthews. If I could add to that, we're already discussing keeping clean water.
flagstaff going for the purpose of communicating rate study related messaging.
so that's another way I'm excited to use to help the public understand the investment That they're making in their public
infrastructure. City manager.
thank you, mayor and council, and thank you for the question. While shannon jones spoke to operational costs and other deliverables on this or updates, I'd like to speak to the
capital projects which comprise a large part of this rate increase.
council can be assured that there will be regular updates at the dais for the council and The community to hear as to how we're doing on these contracts.
as I was listening to the question, we've already started this discussion internally, but I was reminded of how
diligent and transparent we have been on the.
bond for 41 expenditures. Spruce wash improvements. I know it's apples to oranges.
we're talking about flood mitigation and a whole different set of circumstances.
nevertheless, council's hearing regular updates.
the most recent one, you know, just occurred. Those same updates are going out to the community.
and I think it has done a lot in terms of letting our citizens, ratepayers, taxpayers Know.
what the deliverables are and when when they can be expected to be finished.
we have such a large list of capital projects tied to this rate increase.
we owe it to our citizens to report as to the status of those projects.
and you have my assurance that that's going to happen. It will not be within the annual budget.
we're talking about something much more frequent than that. I'm thinking quarterly reports to the council.
thank you. Council member matthews. Thank you. Mayor. City manager just.
and maybe it's just me, but we have received great updates.
but I'm such a visual that I get caught up in that. Oh, great that we finished that project.
but how does it compare to what the timeline that we promised. And there's there is a difference there.
and saying we've completed this project, this project. And then I get I get lost in.
yeah, but did we not finish three other projects because I don't have it in front of me And I see editors standing up back there.
he was a minute ago. Hi, ed. Same with storm water.
you know, our residents haven't really felt the effects of the rate increase that we Approved last year.
and I'd like to see on both those stormwater and water rates, not just the projects, the Capital improvement projects that we
complete, but how does it compare to what we thought we were going to complete?
yet. We'll provide that and we'll provide how we're comparing with how with the estimated Cost as well.
you'll it'll be the timeline, it'll be the cost, it'll be all of that.
and so yes, very good question. And thank you. Thank you.
additional questions. Comments? All right.
I am going to take public comment.
first up, michelle james.
that caught me by surprise. I'm just trying to find my comments.
that was kind of quick. Sorry. Wait, I just started to look for it.
are frustrating to.
oh. Got it. Thank you. I'm michelle james. I'm executive director of friends of flagstaff.
future of f cubed would like to express our thanks to the water services staff for taking The time to discuss with us the details and decision making behind the
proposed water rate increases over the last few months. Staff input has assisted us in our understanding of how the rate study worked and the Factors considered, and that determine the proposed rate increases, as well as why rate
increases are needed now, and how these rate changes would impact the flagstaff community Through december of 2029.
last month, council responded to concerns expressed by many in the community regarding The significant five year increases in single family residential rates by reducing the
overall percentage of funded cip projects and increasing debt f cubed in the community Greatly appreciates this.
however, as we stated at our may 21st council work session, f cube continues to be Concerned about the ability of lower and fixed income households to absorb the increases
in water and wastewater rates during the next five years. These community members would be significantly impacted by past decisions, resulting in Delays to maintain to to maintaining existing facilities and preparing for future
growth. F cube hopes that shifting the burden of rising water rates away from low income Residents will be considered comprehensively in the next water rate study.
that said, we believe the city can address some equity issues now.
water equity occurs when all communities have access to clean, safe, affordable drinking Water and wastewater services.
specifically, we would like to see the city holistically address assistance, Affordability and collection practices by starting to implement the suggestions outlined
in the publication, advancing racial equity across the water sector a tool kit for Utilities.
this was written by the us water alliance. F cube believes that the those most impacted by the rate changes should be included in a Citizens committee formed by the end of 2024, at the latest, to determine how
to both generate emergency funding for those who cannot pay the increased water bills, And to modify collection practices and minimize shut offs for those with financial
hardships. We also encourage the city to look into ways that the flagstaff can community Can assist our neighbors.
thank you. Thank you.
joe galli.
thank you, your honor. Members of council joe galli, 101 west route 66, in flagstaff.
I am the senior advisor of the greater flagstaff chamber of commerce, and I'm here on Behalf of our 1000 plus members.
I want to first take a minute or a couple seconds. Excuse me to thank the water services director, mr.
shannon jones, and his staff, aaron and others who have engaged the business community Throughout this process.
it's been a long process going back to january of 2023, and we have been a part of the Conversation the entire way that has brought us to this
moment in time. I want to also thank mayor and council for listening to the business community and our Concerns about the initially proposed rate hikes of
15% per year on water and sewer for the first five years, and having revised that now as It sits before you down to ten, you know,
we have 1600 commercial meters in this town. And so we're a large participant in paying into the utility for both water and sewer.
and we understand that the city has very large needs, very large capital projects related To these, to utilities, water and sewer.
and I want to share with you that the business community needs certainty and we rely on Certainty.
so I think we'll be happy when this is behind us, as we'll know what our rates are moving Forward.
we also need a reliable delivery for economic growth in this community of water and sewer Services.
we're here today, unfortunately, because we've not done the projects that we were Supposed to do.
and now that we are taking this money in form of rate hike in the next five years, it's Encouraging.
having had several meetings with several city staff and others and just listening to the City manager a moment ago to know that we're going to get these projects done.
and we hope that, of course, the water services department will follow through.
I do want to share, you know, in one of our meetings, our business community members Spoke.
they were very concerned about the upcoming increases. And they said, you know, we're kind of in a situation where it's death by a thousand Cuts.
it's this it's storm water, it's minimum wage and other things that you have heard.
I want you to know that this will be very impactful to our community, not just to our Residents, but our residents will also pay this at the
local retail and in other places, too, as well.
having said all that, I am grateful for a very judicious process, and I'm grateful for Your consideration that you have accepted or planned to accept here a
lower fee increase over the next five years, which will add, of course, by doing that, You extending out the debt on the capital
projects is something that we encouraged you to consider. So thank you.
and I'll take any questions, your honor. Thank you. Thank you.
I don't see any. Thank you. Steven poor.
good evening. Mayor. Vice mayor. Council.
one thing I've been here, I've presented to you and presented to stantec an opportunity To fund 100% of the cip projects.
not once I talk against them. I'm just pointing out the need for you to have a little bit more sharper pen.
and look at this from a standpoint of what the inflation is.
your consultant admitted she uses long term inflation forecasts from the fed, and she got Burnt one time.
so she's kind of shy about using it again. But nobody can predict the pandemic.
and I've suggested that you continually use long term numbers. And one thing I'll do at this point in time is I went and and carol, as has said that she Back on the may 21st meeting that they're going to
provide an update on the website. There's no updates on the financials, on the execution, on the water financials that go From 75 to 90%.
so please, city, we're almost a month down the road. Provide that to your citizens.
it's not there. Number two, going forward, if you want to do some adjustments and if our our big Disagreement here is trying to predict inflation, which nobody can do
100%. But we look to the market and we look to long term trends. And if you look at the long term trends, some of the some of the indexes that were Brought to you by the department by stantec, use them, okay, use them
and come back in two years. If that's down, reduce the ongoing rate going forward.
that's simple. Use your rates. These are your indexes.
the long term index for one of them is is -1.7 for nine years.
and they're getting six. They're asking for a 6% increase. And it's only on 25% of the expenses.
but there's a big variance. So why don't we hold them to okay let's make this an inflation adjustment.
if it doesn't happen they're way off the mark on these numbers. And I've formed you about this.
we don't need to go this high. And I'm not taking away from any cip.
it's just inflation. They ain't going to happen. Or if it happens you can adjust it down the road given where you are today.
thank you for your consideration. I'll answer any questions if you had any.
thank you, mr. Porter. I don't see any. Thank you.
all right. Any additional questions from council? I'm going to close the public hearing.
you have a question? Council member harris.
and I'm not sure who. So staff, jump in here. Is it possible for us to go back in two years if we find that things are looking Different than we anticipated?
could we? And what kind of problem does that create? Or does it create an issue?
mayor, councilors, the process we're going through is, is a policy process.
so I would say absolutely, it is within the council's authority to bring that back.
it's written into the ordinances the same way we're asking you to change them now you Would have the ability to change those in the future.
all right, I'm closing the public hearing, and thoughts or emotion.
council member mccarthy. Well, just a quick follow up.
miss harris's comment. Yes, we can do that any time we want, but every time we go through this process, it costs A lot of money and a lot of effort to, in other words, to go through
all these calculations and hire a consultant and everything. That's a cost that we might want to consider before we say we're going to do it or not do It.
all right. Additional thoughts or emotion? Council member matthews.
thank you. Mayor. Just to add on to that the discussion and the the comments that mr.
wood was bringing up was about using a guesstimate on inflation numbers which are never Guaranteed.
they always change. They're never what we project them to be. Or rarely, maybe they have been.
but I think in our three years if that's what's been off the map, if the
inflation rates that we use for the next three years are way off the mark.
when we do the review, it's not just the the cip that's been produced, but if we're Collecting more money
than we need based on those inflation rates, I think that is it may cost the city a few Extra dollars, but nothing compared to what it's costing our community.
so I'll be in favor in that three years to also look at that inflation rate and make an Adjustment there.
hopefully we don't need to go through nine months of analytics that we can just say, Well, we don't need a debt coverage ratio of 7 to 1%
because we were collecting all this because the rate of inflation may not be that high, Hopefully.
so I would just in three years. I think that's a good discussion.
council member harris. Yeah. I don't ever want to waste the city's money.
and I don't think we ever waste money when we try to save money.
and so I would I would ask us to really, really think about how we do this.
if we if we do find out that we've got more.
I'm in agreement with you, council member matthews, is that if we do find out that we Have more and that the inflation rates have changed
because, like mr. Porter said, nobody could have anticipated that pandemic.
we in a million years, none of us would have thought that that would have happened, at Least not in our lifetime.
so it could change. And if it does, I want us to be open to looking at that, because folks, folks in our Community are hurting and every penny counts.
and I'll say this. Boys and girls club is using the murdock center this summer because they couldn't afford To rent any other space, and we could use that space that so that
parents who did not have a place for their kids to go during the summer, the ones that Are under age that can't stay by themselves, they could help
them out and provide a space for them to go. So, you know, when this is just not affecting some of us, this is affecting all of us.
and so we need to think about that. You know, I didn't have that issue when my son was that age because as I keep saying, I Was very privileged at that point in time.
but there are a whole bunch of folks that are not. And so we need to think about that.
and this is going to hurt people.
council member sweet. Thank you. I did want to echo what my colleagues have stated, and I know that staff is Hearing us loud and clear.
and I last meeting we had with you, I mentioned that I would like to look into ways that We can help community members that may not be able to pay
their full bill, or maybe having a hiccup in life. And I hope that we continue to do that and look into the equity issue that was brought Up.
and when appropriate, I'd like to make a motion. Please do.
I move to read resolution number 2024-30 by title only.
is there a second? Second? Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye aye aye. Any opposed?
city clerk. A resolution of the flagstaff city council declaring as a public record that certain Document filed with the city clerk and entitled water services rates, code changes.
thank you. Is there a motion for number three?
I moved to read ordinance number 2024-19 by title only for the first time.
is there a second? Second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye aye aye. Any opposed?
city clerk, an ordinance of the city council of the city of flagstaff.
amending the flagstaff city code, title three, business regulations, section three dash.
ten dash 001-0008 license fees and title seven health and sanitation.
chapter 7-02 wastewater regulations and chapter 7-03 water regulations.
by adopting by reference that certain document entitled water services rates, code Changes providing for penalties, repeal of conflicting ordinances, severability and
establishing an effective date. Thank you. All right. Moving down to be.
mr. Frankel, I have a question. Do I hold the public hearing before I convene the special meeting, or do I open the Public hearing and then convene the special meeting?
looks like we're going to hold the public hearing first. All right, so I am opening the public hearing, and I believe we have a presentation from Staff.
thank you. Thank you. Stacey saltzburg much appreciated.
good evening. Mayor, vice mayor and council brandy to the city's finance director.
my presentation tonight will cover agenda ten b, 11 a and 12 a, and are all related to The adoption of the city's fiscal
year 20 2425 budget and property taxes.
so here is the timeline for the city's budget adoption. Two weeks ago we had tentative budget adoption on june 4th.
tonight, we first have our public hearing both on budget and tax levy.
then we go into a special meeting where we will do the final budget adoption via Resolution, followed by the first read of the property tax ordinance
setting the property tax rates. And then on june, on july 2nd, we will have the second reading and the adoption of the Property tax ordinance.
the city's fiscal year 20 2425 budget is $579 million,
$432,772 of which is a $39.7
million increase over the prior year, or a 7.4% increase.
much of this increase is related to capital projects, especially in our transportation tax Fund, as well as our general obligation bond funded capital projects,
specifically proposition 441 and proposition 442.
the city's budget is made up of five fund types.
we have the general fund, special revenue funds, debt service funds, capital project Funds, and enterprise funds.
the general fund portion of the budget is approximately 113.6 million, or 20% of the Budget.
our special revenue funds make up 172.8 million, or 30% of the budget.
special revenue funds include our highway user revenue fund, our transportation tax.
pak flag rbb funds our library.
debt service funds make up $19.8 million, or 3% of the budget.
these funds include our general obligation bond, debt service, as well as our pension Bond funds.
we also have our capital project funds for both our general obligation bonds and our non General obligation bond projects.
it makes up $66.4 million or 11% of the budget.
and lastly, we have our enterprise funds. This includes drinking water, wastewater, reclaimed water, stormwater, our solid waste Fund, sustainability and environmental management fund,
the the flagstaff housing authority, as well as the airport.
those funds make up $206.8 million of the budget, or 36%.
included in the city's budget is the following. Proposed property taxes based on council direction this spring for a flat levy, the City's primary for the city's primary property
tax, the total proposed city primary property tax levy is just over $7.2 million.
this levy includes new construction revenue of $71,670, and on average, assessed values on Existing
properties increased approximately 4.3%.
so, based on a flat levy, the proposed tax rate will be 0.6363 per $100 of assessed Value, which is a
rate decrease over the prior year rate of 0.6634.
this lobby is $752,293, below the maximum allowed levy by state statutes and primary Property
taxes are used, are unrestricted funds, and are included in the city's general fund.
the total proposed secondary property tax levy is a flat rate, which is at approximately $9.1 million, at a
rate of 0.8000 per $100 of assessed value.
this is approximately a 5.3% increase in the tax levy per state statutes.
this levy cannot exceed our estimated general obligation debt service payments for the Fiscal year 20 2425.
here's a slide that provides a five year history on the city's property tax rates.
and as you can see, the city's overall property tax rates have decreased year over year For the last five years.
for fiscal year 2425, the maximum allowable rate is 0.7025 per $100 of
assessed valuation. And the city's proposed rate, which also again equals the flat levy rate, is 0.6363.
the city's property. Assessed values have increased over the last year over prior year.
the city's limited net assessed valuation increased 5.3% over the prior year, which Includes new construction of approximately
$11.3 million, and our full cash value evaluation increased 23.5%.
the county assessor's office determines these values. These values are based on evaluations done in late 2022.
for the tax year 2024, per state statute, limited assessed value is used to calculate Both our primary and our secondary
tax taxes, and limited assessed valuation is value is limited to a maximum of a 5% Increase per year for most real
property. So how do these rates impact our communities, property taxes.
so for example, we have a residential for a property with assessed valuation of $100,000.
assuming no increase in assessed valuation from the prior year, they would see an overall Small decrease of $2 and 6 or
$0.71. For commercial property with an assessed value of approximately $4 million, again Assuming no
increase in assessed valuation. Again, each property is unique and the assessors value determines what that assessed Valuation changes year over year.
but again, it can never go up more than 5%.
over the prior, they would actually see a decrease of $191.05.
so that concludes my presentation and I'm available for any questions.
thank you. Brandi council questions.
all right. I will take public council member matthews.
thank you. Mayor. So this slide that you were just showing us.
shows if the assessed values don't change.
how much? For commercial and how much for residential has assessed values on average changed.
so on on average, right. Because every property is different but on existing properties, approximately 4.3% Increase.
yes. Is that for residential? It's for all properties.
so I'm curious. Why didn't you show that?
I do not know, but I do have the numbers for a 5% what the maximum would be.
and the reason why I ask that is because that's what is meaningful to our residents, is Not like.
well, our values aren't changing. And so, look, we're we're not paying as much in taxes.
but the reality is our values are changing a lot. And that increase that number is significant.
it's not a negative.
please go ahead. Well brandy did you have I do I have for.
so for example I didn't put it on the slide but I try to have numbers in my hip pocket When I can.
so for example, if this property went up the 5% maximum allowed, their taxes would Increase
$1.27. So. So there is a small increase.
yep. And then for commercial there's actually still goes down. It's down $53.79.
that's information that I was looking for. Okay. Thank you. Yep I will make that note.
to provide those both. Council member mccarthy did you have a comment? I do. So.
we're not calculating the number of taxes.
let me put it this way. What we're doing in the budget is determining a tax levy, and the tax levy is going down In
proportion. No, the tax levy stays the same. So the tax rate is going down by the same amount that this valuation is going up.
so we are not increasing taxes except for new construction.
correct me if I'm wrong. Yes. New construction would be in addition to the levy.
I think the other thing to note. So for primary property tax we're keeping a flat levy for secondary property tax we are Keeping a flat rate so that based
on what we approved with the voters.
oh okay. So the primary taxes are not going up, but the secondary is going up.
and those secondary taxes are for things that the voters have approved.
that is correct. Yep. Specifically proposition 442 and 441.
with those recent debt issuances.
all right. No additional questions. And I don't see any public comment.
correct. All right. So I am going to close the public hearing and convene the special meeting so that we
can consider resolution number 2024-27.
questions or comments or a motion.
here. I'd like to move that. We read resolution number 2024-27 by title only.
is there a second? I'll second any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed city clerk.
a resolution of the flagstaff city council adopting the budget for the city of flagstaff For fiscal year 2024, dash 2025, and establishing an effective date.
all right. Do I have a motion to adopt? So move. And a second second.
any discussion? All those in favor? Aye aye aye.
any opposed? All right. I am now reconvening our regular meeting.
regular agenda item 12 a.
consideration and adoption of ordinance number 2024-17, an ordinance levying upon the Assessed
valuation of the property within the city of flagstaff.
I always regret starting to read this when it's this long subject to taxation, a certain Sum upon each
$100 of valuation sufficient to raise the amount estimated to be required in the annual Budget, less the amount estimated to be
received from other sources of revenue. Providing funds for various bond redemptions for the purpose of paying interest upon Bonded indebtedness and providing funds for general municipal
expenses, all for the fiscal year ending the 30th day of june 2025.
so I are there any questions or comments?
are at council member mccarthy. Yes. Real quickly. Since we're keeping the primary tax levy level adjusted for inflation, we're actually Reducing the primary taxes.
all right. Is there a motion to read ordinance number 2024-17.
mayor, I'd like to move that. We read ordinance number 2024-17 by title.
title only for the first time. Thank you. Is there a second?
second. Thank you. Any discussion? All those in favor?
aye, aye. Any opposed? All right. City clerk, an ordinance of the city council of the city of flagstaff levying Upon the assessed valuation of the property within the city of flagstaff, arizona,
subject to taxation, a certain sum upon each $100 of valuation sufficient to raise the Amount estimated to be required in the annual budget, less
the amount estimated to be received from other sources of revenue. Providing funds for various bond redemptions for the purposes of paying interest upon Bonded indebtedness and providing funds for general municipal expenses, all for
the fiscal year ending the 30th day of june 2025.
well said. All right. Moving down to item b, consideration and approval of ground lease agreement Between the city of flagstaff and housing solutions of northern
arizona. Welcome, justina.
thank you.
mayor council justine acosta, your assistant housing director.
today, I'm in front of you for the consideration and approval of a ground lease between The city of flagstaff and housing solutions of northern arizona for the development of
affordable rental housing. The site that we're referencing is located at 2240 north isabel, and here's a nice Picture of it.
the original site is 0.87 of an acre. The actual building area is 29,583ft, and the community garden area that is on that site And will remain on that
site, is a little over 8000ft².
so some partial history. A lot of you may still remember a lot of this, but I wanted to kind of tackle it so that You can jog your memory.
in 2018, the city of flagstaff housing section did a procurement for the to hire a Partner to construct
affordable housing on city owned property. The successful respondent for that procurement process was brynn shaw, and they proposed A scattered site project for us.
unfortunately, in 2019, brynn shaw had to withdraw and the project came to a close before Even starting due to
insufficient funding. And unfortunately, they also had to give back the low income housing tax credit that they Were awarded to the state, which was something that had never happened
before. At least not for brynn shaw. So it was a big bummer for them and us in 2021.
brynn shaw donated plans for the ysabel parcel to housing solutions of northern arizona.
as housing solutions was interested in taking a look to see if they could do rental Housing on that parcel and if it would be feasible for them in 2022.
you council approved a lease option with housing solutions for this parcel in order to Enable housing solutions to apply to the arizona department of
housing for funding. Housing solutions was able to attain that funding or a commitment of that funding in 2023.
and it's referenced as home arp dollars.
so the details of the project include 11 units, all of which would be three bedrooms.
they are two story buildings plus a leasing office.
the agreement with the arizona department. The funding agreement with the arizona department of housing has a 15 year compliance Period, under which the the units are required to
serve households that are under 30% ami.
victims of domestic violence and or households experiencing homelessness.
here is a the original site plan for that parcel.
this will be amended as part of the coming process by housing solutions of northern Arizona.
so you can see. If you can see my cursor, here is the community garden area.
there's the first building. Here we have parking.
the leasing office right here to the right, and then the other buildings right here on Top.
we threw in some pictures of elevations that were submitted by brant shaw.
again, these might change. I have a team behind me that will answer a lot of questions if you have them.
but these are the pictures we had, so we threw them in here. So here's that. Here's the south building.
the leasing office.
and then most importantly, the terms of the ground lease. So the ground lease that is for your consideration today is a 99 year term.
housing solutions would pay the city of flagstaff an annual fee of $100 annually.
improvements are to be built, owned and operated by housing solutions.
and then after the 15 year compliance period required by the arizona department of Housing.
the units would not average 30 or would not be at 30% ami any longer, but they would Average up to 80% ami to broaden
that scope of individuals served. And of course, as part of the ground lease, we're going to preserve the community garden That's on that site.
similes requirements specific to the community gardeners that during the construction Phase, that garden will be fenced off to protect the area, the
topsoil will be preserved and housing solutions will replace any lost fruit trees.
so like I mentioned, I have a team behind me. I have housing solutions of northern arizona is here.
I have folks from sustainability available as well as folks from planning. Should you have any questions?
council. Do you have any questions before I take public comment?
council member harris. Okay, so my question is the same as it was a couple of weeks ago when we revisited when We visited another issue regarding housing solutions.
and so let me first clarify by saying that I am very well aware of the housing Regulations regarding preferential
treatment and all of that. So I get that. And so when I ask my question, I want people to understand what I'm asking.
I want to know how we're going to ensure that everyone who qualifies for this particular Housing
unit is going to be made aware of it.
does that? And I have some suggestions about how that can be done, but I want to hear What whoever is responsible is that housing solution.
so I want to hear what they have to say. Sure. Thank you. We will punt that to devonna mcglaughlin with housing solutions.
thank you, madam mayor. Council member harris, my name is davonna mclaughlin, and I have the honor of serving as The ceo of housing solutions of northern arizona.
I would first like to say that housing solutions is committed to serving households in Our community, and has embraced a culture of diversity and inclusion.
our sharon manor and jojo's place programs are required due to funder guidelines and hud Best practices to take referrals from the community's front door coordinated entry
program as a hud supported best practice. We partner with catholic charities and flagstaff shelter services to accept referrals from These programs that serve households experiencing homelessness.
the proposed project before you today will also serve households experiencing Homelessness, those who have a history of domestic violence, and households under 30% of
the area median income. Referrals for this program will likely come from the same source the front door Coordinated entry system, as we're serving a similar demographic population, as required
by our grant funder, the arizona department of housing. Our staff specifically works with the front door program to ensure that households Experiencing homelessness can access multiple housing resources through one front door.
our staff specifically attends weekly case conferencing with housing partners and front Door staff to accept referrals for our housing programs, including the proposed isabel
rental development. In the past year, sharon manor, one of our transitional housing programs, has served 87 Individuals in 39 households.
52% of individuals are native american, 36% are caucasian, and 10% are hispanic.
at jojo's place, which we opened in late january, seven households and were moving in an Additional two households.
today, I don't have their demographic information. Out of the 27 initial households we've served, 58% are caucasian, 23% are native American, 16% are hispanic, and 3% are african
american. 30% of our clients at jojo's are disabled, and our average household area Median income served as 24.57%.
the average age of residents is 56 years old. So we continue to serve those who are struggling in our community to identify housing, Serving very low income households, as mandated by
our grant funders and in partnership with those other homeless service providers that we Work with on a regular basis to accept referrals.
I'm happy to answer questions about specifics about how referrals come to us, but the Coordinated entry front door system is one that we've worked hard through partner agencies
to cultivate over the last several years, and one that is embraced by department of Housing, the continuum of care hud itself, and one that we
enjoy working with partners to ensure that households experiencing homelessness have one Access point to multiple services, including ours.
I don't know if that answered your question, council member harris. No, I think it it really doesn't.
and so I'm going to make a comment here about why I keep asking this question.
I keep asking this question because all of us know that historically, people who have Been
historically marginalized oftentimes does not access the services that are systematic Because they have heart
failings or they have distrust of those services. And what I'm trying to get at is that I want us to look at how we get into those spaces.
and the person is shaking their head in the audience because they know what I'm talking About.
how do we get into those spaces where those people are, those people where people who are Experiencing historical trauma or
whatever from systems that have historically abused them, how do we get into those spaces To get this
information to them? That's the question that I'm trying to ask.
and I guess I haven't been really real successful at articulating my concerns.
what I'm wanting to know is that, well, what I'm I shouldn't say wanting to know, but What I'm going to say is that oftentimes domestic violence
shelters a lot of women will not go to those shelters for a number of reasons.
and so I want to know, what else can we do to get information out to people who may be Experiencing that other than the
traditional ways of going to another institution?
you know, so I may if I'm a domestic violence person and I'm african american, Probability that I'm going to go to one of those other places is not very
likely, especially if I have had issues with systems before.
or so. Am I making sense? You are. But I think it's a broader discussion that just doesn't involve our agency.
so I would love to have the conversation with some of those agency partners that we work With.
we are not a homeless outreach agency.
we're not the path team that's out making sure that individuals who are unhoused in the Forest or in
unsuitable living conditions, that's not what I'm asking you to do. Okay, then that is not what I'm asking you to do.
so our hands are tied in some ways. And how we have to accept referrals given our funding partners, if we're mandated by the Department of housing, who has given us millions of dollars to build housing to
utilize referral systems like the front door, then we can certainly work with our front Door partners to make sure that that outreach is happening in a better, more equitable,
thoughtful way. But we can't have side doors to get into our programs because we will have findings from The department of housing because we're not utilizing their best
practices. So I do understand what you're saying, and I wholeheartedly support efforts to Increase outreach and to ensure that folks that have
historically been marginalized and unable to access services have the ability to get into Our programs.
but I do need to have those conversations with our partners and our funders because we Can't be putting at risk our agency because of noncompliance.
okay. So I'm going to make this last comment and then I'm going to let this go. I'm not asking you to do that.
I would never, ever ask you to put your funding at risk. Okay. And I'm very well aware of the restrictions that come along with a lot of funding.
so let me say that up front. So I'm not asking you to do that, nor would I ever ask you to do that.
but I am asking people that run certain kinds of programs to try and make sure that People who traditionally may not
access those programs, that we try and reach out to them.
and there are a number of ways that that can be done without doing the things that you're Saying.
so I'm going to stop right there and and leave it.
and I know for a fact that you have hired some people, and I'm hoping that they will help You to do the kinds of things that
I've articulated here today. Okay. Thank you. Council questions.
all right. I'm going to take public comment. So davonna.
I just finished saying I was like, this is going to be me again. Yes. All right.
hang on one second. I'm sorry. Let me find what I want to say.
eek! Awesome. All right. So thank you so much.
madam mayor and members of city council we are grateful and excited to be before you Tonight for your consideration to move forward with approval of the lease agreement
that will allow us to develop and construct 11 three bedroom apartments on the isabelle Property owned by the city of flagstaff.
the idea of this development has been a long time coming. And and justina went through the history of this property, and it requires many partners To make this possible.
we're thankful to the city's partnership in this project, as the first domino to fall for Affordable housing is often land and site control.
without access to land, it's impossible to develop housing. We're also excited to bring forward additional leverage and funding partnerships to make This possible.
development and construction takes significant financial investments, and we're thrilled To be working with the arizona department of housing to complete the environmental review
and site control requirements, to execute our grant agreement, to be able to secure the Necessary funding to construct these apartments.
as a community housing development organization, housing solutions has the experience and Expertise in affordable housing development.
we've successfully redeveloped jojo's place, utilizing funding from the department of Housing to renovate an aged motel property and create 44 studio apartments serving
households experiencing homelessness. With your help at the city of flagstaff utilizing cdbg funding and private financing, we Were able to expand and remodel our sharon manor transitional housing
program to serve 29 households at any given time. We're excited about this new opportunity to build affordable housing, which will serve Our community for 99 years, providing decent, safe and affordable housing to very low
income, formerly homeless households or victims of domestic violence. We know the need for decent, affordable housing continues to grow in our community, and We're honored to work with partners such as the city to bring these units forward.
we currently own and lease 25 scattered site permanent rental units, 24 located in Flagstaff.
we'll expand that to 26 units in the fall with the acquisition of two new condominiums in Partnership with the city, and we'll expand even more with the completion of these units,
managing an inventory of 37 affordable rentals that provide permanent affordable housing.
that's in addition to the 44 transitional housing units at jojo's place, the 29 Transitional housing units at sharon manor, and the 32 housing units we're working to open
in the fall in cottonwood. In case you were adding that up, it will be 142 total units of affordable rental housing, Benefiting low income households in our northern arizona communities.
we are grateful for this opportunity and partnership, and we thank you for your Investment in affordable housing.
and I really wanted to get down for that. Timer came off because it scared me twice. So thank you. Thank you.
giovanna. And I would just like to say to.
to you and your staff at housing solutions, as well as to all of our other partners in This work, that
I appreciate that you have taken on such a huge part of the burden of addressing
our housing crisis, and I'm glad that we can we can partner in this way, and I'm looking Forward
to many more partnerships and looking forward to all of us working together to attract Additional resources to this community so that we can get our
neighbors housed and safe and and keep our residents living in flagstaff.
any additional comments or questions? Because I will entertain a motion to approve and to authorize the city manager to execute The ground lease.
mayor, I'd like to move to approve the ground lease with housing solutions of northern Arizona, as well as authorize the city manager to execute the ground
lease. Is there a second? I'll second any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed?
all right. Thank you very much. All right. Moving down to item number c consideration and adoption of ordinance number 2024-18.
good afternoon, mayor and council. Bryce doty, real estate manager.
today, I'm here to present an ordinance proposing a property exchange related to real Property that we need for the lone tree overpass.
so here's where we're at in the world. The yellow star.
and here is the aerial. So what we're at where we're at right here is the northwest corner intersection of butler And colorado, which will become lone tree.
we previously purchased the corner lot, which which had a house on it that's since been Demolished.
and now that we have 100% design, we know exactly kind of what we need from that lot.
and so what what is highlighted here in the red or outlined in the red, that's actually Land that we do not need for the project.
and so what we do need, though, is about 223ft² on the neighboring parcel owned by the Hondells.
and so what this ordinance does is propose that instead of purchasing theirs outright, we Actually do a swap.
and we did it's not quite apples to apples, because what we have left over is not really A lot that has as much value as it used to
because it's 1000ft². So it's not really a legal lot.
and, and so really we, we valued that for more of its assemblage purposes to the adjacent Lot.
so that's why even though we're giving them more square feet the numbers are about the Same, but it ends up being that the proposed trade would be about $400, that they would
owe us to the city for the, for the exchange. And so that's really all there is to this and that.
there we go. That's a bit better idea of understanding. So we're giving them the yellow and we're receiving the green.
and that will become part of their lot. And that's that's all there is to it.
I'm happy to address any questions if you have any concerns about it council.
any questions.
all right. I will entertain a motion to read the ordinance for the first time.
mayor. I'll move to read ordinance number 2024-1 8 or 1 eight by title only for the first Time.
is there a second? I'll second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed?
you did such a great job of explaining everything. There were no questions.
perfect. Okay, so moving down to d.
oh, what did I do? I still have to read. Oh that's what we were voting on this one for me.
an ordinance of the city council of the city of flagstaff authorizing the exchange of Real property of substantially equal value with property owners gary g.
and mary eileen hundelt. Providing for severability, authority for clerical corrections and establishing an Effective date.
thank you. My apologies. Now we're moving down to d consideration and adoption of resolution number 202432.
and ordinance number 2024-20.
good afternoon, mayor and council. I believe that's me if I'm reading it correctly.
so we're here today to talk about chapter 12 of the city code.
so that is the floodplain regulations. Again, my name is ed schenck.
I'm the stormwater section director. I do want to give a thanks to other staff.
so chase mcleod, who's the project manager for floodplain management, as well as Sterling, who did a very thorough review of chapter 12.
I do not have a presentation today. This is a fairly minor revision of our chapter 12 code.
the last revision was in 2011. Since that time, fema has changed a lot of their terminology within their own federal Code and federal regulations.
and with those changes in their terminology, both fema as well as the state regulators.
so that would be the arizona department of water resources. Have reached out to the city to revise our code.
accordingly. So if you read through the red line that's in your packet, you'll see it's Very minimal.
it's really just clarifying a few terms. Changing a few terms to be up to date and changing a few things that were implicit to Explicit.
so there's no change in policy, there's no change in financial implications. There's no change to the community in terms of how we regulate.
this chapter 12 happy to take any questions. If not happy to to move this along and, and hopefully get done before recess.
thank you. Thank you. Any questions?
how about a motion to read the resolution by title only?
mayor, I move to read resolution number 2024-32 by title only.
second. Any discussion? All those in favor?
aye aye aye. Any opposed? City clerk.
a resolution of the flagstaff city council declaring as a public record that certain Document filed with the city clerk and entitled 2024 revisions to floodplain regulations.
thank you. And another motion, please.
I moved to read ordinance number 2024-20 by title only for the first time.
and a second second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed? City clerk, an ordinance of the city council of the city of flagstaff.
amending the flagstaff city code. Title 12, flood plains. Chapter 12 dash zero one floodplain regulations by adopting by reference that certain Document entitled 2024 revisions to floodplain regulations providing for penalties,
repeal of conflicting ordinances, severability and establishing an effective date.
thank you. See you on july 2nd. See you soon. Thank you.
all right. Moving down to item number e consideration and adoption of resolution number 2024-31.
all right.
oh. Sorry. Just bear with me. One moment.
yes. Good evening, mayor and council.
I'm here to talk about the woodshire on butler condominiums and a proposed amended Development agreement.
the site is located just south of east butler, near harrold ranch road.
and then to the kind of south and west is little america, just to orient where everybody Is at.
the site is zoned high density residential, and then a portion of it is highway Commercial.
and here's an aerial for context. So during the site planning for the proposed woodshire development in the summer of 20.
yeah. 2018, it was proposed that about a three quarter of an acre remnant parcel from the Planned harold harold ranch roundabout be sold to the
developer to achieve two goals to increase the number of units in the development from 40 To 50, and to provide secondary access to the development from the
roundabout. So while currently that lot line is going straight down the middle, there's Actually been a plot that creates that about just an acre parcel to
that site. The city's estimate of the property's value was about
175,000. The city posted an invitation for bid from for the sale of the property in January of 2019, with a minimum bid
requirement of $130,000, plus the legal obligation to construct a minimum of five Permanently affordable ownership units.
berkshire brookfield was the sole bidder and council accepted the offer in march of 2019.
this allowed berkshire to move forward with their site plan, which was approved in may of 2019.
then, in july of 2019, the preliminary plat development agreement and purchase contract Was approved by council.
the final plat was approved in february of 2021. Of the five required affordable ownership units, only one has been built and sold to Date.
the first affordable purchase contract was signed in 20th october of 2021 for $278,000.
however, the home builder ultimately withdrew the following year due to construction Delays and rising interest rates.
the second affordable purchase contract was signed in may of 2022 for $326,000 give or Take a little.
and in september of 2023, the first affordable condo was built and sold.
however, soon after that, we began conversations with brookfield about possibly amending The da.
so the construction process at woodshire has been greatly impacted by covid 19 due to Labor shortages, supply
issues and delivery delays. So the initial affordable sales price was about 275,000, which is about 20% less than the Market rate units of 330,000.
the affordable sales price has increased by roughly $100,000 since the initial units were Offered for sale in 2020, and are currently going for about
368,000. The latest challenge has been raising interest rates and the cost that that adds To a monthly housing payment.
the da currently restricts the housing payment to 30% of the eligible buyer's monthly Household income, with no exceptions.
housing staff members have been have seen consistent interest in the affordable units From eligible buyers since 2020, but the eligibility.
the ability of eligible buyers to enter into a successful purchase contract has been Hampered by the issues previously discussed, and there have been no more
purchase contracts since may of 2022.
so there's a lot on this slide. I'm not going to read it all. But in summary, since 2020 3rd september of 2023, city staff members have been working With brookfield on the proposals that have
included in fee options, as well as greatly reducing the price of two units to 275,000 And
then selling the other two at market rate. These were ultimately not acceptable by staff.
and then the the applicant proposed an amendment to simply increase the army of the Eligible buyers from 100%
to 125% ami.
staff agreed to this increase if the current sales price. Remains at $368,000.
for the remaining affordable units. And the applicant has agreed.
so mutually acceptable and supported by several members of the community.
the proposed change that we're presenting tonight is to section 4.3, one of the existing Development agreement.
so changing the 100% ami to 125% locking in the commitment that the remaining units be Sold
at 368,000. Also allowing a little flexibility on that 30% and allowing the housing director to Approve,
you know, a little bit more in case we do run into those issues again with the rising Interest cost.
and then also, we've built in the ability for a two year extension at the request of the Written request of the developer for two years extension of this
agreement, understanding the different challenges that are proposed.
here is just a bit of an affordability affordability analysis with the 2024 new median Income limits.
so you can see that with the new sale adjusted price, that that would likely serve Households of 3 or 4.
and if you have any questions about this specific slide, I'm going to turn to my friends In housing to address those.
and that's all we have for presentation. As I said, this is a mutually agreed upon and acceptable by both housing staff planning As well as the applicant.
and the applicant is here as well to answer additional questions.
thank you. Council questions.
I don't see any public comment. So if I will entertain a motion.
mayor. I move that we read resolution 2024 dash 31 by title only.
is there a second? I'll second. Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed?
city clerk. A resolution of the flagstaff city council authorizing the execution of the first Amendment to the development agreement between woodshire en butler, llc and the city of
flagstaff, related to the development of approximately 4.06 acres of real property, Generally located at 3001 east butler avenue and establishing
an effective date. I moved to adopt resolution 2024 dash 31.
is there a second? I'll second any discussion. All those in favor?
aye, aye. All right. Thank you, thank you.
all right. Moving down to item number or letter f consideration and adoption of Resolution number
2024-28. If I can get my papers together here.
good evening, mayor and council. Stacey saltzburg. I serve as your city clerk.
I'm actually going to talk just a little bit about the next two items. So items 12 f and 12 g, as they're both related to our upcoming november election.
so the first resolution is to officially call the special election of november 5th, 2020 For this special election will be held in conjunction
with our regular election. As it relates to our new council members and mayoral election.
there are two questions that are going to be put on that november 5th ballot.
we've had discussions here with council about these two items.
the first relates to the continuation of our existing b-b-b tax, and that will be an Extension of a through
2043. And the second question is a continuation and possible increase of our local public Transit
transaction privilege tax. And this tax relates to mountain lion and their services.
moving on to item 12 g. That resolution will approve an intergovernmental agreement with coconino county Elections.
and this is to conduct the actual election in november. This is a very typical and standard iga that we do each election cycle.
there is a financial component to this iga. The county charges us $2 per registered voter.
so we're looking at approximately $100,000 for the november election based on current Registered voter numbers.
so with that, I stand for any questions that you might have.
thank you. Stacey council questions. Vice mayor. That's the price of five radios.
let's do it. I would just like to ask some
clarifying questions for the public so that they can hear the city of flagstaff is not Equipped
to. To carry on our own election, correct?
correct. Yes, mayor. And so we have contracted with the county.
I mean forever. Forever? Yes. Thank you. And I think those were the two biggest questions I had.
I'm just thinking of emails that I've received from people in the past about elections And also mail
ballots. Mailed ballots will come to voters.
if you're on the active early voting list or if you request an early ballot.
that's correct. This election is not an all mail ballot, as was the special election last November.
yes, you are correct. There will be a this will be a polling place election in addition to those early ballots.
okay. Thank you. Questions? Comments?
I will entertain a motion for f mayor.
before. Before we take a motion. I'm sorry I failed to mention that part of the call of election is that we will begin to Solicit pro con statements for the two ballot
measures that are going to be advanced to that ballot.
the period to provide those statements ends on.
I should have this at the top of my head. I believe it is august 5th by 5 p.m.
to my office, but that will be published in the newspaper and also on our website, and a Press release will be going out for that.
so I wanted to make sure I mentioned that for the public. Yes. Thank you.
and the city doesn't charge for statements. Correct? Correct. And do you know the word limit?
that's fine. It is. If you give me just a moment, I can clarify that it's in exhibit b that I did not have Printed for me in front.
no need, no need. I think it's 300 words. Okay. Thank you.
all right, so I will entertain a motion to read resolution 24 dash 28 by title only.
I move to read resolution number 202428 by title only.
is there a second? I'll second. Any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed?
all right. City clerk. A resolution of the flagstaff city council ordering and calling a special election of the City for november 5th, 2024, in conjunction with the city's general election, to
submit two questions to the qualified electors of flagstaff with respect to the possible Continuation of the city lodging, restaurant and lounge, b-b-b tax, and the
possible increase in continuation of a local transaction privilege tax sales tax for the Purposes of public transit.
thank you. Can I get a motion to adopt? I moved to adopt resolution number 202428.
is there a second? I'll second any discussion.
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed? All right. Moving down to g.
I will entertain a motion to read resolution 2429.
mayor, I move to read resolution number 202429 by title only.
is there a second? Second? Any discussion?
all those in favor? Aye, aye. Any opposed? City clerk.
a resolution of the flagstaff city council approving an intergovernmental agreement Between coconino county and the city of flagstaff for election services for the november
5th, 2024 general election. Can I get a motion to adopt?
so moved. Is there a second?
second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye aye aye. Any opposed?
all right. Thank you. Question for stacey real quick. Sure. Stacey.
if citizens just want to I know it's going to be on the pamphlet, but if they want to do A comment pro or con.
besides, we just had recent presentations by b-b-b and, and transit.
is there any other place where they can go and see the actual numbers so they could talk Intelligently about the increase or what's being proposed?
so. Yes, we'll have the ballot questions on our website, on our election website, so that They can see the exact numbers that are being proposed in terms of
percentages associated with those taxes. And that will also be published in the newspaper.
and again, we'll have a press release that will go out that includes that.
absolutely. It should go out, if not by the end of this week, early next week. Thank you. You bet. All right so that we can stretch our legs and be super sharp.
for this presentation, I am going to call a ten minute break.
I've learned not to. All right, let's get started.
moving down to item number 13. 13 a to be specific carbon neutrality plan by annual progress report.
good evening, mayor and council. I'm jenny neiman, climate action section director.
thank you for making time on a busy night for our bi annual progress report on the carbon Neutrality plan.
tonight I'll be joined by danny pressler, our climate analyst, brady henderson, one of Our climate corps volunteer members, and nicole antonopoulos.
we do have a lengthy presentation. We'll work to be concise and move throughout this important information.
in the powerpoint, we've added one slide. It's slide 22 that was not in your packet.
we'll call it out when we get there. Just so you all know, we got some updated information.
in past biannual updates, we focused on the climate action programs that we have put in Place to achieve our carbon neutrality plan goals.
tonight's presentation is different. We're focusing on the goals themselves and the metrics that will help us get to those Goals.
this update will be the first step towards a more data informed approach, and will be the Basis for our progress reports to council moving forward.
our goal tonight is to build a foundational level of knowledge for our carbon neutrality Metrics, to help both council and the community understand our key performance
indicators and how we'll achieve them. And then over the next six years, we'll come back to council and coming back to these Metrics to illustrate our progress.
we'll start with a bit of background information. We'll go through the foundations or building blocks of the work that we've done so far.
we'll review our greenhouse gas emissions. Talk about buildings and transportation are two largest sectors.
we'll talk a little bit about beyond greenhouse gas emissions and then discuss next Steps.
for the benefit of our community listeners, we wanted to review the basics of the carbon Neutrality plan and introduce our climate action team.
the carbon neutrality plan includes 15 target areas of action.
they are visualized here. It's a lot to wrap your arms around.
we we know that it it really demonstrates the breadth of climate action.
climate action fundamentally entails change changing from our status quo to a more a more Resource efficient
future. And we really must make change across every area of our community, which is why Our work is so broad.
we have five and a half team members to support that very broad work and all of this Change.
I've briefly summarized a little bit of what our team members do.
it's an oversimplification, but the point is that because the cmp is so large, all of our Team members cover many different topics, and we rely heavily on city staff across the
organization and residents and partners across the community to take action.
and you'll hear a lot about those different actors today. About half of our work involves supporting those partners.
half of our time goes to programs that we've developed, and a third magical half goes to Writing grants.
kidding aside, I didn't put it on here, but everyone on our team is a grant writer, and We're also supported right now by six americorps members.
they serve as either vista or climate corps volunteers. These are temporary position positions.
they're made possible through a really strong partnership with niu and a strong Commitment to mentorship in our office, and they're completely critical to all of our work
and to being able to expand the capacity as we've been able to change.
and yes, I'm sorry to to you're on your second slide and I'm interrupting.
that is okay. One of those americorps members is the young man who's working also with The fire
department. Am I am I correct? No. So that is actually noah. Noah is he is with the fire department, but he works really closely with us.
so there are multiple other americorps climate corps members. I believe storm water has one as well.
and maybe beautification. So there's a couple more actually throughout the city as well.
thank you. No problem. And now I'm actually thrilled to hand this over to danny to discuss our carbon neutrality Plan goals.
good evening, mayor and council. I'm danny pressler, and my role as a climate analyst is focused on understanding and Mitigating sources of excess greenhouse gas emissions.
it's an honor to join you this evening to to report on the state of emissions in our Community.
we'll get warmed up with a quick refresher course on emission reduction goals and the Carbon neutrality plan, and focusing tonight on the two major sources of greenhouse gas
emissions building energy and transportation. The cnp establishes other metrics that are critical to achieving carbon neutrality, Including reducing emissions from our landfill and significant carbon dioxide removal
efforts. For the sake of time. We'll only touch briefly on these important topics tonight, but we will be giving more Detailed attention to them when we come back in the fall for our next presentation.
flagstaff ability to achieve carbon neutrality will depend on actions taken across Residential, commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the city itself, which owns and
maintains nearly 1,000,000ft² of buildings. There are several strategies to reduce emissions from building energy, but I like to sum These up as using cleaner energy and using it more efficiently in the using it
more efficiently bucket. Our goals include reducing energy and natural gas use and completing energy retrofits of Existing buildings on the city's part.
our goals include reducing energy by 28%, cutting natural gas use by 60%, and Retrofitting all of our existing city buildings on the residential
side, the goals are to reduce energy use by 43%, cut natural gas use by 62%, and retrofit 50% of homes, which is about
12,500 homes.
for the commercial sector, the path to carbon neutrality calls for an 11% reduction in Energy use, 20% reduction in natural gas use, and completing deep energy retrofits on
15% of commercial buildings. The cnp, determined to not rely on energy and natural gas use reduced from the industrial Sector, and this is only because these processes can be a lot harder to
decarbonize. As such, we don't have any goals established for these metrics.
for the industrial sector. However, this means that any work in energy efficiency or electrification taking on by The industrial sector is really a bonus and helps us get closer to our
carbon neutrality goals.
in the use cleaner energy bucket. Our goals are established for installing new solar systems, leveraging clean or zero Emission electricity, and converting buildings to run fully on electricity instead of
using natural gas for our city buildings. Carbon neutrality calls for expanding solar to cover 100% of our municipal energy demand.
and electrifying all of our new city buildings. For the residential sector, the goals are to increase solar system, excuse me, increase Solar capacity by ten megawatts across 2000
homes and leveraging 72% clean energy and electrifying 68% of our homes.
for the commercial sector. Clean energy goals include installing ten megawatts of new solar systems, leveraging 69% Of clean energy, and electrifying 25% of these commercial buildings.
on the industrial side, this carbon neutrality plan calls for five additional megawatts Of solar energy and 68% clean energy by 2030.
the carbon neutrality plan. Transportation strategies fall into two main buckets supporting multimodal transportation And the adoption of electric vehicles.
our path to carbon neutrality by 2030 calls for holding the number of miles traveled by Vehicles to the same levels as 2019.
by increasing residential density, reducing the distance to transit lines, and fully Funding our active transportation master plan, it will be easier for our community members
to skip the car ride to get where they need to go. Recognizing that vehicles are still an important part of our transportation system, the Carbon neutrality plan seeks to reduce emissions by having 30% of those vehicle miles
traveled from electric vehicles. The city aims to enable greater adoption of evs by providing 50 public charging stations And walking the talk by transitioning our own fleet to electric vehicles, starting with
sedans and suvs and more recently, pickup trucks. I'm going to hand the mic back to jenny now.
thank you. Danny. We're going to do a little switching back and forth. Danny is really the one that we let do the phone numbers.
I'm going to discuss how we've been laying the foundations for our carbon neutrality Work.
this is some way a brief summary of what we've been up to the last three years. It is only highlights, but you will definitely have heard some of this in cmp updates.
I think a good way to think about it is, you know, the first time you buy an electric Vehicle as a big organization, there's a lot to learn.
there's a lot to know about procurement. There's a lot of things. The 10th electric vehicle gets easier, right?
the 30th electric vehicle, it gets easier. And so we're we're in similar situations like that throughout basically all of our work Because again, the the foundational aspect here is change.
I'm going to briefly review our timeline, and I don't want to get too bogged down in it.
but again, for the benefit of the community, we really wanted to kind of do a quick look Back.
we adopted the carbon neutrality plan. Council adopted the carbon neutrality plan in june of 2021.
that is the yellow star here. The pink arrow is where we are today.
the first thing that we did, the first major action that we took was actually revising Our regional plan to make sure that our regional plan matched where we were going with the
carbon neutrality plan. It was they were in line with each other, but we really wanted to incorporate that.
and so we took a very lengthy process of talking to the public.
pretty much as soon as the carbon neutrality plan was passed. The next thing we did was revise the carbon neutrality plan.
this integrated the adaptation elements into the cmp that were prior in the 2018 climate Action and adaptation plan, and one
notable item is that due to the june adoption of the carbon neutrality plan in 2021, the First fiscal year that we actually had impacted by the carbon neutrality
plan was just last fiscal year, fiscal year from 2022 to 2023.
finally, as discussed in april, we plan to revise second time starting next year.
and so really taking back a step back from that timeline, we wanted to kind of talk about The sorts of things we've been doing in the last three years and the sorts of things that
we're going to be doing in the next four years. Quick math. We've been really busy, incredibly busy planning those seeds for change.
this includes laying foundations. It might be new programing, it might be new positions.
it's new data collection. It's building community capacity. Sometimes that starts one conversation at a time.
that goes through partnerships. It includes nudging folks to change behaviors, helping to change sort of the idea of, Could I have a heat pump in my home?
or could I take the bus to work one day a month? It also involves working with industry to change technology.
soon we'll move into code and policy changes, and we'll talk a little bit about that Later.
and these are all step one. And these really lay the seeds for emission reductions. And then step two and these are these later years that we're coming into is when we hope To start to see those emission reductions.
and so that's when you move from early adopters into more and more people adopting that New technology.
that's when you get those community changes, when you have increased community capacity For these conversations and more.
and once these changes start to take place, that's when you start to see those emission Reductions, those generally we expect to start happening around year six, which is
2027. And so one thing again, that's not on here.
our grants grants are available to support much of this work.
and we are actively pursuing that. But this is generally supported by a large mix of existing staff capacity, a bit of new Staff capacity, grant funding, etc..
I'm going to expand a bit on some of those foundational elements that I mentioned.
the first is really fundamentals. So we got one new position with the carbon neutrality plan one and a half.
really. The energy specialist is half grant funded for three years.
we started with expanding our existing programs. We said, what are we doing right now and what can we ramp up really, really quickly?
that is our rebate programs, our hepa filter distribution program, those we were doing Before the start of the adoption of the carbon neutrality plan.
we've also created new offerings to respond to community needs. One highlight is our flood proofing assistance program as well as our climate resilience Project.
and we've also found new ways to collect data. These are sort of the fundamentals that support all the rest of our work.
building community capacity involves supporting our many partners. Now you see the county helping them to also move forward because they are big players in Our community.
we also work with members of our climate advisory groups who actually advise on our Programing, and they're from the community, and we support climate action in schools
to take climate action. We also really need businesses and industry partners.
so we've been working to catalyze businesses and develop local industries.
the best example of this is the four corners carbon coalition. This coalition provides seed funding for carbon dioxide removal pilots throughout the Four corner states.
the city founded that this coalition. We're really excited. We have a local project in town that we hope will be removing Carbon dioxide from the air by the end of 2024.
we also work to support small businesses through trainings and things like our ev sales Tax rebate program that supported local ev purchases.
now, incentives involve working more directly in homes. We know that to see change, we have to change behavior.
and to change behavior you have to change the incentives. It's the only way that it really works.
the most effective way to do this is to change it through financial incentives. And so the city has provided increased assistance for home energy rebates, as well as a Bonus for low income families.
finally, code and policy changes on the timeline. This is where you really start to see those large changes, right?
the the larger scale as opposed to working house by house or vehicle by vehicle, to see That sort of policy level change.
all the projects are here are ongoing, and I know council has heard much about them.
we haven't yet completed these changes, but we are in the process of analyzing what code And policy changes need to be made to help us reach our climate goals.
and now I'm going to hand it back to danny for more numbers.
thanks, jenny. Tracking our emissions is really critical to measuring our progress on our Carbon neutrality plan, and understanding how far we still have to go.
the sustainability office monitors community wide emissions through greenhouse gas Inventories, which are done annually, and this entails gathering data from external
partners such as aps, metroplan, unisource and others, as well as city divisions Including public works, water services and the airport.
we use software through italy to calculate emissions that are associated with the data Sets that we collect, following methods that are established by global protocols.
while the methods are sound, I do want to caution that these inventories are our best Estimates based on the data that's made available to us.
for instance, we have really good data on energy excuse me, on energy use.
and we have a high level of confidence in these emission estimates. Transportation, on the other hand, is significantly more complicated to calculate.
and it relies on computer models which are getting better all the time but are still not Perfect.
so now we'll take a look here. Here we have a high level summary of flagstaff community emissions from 2019, 2021 and 2023.
the bar on the far right shows where we're striving to be by 2030.
the big picture takeaway here is that emissions have decreased only slightly from 2019 Levels by a little over 1%.
that might seem insignificant, but just to put this in perspective, that reduction is Equivalent to the electricity used by 2000 homes for a year.
within each bar, the emissions per year are broken down by source across all years.
the largest source of of emissions are from the building energy sector, followed by Transportation and then solid waste.
water and wastewater emissions make up a small sliver of 2% and a few others that are Lumped into the other category.
if we zoom back out again, there was a near 6% decline in emissions between 2019 and 2021.
this was largely because of the pandemic and the restriction on travel at that time.
however, we did see that emissions increase once we were able to move around freely Again.
to reach carbon neutrality, we'll need to further reduce emissions from 2023 levels by 37% and then offset the remaining emissions through carbon dioxide removal.
and if you're doing really quick math, that would be equal to a pandemic sized shift Every year for the next six years, which can feel pretty daunting.
there have been countless conversations on the importance and urgency of taking action on Climate change within these walls.
so tonight I just want to remind council that we are not alone in this journey.
council member matthews has a question. Quick question. Can you explain by 2030, solid waste and water and wastewater are.
you can't hardly even see the line. So how are we reducing emissions in those areas?
yes. Mayor. Council. Mayor, council member. Matthews great question and good observation.
it is a 90% reduction in solid waste that we would need to achieve that carbon neutrality Path that's outlined in the cnp.
we're going to be coming back in the fall with some really good detailed information on How we would be looking to achieve that.
so if I may hold that that follow up until a little bit later.
thank you. That's fine. Council member mccarthy.
I presume the large, large part of the reduction for solid waste would be methane Collection,
which is a very strong greenhouse gas. So if we start collecting that and, and at one point we actually collected it and Generated electricity with it,
but I don't think we're doing that anymore. But anyway, that's probably the biggest part of it.
and mayor council member mccarthy. That is a great spoiler alert for the fall.
you're spot on with that. That is, capturing the methane production at the landfill will get us a good majority of The way there.
but before you go on, though I remember being told that when they measured the methane Gas currently in our landfill, it was
almost nonexistent, that they didn't project, that there was going to be anything Significant to capture for at least.
20 years. Yeah. So it is it is not.
at the point of being regulated right now. Is is probably what the idea is that it's not significant.
there is still a lot of methane that comes out, and that is why our emissions from solid Waste are so high.
it is because of those methane emissions, but it is not at the level of being regulated Yet.
and so that is why we have not made that investment yet. There was a time around when we wrote the carbon neutrality plan, when we actually Thought that the regulations were going to be shifted so that we would have to do it
sooner rather than later. And, you know, with the carbon neutrality plan, you make projections and you think Regulations are going to change and then they don't.
right? So we know we're going to have work to do there because we are not on track right Now to have kepek ou cap our landfill
cells right now for methane. But yeah, it is not a regulated and yes, please, sam, feel free to come on up.
all right. Good evening, mayor and council. So, sam beckett, I'm serving as the solid waste director right now.
I think they said it very well here. Right now, we just don't generate enough methane to even qualify as a as a service to to Start capturing that.
we've been watching that really closely with the epa adeq. We just don't generate enough.
there's a lot of factors to that. Our elevation is a big piece of that. The location of the landfill, the design of it.
on the original cells that we developed and we're working off of now. They're unlined.
so when they do finally close and that's many years down the road, they will be required, Even though that they have a very low threshold of, of actual
production of methane. They'll be required after the closure. But again, that's many, many years down the road if we see a change in that, they're Constantly monitoring this.
if there's any sort of change or we start to see an uptick in that, then we will fall Under different regulations and we'll start monitoring that.
but as of now, we're kind of fortunate in that case that we don't see the same thing they See at lower elevations, where they have high production of methane, and they have to
monitor and capture a ton of that. So that big yellow block.
of methane gas is not really. There yet.
I'll let jenny speak to that. Sure. So the emissions are there. These emissions, we calculate not at site.
right. As danny said, this is all really modeling. But the emissions do come out.
they're just not at that level of being regulated yet. Every community has a lot of emissions from their landfill.
and so it's just based on those regulations as to when you have to cap your landfill and Capture that methane.
so we right now are not projecting to see the decrease in those emissions because we are Not projecting to cap our, our landfill
by then. So we will have, as I said, we'll have like a lot to make up for in 2030 to get Our emissions down that low without the cap
in and the capturing of emissions. Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess sam just said we didn't have any emissions really Coming out.
no, he said we don't have enough that are regulated to be captured.
yeah. There. They're they're pretty finicky on where that threshold is.
we're just under the threshold. That's where we're at. It's still produces.
you know, I'll go with the numbers they have here on the screen, but it's just not at a Level that the arizona department of environmental quality or the
epa requires us to, to capture those.
california has some great golf courses with methane gas. Yes, he's played on a couple of them.
if we were in california, we would probably already be capped and capturing council Member mccarthy.
so if we don't capture our methane at the landfill.
in 2030, we can add that same little block of yellow on top of the the column.
yep. Mayor council member mccarthy. Great observation. That would be true.
and then, if I may just want to note, council member matthews, that data that we have in Here is from solid waste.
so they are tracking the methane emissions, and we are just inputting that into the Model.
oh, actually, let me just make sure I got. All the good stuff here.
okay, so I just want to note real quick that in order to get to that 2030 goal, it would Be that 6% decline
per year. And where I was going with this is that that does feel like a lot.
however, we're not alone in that journey. For instance, aps is committed to providing 65% clean electricity by 2030, and that Change alone gets us one third of the way closer to our goal.
this is the new slide that jenny referred to. It wasn't included in your packet, but we thought it would be helpful to also look at our Community emissions by population.
so if you take all the greenhouse gas emissions in flagstaff in a given year and divide It by the population, in that same year, we've hovered around 9.3 and ten metric
tons of greenhouse gas emissions per person for the past year or five years.
and just for a little comparison, in 2020, the per capita emissions in maricopa county Was 10.5, so we are below that level.
overall, the emissions intensity for flagstaff has decreased by 3% per person from 2019 To 2023.
and really importantly, the note here is that flagstaff was able to reduce its emissions And its emission intensity while our population grew, while more extreme temperatures were
brought. And and while more extreme temperatures brought increased demand for energy.
the heat wave that we had earlier this month is a good example of this challenge. Those with air conditioning were able to cool their homes.
that increased the demand for electricity. Ac is often considered a luxury in our community, but it is quickly becoming more Necessary and prevalent.
and so we do see this as a as a challenge to our emission reduction goals.
and in the future, we'll plan to overlay our weather with our population in the same Graph.
this is the last emissions bar graph that we'll look at tonight, I promise. And I'll make it brief.
this chart just further details the source of emissions. For instance energy is subdivided into those different sectors.
but recall that I mentioned that we needed the equivalent of a 6% decrease in emissions Each year for the next six years.
and what I want to note is that in reality, we don't expect these reductions to be linear Or evenly distributed across the years.
it's more likely that we'll start seeing significant reductions in 2027, in year six of The plan.
and that's because the scale of change that the city and the community and our partners Are working at to create a more sustainable future requires capacity building at all
levels, as jenny has elaborated on and will touch on a bit more soon.
okay, so now here comes the fun part. We're going to be reporting on progress on the carbon neutrality plan goals and actions.
the progress update is organized with a high level overview of the cnp actions first.
and then we'll be dividing these into three topic areas. Looking at building energy, transportation, resilience and equity within each area will Include the work that's being undertaken and why, who the actors
are and how progress is measured, and update on the progress.
a program highlight and then a quick recap.
these progress meter bars give just a quick snapshot in time of our work across the four Priority areas of the carbon neutrality plan to help meet the goals that we discussed
earlier, the cnp details 215 opportunities for action to implement across these four Areas.
the greenish teal color shows the percent of actions that are completed. Yellow indicates actions that are in progress or ongoing, and the salmon represent Actions that have not yet been started.
in the three years since council adopted the cnp 115.
of those, 215 actions have been or are being implemented.
I'm really proud of the city and the council and the community's significant efforts Undertaken in each of these priority areas, and the remainder of this presentation will
highlight several of these actions and show how they align with the cnp goals.
first, we'll take a look at our energy priority, starting with renewable energy, then Energy efficiency and electrification.
we'll discuss project progress on city owned buildings and buildings across the community.
we'll also note where there are gaps in the data and where progress on some goals cannot Yet be quantified.
clean and renewable sources of energy are not just important for lowering emissions, they Are also good for improving public health by reducing air pollution and can help residents
save on energy bills. We're focused on supporting renewable energy generation through expansion of solar on Homes, commercial and industrial buildings and flagstaff and being a leader by installing
solar on city property as well as purchasing renewable energy.
a common theme that you're going to hear tonight is that the city isn't alone in these Efforts, and we can't do it alone, either when it comes to expanding solar.
other key actors are those who own buildings, and that includes residents, businesses and Institutions, as well as those who install solar.
our local utility providers and their regulators to track progress.
we look at our key performance indicators, or kpis, which are directly related to the Goals we just went over.
there's been significant progress made on the renewable energy front in the past three Years.
this slide has been updated from what was included in your packet based on recent data That aps provided, showing the total number of solar installations in flagstaff since
june 2021, when the cnp was adopted, the city has already met its it's goal of 100% Renewable electricity for municipal operations, and this was done
ahead of schedule because of onsite solar systems and purchasing renewable energy.
through the green power partners program with aps, we are on track to meet or exceed our Residential solar goal.
with nearly 1000 residents choosing to go solar and adding six megawatts of renewable Energy to the grid.
however, progress is lagging on the commercial and industrial side. There's only been seven new systems brought online since june 2021, adding less than one Megawatt of the 15 megawatt goal.
the northern arizona solar co-op has helped to boost these residential solar Installations.
the city partners with a nonprofit called solar united neighbors, and we team up with Coconino county and the city of sedona to bring neighbors together to learn more about
solar and then use their collective power to negotiate better prices. In the first two rounds, more than 100 flagstaff residents went solar through this Program, and they're projected to save 4.7 million on electricity
bills over the life of those solar systems. The third round of the co-op is underway, and we expanded outreach to small businesses as Well as residents.
just to recap on the renewable energy update, we've been busy setting foundations for Solar ready building codes, making it easier and less costly for residents to go solar.
and looking ahead, we're excited to expand the benefits of solar to more low income Households and encourage the business community to go solar.
I'll turn it back to jenny now to give us an update on energy efficiency and building Electrification.
thank you. Thanks, danny. Thanks, council. I'm going to follow a similar sort of structure to danny, and I'm going to talk about Building energy use.
so building energy use is how much energy we use in our buildings.
it's one of the most foundational building blocks. We have two goals here to use less energy through efficiency and to choose cleaner energy In our homes and in our buildings by
choosing electric appliances and equipment. The y here is similar to renewable energy and this is what gets us excited.
this work improves health, it reduces cost for our residents, and as a bonus, it leads to Lower emissions.
and we get there through retrofitting our buildings. We will do this with new buildings as well.
but the focus that we really have is, is retrofitting new buildings.
that's the harder work in a lot of ways. I want to be up front.
this work is difficult. It's existing buildings are people's homes.
their businesses, their where they spend time in. Right. And so our challenge is to convince them that retrofits are a good idea, that this Is going to save them money, that this is going to make their home more comfortable,
that this is going to help their health. Right. We've discussed this before.
no one has to retrofit their home. No one will be forced to retrofit their home.
and instead, we want to work with our community. We want to build trust with our community.
we want to persuade folks that retrofitting even just one appliance, replacing one Appliance, maybe it's your stove, maybe it's your water heater.
that that can be good for your health. It can be good for your monthly utility bills.
and so it's about spreading information. It's about changing incentives. It's facilitating change.
and again it goes back to building trust. The actors here are the people who control buildings.
so yes. Vice mayor. Yeah. Ginny, just briefly, maybe highlight for us some of the ways in which retrofitting Improves health.
sure. So gas stoves are the biggest thing. There's a lot of research these days on the harmful effects of essentially combusting gas In your home.
and I say this as a person who had a gas stove for most of my life and also slept next to My water heater, combusting gas, right.
really close. And and there's just a lot of research on particularly if you have existing Health challenges.
so maybe if you've got somebody with asthma in the home gas combustion in your home can Really exacerbate that.
and that is because it is methane gas. And there are a lot of pollutants that come from that process.
so that's really the number one. Other things, though, when you weatherize a home, when you insulate somebody's attic or You fill in cracks in the wall seal around windows, you're also keeping smoke out.
you're keeping allergens out. You're kind of creating a better air quality inside the home, as well as just making that Home more comfortable.
so those are the two big things that we go to when we think about health.
council member matthews said. I'm getting through my 75. Sorry, I said, I'm getting through my 75 questions.
I love it. Can you expand a little bit more on saving a resident?
I know retrofitting to make it weatherized and stuff helps.
I mean, we don't have ac at our house. We open our windows at night, close them during the day, and we wear a sweater inside.
so, you know, we're lucky in that regards, but. Gas without talking about the emissions is a cheaper utility than electricity, and aps Continues to raise
rates. And so how do we get to that? Saves a resident money.
sure. So as you mentioned we start with energy efficiency. Right. So when we talk retrofits we talk both energy efficiency and electrification.
the energy efficiency cases is pretty there. I think you mentioned that, you know, folks can save so much by just insulating their Attic.
right. And we we really do try to help folks do insulation first.
right? Do energy efficiency first. In terms of electrification, you're right.
gas by the unit of energy is cheaper. But electric appliances are much, much more efficient.
and so they are using much less energy by unit of energy.
and so a water heater folks can save, you know, the new heat pump water heaters, they are Significantly less expensive to operate
than gas because they are something like 400 times more efficient than a gas water Heater.
and so it's really because of the efficiency of those appliances.
a lot of our gas appliances are oversize for the home. They're using gas.
and we used to kind of compare it. You're you're using sort of a chainsaw when you could have a butter knife right there, Just overpowered for our homes in a lot of ways.
and so the efficiency of these new electric appliances and equipment is pretty Incredible.
from a cost savings perspective. Water heaters are sort of the heroes there because they're incredibly good at it, adding To efficiency.
same with heat pump dryers incredible efficiencies.
their furnaces are where you get a little bit more to closer to that cost comparison.
but the studies are finding that it's about equal with replacing a gas furnace with an Electric heat pump, as long as it's a cold climate heat pump, so that
it's made for our climate in terms of rates over time, electricity is much, much more Stable than natural gas rates.
natural gas rates are incredibly influenced by world events overall in economics.
all kinds of things happening across the country and over time, when you look at the Graphs, one is up and down and up and down, and one is very, very steady.
and so there's a lot there in terms of consistency and reliability for that cost Calculation for families.
of course. So too fast.
we're not at the recap yet. Sorry. Thinking about the progress.
we're starting to make a dent. As I said, this is house by house. It's sometimes conversation by conversation, but we can say we're now sponsoring far more Homes through energy rebates than we used to.
we do need better data about what retrofits are happening without city incentives.
we know that they're happening in town. And so we're going to be working with contractors to figure out how we get better data About what work they are doing.
we're also just trying to get more people to use the incentives. But there's a lot of incentives federally right now that dwarf our incentives.
and so a lot of people may just be going that route. The same goes for commercial businesses.
we are working to encourage businesses to take advantage of current incentives for energy Efficiency retrofits that are available federally.
and we're working again to find creative solutions to some data challenges that we have When we wrote the carbon neutrality plan.
this is what we need, right? These are the things we need to do. And and we've really got to figure out good ways to track it.
but we are making progress. We're working with a small cohort of businesses this spring in a green business program To work with them on energy and water savings.
so little by little, we are starting to make a dent here.
I'm really thrilled here to and I should have just gone to this slide to highlight our Home energy and weatherization rebate program.
over the last three years, we've increased funding for this program significantly.
so thank you, council. Mainly this was through federal funding that the city received, and this has helped us Support almost 300 residents in improving their homes.
I'm really proud of this chart because it reflects that. The most common retrofit that we support is attic insulation.
and again, you know, some people come and say, should I electrify or should I get solar?
and my first question is always, is your attic insulated? Right. Because you can save so much money.
and with our cold climates, this can be a huge money saver for folks.
and so the first four topics here. So attic insulation, crawl space insulation, duct sealing and air sealing which is Closing up those gaps in your homes.
those are all energy efficiency practices. And they make up the majority of our rebate dollars that are given out to folks.
finally, our cold climate heat pumps this really just tells us these are happening there In town.
they work in town, they work in flagstaff, they work with our cold climate.
and folks that we talk to are really happy with them. So just really thankful to the staff that work on this program.
in terms of distribution, we are doing all right with getting throughout flagstaff Neighborhoods.
we haven't hit everywhere, and we're working really hard to get into every neighborhood.
here I want to talk about we do provide increased incentives for households that have Lower incomes.
that makes this upfront investment easier to make before people get those cost savings Over time.
so we are working to spread our work into every neighborhood and ideally every home in Flagstaff.
council member harris. So for the.
just go back. One more slide. Sure. Yeah. The attic insulation.
yes. Okay. So so are these rebates programs, are they mostly for homeowners or what about people who Are renting.
so can they because it's not their property. Right. So.
sorry. Okay. Go ahead. Thank you. Sorry. Aaron council member harris.
a landlord can take it upon themselves. And we do have landlords that participate in the program.
we do collect that data about, you know, is this a home that you live in or is this a Home that you rent?
a tenant could do it if they got their landlords permission. Right. But they likely wouldn't put in that investment in their home for renters.
we do have a program where we try to just give them tips on what they can do, things like Window insulation.
and we know people do do that filling gaps. But these are those larger investments that a renter is unlikely to make.
but we do make sure that if it is a rented home you actually can a landlord can insulate Or participate in the rebate program for multiple
homes. If a landlord is willing to do that, we don't want to stop them. Right? We're trying to do everything we can to reduce that barrier, because what it is, Is a mixed incentive, right?
the tenant is paying the bill, but the landlord is the one making the investment or not.
right. So they don't have a ton of investment to do that. Or sorry to a ton of incentive to do that.
so we do want to remove every barrier we can. So the so the landlord has to put the money up front.
right. It's not coming from the tenant, but they get their money back through their rents Probably.
and maybe they even raise them. But whatever we hope they don't. We hope they don't. But yeah, we live in the real world.
okay. Thanks. Of course.
so just to recap really quickly on building energy use. This is tricky area.
we're asking people to make change. And so it's slow work. It's hard work. We know that we're working conversation by conversation, home by home upcoming.
we're really excited because we have the energy upgrade for healthy homes program.
this is our hud funded program. We are finally in the procurement stages.
it is it is a little bit slow working through the levels of federal government.
but we are working through procurement now. And this solves that problem about the upfront investment.
this program is only for low income homeowners or low people who rent to low income Tenants.
and what it does is instead of asking people to make that investment upfront, is the city Is actually helping facilitate that investment with those hud dollars.
and so we're able to really solve that problem of folks just don't have the upfront Investment to make these changes themselves.
we're also doing contractor outreach. We've got rebates coming through federally, and we hope soon from the state, which is Also passed through federal money but will help to encourage more of these investments.
and now I'm going to hand it over to danny. Council member mccarthy.
well, I'm going to be accused of saying this before because I have.
but it's so important. I'm going to say it. It's. Substantially more efficient to insulate a home during initial construction.
it's essentially negligible, and the increased cost of putting like 21 in the walls Instead of 19.
and incidentally, our 19.
is rated at six inches, but a two by six wall is 5.5in.
so it's really only our 15. Yes. And our 21 is rated at 5.5in.
so it really is our 21. So you're increasing your insulation by the ratio of 21 divided by 15 for essentially Nothing.
and I did that when I built my house. And my house is literally never been hot in the 20 years I've lived in it.
and almost all my neighbors have added air conditioning at substantial expense and a lot Of power generated
where I just opened the windows at night, put a fan on in one bathroom and suck the air Out, and by morning it's cold enough that I have to
wear the same kind of shirt I wear in the winter. So I would think that it would be very important that we change our codes to require Better insulation, because it's a minor cost and
amazing difference in efficiency and and emissions reduction.
thank you, thank you. I just add one more thing.
if you open your windows in the winter. In the summer. You're. Getting fresh air through the house if you don't.
a lot of houses in flagstaff have radon problems, which is radioactive gas, and it's Dangerous, so it also
solves that problem. So if you seal the house up really well, you're sealing the radon inside the house.
we highly encourage radon testing. All right, danny. All right, switching gears now, we'll look at our progress in enabling Vehicle electrification and
encouraging active transportation within the city and within our broader community.
reducing emissions from transportation is one of the hardest nuts to crack.
and that is because it depends on the choices of 75,000, some residents and countless Visitors deciding where they'll go and how they'll get there every single day
to shift commute choices. Low emission modes needs to be safe. They need to be convenient, affordable, and reliable.
electric mobility is becoming more viable for residents and fleet operators due to Industry developments, charging network expansion, market changes and incentives.
compared to gas or diesel vehicles, electric vehicles are better for the local air Quality because they don't emit any harmful pollutants as they're driven, and they're
generally cheaper to fuel and maintain, saving drivers an average of 60% on fuel costs Annually.
they're also more efficient and generate an average of 80% fewer emissions compared to Those gas or diesel vehicles.
electric bikes and electric scooters bring even greater cost savings and reduced Emissions.
the adoption of electric vehicles, e-bikes and scooters involves a lot of players, Including everyone that makes commute choices, public transportation providers, auto
manufacturers and mechanics, charging station manufacturers and mechanics, local Utilities, and many more.
next, we'll look at our key performance indicators.
we are still working with adot to quantify our progress on the ev adoption in our Community.
we do know that there are 766 evs registered in flagstaff, and this was a 57% increase From just two years ago.
based on statewide data, evs make up about 1% of vehicles currently, but they have Doubled in the past two years.
so the recent growth in the evs in our community and across the state is a promising Sign.
the city is striving to lead by example here. We adopted our ev first policy.
we've integrated 16 evs into our fleet, and we've installed charging infrastructure at 14 City facilities.
the city has also installed 18 public charging stations, putting us a little over the Third of the way to our goal of 50 public charging stations.
city council has been actively involved and kept up to date on the city's fleet Electrification efforts.
so we thought tonight we would share a little bit of the work of one of our partners. Northern arizona university has been also electrifying its fleet and now has 12 evs.
today, this makes up 4% of their vehicle fleet, which puts them right on par with the City of flagstaff.
they'll be purchasing their first electric shuttle busses. These are full size 40 footers and the fast charging to support these, thanks to a grant That they were able to secure, now is working to increase the share of evs in their
fleet by 10% annually through right sizing their fleet and replacing ice engines with evs Where viable and ice is internal combustion engine.
so to quickly recap, the city has made progress on expanding our charging network for Fleet vehicles and the community at large, and has encouraged the adoption of evs through
that ev sales tax rebate. Looking ahead, we'll continue to add charging infrastructure at city facilities, with a Focus on adding dc fast charging for our fleet vehicles.
and at the same time, adot is working to expand fast charging across the I-17 and the I-40, as well as other interstates and highways.
jenny will now report on our progress for active transportation.
all right. This is our last sort of topic area highlight to close out transportation.
and I'm going to quickly go through our active transportation work. This is an area I know that council is really familiar with.
and this is really due to the many projects going on that you hear from our amazing Colleagues across the city on.
this is the one that is driven most by those amazing partners, both within the city as Well as out.
when I refer to active transportation, I'm referring to basically any car non-car mode of Transport.
and the reason for that is because all of the other modes are just much more resource Efficient.
it's not a value judgment, it's really just it's about resources to move around town.
this includes bus walking, rolling, scootering, skateboarding, hoverboarding and more.
and the benefits are really strong. Again, we've got health benefits from reduced pollution, health benefits from just having More active travel in your day, cost savings, and a more equitable community.
transportation costs are a really big part of overall cost of living.
to increase our active transportation, we rely really on both land use and transportation Planning.
it's it's sort of that long game, right? When we think about density by increasing density within our community, especially in our Existing neighborhoods, we decrease distances between someone's home
and where, wherever they're going, by increasing transit, we decrease the distance from Their home or their work to the closest bus station.
and we also support walking and biking by implementing the active transportation master Plan.
as I mentioned before, active transportation depends heavily on our partners.
internally, this is the real heroes in engineering and community development that are Delivering these projects and making these plans.
it's also outside agencies like our friends at metro plan, mountain line and adot, as Well as now and changing our land use and changing how we travel are
also really include partnerships in our development community.
those developers that are choosing where to develop, how we increase density, as well as Finally, those residents who make choices every single day in
terms of progress. As danny said, active transportation really is that hardest nut to crack.
it depends on every resident in the city and their and their daily travel choices, and It's our job to make those travel choices easier, right?
we don't need everyone to bike. We don't need everybody to bus. We don't need everybody to walk.
but what we do want to do is make those options as accessible for as many people as Possible.
most of our trips are pretty short trips. They're under three miles. And so how can we help people make that choice and how can we make that choice easier?
transportation and land use are really connected. As you all know, when somebody lives downtown or in south side, they have a pretty easy Trip to go to nyu or to go to the post office, or to go to the main library.
when somebody lives around fourth street, they have a pretty easy trip to a lot of schools And maybe to the grocery store.
and so it's really about density and infrastructure together to make those trips easier Here, I'm really excited to highlight the work of our transportation
engineering team to improve safety on butler avenue. I know you all know a lot about these programs, this progress, so I'm not going to Belabor it too much, but it's a really good combination of grants, partnerships, council
policy decisions to lower the speed limit. And all those things come together to a really cool example of what we can do.
butler can be the example of what we do across the city, which I know is a lot of apple Bites.
right? But little by little, we will fill those gaps.
we'll make those sort of safe corridors better, and we'll make that sort of trip choice Easier.
to recap our transportation work, we're working to lay foundations, implementing the Active transportation plan.
we've got right sizing of roads going on in multiple places across the city.
there's a lot of work coming up with our large grant funding projects delivered by our Capital team and an upcoming transportation master plan, which will be led again by
engineering and planning. And as I've said before, this is a hard area, but the the goals are really broad and they Align really significantly with other goals for our community
council. I'm now going to briefly go beyond buildings and transportation.
as we round out this presentation, I'm going to talk about the work that we do that goes Beyond mitigation.
that hasn't been a focus tonight, but it is often a focus of our work and of our updates To you.
this work generally centers on our two other goals for the carbon neutrality plan that is Resilience and equity.
building resilience and and building community equity have strong outcomes beyond Greenhouse gas emissions.
this work improves community health. It creates more resilient neighborhoods.
it reduces costs for our residents. Sometimes the most fun work that we do and it's really critical to all of our work.
we have to ensure that as we take climate action, that we're including everybody in that Climate action, and also that we're not decreasing our resilience as we go, that we're not
less prepared as we go. And so this work is really hard to measure, which is why it wasn't necessarily earlier in The conversation.
it's hard to know where a one on one conversation goes. And that is really the work of our team a lot of times, is having these one on one Conversations about flooding in their neighborhood and what they can do, or why they might
think of a different, you know, way to go about their daily day. So we we try to really critically address this throughout all of our work.
but I wanted to highlight a couple things here really quickly with equity.
before I get started, what's really important is that we try to incorporate equity into All of our existing programs.
so we incorporate equity into our flood prevention program. We incorporate equity into our rebate program.
but we do have things where equity stands alone. That's our equity at climate advisory group.
it's our sustained engagement because we know we need a really broad and diverse Coalition to move this forward.
it's also things like hepa filtration, hepa filter distribution, which you'll hear about In a second.
in terms of upcoming work, we've got wood stove rebates that we want to, you know, work More with people because the health benefits are so, so strong, not only for
inside your home, but also for your neighbors, as well as fully launching our retrofit Program.
and now I'm excited to hand it over to brady henderson for the best part.
good evening, mayor and council. My name is brady henderson, and I'm honored to be representing the climate section of the Sustainability as an americorps volunteer.
so to provide some background, I just graduated with my bachelor's degree in public Health from nyu, and I'll be pursuing my master's in public health this fall.
my role here at the sustainability office is to help coordinate the free hepa program and The flood prevention grant program.
so I am here today to provide an update on the free hepa air purifier program, a grant Funded initiative that aims to reduce the effects of wildfire
smoke seen by flagstaff city residents. And has done, yes, and has done so for the past four years.
since its inception, this program has been supported by multiple small grants, enabling Us to distribute 200 hepa filters to our residents since 2021.
so wildfire smoke poses a major health risk when when exposed to it for long periods of Time, and these effects can be exacerbated for certain populations.
because of this, our targeted outreach has focused on these most popular on those most Vulnerable to these air quality issues, specifically residents with
preexisting conditions, households with four or more members members over 65 and under 15 Years of age, and finally households with incomes under the area median
income. So, with more background of the overarching goals of this program, I'd like to Bring your attention to the outcomes of the most recent round from april 1st through april
30th, 2024. So through a dedicated and sustained outreach efforts via social media and tabling Events.
primarily, we received 345 applications this most recent application period.
the demand is far greater than previous application periods and as a as a grant funded Program, we had a limited amount of hepa filters to distribute.
so in this last round, 45 flagstaff city residents received free hepa filter.
upon receiving this new filter, residents can breathe easy inside regardless of the air Quality outside.
this initiative has not only provided immediate relief to these households, but has also Significantly improved awareness about the impacts of wildfire smoke on health and
well-being. So here's a quick map displaying the distribution of hepa filters since 2021, And despite limited funding, we have been able to distribute filters all over the city of
flagstaff to people who need them most. And as you can see by the map, the distribution has taken place in all of the cities most Smoke impacted areas.
so looking ahead, we plan to continue distributing hepa filters using available grant Funding.
our goal is to build upon the established demand for these filters, and to further Increase community education and partnerships.
by doing so, we hope to enhance the resilience of our community against air quality Issues, particularly those related to wildfire smoke.
throughout my time distributing filters, I've been able to see so many excited faces. Grateful for the opportunity to have cleaner air during wildfire season at no extra cost.
with still such a high demand for the hepa air filters and flagstaff, we hope to increase The program's capacity to ensure every household has access to clean air, no matter the
weather. So with that, thank you for your time and I will be passing it back off to Jenny.
thank you so much brady. Moving on really quickly to community resilience.
again, we try to embed resilience in all of our work, in all of our mitigation work to Reduce emissions.
but we have stood up a number of resilience focused programs in the last three years.
these include help for residents in buying flood prevention materials if they live in a Flood prone neighborhood, the stream stewards program, and basically all of the work of
our neighborhood engagement program with this activates volunteers in our community.
it helps volunteers get to know each other while improving our streams or our streets and Our trails.
coming up, we just two weeks ago launched our resilience hub project that is epa funded And will develop three resilience hubs in flagstaff.
we're creating new projects and partnerships on biomass to improve the health of our Forests and working closely with wildland fire.
with all that, I've got just three more slides quickly reviewing where we're heading in Our next progress report.
in the fall, we will review our carbon dioxide removal work as well as our food systems And waste work.
in the meantime, we continue to seek grant funding. We're working on three federal grants right now.
it's really fun. We've got a lot of planning and policy change coming up that council is quite familiar With, and we're really excited about these opportunities because they will help us create
that larger scale change at that policy level, which is just a much more efficient way to Create change.
the city is going to continue working towards large infrastructure projects from landfill Gas capture, as we talked about, to transportation planning, and from a staffing
perspective, we've got some grant writing capacity coming on board. Thank you. Council, as well as two grant funded positions to support our fire, climate And health work, as well as the resilience hub project.
before I close, I just want to take a moment to shout out our americorps volunteers, just Some of whom we've mentioned earlier.
we have six on the climate team, but we actually have ten americorps, vistas or climate Corps members in our office.
they're pictured here with our team on earth day, and we're just so grateful for the work That they do.
they make so much work of so they make so much of our work possible.
many of their terms will come to a close in august, so we will have ten fewer people on Our team starting in september.
so just to felicia, to katie, b to sydney, to bella, to gracie to katie s to bri, to Kaylee, sam and brady.
thank you for your service to the flagstaff community.
thank you. Council I know this was long and late, and we just really appreciate your time And attention to this update.
we're really grateful to have the opportunity. We're really grateful that you brought this great update to us, so thank you.
I mean, this was time very well spent. So council questions or comments?
council member matthews. Thank you. I just want to echo that, that it's really helpful to see, you know, we get Piecemeal information, but it's really helpful to see just a whole
picture in one one presentation and to see you guys are busy bees.
and we appreciate that because it does take a community. And it does. Thank goodness for the americorps helpers and stuff.
so just thank you to all your team part time full time borrowed.
so thank you, thank you.
council member sweet. Thank you and thank you for the presentation.
I'm glad to see that you are continuing to reach out to the business community.
and I've actually had a couple of downtown neighbors say that they were approached and Given information on it.
so I was excited to hear and I was able to ride my electric bike.
kicking off a parade this past weekend. It was really fun, and I'm wondering if you can remind me what the e-bike initiative is.
yes. So this is something that we are just working on and what we want to do.
nicole do you want to speak to it or do you want me to? I'm happy to. So what we're working to do and this was a request by council.
we're working to figure out ways to make it work, because e-bike initiatives are Incredibly complex and turns out incredibly time intensive.
what we want to do is actually work within communities that are already served by the City of flagstaff.
so we're looking to potentially partner with our housing team to think about, can we do Something like offering e-bikes at our
city of flagstaff owned housing developments, and so can we offer those on a loan?
we're still working out the logistics of how we can do that. But the essentially, you know, e-bikes can be car replacers, right?
and we know that a lot of folks who are lower income, they don't have access to a car a Lot of the times, or they don't have access to as many cars as they might need for their
families. And so e-bikes can sort of be that car replacement. And so this is very tbd.
but we're really excited about it. And the idea is really to say, all right, folks that were already serving, can we sort of Bring these bikes to these communities.
and again, we've got a lot of logistics to figure out there, but we're really excited to Launch that.
thank you. Of course.
council member harris. Hi. Great presentation.
just a couple questions. So for the ev charging stations, the one, the public ones.
yes. Or do we charge for those? Not quite yet. And I know that danny maybe has an update on that, but based on council direction, we Will be moving in that direction.
we need to do I believe a little bit of a fee study as our, as our next step.
but we will be getting there and we're excited. Good. And then back to the whole density issue.
yes, I have a question about that. So when we have filled up all the.
the neighborhoods that we think density should be in.
what do we do then? Do we start going into other neighborhoods that don't want density?
density? I'm just asking. I think it's a great question.
the so the land availability and suitability study and the client code analysis project, Or looking at this as the regional plan.
I my neighborhood is one of those neighborhoods, right? You can't put density in my neighborhood due to a lot of history and a lot of zoning.
right. And so it is something that we have to talk about as a community. We have a ton of land in our community that is incredibly low density.
the downtown study even came out and said, even our downtown is incredibly low density.
and so it will take hard conversations with our community about how can we accommodate Density.
building out and out and out is incredibly expensive. The infrastructure is incredibly expensive, the water is incredibly expensive.
and so density is in many, many ways, a ways to use our existing infrastructure.
if you could say, have a duplex in my neighborhood, right. Somebody would have a really nice commute to work that I get to enjoy, right?
maybe you can have a triplex. Maybe you can have, you know, a small apartment building.
I might even say. And so these studies are really asking these hard questions.
we have a we owe a lot to our planning team and everybody on the land availability and Suitability study, as well as the code analysis project, who
are asking these questions to say, why are we so low density?
a lot of our developers really, really struggle to meet the even the minimum densities Required because of our zoning.
and so, you know, people are are asking the hard questions. It's part of why we're really excited about this study because it really looks at, man, Why are we so low density not only in our downtown, but also in most of our residential
neighborhoods? And what can we do about that? We talk a lot about missing middle housing, right?
we're not talking about six story apartment buildings in these neighborhoods, but we're Talking about like, how can we integrate some of that density that south side has?
that town side has that that flagstaff actually was built on sort of this missing middle.
and that's the that's the that's back to the whole issue with equity.
yes. And so while we say on one hand we want our plan to.
think about equity or take that into consideration. But then the people that want our plan don't want the density in their neighborhoods.
so, I mean, we have a six of one, half a dozen of the other.
so anyway, just a comment. Thank you. And I'll say that your office has helped me so much in just
understanding what's available. I joined solar partners through you, had a solar array installed on my roof, and often End up
selling power back to aps. And I of course love to see that.
and I love to see an aps bill. That's really just the different fees that come with an aps bill.
I've replaced my windows. I replaced my doors. That had a huge impact and insulation.
I have almost electrified all of my appliances.
I'm I'm doing it as they're wearing out. Awesome. So I've got a couple more appliances.
I'm contemplating a heat pump, and I have watched the videos that you have on the Website,
so I just appreciate the amount of information that you make available to the public so That we can learn more about
what's available to us and why, if we're in a position to take advantage of some makes Sense for us to do so.
so thank you, thank you. And we have an online public commenter.
mayor and council, I have jason kotowski. Jason, you may go ahead and address mayor and council.
hi. Mayor, vice mayor and councilors. My name is jason kardoskee, and I've been a resident of the greater flagstaff area for Seven years.
I'm the regional field organizer for the northern arizona climate change alliance.
so depending on who you ask, they may call me something else. I would like to thank the city council, the sustainability office and the staff for Working toward the critical goal of ensuring the flagstaff community is carbon neutral by
2030. If every locality across the world were taking we're working toward the same goal.
we could significantly reduce the threats of the climate crisis.
I would like to add that I am very impressed by the amount of work your five and a half Sustainability staff members are performing.
this presentation was very informative. But I am here today to encourage city council to consider the scopes of the community's Emissions next year when you revise the carbon
neutrality plan. Companies include financial services, contracted and investments made as scope three Emissions when accounting for their carbon footprints.
it may not be the common model to account for community emissions, but models can change.
I don't think many on the city council would consider a direct investment in our offshore Arctic drilling as being in unison
with the carbon neutrality goal. Maybe it would technically not affect the goal, but it's not in harmony with it.
and directly providing money to a bank that invests in harmful fossil fuel extraction has The exact same result.
so as we continue to make progress toward the goal of carbon neutrality, I think we Should strongly reconsider how we analyze the scope of flagstaff
emissions and include scope three emissions.
I really actually hate to throw that out there. After seeing this presentation and all the hard work your staff has done and kind of throw It on your step.
but I do think it's critical to the overall problem since we don't live in a bubble.
thank you so much for the opportunity. Thanks. Bye. All right.
there's no additional public comment. Just. Thank you. I know that it takes a great deal of time out of what you're already working on to put Together a presentation like
this, and I appreciate it. I know council appreciates it, and I know the public appreciates it, so thank you.
thank you all. Okay, we're moving down to open call to the public, and I don't see any of That.
we're moving down to informational items two from mayor, council and staff and future Agenda item requests.
let's start with council member sweet.
just real quick. It was a very busy few days and I got to celebrate quite a bit of Different events with our council,
and it was very inspiring to see everyone out and working hard, and I'll just leave it at That.
thank you. Council member mccarthy.
well. Thank you. I was lucky enough to be invited to the may hicks house.
this morning. And that's the house, of course. Where may hicks lived.
who was the one that made the first flag for the state of arizona?
and the secretary of state, adrian fontes, was there.
and he spoke earlier tonight. As you know it seems like I and other council members also have been to a lot of meetings About this may hicks
house and how it can be preserved and ideas, but I think it would be a good idea if the City could
appoint someone to kind of take the lead on this. So the some of the staff has already involved in a mr.
clifton. I can give you a list of some of the people that were at the meeting today.
I actually made a list, but I forgot to bring it tonight. So I guess my request.
I don't know if this is a fair or just something that you could do is to appoint someone.
I don't know if that'd be in community development or if it be in real estate or Whatever, to kind of take the lead from the city's viewpoint.
for a couple of reasons. One is it's a valuable house, and it's in danger of being demolished because there's a Big project going in there.
and one of the lead ideas is to put the to move the house over to the murdoch center, and Then it
can be used for various things meetings, maybe boys girls club, whatever.
so I'm, I don't know if you want to answer that now or come back to me later, but I'm Just hoping that we can kind of help the process along.
I think mister fontas was a little frustrated, like, there's all these ideas, but he Says, well, who's heading this up?
you know, and he he did offer that maybe he could help as far as maybe some fundraising Or something.
but somebody has to kind of take the lead on it, so I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Mayor, would you like a response?
thank you, council member mccarthy, for bringing that back up. It was a wonderful discussion by our secretary of state earlier.
allow us to huddle internally and talk about this. There's already discussions occurring offline, and expect us to report back.
just might note that he was planning to leave town, but he actually stayed over so that He could make a presentation at council tonight.
so he's taking this very seriously. We were quite honored to have his presence.
absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, vice mayor.
council member harris. Council member matthews.
yeah, it was a very busy couple of days, and I had the honor of being joined by coconino County
chair judy begay in welcoming the first lady doctor, jill biden, at the airport when she Came to flagstaff.
and it was just our airports.
brian was there. And this all took place at wiseman aviation.
and they're just so well equipped and well trained and able to pull together.
kind of a big feat to have that type of a airplane land on our, at our
airport. And I think I will leave it at that city manager.
nothing for me. Thank you. Mayor. All right then, we're adjourned.