Our clerk and establish our quorum. I know that council member lee is gone. He did have
this travel plan early in january, but he plans to listen to this first hour of and
participate in this first hour as we discuss. So if we can just get the roll call. Yes.
okay. That's we're going to we're going to move forward anyway with the roll call.
thank you. Good afternoon, council president francis here. Councilor radford present.
councilor dingman here. Councilor freeman here. Councilor larson. Yes. And just
a second. Oh, okay. And councilor lee. Councilor lee. He logged on and then he put
himself on. Okay. Well, we'll mark markham as absent for now, and we'll get him on. Okay.
thank you. Mayor, you have quorum. Okay. I want to thank all of our guests who have come
today to help us work through both our kratom and our alcohol ordinance. We do have a lot of
our first responders in the room and building officials, so thank you. We've got two big
two big ordinances to tackle today. And so we will begin. Legal is going to introduce our
first ordinance for the ban of the sale of kratom. And we did have our coroner who is also
going to join us. But if you wouldn't mind, she is not. I don't see her yet. All right.
so we discussed this ordinance a couple weeks ago. Since then there have been a couple
changes. Again, this this ordinance is to ban the sale. Only the sale, not the
possession. The sale of kratom within the city of idaho falls or two residents of the city of
idaho falls. So that would also include any online sales that are targeting those in the city
of idaho falls. Since we last met, I've revised the ordinance to also prohibit. Can we go
down a little bit, linda? Madam clerk added to the definition of kratom that also includes
any synthetic or semi-synthetic forms of certain alkaloid compounds that are present in
naturally occurring kratom. Kind of close the loophole that this would be banning all forms
of kratom, not just those naturally occurring, but those that are imitation kratom
basically also added to the definition of some of the additional. I can't remember
which ones that were which ones it was, but I added some of the alkaloid compounds to the
actual definition of kratom for natural kratom as well, and other than that, there were no
changes made. Any questions on the contents of the ordinance? Okay, okay. We have the county
sheriff here. Is a corner here yet? We were our intent was we were leading out with the
coroner. We were she was going to join us right at 3:00 so that she could describe her
experience with, you know, why she created the the public awareness around kratom. I, I
don't know what to do with her. Not here. She is the lead out for the for the entire purpose.
I know council member dingman was the first to kind of bring it to our attention, I don't I
have in no way prepped her to to speak to why why that came forward. If you feel such that
you want to bring it forward. If not, we can try and find out where our where the corner is.
I have a feeling I'm sure someone in the audience is texting her, maybe to see where
she might be at. But but yeah, this did get my attention because of a couple of
different stories. One being locally produced through the coroner's office and the
notification of the deaths that were kratom related. And then actually some stories that come
out of montana, because I have some family lives in montana, and I do pay a little bit of
attention to the news there and saw this as a public health issue that I thought that
council might want to consider looking at. I think that the intent of the ordinance is to
make it clear what kinds of what kinds of retail businesses that I think that we want to to
see here, and what we don't want to see here is a risk to public safety. I'm sure that,
like the rest of council, well, I think we've all been getting very similar emails, mostly
copy and paste emails from primarily nonresidents. I have been tracking their the, the
residential status and, and asking them, hey, how did you hear about this? Why are you
emailing me from new jersey? And there were two organizations that had put this
ordinance to the attention of customers of a business that's not even in this part of the
state. And again, I think we all probably got the exact same emails. Every email I got from
an idaho falls resident supported a ban on the sale of kratom. One of the things that
I thought about, you know, I've got one one last child that's still in school here in idaho
falls that has a gas station just a few hundred feet from his classrooms on multiple
sides. And the thought of this continuing to be unregulated here was something that I
thought the council should discuss, especially after hearing the impact that it's
having. And, you know, we're in a rare position to be able to ban the sale of something like
this. We can't ban the sale of fentanyl, right. We've there's certain things that we cannot
do, and this is one of them that we can do. So it does appear our corner has arrived.
so. If you wouldn't mind taking and making a grand entrance. Yes. I'm sorry. No, I apologize.
I got stuck in traffic and nobody in idaho would like to. Like I said, I like to make an
entrance apparently, and make sure everybody sees the belle of the ball. Here, let me just
silence everybody. And while the corner is coming up, I will note I neglected to note that
there has been some action on the or potential action on the idaho legislature side this
legislative session. There were two bills kind of competing bills, one to regulate kratom
in certain in certain ways, like you couldn't purchase it if you believe, if you're under
21, they banned regulate synthetic but allowed natural. Another bill banned outright
kratom in any form. Both bills did not pass. And so it went. I think one got voted on, it
didn't pass and the other just didn't make it out of committee. So the state of the law right
now leaves it open for the city to regulate it, if it so sees fit. Okay. Welcome. And thank
you very much for coming, miss sanchez. We just kind of through preliminaries, had have
briefly discussed maybe why this was brought forward to council. And just for public
information, where we are at with this is that. As it as we would normally do in a work
session and council identifies a potential issue within the city and brings it forward in
the form of a work in the form of a work session, not as an issue, but as a solution to the
issue. We talk about, you know, what are some of the issues that we might be having in the
city? And then we formalize that in this kind of a work session process, where there is
a solution being proposed. And a lot of that problem actually did come to our attention
through you. So if you wouldn't mind sharing your experience with this and why you made the
public notice back in october. Absolutely. So I don't know if you guys know too much about me
and my appointment. So I was appointed at the very end of december in 2024. It was like
the second to the last day of the year. And then I started my appointment as coroner
basically december 31st. And one of the things that I had put into my responsibilities
was settling some of the previous cases that were still open by the previous coroner.
and one of the cases that was pending was a young man that we were essentially waiting for
his toxicology to come in. Once that toxicology came in, then I reviewed it and I was to sign
his death certificate. And that was one of the very first things that I had to do as a
coroner, is to settle some of his old cases. The reason that I'm bringing this up is because
that is kind of what started my realization of what kratom was and how it was affecting our
community, because that individual, his toxicology, came back with the mitragynine
toxicity. And I hadn't in my career heard of it before or heard about kratom. On a
personal level, I had heard about kratom amongst some individuals that I knew they
had talked about it, but I never was truly interested to know what it was until I saw it
on a toxicology report. Once I started to look into it, I realized what it was and just
kind of kept it on my radar. A couple of weeks after that incident and me signing that
death certificate, it was his sole cause of death there. He was a young individual. He was
only 19 years old, and the only thing in his system was kratom. He didn't have any medical
history. He had nothing. He had no other addictions or any abuse that would have
contributed to his passing. It was strictly just kratom. A couple weeks after that, I was
an investigator called out to the the scene of a young individual, and she was only 23,
I believe, and at the time, everything that I was seeing, I didn't quite. I couldn't make
the determination of what her cause of death was. So I decided to send her to autopsy.
while we were at autopsy, I brought to their attention that while I was out doing this
investigation, I had come across some packets of kratom. And it was the loose leaf, not
a concentrate, not the synthetic. It was the powdered kratom that you see in bags.
while we were conducting her autopsy, even the pathologist said that it was something that
is newer for them. It's not something that they're experiencing a lot of. They
were going to do a lot more research. We got the toxicology back. Her cause of death ended
up being an overdose due to acute drug toxicity of kratom. After that, that's kind of when
my red flags went off and I decided that I was just going to monitor the situation
because I researched into kratom and the fact that it has opiate like symptoms to it. And
so the addiction level with it is very much like any other opiates. And so while it was
being marketed as natural, it's not necessarily something that's safe, just like with all
addictions. A couple of weeks after her passing, I had another younger individual, I
believe he was in his 30s. And while we took him to autopsy, we emptied his pockets. He had
synthetic seven zero concentrate in his pockets. It came in the. The little
concentrated containers, very similar to like five hour energy drinks. And his cause of
death came back as a drug intoxication of this synthetic kratom. By the time I hit, it
was just bam, bam, bam. Those three. I decided to start reaching out to other counties
across idaho, and I focused my efforts on the bigger counties that might have more awareness
of the substance, as well as counties that had a younger population. So counties that
had maybe college towns in them, so bannock and pocatello, madison with the with the
university, there are us having a university. And while they had a couple of deaths that
were related to kratom and they had been monitoring it, it was not nearly what we were
experiencing so quickly in our county. By the time october hit, I had looked back at a couple
of previous cases and found that they. That kratom was also related to those cases. I
contacted my toxicology lab and asked that they pull all toxicologies that had come back
related to that had this substance on them, and then I pulled those death certificates
and I found that we had a what feels like a low number, but it's actually an abundance of
kratom related deaths in such a short period of time. In about a year and a half, we had had
six. And while six doesn't seem like a very big number, if you put it in comparison to all of
the other drug overdoses that we had experienced in our county, we had more kratom
related deaths than we had fentanyl related deaths at the time. And everybody's so hyper
focused on opiates in that sense, and fentanyl that we were overlooking how something
like this natural substance could be affecting our community over the last year.
and actually, ever since, I by the time october came, the family members of those
individuals that had lost their loved ones to, to kratom, they wanted awareness. They were in
pain. They were reaching out to me because over the last few months, they had noticed just
such a spike in an increase in the amount of kratom that was hitting our community. It used
to be only accessible in tobacco shops or like smoke shops, and now you can't drive
down the street without seeing flags that say kratom all over them. You can't go through, you
can't pass by a tobacco store without seeing kratom in led sign. We were now at a point
where you're now seeing it in our gas stations. I have gone to multiple gas stations just
in the last week, and there's display cases with concentrate and the seven zero byproduct of
kratom on their display cabinets right next to the cash register. A lot of people are
talking about regulation and how it's needed. I absolutely agree that regulation is needed.
however, there is not a solution right now with regulation there. There's so
many people that have an input on what regulation looks like that while people are trying to
make a decision on what regulation looks like, it's continuing to grow, it's
continuing to expand into other concentrates, and it's continuing to to be in our
community, which is why I think it's an amazing idea, truly, that our city takes a stand and
our county takes a stand and bans it as a show that statewide it needs to happen.
but if we can do it on a smaller level, then hopefully it can grow as well to that
state level. But if we continue to wait for the state to make a decision on this, we're going
to continue to lose people. I have an individual, unfortunately, right now that
is at the hospital and will be passing today, and their cause of death will be related to
kratom. And I have another individual who two weeks ago, and I'm just waiting for the
toxicology to come in. But it's another kratom related death. So it's continuously happening
in our community. And the longer that we wait without putting any kind of banner
restrictions, the the more people in our community are being affected by this. Yes.
council members, please feel free to sanchez. You're okay to answer the questions from council. Is that okay? I'm super interested in. We have narcan for. Does it help at all?
so unfortunately it does not. Narcan is. While it is an amazing opportunity, especially
for opiate related things and fentanyl, it's one of those that if you don't register it
and do it right then and there, then there's, it won't help you. You can narcan somebody five,
ten times. And if they're already at that brink of passing, they're already gone.
unfortunately, here in idaho falls, with us having a major trauma hospital, we're actually
seeing people from outside communities that are potentially passing from
overdoses, from kratom related products coming into our county as well. And then in addition,
I know that I was reached out recently by a detective who is going through an investigation
for a store that was robbed of kratom. And so now I that spikes my alerts of if I have
any overdoses related to kratom, that could potentially also be related to these criminal
matters. You said toxicology tests after the person has died can tell you if those kratom or
how much kratom. But it's not as easy to text check an actual solution in a bottle to see if
it's kratom. Is that am I right? Yes. So a lot like we have testing for for substances
while we're out on scene kratom, because it is a natural marketed substance. It's not
something that's being looked for and tested on. And so we don't have any kind of solution
where we can put a potentially put it into the concentrate. And if it's blue, then it's
positive for kratom. What happens is it's up to us and the investigators. So law
enforcement and through the coroner deputies that we recognize what kratom is and
what it looks like to look for it while we're on scene in that way. And that's how we've been
able so far to find these kratom related deaths is that while we're out on scene, the
investigators are finding the physical kratom related products. Okay. If if you if
you don't mind, we would love to have sheriff and police chief johnson join us at the.
I'm not going to call it the dais, but at our at our table here, just to as part of the
conversation, if you can speak loud, you're okay to sit there. It doesn't have to be too
formal. Do you want me to. I would like you to remain. If you're okay. As counsel begins
to kind of have a conversation around this, I think it was a good segue to lead in to the
testing of this substance. And we're really looking for the sheriff and the chief to help
us understand the enforcement, the challenges of enforcement, what they're seeing on the
ground as we talk about this really probably becoming more about awareness than it is
anything else. We'd really like your insights into this. And then if you're okay with
counsel asking follow up questions, that would be helpful. So if you're okay, sheriff, to begin with you and just give us your insights and your thoughts on enforcement
and where the city is headed with this ban of the once again, it's just the sale of kratom as
opposed to the possession. So certainly one of the one of the issues that we saw this
legislative session was, you know, attempting to get something passed at the state
level and at every section as we were doing that, we were kind of going through two
discussions. One was the full banning actually making it a schedule one product. And on
the scheduling. And that failed. Additionally, there was some controls that were attempted to
be put in place. You had a strong medical component that was there. Talking about that,
wanting to restrict the sale, especially to juveniles. And as it stands right now, both of
those efforts have failed. So in the state of idaho, there is no prohibition on the sale
whatsoever. So anybody of any age technically can walk into one of these shops and purchase
kratom. And we you don't even have to be. 18. Correct. And so we have several indicators that
these we know through our discussions with some of the school district, etc. That we
are seeing this in younger populations being used in school. We've had different
reports of different levels of intoxication and illness caused by kratom. In the schools, we
have stores within walking distance of some of the schools that are selling these products,
and again, with no restriction on sale. So then it's just up to whether or not a court even
notices if they're going to sell that to somebody who's underage. So that's probably one of my largest concerns, recognizing the availability and the misunderstanding that
this can be very dangerous. And so knowing what we know about kratom, it it reacts on the
same receptor in the brain that opiates do. And at higher doses, it suppresses breathing, just
like opiates do. And so there's your danger in, in the, in the product. And so it's about
concentration. And then when you start talking about the synthetic 708, that is a higher
synthetic concentration that they're seeing problems with all over the nation. So there's
no question that the problems on, on us. And now we need to do something to begin to
control and deal with the product in the community. Another concern I have is the
fact that if we just pass an ordinance in the city of falls, it will immediately transfer
into these other areas into the county or the city of ammon. So I did alert the city of ammon
that you were looking at this ordinance, because I think it's important that we make the
effort holistically for the entire county and have mirroring ordinances for the
other cities, as well as the county. Councilor. Do you have any questions for the sheriff
on or any counties or cities already banning the sale of it? I'm not aware of any, and I
there are, but I am aware that there are other states that have. And other cities and
other states that have placed ordinances to ban the sale. I was thinking kootenai county
had a ordinance and they were. In fact, they were going to amend it a little bit, but
apparently not. Okay. I'm not aware they may have. I'm just not personally aware I could
look into it, I don't know. So what is the enforcement look like? So in first off, if we to
to kind of what sheriff hall said that this this would. If you're in a perfect world, the
federal government would schedule it like other controlled substances and then
it would be banned like fentanyl as a ban. In a great world, the state would take it
up and regulate it as a state. That way you wouldn't have different counties doing things
differently. But in a good world, the entire bonneville county would would take it up.
and then the world we have, it looks like idaho falls right now, and hopefully the other ones follow so that that jurisdictional difference makes it harder because if it's not
idaho falls, you will be able to walk two blocks down the road. And there's, I mean, you
know, city, county, city, county in some places. And so it will just push the legal
sale. People will still be able to buy it. They'll be able to possess it. It is a really a
value statement by the city saying, we think this is important. In idaho falls, we
first started seeing kratom that we're aware of. I'm sure it's been around for a while,
but to document it was in 2024 and it was in december, I believe it was the overdose of
the coroner was talking about the case actually happened december 18th, which was right
before coroner came into office. Then we had one other overdose that we have seen in idaho
falls, which happened in 2026 at the beginning of 2026, which the toxicology showed kratom
and some kava as well. And kratom was the predominant thing there. We've also had
four thefts of kratom. There's a gray slash black market for kratom. Also. People will steal
it as valuable. They'll sell it. The biggest one was about almost $9,000 worth of kratom,
was taken out of a vape shop. And that was most likely the one the coroner was talking
about. So. For for enforcement, this bans the sale of kratom and to advertise the sale
kratom I offer for sale, which is to say, hey, we we have it. It doesn't ban the possession
and you can buy it all over just outside of idaho falls. I believe what will happen is, is
that the businesses that are regular good businesses and want to be good citizens, once
they know that that sale is banned, they will probably quit selling it. That's most of your
convenience stores. Stinker station probably doesn't want the police coming down there and doing stuff that will probably stop selling it. I think that some of the vape
shops, which are currently selling things that are on the fringes of legality, I'll just
phrase it that way. I think they probably have some thc products. If we test, it might
test illegal. And so they're already willing to kind of flirt with that line. And I
believe we'll probably still see it sold there. Inside of idaho falls, there is a
challenge to the prosecution, I think, and the city attorney and I have talked briefly about
this with every other controlled substance. We have a presumptive test, and we have
testing to say this is the controlled substance, for example, marijuana. We just
don't grab marijuana to go to court and say, hey, this is marijuana, your honor, take our
word for it. We have a presumptive test that says this marijuana, which gives us
probable cause. And then we'll send it to state lab and they will do a definitive test that
says marijuana, so that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that marijuana, that test does
not exist for kratom outside of a commercial market. What I mean is, if we had to do that,
we'd have to come up some money to send it into a private lab, have that test on our own. We
couldn't send it to a state lab. It's really unknown how a court is going to handle that, but
this will be a first for me. I've never seen a substance case go to court without a
definitive test to say what it is. I believe we're going to go off of what the packaging says
it is it. So we're believing the packaging. Is that beyond a reasonable doubt, or will they
be able to argue that? Yeah, the packaging says it is, but can you prove it is what it
says it is because this packaging is I mean, my creatine package may not have the creatine in it that says it has. So usually with a substance, you have to have a
test and we don't have that. So that's a challenge to enforcement. Another thing which I think is unlikely to happen currently because I think we have a phenomenal
sheriff right now that my understanding is, though, if we put people in jail just on a
city ordinance, it is possible for the county to bill us for the incarceration. So if it's
only a city ordinance, pretty much everyone we book into jail is a misdemeanor. That is a
misdemeanor, and it's covered under state law. I don't think we'll have that issue with the
current county folks, but those things have been different in the past. There's no guarantee
what might happen. 2 or 3 sheriffs from now. So I would look at this as like a value
statement, something that idaho falls says. We think this is really valuable, and we think
that probably the state ought to take it up. I think legitimate businesses will
honor the ban of sale. I think other businesses will push the envelope. And we we currently
don't have the capacity to do a lot of marijuana investigations in these businesses. And I
believe you go in there, you'll find some thc products and things like that, that they have shops. We won't have the ability to, to really do a lot of interdiction on that. So
it's a, it's a value statement by the city, in my opinion. And when when you say value
statement and, and an awareness, an awareness, because you did mention that most convenience
stores do want to be credible, you know, as we talk about them around our schools, they will
actually probably stop the sale of kratom, I believe. So bringing just the awareness of
it is, is going to be major. What kind of way I think this will happen is we'll work on
some sort of formal warning letter with the city attorney's office and send it to the
businesses that are selling and say, hey, we think you're in violation of idaho's ordinance. Here's what the potential ramifications are. You need to sell this stuff. I think most
of them will come into compliance, and I think I see this as harm reduction, right?
I mean, even if we had 30% of convenience stores comply, that's 30% fewer stores selling
the product that we know is killing our residents. And you save one life, it's worth it.
yeah, that's how I feel too. Councilmember friedman, kellogg, idaho actually did ban. I just
looked this up. Did ban the sale of kratom this year. And yeah, I don't, I, I don't care
if we're the first in idaho. That's even better because I'd rather take a stance now. But I,
I, I hear what chief johnson is saying. I hope that our, our county and the city of ammon do
hopefully take this up as well. It's very expensive though, to move businesses. I mean, I'm
not sure everyone's going to just bail to these out other cities and our county as a
result of this. But yeah, it would be it would be nice if we could all be on the same page.
I don't think businesses are going to move. I think it'll just change where people go to
buy their creating. If there isn't some consistency and support. And so if if I'm going to make a make up a, I would say, maverick, I, I don't want to throw maverick under the bus.
let's say they're called bob's. If there's a bob's in idaho falls, then there's probably a
bob's in aminol. So they'll just take all their product anyhow and settled out of there because it would be legal there. So that's why you want some consistency between
jurisdictions. You mentioned earlier putting some pressure on the state legislature by us
doing this and that. That's true of the surrounding jurisdictions, right? That if
we do this, then it's likely that the county will do it. It's likely that animal will do
it, and hopefully it becomes statewide. You know, this happened with the the hands
free ordinance when we when the same kind of thing. Enough of us passed an ordinance in the
state, 11 or 13 of us or something that the state finally said, you know, we got
to do this. My question is, is if we if we do do this, do we sunset it somehow? If the state
does ban it themselves, do we we have our we have we pass an ordinance. Then then is there a
way we sunset it just. Yeah. By under under the way our constitutional structure works.
if the state acts on this. And unless it carves out something saying, unless provided
otherwise by a city, the state will preempt whatever the city does here. We don't have to
build a sunset because it'll be automatic as of the date of the passage, and we probably would
need to go and just repeal it. And I had one other comment too, because I was I was working as
a paramedic when we had spice show up on scene. Right. And you guys are familiar with that.
and it was banned. And, and, you know, it seems to me like it was a, it's very similar
kind of a, you know, it wasn't killing people. This is but it was incapacitating people to
the point where they couldn't function. Right. And so, you know, I, it just blows my mind
that the state of idaho would look at this and not take it to the statute level. I, I don't,
I don't, I don't even know if I want to comment about that. And one thing I would say is that
there was some action at the federal level. There were some senators that signed on to at
least the intention to try to regulate kratom. So there are there is movement at the
federal level on a potential scheduling. But that gets down into arguing which schedule do
you make it? Right. But obviously there are there are groups out there that believe
that it has some medicinal qualities to it. But that's the same argument we've had with
marijuana for ad nauseum. So what what that's that's why that initial discussion was
schedule one. So potentially you could see some type of scheduling come come out of the
federal government level. But as we all know, that can take a long time to happen. And at
least at this local level, you can take action immediately. And, and that sends that
message that we're seeing the problems in the community with the coroner's identified. Like
I said earlier, if we save one person's life, it's worth it, right? I mean, I know that
people we've all been getting tons of letters about about how it helps them with their pain.
well, there's other ways to alleviate your pain. And, you know, once you're dead, you
don't, you're not, you're dead. And so I'm all for doing, doing this. And I hope the county
will pick it up. I want to encourage that to happen. I'd like to kind of piggyback off
of something, councilor silverman said. You know, we talk about if we just do it in
idaho falls, it'll just push it out, but it won't push it out. For fifth graders who have a c
store next door, they'll quit getting it. I mean, I guess if we have an older brother. But
you get my point and it goes back to 30% or whatever. But the idea that a, you know, a
grade school kid or a junior high kid can walk to a c store and buy this stuff and stick it
in their pocket. I'm all for shutting down whatever part we can shut down. Half a loaf is
better than nothing. We'll make it harder for them to get it. And it does create the gray
black market for it. And same as when you ban marijuana or any other substance, there's a
a corona that it will make it harder, especially for younger kids to get. Thank you. The
other thing I think is important is we it gives us an additional opportunity to
message its dangerousness. Absolutely understands that. I think there's a lot of parents
that don't even recognize this. They don't know it exists. They don't know what to look for.
they may see it in their kid's pocket, not even realize it. Yeah. And you know, we have a
fantastic communications team here at the city that can really help message this to the
residents and help them identify, I think, potentially some of these substances. And,
and yeah, start that conversation with their, with their kids. And we've talked
about messaging with the school district as well. So that there is that consistency, consistent
messaging, just as a kind of to back up to the timeline. December 2nd, the fda did do a
press release as well that said, you know, we would warn citizens of the united states
to stay away from kratom, I think. And then, you know, we approached bonneville county,
and it did look like there was going to be this legislation that was moved forward. And so it felt like, let's let's just hold off and we'll wait and let just the whole session came and
went with all of the arguments being brought forward, just as the coroner did. And so here we
are today, right. Saying we're going to we're here to take that step. And so what you have
before you is the ban of the sale of kratom in the city of idaho falls. And unless there
is a consensus from council today to not bring it forward, you would see it on the agenda
for thursday. Could I ask all three, all three of you a question suggestion on a date
of effective? How much time would you make it? Tomorrow. Tomorrow? Well, I'm hoping to
do that. I don't know about you guys. In all honesty, if we if it can get put into presented
on thursday, if we can have everything, it's the start of the month. So having all the
wording put in place, having, you know, the opportunity to be able to reach out to the
businesses that are selling because ultimately we don't want the businesses to be the
ones that are suffering the short end of this. And, you know, not realizing that there
has been this change and then suffering the repercussions of it. So giving them time. And
essentially it is like you guys said, it's just bringing that awareness that this is happening and it is going to be happening. I think that having a summer start is the best way
to get it done. Work through the kinks for the rest of this month and have it issued as of
july 1st to to ban the sale of kratom. And that gives the stores enough time to become
aware of it, as well as figure out what their solution is to getting it off the shelves.
please. Yeah, I would love a perfect world like that. I would ask you just to wait a
little bit longer. June and july is totally tied up with this great 250th anniversary,
and it's all hands on deck for that. So to, to do a notification letter, give
people the opportunity to get off their shelves and things like that. I think if you had
an effect, you could start whenever you want before we actually start getting that done. You're going to be looking late august, early september, which I think is
fine to make it effective july 1st, regardless of that's the date that all the statutes that
are passed in the state take effect, which we don't. Right. Yeah. I don't see why you can't
have it take effect that day. I mean, whether we can get out and work it at this time
doesn't regardless, but it would give us some time to you know, we we got to understand
it's going to take them a while to get rid of it. The like if I don't think it's off shelves,
about 1200 square foot. I mean, you don't have costco sized, I think july 1st places here that
require hundreds of people to remove these things. So and I would just add, just to answer
your question, I think 30 days is, is an ample time ordinance. You think how long? 30 days, 30
days. Yeah, that's that's my opinion. That gives that gives you time to notice it.
everybody to be aware that it's happening. And then it hopefully gives us some time as
a county to catch up and have something that mirrors and comes in line as rapidly as
possible. I think it would be a good time to. Then when kids come back into school, it's off
of the shelf. You know, it's off of the shelves. If you say, you know, july 1st, it might
take a little bit of time to get all of the messaging out there. And, and then there will
be a period of time that's like, no, we're really serious about this august. And then kids come
back at the end of august and it's gone. That would be a, I think that that timeline does
actually work well. So if as I'm kind of seeing some nods that you will expect to see
this on thursday, come forward as presented, unless there's anything, what's the date we're
going to july 1st. Well that'll be yeah, that'll be decided on in the resolution. Excuse me.
in the ordinance number. It'll be as part of the section four it'll say shall take effect on
the. And we will fill that that in right now. You know, when you do the. Motion. Oh we're
going to do we're going to have it start immediately. Well no, when you when you have when you
make the motion on thursday, okay, there will be an effective date. I'll be making
the motion. And for effective july 1st, you can vote yes or no. No. I just want to know the
date. July 1st, july. That would be what we would that's what I would what the
proposition would be. Okay. We want to thank you for coming. I we know you are very busy and
we really do appreciate you taking the time and bringing your experience in law
enforcement. And particularly I'm going to speak here is that I'm glad we don't have
marijuana in the city of idaho falls. I have watched that happen across the nation and
people say, oh, it'll be fine. And then a year later, two years later, five years later,
it's a mess. And I just really want to thank both of our public safety heads in both
bonneville county and city of idaho falls for really keeping the foot on the pedal on that,
keeping that out of our county. So thank you. Thank you. Just my own personal opinion, but it
is my opinion that it is it is really helped keep idaho falls what it is. Thank you. Thank
you for being here. And thank you for having the knowledge and experience that you do. All
right. Yes. You don't you don't have to stick around unless you want to hear now how we plan on
updating our alcohol ordinance. We might we might see. Okay. Thank you guys. You are welcome
to be more strict on alcohol as the coroner. Chronic alcoholism is now speaking. We do have
that in our whereas statement. Council. We have our attorney in front of us. He has brought
this ordinance and I'm going to let him explain most of it, but I want to thank him. It is 34
pages long. It is taken months in order to. Yes, we will have the rest of the. Participated.
it has taken months. I'd like to have a special thank you to emily geisler for her work on
the ordinance as well. I think we you know, the intentions were good in our first round of
this ordinance, but clearly we didn't capture it all. And I think there was this concern of,
you know, what is the city doing? And are they just going to is this just in an effort to
do an outright ban on alcohol permitting? And so we really went and and looked at all of
the alcohol ordinances and all of the discrepancies. I want to just frame this for a minute,
though. As we move through this ordinance, you will see that our legal department has got
the presentation in front of you. We've got the presentation on the screen because it is a
long ordinance. The way that we tackled the presentation is to say, here are the issues and
here are the solutions. Although the solutions within the ordinance are found in
several locations. So you might be looking at page 22. Now we're back to page ten. Now
we're on page one with definitions. So I just want you to know that that there wasn't
a great way to organize it that fit the ordinance chronologically,
chronologically. But yeah, in, in the terms of the numerically. But that is why there is bounce
around. And if you if there is confusion in what page are we looking at? Please feel free.
speak up. Say I'm not sure where we're looking. It is a long ordinance, but I'm hoping
that we have captured it with the parameters of what is the issue that we are trying to
solve. And here are our solutions. And then as we move through this ordinance, we will
get towards the end, we'll have an anticipated timeline and next steps. So we'll turn that
over to our legal department. Okay, chief, do you want to be here? All right. So as the
mayor indicated, we previously touched on alcohol a couple of months ago for the alcohol
server training portion. This newest ordinance merges that of it still has the idea of
alcohol server training, but we think we're doing a lot more changes to the overall alcohol
ordinances we have. So one of the main issues is we have three. Currently we have three
separate codes for alcohol in our ordinances one for liquor, one for beer and one for wine.
some of the issues that this has caused is we have sometimes we will update one ordinance,
but not the other two. And it has led to differences. So for instance, if you want to get a
liquor license, what you have to put on your application for alcohol liquor license is
different than if you're applying for a beer or wine license. So to simplify things,
it's going to be much easier both for the applicants and for the city clerk to have one set
of information that they need. So if you're applying for so we're going to have a basic
form, you know, here's your application, here's all you need. And do you want a beer,
wine or liquor license or all or some combination thereof? Right. Makes it easier for
people. It also makes it easier for people if they're not having to go through several different sets of codes, you know, if they're getting a beer as well as a liquor license,
they're not having to go through several sets of codes to figure out which of the requirements apply to which. In addition, we had an issue with enforcement just as an example.
so currently we have three different crimes for open container one, if you're
carrying an open container of wine, one for beer and one for liquor, and occasionally out in
the field, officers will select the wrong citation. And so, you know, they'll do the four dash,
two dash, whatever, instead of the four dash, three dash, whatever it is, it's listed same as open container, correct. And so they'll get cited. And then the defense attorneys are
sitting there waiting for us to go to trial and hoping that we didn't notice the difference.
and then they'll say, hey, judge, wrong citation, dismiss the case. Right? So far, to my knowledge, we've caught all of those, but it's just an example of one of the problems that
happens when multiple codes. So a big part of this ordinance is you'll see is we are merging
all three together. The we're merging, we're taking the liquor ordinance and we're
amending that one. And then we're taking the, the beer and wine, the things from those
ordinances and putting them into the liquor ordinance and repealing the beer and wine
sections entirely. So then the result will be merged into one code section. So when you see.
so a lot of the changes you'll see as you go through the ordinance are simply those
merges, right. You'll see an entire new section, what looks like an entire new section in the liquor ordinance or what previously was a liquor organization. Say, if this
ordinance passes, it'll look like a whole new section, but it's actually just something
that was taken from the wine or the beer section and put into there, somewhat altered. We've
tried to make them talk with each other better and made changes throughout. The only
thing that won't be merged is the special events permits for under the parks code. So we
have a special permit if you want to do an alcohol event on city property or an enclosed
public street, you have to get a special event permit, and that will remain in a separate
part of the code in the parks section. Why is that? Why is that? Because that's it's only
applicable for when it's on city property. It's currently already separate. And it really
has more to do with the management of city property. And it doesn't apply to it's
only particularly when it's on city property, city owned property, as you say. So if we
wanted to, we could merge them all together. But it just that's currently how we have.
it kind of made sense not to merge that the the people getting an alcohol license,
they really don't need to worry about that unless they're doing an event on city owned property.
all right. All right. So I'll turn the time over to the chief. So just to talk, chief johnson,
to talk about alcohol related incidents and having. So this is, you know, in reference to
the alcohol server training. So it was recognized sometime ago that we've had an increase in
alcohol related crime, alcohol related incidents, specifically in the downtown area, but not
limited to that. It mentions duis there, but this would include sexual assaults,
assaults, batteries, disturbances, urination in public vandalism, shooting, all
sorts of crimes that have a nexus about alcohol and specifically the over service
of alcohol. And so that over service training was brought to you. I can't remember what it's
been some time now, but the goal was to try to bring people in compliance with state law
that already exists about overserving alcohol and the way to help people come in
compliance was to require some server training. When that was first heard, there were some
concerns from the business community, specifically those that had alcohol licenses and
the bars and places like that, restaurants, and they have some really valid concerns. I think
council president francis spent a lot of time talking with different groups. I also spent
quite a bit of time meeting individually with different bar owners. Can we go to the next
one there? So there were some changes made to the server training from the original
ordinance that you saw. I can't read that one. So it changed the the definition of who would
be cited to the immediate manager. I think there was a concern that everyone in the
chain of command would or could be cited up to, including the owner. And so in talking with
the the businesses, it seemed best to limit that to the immediate manager. That would
be the person who was from the business. Well, just just to clarify, it changed the
definition of a server, alcohol and security personnel so that managers, only the immediate
managers are required, are the ones required to get server training. And so with this
change, if you're the manager of a manager, you don't have to get the alcohol server training.
so it would just be the immediate manager that's required to get alcohol server training, in addition to the actual servers of alcohol and security personnel. And then it
would change the effective date to october 1st. It would some of the concerns of the
businesses is they felt like if they're really busy, to be able to provide the documentation
that their compliance would be difficult for them. We talked about a lot of ways to, to work
through that problem. State law authorizes police officers to go into establishments with
alcohol license and look at other things. And, and so as we're doing that, we would also
want to see the server training, but we would give them four days to, to get that
documentation to us. And that works out just fine with the enforcement. But also it also
takes care of the concern for the business owners of their peak hours and having people
available to do that and conduct their business. So we put that four days. One further
thing. So just to clarify, this might be somewhat ambiguous on this, frank. The ordinance
would take effect whenever city council wanted it to take effect. But as far as the
alcohol, the requirement to have certificates showing that you obtained alcohol server
training, that wouldn't be effective until october 1st of this year. And again, part of
the reason is to give them time to come into compliance. My understanding is that it will
be able to provide several trainings between now and then, so that they can have several
free training trainings so that they'll be able to come into compliance by that date.
there's multiple places where a business can get the training. Some chain stores have
corporate based training that they already require their people to do. There's online places where you can do it online. We've already hosted one server training at the
mountain america center, and we had about 40 people attend that one. So there'll be multiple
places where people can get that training. In our meetings with the with the different
business owners. The other thing they were worried about was a pardon. The ordinance that said that the chief of police could and I paraphrase what the ordinance says, but it
says that I can update the required training from time to time. As. Their concern was
that that I or someone like me would randomly change what they had to be trained on. Like I
would decide, well, I want you to now train on this as well and add stuff that the
ordinance does not contemplate in our conversation. I want to make it clear my my
interpretation of that portion of it is, is that I couldn't do that, but I could say, well,
this particular training is not in compliance with our ordinance. It doesn't cover the
topics we require. That's no longer allowed this or this training does. And so it's not
that I can I can set what has to be trained on, but which trainings cover what council
has to be trained on. And that was important to them so that they didn't have someone changing the requirements. And I think we talked through that as well. And this would allow
you to approve some national chains that have their own training program. They would
have to cover what's what's said in ordinance. I think most of them will cover more than
that. They could cover less than that. So as long as the particular training covered what was required by ordinance, we would approve it. And for council's information, we
modeled this ordinance, this this portion of the ordinance we modeled largely after boise
ordinance that requires alcohol server training. They already have a similar. The list of
what the training. What training is required pretty much took verbatim from the
boise ordinance. And so it's my understanding correctly from wrong chief, that we would. We
would probably be able to adopt those. If you go on the boise city of boise website, they'll
say, here, here's the approved online trainings. We have online trainings in addition to the free trainings that I will, will provide. And so potentially chief thompson
could just use those same programs that are already approved by the boise. Of
course, you can review them, make sure it's good. But we could we could follow suit. And
there were resources. Yeah, there's multiple ones out there. There's some business owners already know and like, and I think they qualify. Also if there's a corporate wouldn't do
that also. And then just the penalties, it makes escalating penalties for the certificate
holder. So it's for violations in 18 months. First for infractions after that will
become a misdemeanor. Escalating penalties for licensees. They would be 11
violations in 18 months. I had a quick conversation with council francis again,
and 811 by a lot in 18 months. Typically, we set those numbers a little bit lower. That was
kind of a compromise, kind of a because you had a competing interest. If I have 20 servers
or 30 servers and I hire five new servers every couple of weeks because there's tough
labor market. It seemed that we were trying to recognize that some of the bigger
establishments had put a lot of people through. They may have some people that struggle to get that initially. And so that's where that came from. And then for charitable,
charitable event, permit holders would have to have one person certified for every 100
people that were serving alcohol to. And the violations would be infractions. And the
third infraction within 18 months would trigger a ban on the charitable event permit. I
will add for the the 12th infraction. So if they fail to have a certificate of alcohol
server training, the 12th one within 18 months would be would lead to the initiate a
proceeding to either suspend or revoke the alcohol license. And just as a kind of an aside,
what we have noticed, especially in the downtown area, is just the bottle of alcohol.
server training has already improved the environment downtown and compliance we have
with several of the businesses downtown. It has made an improvement. Just the idea that
this is coming. It's already helped out and that's the basic idea behind this ordinance, is
that a you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And it also is helpful
for the establishments themselves because by implementing these sorts of
programs, it helps their liability should something go wrong, because then they can say, hey, we have a training server program, we rigorously enforce and we keep our servers
trained on it. And they recognize when some of these overserved and no, we didn't overserve that can be it can be helpful in litigation for the establishments as well. Okay.
any questions? Okay. So for this one, I kind of want to let fire and community develop or a
building inspector comment on some of the issues we've seen with specifically with alcohol
catering permits. My understanding is so alcohol catering permits. So let me
just back up a little bit. We have a lot of licenses and different types of permits,
right? You have your alcohol license, which allows you to establishment sell beer, wine
or liquor. You have an alcohol catering permit. What this allows is for an alcohol,
somebody who holds an alcohol license to go off premises, to go to a different location and
hold, you know, serve alcohol at an event can be no longer than three days. And we also
have another permit called a charitable or permit for benevolent charitable or public
purpose, which is similar to an alcohol catering permit, except you don't have to have you can
apply for it even if you don't have an alcohol license. Your subject is more additional
stringent requirements. You have to show that you are using the profits and paying it
towards some sort of charitable or benevolent public purpose. So there's a more stringent on
that. But the issue has been that at times people will basically get consecutive
alcohol catering permits. Again, these are meant to be temporary. They're meant to be for three
days only. But we our current code has no limit. So you can get one every three days. So
I'll let fire and cbs talk to some of those. I'll start with fire first and then turn to cbs.
some of the issues that have come up from that. Yeah. Good afternoon mayor, council, scott,
fire marshal. The fire department has been tasked with being a part of the alcohol
license and catering permit process to ensure that the buildings meet a basic fire
safety inspection and quick history. The fire code is the maintenance code for the
building code, and our inspectors go out to ensure that the building's maintained
at the standard, that it was built under the building code. And with that, there's a small
class of buildings that can serve alcohol and alcohol in them. And they're part of the
assembly occupancies. And it's the assembly to. So part of our inspection when we go, besides
making sure doors open the right way, they have the appropriate signs, fire signals
are in place. We also vet to see if this is an appropriate building to hold the event, but
it's not an appropriate building to hold an event. Then we'll through the catering
process, we look at if they have the basic safety measures in place, we'll give them a
permit to the maximum occupancy of what they're designed to an internal policy with id. What
we found is if there is a business that starts and is operating like a bar restaurant,
we refer them to the building official to put a stop work order. You are, you are, you've
started a business in the building. And that's not an a to or an appropriate building. You need to work with the building official to go through the change of use process to
have you continue your business as an open bar. But on the catering permit side, we've
seen in lieu of doing a change of use, the repetitive request for permits. So so you'll have
an existing business like the downtown event center who's invested in their business and
they've met with the building official. They've made those changes that they needed to do to be a full event center, meet the a standard. And then we have others that are just
repetitively using the permit process to get around that meeting with the building
officials. So we're trying to shore up and shorten that meeting time so they can meet
with the building official and set a plan in place. As you can see, we have a draw down period
of time in the ordinance that gives these business owners time to implement that plan,
because there is a cost that will go with some of those changes and some sometimes it
won't be as much as others, depending on how big the facility is. So in reference to
the slide, you can see that the plan is to reduce these permits over time until they make the
appropriate changes. The first three years will be 52 catering permits. So basically every
week for three years, the fourth year will draw down to 26 catering permits. And by the
fifth year, hopefully those changes have been made. And if not, we would hold we would
limit them to 12 alcohol catering permits a year for in a in a for profit scenario,
this would not apply to buildings that are already historic. It's a reference for.
that would be the gym on first street, the old bar. They currently don't have an alcohol
license, but they are in a two. So we would continue to give them their permits because they
met that building standard at the time that they were in business. But for charitable
events like zac mentioned, we wouldn't have a limit on those because there's other
restrictions in place that assist them with their permit process. Are there any
questions on this slide before we go to the the continued slide, or do you want me to
finish the continue slide? Just a question. Why? Why did we want to go down. 52 to 12. So
the underlying concern is that by getting an alcohol catering permit. For buildings that
aren't a. Two they're not up to code for an a2 assembly group. These a2 assembly group, they
have special conditions that they have to meet. Right. I believe it's they have to
sprinkle. It has to be sprinklers, sprinklers or so in in a lot of cases, that is.
that's correct. It's there's a number of requirements that the a2 classification of any
building is. It has been designed for the consumption of food and drink and any other
classification of a building has not been designed that way. And so we are trying to get
buildings that have multiple catering permits to, to get their buildings up to a
standard that is safe for people to be in. So it's largely a safety. What we don't
want is, or the, the idea behind it is we have establishments that have met
that have come up to code to be safe, and they've got their alcohol license, but there's
kind of an unfair competition when we have unlimited number of temporary alcohol catering
permits is basically a business that has not invested the expense of coming all the way
up to the safety needed or the code needed to be safe. They can have unlimited and
basically operate the drinking establishment. And so the idea, but the idea here is kind of
wrestling with, we want to make it safe for people to, to drink, but at the same time,
recognizing that we have vested interests in the current model that we have under our current
ordinance, that people can get unlimited number of catering permits. So the idea here is
for the first three years, they can recoup their investment. And if they want to make the
changes to come to it, up to the standards of an a2 or assembly group a2, they can or
or they just have to reduce the number of alcohol permits in the fourth and fifth years all
the way down to 12. So for us as council members, can you kind of describe what kind of
costs we're talking about to go to an a2? So across the street from me, I work on lincoln road
and there was a there was a mechanic shop that had a big section that became a, an
antique store. And it was an antique store for ten years. And then they just put up a
sign recently that said they're going to be an event space. So the cost of putting that
building into an a2, are we talking $1 million, 200,000? I mean, when you say 52 permits,
you know, that's times three. So you're saying you can make enough money from the alcohol
to be able to pay for the sprinkler? Are we talking I mean, what's the kind of cost
pressures are we talking about? So, so probably really depends on, on the building. There's
some. Criteria around what what is an a2 occupancy classification. A couple of
those things. For example, the fire area, if it exceeds 5000ft■!s, the fire area has an
occupant load of 100 or more. And the fire area is located on a floor. Other than the level
of exit discharge. So once those are exceeded, then a fire sprinkler system is required in
that building. This is interesting because the international residence code
also requires in the state of idaho, that we put sprinklers in homes right now, and the
state has exempted that because of the cost. So to me, this is another question. Are we are we
trying to prevent something that's really an issue? I mean, is there research from the
international building code that this had there was enough problems with these things, or
is it just an arbitrary standard, like the like the residence code where the state
of idaho is like, this is too expensive. It ruins business and it stops people from having
opportunities. Well, this is where I think we ought to pause and take a council discussion, because what was the purpose of allowing the three day permits in buildings? What why did we
do that in the first place? Because I think that's the basis of where this is headed.
yeah. And so one, one way that we've talked about it, trying to consolidate this ordinance
is the purpose was particularly to help places like the museums that had events where they were
and they had alcohol at the event. But it has turned out to be a business practice, which
has helped some business groups go. And did we intend that the three day permits could be just
drawn again and again and again because and this is where I have a question to, to make
sure I got this right. It is for location. So somebody who has their liquor license, they
could do 300 events as long as there was no location more than 52 times. Is that the way I'm
reading this? If they had the personnel, they could do 1500 events a year and go go all
over and not at one location, only 52 right now. Yeah. And basically that's really for the
this is about the location. It's not about the alcohol license. Okay, so why did we do
the three day permit and what were we trying to accomplish? Because that's the key to what
the question you're getting to, I think, and I think there's a lot of conversation about that,
right? Like I think the other broader issue is commercial establishments, right? I mean,
I think that's, that's another question that we should come back to that because that definition is in here. But but yeah, I think that the the fact that we want to have caterers,
I'll be honest with you, I think this is an unnecessary conversation just in my
experience, because as a ceo who has to sign, you know, insurance documents and I have
to plan annual dinners, my insurance will not let me run an annual dinner without
signing that. I will not allow alcohol served unless there's a caterer present, because the
liability is so high. Because if you overserve someone and it's a it's a company dinner and they drive and kill someone, we're on the hook for a couple million dollars. And the
insurance companies know that. And so they have enforced that. And so, and that's where I
think some of this comes to fruition, like with a museum or someone who wanted to do this.
and that was never going to happen, where we go back into a building like that and make it
safe and do a sprinkler like that was going to be millions of dollars. And so we were
trying to find a way forward, is what I think we were trying to do. Look for right now. Back
off the nonprofit one, because that's a separate section. We'll come back to it there too.
and I've got two views in my head on that one. This one is just for we've established a
business practice that allows a building that was used for some purpose to be converted to an
event center and start having catered ■events. Now they can do that at 52 weeks of the year,
or well, they can do it unlimited right now. No. Can I just answer your a couple quick
questions that you had, and then that might give you a little bit more to talk about. But the building code establishes these safety margins by an attorney, a
firefighter, a building official, a business owner. So those collective that's a
collective or consensus document that have agreed like, hey, these are the minimum
standards. So the information that we're sharing with you today are the minimum standards
for people who are serving and drinking alcohol. Secondly, the what that's done at the
international level, right? Like that's the ibc, the irc. To me, that's a pretty broad
regulatory agency that seems to have no oversight. It's driven by the state of idaho, with the
exceptions that I talked about, that have driven up pricing of housing to a point where it's
almost unacceptable. And that's why we don't have sprinklers. So I want to know what's
actually safe versus this group that says, oh, this is the highest level. It's a little
bit like transom, like windows in someone's basement. Yeah. That we've had how many deaths
in the, in the country on that, but it's an increase the cost of every house by $40,000 to
make sure we have big windows, you know, like, where's the, where's the balance of regulation is what I'm trying to say here. But the reason the alcohol, alcohol is a big
component in the building code and fire code, as is it looks at people that cannot preserve
their own life if they're crowded and they get trampled. Well, we have young children,
so the fire code and building code really shrink down the size and increase the amount of
fire protection that's in the building or safety protective systems. When we have small
children, when we have people that are sedated and getting procedures, when we have
elderly that are bedridden, and when we have people that drink alcohol. And so it's designed
to kick in to require some of those other safety requirements like sprinklers or, or alarm
systems, because it's going to be a delayed progress to get people out of the fire code is
all about getting people out. Like just like you said, those windows, yes, we use them for
egress, but we also use them to, to fight fire through them as well. But it's, it's all
designed to get people out. And the timing that they've studied what it takes to take 42.5 year
olds out of a daycare is longer than, than a fifth grade class. So but that's why, that's why
the people who, who are drinking that are probably had a slow response because of that.
that's why that category kind of gets limited. Do you have any number? For me, it is
200,000 plus at least right to sprinkler it. It really depends on quite a bit on, on the size
of the building and stuff. That's probably right around. One example is, is cody just
mentioned the under 5000 square square feet or under 100. A lot of our small restaurants in
town that serve alcohol do not need these extra safety because they are small enough. Yeah
they are, you know, franklin cheesesteak, the piehole places where you can serve and drink
because they're under that perimeter. And you will see a design market in architecture
that are building right under the parameters, which is great in, in it's, it meets the
building code and they know exactly those thresholds and, and kind of design right under
them. Yeah. So, so really, when it comes to introducing alcohol into a building, the, the
requirements really get tightened up really, really fast because you can do like an
a three, which is an event center without alcohol. And the, and it opens up quite a lot. So
the test and, and the research and everything like that. And then once you introduce alcohol
into a building, the, the requirements really tighten up. It really sounds like it's
because they may not be coherent, making good choices. Great. Yeah, but, but one of
the huge differences is you'll see is where these sprinklers at that 90, 99 person level, we
have buildings that pull alcohol permits that they could have 1800 people in there with
no sprinklers. So those are those things. When you look at the fire deaths in america, we
have a theater that was the worst in 602 people. But everything under that bar,
restaurant, bar, restaurant, bar, restaurant, concert, place, bar, restaurant and, and, and
it's just a, we try to learn from those tragedies and put things in place. And that's why
they're in the building code and fire code today. But. I think that's just the best way
I can kind of. This is just a way to find that route forward over time, as opposed to just
implementing it right now. And it's not going to it's not going to eliminate alcohol
permits. Even after the fifth year, it allows up to 12 per location. So if you're a
business and you have alcohol events once a month for your employees, that's fine. Or if
you have like a few weddings a year. Sure, sure. Yeah. But if you're going to be, well,
really what we're trying to get at is if you're going to treat yourself like an alcohol
establishment, you need to come up to code so it's safe for people. So and then both that
both the safety and the unfair competition aspect. So what did we do? The three day permits.
yeah. The only thing I could think of would be, you know, politics, these, these random
holiday opportunities that businesses get. Are you just saying opposed to one day or
when you ask that question? No, because I, as I remember it, came from events like at the
museum of idaho. Well, the charity ones definitely. Yeah, mostly annual events, but
sometimes like quarterly events, which is a little more like the museum. I may be wrong, but I
think the art museum periodically rents their space out to various groups. So they
felt like. If they got the if they got somebody with the permit to come and serve the
alcohol, that would be, it would have to come to the code. Do you see we were encouraging
the non. It is nonprofit, but they were actually doing it by renting it out to somebody else,
if that makes sense. So that was my understanding of why we did it. But is that still why
we're doing it? Because we have created a business practice. I believe that we didn't
necessarily an unintended consequence of the. Yeah, yeah. So we have because we didn't
put a limit on how many you could have. Right. So this does that. But I think it was also
that there there was that practice happening. Right. And it wasn't it wasn't like the
museum of idaho was suddenly up. All right, right, right, right, right. Like, right. Like, yeah,
yeah, it was there is this, this idea that, that there is trying to make a shift in their
business practices. Exactly. Yeah. So it isn't really a change of use. So it was trying
to thread that needle that that change of use wasn't, was equally as aggressive, right.
for, for a business or for a, a center. So if that was our main purpose, then that's where this
kind of came from. To say we didn't intend to establish a business practice that would go
on as a three day a week nightclub. Yeah. Because that really maybe you've gone beyond
you actually have changed the use. Does that make sense? Yes. Now you really are doing this.
we're trying to we're working our way back out of this hole. That's where this all comes
from. And, and like getting these numbers is, is a little bit guesswork. So I'm not
saying these are the best numbers we could, we could decide to change them. And 12th
may be too small. I don't know. But that's what the plan was behind it. Trying to adjust to
what we thought was the original purpose. Am I speaking correctly? Yeah, you're
speaking correctly. It's just I just also want to reiterate this really puts us in a
dilemma. So outside of the, the permitting that we have allowed, if if someone is serving
alcohol in the building, that's not a, a two and we get a complaint and we go inspect it,
we bring it to cody, he puts a stop work order and closes it down. It's not supposed to be
happening there. But then on the back side, through the state, I can permit. Right. And
we decide what their level of people can be in there and declare that maximum occupancy,
which we just we have to look at the design value on the blueprints that say this. And
for the museum, it's a 1040. For other places, it's 1920. And when you go back to look at
when someone's asking me, I want to be a bar today or tonight. Here's the threshold.
it's that 5000ft■s, 100 people on the main floor. Or I'm or I'm making it up. Like you said,
I'm making up a number. Or do you feel differently? Because I think very valid to what you
just said about I'm being a bar for the night, right? Where someone's trying to create
revenue and they're really. But what if it's a wedding and you're just having wine there? And suddenly it's a sprinkler question as to whether or not you make that, you know what I
mean? Like there seems like there's a difference there, but it can't be for you as a
regulator that makes it difficult. Yeah. I look at it essentially the same. If you're an event center, downtown event center, and they hold events 300 plus days a year and they
have an alcohol license, some of these event centers may have their own license or they may
cater. It depends on what their circumstances are, but I don't I don't look at them any
differently than cody. Any other comments about that? And sometimes we, we tend to, to
just focus on the fire sprinkler systems in these buildings. But it really comes
down to a lot more than that. We want to make sure there's enough exits in place so that
we don't have 100 people in. They only have one exit door out of that building. That
could be a very dangerous situation. The doors open up. Or if we do have multiple doors,
we don't have exit signs. So if the building is filled with smoke, people don't know where
to go. There's there's quite a lot of things in the building code that, that we look at, not
just fire sprinklers in those areas. And we just want to, as we look at the buildings and
evaluate them for events, we just want to make sure that in an emergency, they they can get
out and find hydrogen and do their job. Yeah. The density value changes drastically. In
an a2, you can be one person up to seven square feet, and other mercantile stores one every
300ft. So we go from a 49, a 49 occupancy load as just a mercantile store, or they can
be 300 and something as a a2. And so that's the conflict. And in my mind, I see the permits
of all the random celebratory events that you want to have in town. We are here to go inspect
the building, make sure it meets the basic safety requirements, and support all these great activities. However, just like councilman francis said, then you have others that
are just turning it as a business. That's really conflict with with the intent
in my mind. So. Okay. We cover those last two. We deal with those. Yeah. Let's see if we
got this. Yeah. And then just as a again, this limits only this limited. The downscaling
process only applies to alcohol catering permits. It does not apply to any charitable event.
permits is again, the parameters there are different. They have to give it to a. For
public purpose. One of the other changes that was proposed to be made is that currently,
to get a catering permit, you have to have city alcohol license and. The proposed
change here is to allow. Even if you don't have a city alcohol license, but you have a
state or county one that's required, that you could come in and do a catering event here
in the city. So it would allow out of city alcohol license holders to come into the city.
so that's one of the changes. And council president francis, did you have a I can't remember
exactly what the reason was, but we at times, I believe we have events where we have out
of out of city alcohol vendors. Is that correct? Is that the reason? I think the idea was
that some some people have licenses, do catering, but they're located in the county
or they're located in. So they wouldn't have a city license, city alcohol license, but they
have a state license and they have a county license or local whatever they have, they could
come to idaho falls and cater an event. That was the idea. Yeah. So that was that was the
idea behind this. Otherwise you'd be limiting only caterers that were premised in idaho
falls could cater an event, and we didn't want to restrict it at that level. That was what
was behind that. Okay. Moving on to the next one. Hold on, can I skip a slide? Okay. Sorry,
I apologize. This going back to the alcohol permits that changes again if there's a do
not the proposed changes to if there's a stop work notice or do not occupy order in place,
they can't get one because obviously there's a problem in the building. And then also when there's an alcohol catering permit issued, it has a number on there that I
believe is five sets of the maximum number of people, and that'll be on there. And then
part of this code change will say, you can't exceed that number, because sometimes it'll be lower than the normal building limits. Right. As I explained to you tonight, when
there's alcohol involved, that number, the number of people that are allowed to be there shrinks drastically at times. And that actually wouldn't have required the ordinance because
we already started that practice on the application. Now the caterer has to identify
how many people we get from the fire department. Yes. In the building official approves
those occupancy, the max occupancy load in the space. And so we're we're verifying
with him or on a on a site approved plan. And sometimes we'll go. If we don't have that
history, we'll go measure and apply the calculus and confirm it with the building. And the
reason for putting it as a requirement in the ordinance is. So if people violate that now,
we can move on to potentially move to suspend or revoke the license. Okay. So sorry. Okay.
going okay. So going forward, we already we already covered this out of city people,
alcohol license holders could do alcohol catering permit. Okay, so one issue that we've
found over the years is this, this loophole of a person that has what's clearly a commercial
establishment will have an event and they'll just lease it out to a private party, and
then that private party will serve alcohol. We go to, you know, site and they say, this
is a private event. What are you doing? You can't cite us. And so in a way, just by dint
of a lease, they're saying you can't you can't regulate our space and you can't prohibit us
from having alcohol. So do you have anything to add on that, chief? Okay. So the proposed
solution is to have defined commercial establishment, and you'll see that in special
attention to that. That's in section four, two one in the definitions section. Basically,
if you hold yourself out as a commercial establishment and you're not a residence or a
hotel or motel or something like that, your commercial establishment. And so the
proposed changes are, unless you have an alcohol license or a catering permit or a
charitable events permit, you can't. The owner or operator can't sell, etc. Alcohol from a
commercial establishment. So you've got to get a license, otherwise you can't do it. You
also can't lease or rent to another person knowing that the person would serve alcohol. So
again, it's trying to close that loophole. If somebody's saying, hey, I have a lease. And so they were private event. And on the flip side, a person renting or leasing commercial
establishment can't sell alcohol again unless they have the proper licenses or permits.
and so it's coming at it from both angles, both the owner as well as the person leasing it
have a responsibility not to serve alcohol unless they have the proper licenses or permits.
any questions on that? Yeah, I have all kinds of problems with this. First of all, under our
rules, like, I mean, we're not the regulatory agency, right? Idaho state police and abc is
the regulatory. And to say that commercial spaces, I mean, this even makes me question whether
if I'm a consultant and I have people over for a beer, I'm a commercial business. Like that
seems problematic. If this seems very, very, very broad and not allowed under idaho
code 23916, when we talk about what a city can and can't regulate based on when there's
a state regulatory agency telling us what we can and can't. John, will you repeat
that a little louder just because I'm writing this down? Yeah. My dad for what I dapa
11.05. If you go look it up, abc is the regulatory agency alcohol bureau. So the state
office of the state police are the ones who run alcohol laws. Right. And we are dillon's real
estate. And and we don't get to do things that we just want to do. And, and making commercial
establishments a place that can't serve alcohol. It's not it's something they've
considered. And they just redid this whole law in 2025 and didn't witness it. And this is
an unusual space events, event centers, you know, downtown events center is a perfect
example of someone who just took a business model for it. Right? So I just don't think
we're, I don't, I don't think this is an option for us to do. And I can look into that if
you'd like me to. Can we meet afterwards? You can. And we have july. I mean, I know we're
not voting on it for a while, but I just think we're going to have to get very granular if we
want to kind of take care of some of these things and look at it, dapa, instead of just,
you know, the this doesn't say you can't serve alcohol in a commercial establishment. It
says you have to have a license or permit. So if you have catering permit, you can have
alcohol there. But so that doesn't change what I just said about being a consultancy
practice in your home. You're going to get a catering permit for every time you want to drink a beer. I mean, every, every, every residence in the city that runs a very specific
against residency in this though, I mean, if I remember, but if but if you're a
commercial entity with this definition, so you're going to have to tighten that. Clark,
could we pull up the. Madam clerk can we pull up the clean version of the alcohol
ordinance? Beyond that, it's just a whole question of whether this is allowed. This was the core of the issue, if you remember. We talked. Oh yeah, I know. I mean, that's
why it's here. I mean, that's why we're doing all 34 pages. And I'll be honest with you,
this the other thing is I think this is a year long process. My my siblings, the attorneys say
that there is nothing more complex than alcohol law. So this is the one thing that it
does say on commercial establishment, any location upon which any business is
conducted that provides, extends, offers, sells or otherwise makes available goods, services or facilities to the public, not including a person's place of residence
that is not made available to the public and not including the temporary living space of a
hotel, motel or other establishment that provides temporary living space for individuals. Yeah. So what about a hairdresser at home? You know, I would say the
hairdresser makes her place available. So I just think this whole piece of this is really
not something we're ready to take on. I think we really need an in depth understanding of
whether this is allowed with event centers, because we probably have over 100 or 200
event centers in this city that think that they. I signed a contract with an event center
last year that said, yes, you can serve alcohol if you have your insurance and you do all
your things and. And so if you get a caterer in there, they didn't care if I got a caterer
or not with that, with that event center. So I think there's mass confusion about what is, is. And I think there's a large gray area here under idaho rules and under the
alcohol rules. And and then we have the county rules. We have the city rules. And the
complexity of that is just not us here saying, oh, this is what we want. I think we have a
lot of work ahead and lots of times and this is, again, I'll look into this lots of times
the state law sets a floor, but then explicitly says you can increase that cities. My
impression is so far from my review of the alcohol state alcohol code, is that we're
allowed to be more stringent and. And I got the opposite view was that we're allowed to
have concurrent licenses, but not we can't become more restrictive. And I think some
of that is borne out of the corruption schemes and corruption scandals out of out
of like the mob era. Because when you have 1 or 2 people that were in charge, you got
ugly. When cities had control over over states and counties. So it's just I don't know that,
but I just think it's something we have to consider because the complexity of this is pretty
intense. I just have one comment real quick about that because I was had a lot of
questions about 4 or 5 years ago. And I, I can't remember this, this the captain, I think
it's captain state, but I did have a conference call with him and wanted to know the process.
and he said, we have we have our oversight of the alcohol licenses and permits, but we
rely on you guys in our local cities, like we don't send inspectors out. It's up to the
fire inspectors to go validate. Are they in the right space? Does it mean basic fire safety
inspection? And cody and I had discussed this, discussed this quite a bit over the last month,
couple months since I've been home. And cody, can you just talk about the the code council?
when you when you asked about how many permits or how many times we could allow alcohol in
the outside of an a to. Because I have just. So yeah, so fire department had asked me, you
know, if I could look into how many times they could allow an alcohol event in a building
that was not designed that way. And so I reached out to international code council on
that, and they came back and said, the number is zero. What? Tell me what international code
council, I don't know. That's who does the international building code. Yeah, they're
the ones that actually create the ipc, the fire code, existing building codes, all of
our codes for most all of our codes come right from icc. I think that's probably true, but
I don't think that is how abc and adapa is reading. So. Could you have a madam clerk, if we
could go down to the definition of commercial establishment just for reference, that's the
definition of commercial establishment right there in the middle of the page. Now on the top of the page. That is the one that I just read. Yeah, yeah. That's correct. Any
location upon which any business is conducted that provides, extends, offers, sells or otherwise makes available goods, services or facilities to the public, not
including a person's place of residence is not made available to the public, and not including the temporary living space of a hotel, motel or other establishment. Provides
temporary living space for individuals. So with with that definition as it is currently.
and and this is council's ordinance. And if you want to tweak the definition, we
absolutely could tweak it. But the way this is what the intent behind it was. If you're if
you're a business open to the public. Again, the idea here is we're trying to protect safety.
so if you're not, you know, if you're not getting your alcohol, the alcohol license, alcohol
permits, charitable event permits, what that does is allows us to review and say, hey, are you safe for consumption of alcohol? And we don't have a mechanism for
saying, because if we don't have something like this, then a person can say, I just don't
get a license, then I'll just sell alcohol. And that's kind of the idea of kind of, did you
find a clause like this anywhere else? Because this isn't in the boise ordinance,
is it? No, no, this is very yeah. This doesn't seem normal. When I started looking. So
there must be another way to comment because you're right, you can't just go the other way, right? There must be some middle ground. There's got to be some. And basically what
this is saying is if your commercial establishment, you've got to get a license or permit, otherwise you can't serve alcohol because it's a regulated item. And that's,
that's what this that's the intent. And that's what this was trying to, to accomplish. But when I talk with attorneys, when I talk with, you know, kind of the experts, that's not
been the concept around alcohol consumption at a private event in a business or a building you
own, you put up signs that say, this is a private event and the public's not welcome. So say
you want to put a wedding on it. You're my neighbor has this nice backyard. Or if you want
to put it on at your place of business for a night where you're going to have a light
after five or a business after hours from the chamber, and you want to serve alcohol. If it's
a private event that was by invitees and you say to the public, you're not allowed here
right now, then someone showing up with beer and alcohol is perfectly acceptable. And it has been in the state of idaho for the last forever. And so I think that's where we're
finding this tension, is that that hasn't ever been kind of resolved at the state level, I
do. If I saw the backyard example that that's a residence, that would be it's not a
commercial establishment. But yes, if you're under this proposed amendment, if you are
a commercial establishment and you say, hey, we're now a private event, then yes, this
is what this would apply. And the answer would be an alcohol permit. Well, that's if you're
going to force that issue. But I think that's where you have I think that's where you're up
against some legal problems. This is really interesting because because, you know, one
of the things that I love attorneys, you will find an attorney to argue both sides of
every point known to man. I mean, it's designed as an adversarial system, right? So
if when we talked, so I was a little confused on a, b, c, and the state police enforce this,
they can, but they don't. We do it. That's why concurrence. We will call a, b, c and they help
us out. We will call the state police. They will help us. But if we're just going to sit and
wait for them to do enforcement, that's that's just not going to happen very often. What we so
what I've talked about a, b, c and the state police, their opinion is what the the stuff
you're describing is already prohibited by state law and go ahead and arrest for it and
cite for it. That's the opinion from the alcohol beverage control and the state police
that those those, you know, those, those commercial establishments that are serving
alcohol are doing so outside of the the requirements to be an alcohol establishment. So
that's their, you know, that. Do you think it's you make sure that was clear that they said
they were closed for business that that do you see what I'm saying? Like that matters
immensely. And then say then is it okay to. Yeah, this is what I'm I'm sure there's an
attorney to argue that's just fine because that's what they're arguing in court. When we arrest them, you will find an attorney that argues that the whole time. But but our our
information that we have, whether it's right or wrong, is that that's already illegal
under state law. We are struggling enforcement here in idaho falls because what you're
describing, because people are arguing both sides to the point what we were hoping this
ordinance would do was make it very clear, hey, you can't do that. My seat says, let's find
out so that we don't do that and then get sued for a couple million dollars. Does that make
sense? Like, let's let's get it right. So let's get it in writing from from abc and in
napa and from the state police. And then let's look at the court cases because this has
been this isn't like the first time this has happened. And I was shown the court cases where
these charges were dismissed out of hand in other parts of the state when this was tried,
when they held up signs and they did these things. So that's what I'm saying is, let's find out what the answer is and make it predictable for the business communities, right?
because there's 100 people's livelihoods. They're trying to figure this out to council member radford. I do think that this is intended to make it predictable. I mean, I agree we
want to make sure that we are, you know, not in conflict with things that that are with the
state. But, you know, as far as when it comes to fire code and and all of that, we are very
careful when it, you know, 26ft wide and here's the radius turn and here's how we're going to
fight it. And then to kind of throw our hands up and say, well, this is a private event
and you've got doors that don't swing outward, you know, and then it's a it's a major
catastrophe in the city of idaho falls. And we said, well, you know, we there was nothing
we could do about it. There's, there's that tension there as well. You don't want, you know,
300 people. We're not going to go around, baby, you know, babysitting, but there has to
be some kind of understanding and compromise back and forth. Agreed. But I think if you're
having a private event, you're probably not having a 500, 000 people generally in these
locations. Are you renting it out for a private event? Yeah. And then that's another
question, right? The landlords have this. It's still a private event, but they were making
money on the front end because they're renting out their space to a private event. That's
exactly what I signed for and had. Right. Yes. But you know, you might. So you're not wrong.
what we do have to figure out, though, is what is actually true or not. But and I think I
think the catering permit option, I think might be a pretty good middle ground, but
I don't think it's a bad. So that's why I think we have to figure out from there, bring
that from. And I'll just say this too, the reason I say we don't use water, we hire water
attorney. Right. And so I think with this ordinance too, I think we should just send it
all through a few different alcohol attorneys. Like we can do that authorization. Yeah, we
need to get some money for it to happen. But that's what I think is that the, the
complexity of the interaction of the state, county, city and abc and idaho is so complex. Us
just saying, no, we should not allow commercial businesses to establish. And the definition
is going to have to be very clear. So anyway, that's on this piece. I'm going to make
one more comment. I could go on, but you've given one side of the extreme of somebody runs an
architecture thing out of their home and has a beer with somebody. The other extreme is
somebody says, I can make a lot more money if I have a warehouse, and I push all the
stuff over here, and this other becomes an event center, and people can come in and create
private parties and drink and bring their own booze, that creates a problem. And when
that creates a problem, when people can't get out, and we said we had a chance to prevent
that and we didn't, that's a responsibility too. So that's the other end of it. And that's
where we're trying. That's where this comes from is that very problem. And I just think
there's got to be someone who's done this. You know what I'm saying? In the state of idaho,
this happened and across the country because when I just there has to be a more. And we
do have I mean, just for anybody who is watching and listening, we do have june 2nd
through june 21st for public outreach. And if we find that, as you know, we move forward
legally that there is some question there, we will as well, you know, rework it and there
will be opportunity to reach out in the next three weeks as well. That is something that
comes up in the, you know, anticipated timeline. So there is there is opportunity for
that. Council member. I appreciate you bringing that up. All right. I think I'll move on.
just an interest of time. Move on to the next slide. Okay. So one of the things that came to
our attention recently is that our ordinance, current ordinances don't are pretty
light on what the process is for suspension or revocation, as well as the bases for
suspension or revocation. If you notice, if you look at the wine and beer ordinances, it
doesn't even mention the word revocation. If I remember correctly. And then in our
liquor ordinance, it does mention revocation, but it's a very limited number of grounds,
which was kind of a surprise to the the then city clerk that we couldn't revoke, you know, say
that they, they, they became disqualified for a ground that wasn't in that specific list.
so we have the proposed solution is to be very clear and specify what can trigger
suspension or revocation process, and that there's a very. So if you look at the
state code for the way they handle their licenses, it's pretty ambiguous. It just kind
of goes to the director. The director can assess a fine or revocation or suspension. The
recommendation was to make it very clear process. So if you're found, you know, if it's
found true that there's been one of those violations the first time within five years,
the suspension for seven days would be alcohol license, during which period you can't
serve any alcohol. And if you do during that period, then that's a basis for revocation.
second violation within five years, it's ten days suspension. Third violation would be 14
days and a $1,000 fine. And then a fourth violation is to revoke your city alcohol
license, all of them for that particular premises. But again, it's within a five year time
frame. So you would have to in order to have it revoked, you'd have to have four violations
within five years. So if you only had, you know, one violation every two years,
you're just never going to actually get to the point of getting revoked. So it kind of
allows you to kind of wipe the slate clean. So that was kind of the thinking there, along
with, does that include the paperwork errors of the trainers? Correct. So if you
look at for 2-24-2-20. So a it spells out. And for the alcohol, remember. Let me just double
check. But I'm pretty sure that when I did that I only had in there the time when you have 12
infractions that that can trigger revocation, suspension, nothing else in that particular
part of the ordinance. If you look at it, it spells out each individual part of our
ordinance. Again, let me just double check that we do it once. Okay. This made me think that
was true. Yeah. The only one in of chapter or of section 19, which is alcohol server
training is subsection c for which is the. 12 violations or more within a period of 18
months for the alcohol server. So that's correct. So I know that was one of the concerns
previously. Okay. Relatedly, our ordinance was pretty light on the appeals process. And
having come from the court of appeals or having clerked there, I'm kind of a appeals nut. And
so throughout the statute, you'll see now it's peppered with and appeals process for
when you when the two things happen, right. We made it so that the decisions to suspend
or revoke. Or just to deny or approve is made by the city clerk now. But the decision can
be appealed to city council. And your review is limited to whether substantial evidence
supports the factual findings of the clerk, and then whether the as a matter of law, based
on those factual findings, the decision was correct. And so you'll see for each and every
one. So this is this is kind of detailed. I'm not going to go through this in detail, but
these are the code sections that are there in your packets for the details of what where
each section is that does what. So you see here there's the section. The first section is
for for an alcohol license, the clerk has authority to approve or deny. And then here's how it
gets appealed. And then here's the decision. You know, clerk gets to decide whether to
suspend or revoke. It can also be appealed. Those sections are there for you. Same with
alcohol catering permit. Same with the charitable event permit. The appeals process for
the special event permit was a little bit different. Again, the special event permit, this
is where it's on city property park or a closed public street. The clerk similar to the others,
the clerk decides whether to approve or deny denial or revocation can be appealed to
city council. But. And maybe I need to go and revise this. Currently, there's no
revocation process for a special event permit except for the parks and rec director, the
fire chief, or the chief of police as they see a violation ongoing during an event, they can immediately terminate terminate the event. And our code currently provides that.
there's no appeal from that. Okay. But hopefully that will help. Having a clear appeals
process will allow it just to help everybody, the applicants as well as the city. Just some.
yeah. Can we go back? Yeah, I'm just curious about the fire chief, police chief and the
director or designee maybe. Oh, so that's automatically included under. It's one of the
it's one of the general sections of our city code. It says that if any. Basically, if
any director is named in our city code, it includes any authorized people under that
director. So if chief johnson designates a sergeant to be the authorized over this sort of
thing, they could come and exercise their authority. Basically, it's been delegated. But that's in another part of our of our code that automatically says, if there's
a director that includes authorized designees, basically. Any other questions? Just just
please note that there were a lot of minor changes. I went through the state code. I
reviewed state code, tried to make it in compliance. Sometimes we had duplicative things where we were penalizing the exact same thing the state code was. And I was like,
there's no point in that. And so I removed those or sometimes added things. And so there are
a lot of changes. We didn't have time at this meeting to get through everything. Thanks.
council president francis, how many hours did you spend revising this thing? Probably. Probably at 20 hours, 25. Not as many hours as you did. Yeah. So some of the some of the
other changes for permits or special event permits, again, that's for when it's at city
owned property, we changed it so that you can have liquor at memorial drive plaza and any
closed public streets. Another change that we made is to give the chief of police and the
city attorney authority to compel production of certain items, specifically including
video surveillance. So if we have an alcohol establishment that, you know, we think we
have a crime that's related. And they said, hey, we left from this bar. We would just like the surveillance video so we can see what was happening before they left and get them.
okay. And then this is the anticipated timeline for the ordinance today, june 1st, is
the we're presenting it to for your consideration, june 2nd through the 21st will be public
outreach. I know our chief of staff, margaret winburn, wimborne, and others in our in
our city have been working on setting up times to meet with those in our community to do
public outreach director. Margaret. Yes. And then councilman francis has really
been leading that effort and is going to do some work with chief johnson, sort of
collaboratively going to meet with downtown merchants, especially. Yeah. And that
allows the public to give good feedback on on this ordinance. June 22nd, it's anticipated
we'll have a second work session to incorporate public feedback or change any other
thinking, other changes that council sees fit. And then tentative date of july 9th for
whether to adopt the proposed amendments to the alcohol ordinance. I do have a question.
we kind of went back quickly back to the nonprofit. So if I read this right, a nonprofit
could purchase their own alcohol sealed keg and sealed bottles of wine and serve it
themselves under two hours without any kind of permit. Or did they apply for a catering
permit even though they don't have a license to get a catering? No, they could they
could get a charitable event permit. Okay. If they qualify, it has to be a public purpose.
you know, they donate the proceeds to a for a public purpose. So a museum, if for
itself it purchases its wine or whatever from a distributor and doesn't open it until the event,
and they do the serving themselves, they don't need a catering permit. They don't need any. That's correct. They, they get they get a charitable event, charitable. If they get
a charitable event permit. That's correct. They can, okay. They can do that themselves. And as far as the two hour thing, that only if it's over two hours, what that would
trigger is a requirement to have a person with alcohol server training. Right. Okay.
okay. There are nonprofits that do hire a caterer and we will do the permit for them. And in
that case, the caterer applies for that location. Correct. Okay. Got it. Okay. All right.
any other questions? Comments. But please. And I'm open to if if council at this meeting
wants to make substantive changes, I'm happy to to take those and then make those changes so that when we go to the public, we have something different. We'll try to get
working on those quickly, of course. Or if you just want to let it percolate and think
about it. And then at june 22nd, then you come with proposals. And again, my office is open.
if any of you have changes you'd like, please see me and we can talk about it. At this
point, I don't think that we want to make I mean, I'm not hearing substantive,
substantive changes. I am hearing, you know, that that more bedding. But as far as
council being able to come in and work out changes, I don't I prefer not to see that all of
the changes should come june 22nd. There's potential to work with the attorney to come up
with language to present to council on june 22nd, but this would. The expectation would be
that we would see this come forward with the public input, and that then we would decide
whether or not we want to incorporate and what that would incorporate following a process
that not every piece of public input is going to end up in the ordinance. And not every piece
of council input is also good in the ordinance, so that otherwise, otherwise we end up
with all of these. Or did this come from. So I would expect that this would come back to us
as is with a list of potential input that we could talk about in the june 22nd. There isn't
anything magical about july 9th. We would have some time to work between june 22nd and july 9th
to incorporate that. But the expectation would be nothing changes unless council decides
right here. Now there's something very specific that they'd like to change before it
goes to the public. So I have something I think that would help us get it through is, I
think the the server thing should just be out completely. It's already an insurance thing.
it already is tips. And there's all these trainings that have to happen from an insurance
standpoint. I think we're creating $120,000 on the back of a napkin, kind of to have a
full time person to figure out 2000 servers that we have to keep track of. And it just
makes no sense to me and people, they're at risk losing their licenses if these bartenders
don't already do this. These bartenders have to not overserve. And so that one,
just to me seems clear that we we shouldn't be doing it. Okay. Can we have chief johnson
address that one? Because I think that the server training actually has been working,
particularly in the downtown area. I think the overserving is part of the genesis of this
entire process. Yeah. So unfortunately, we had to make multiple cases on local
bartenders for our service. We've got several more cases for criminal cases on our
service. The idea behind the server training is to prevent that from happening in the
first place. So when a. When when the city attorney talked about the compelling of of
video or surveillance video, a lot of that, that video that we're, we're going after is we
have a dui crash out in the community. Where, where did you come from? They'll say it was a
particular drinking establishment. We wanted to look at the video for that.
some servers have been terminated, so it's not like there isn't a huge problem in
idaho falls with servers. Overserving there has been a significant problem in idaho
falls with servers. Overserving with. When we first brought this ordinance forth, there was
a lot of conversation about it, and we've seen better compliance with overserving
have we talked about having that? I think if we decided to take that out, we'd go right
back to where we were before. And that's the sex assaults, the fights in the street,
vandalism, the urination in public. This is this is a significant issue. The
alternative to that is I've called boise bars and I've talked to owners here in town,
have talked to boise, and they said that this did not have any like meaningful. And I'd like
to see some studies where this. Because insurance agencies did this, I tried to look up to see
if overserving training has any impact on, on sex crimes or sexual assaults. It says that
the evidence is weak at all. And so you might say that anecdotally, but how do we know
that? And then we're adding a full time position and a regulatory on all of our
businesses. And we just 75% turn rate on servers in downtown, in these bars and in
any service activity. So I think we need to find ways that in the ordinance that we could
encourage this and maybe do it at the end of the year when they're up for renewal, they show us their records. But because I'm not against trying to solve the problem, but doing
it this way with managing 2000 expirations in an office, like that's craziness to me in terms
of regulatory. And ultimately we'll do whatever council directs us to do. I think as we
talked to boise, I'll forward you the the data from boise. I think I've heard the council
president, francis and brandon, they drove by council, had the same question. And, you know,
stats are stats and you can argue stats all day long. Boise pd feels like it's been
immensely successful and it's contributed to a much better downtown. The the goal of what
we want is we see huge value to being able to come and idaho falls and get a drink. We see
huge value in the businesses that do that. We see huge value in contributing to the to the
culture of idaho falls. And there's, there's a, a great outcome when that that works
well. If you look at a typical weekend night, idaho falls as compared to a typical weekend
night. Boise, you see significant differences. We would anticipate boise would be
much crazier than idaho falls because it's a much bigger city, lots more people. But that's
not the experience on the street. And so we were looking for a way to make it better.
I'm not new at this. I've done this in a few states now. Right? And I've done park closings all
over the place. And it's just inherent in the nature of alcohol. If you get a lot of
people that are drinking, there's things that happen in connection with that. And so
bar closing is no shock me. Like it would maybe a general citizen that watched it. I've
seen enough of them. The one that got me was when there were seven fights within ten minutes,
about two blocks from here, including a guy that kicked one of my officers in the head. And
it is a problem in idaho falls. So when we looked at what boise was doing, now boise has the
answer to every question, because I don't think they do. But but what they were doing
with the server training in talking to their police department, looking at their data, they had a significant impact. I think you can go to downtown boise. I think you go
to boise. I think you can get a drink. I think you'd still have a good time. I think the
economy works really well, but it's mitigating the things that we don't want because people
aren't going to want to come downtown and get a drink if they're going to get punched and spit on, and people are peeing in the back alley and vomiting in the front walkway,
and we see case after case after case here in idaho falls, because we were not requiring
server training. The they were overserving. So what was the feedback? Because when I've
been talking to the owners, they said that they went to the training that was offered and said it was no different than what they'd been requiring their employees to have all
along. If that is the case. And what we told them is we believe that a lot of them will already
be in compliance. So if they've already been doing it, it wouldn't be a huge burden then
to continue doing if that's the trend already doing. But the burden in keeping track, that's
what I'm trying to say. And the owners that I talk to are like, yeah, I can, I can just go to
ammon. Like we are unique in that. In terms of boise, it's we're so small that they'll
just go across the border and open another. And we've built something really cool downtown.
and you're right, it's been problematic at times as well, but it's also really made a
meaningful difference for us as a city. What's happened with the kind of connection of bars
and the things to do downtown? There's there's been some exceptions to that, though. We've we've had to shut down bars because we had massive gunfights. I think the biggest
gunfight I've seen in an urban setting happened in idaho falls at the old hurricane bar. And
that was one of the biggest gunfights. I mean, we're talking 30 plus rounds being thrown back and forth. It was a miracle we didn't have all sorts of dead people. And that
type of behavior has followed other particular bars. So when, when when you're looking at it,
you know, I will I will compare it to driving laws, you know. In order to drive, you have to
have a driver's license. It's a highly regulated activity. You can't just go out and drive.
you have your driver's license. There's a test you have to take to get a license. There's
training you have to go through to to get that license. You know, if we were to say,
everybody go ahead and and, you know. We hope you don't run a red light, but please don't do
it. You would you would end up with most people complying. That's not a valid comparison
because we are we are already have bartenders that can lose not only everything, but they
can be sued if they sue and get a dui because of their overperforming. I mean, you're
not that's not what we're saying here. We're not saying to go to nothing and just allow
anything. But what I'm saying is, if I understand you correctly, I don't know if what
you're suggesting is keep doing what we've always been doing. I'm suggesting what I'm saying is what we've always been doing was not working. I'm suggesting that we do something like
you're saying, but with less regulatory effort. Does that make sense? Like the middle ground you're saying. And then the other piece of that is to do it in a way that identifies
that these people have already taken their profession seriously, and that they want the same things that you want because they're the same things. You're saying is what I hear
from the bar owners. They need this to work. Their livelihoods need it to work. They and
they're the ones that came to us and asked for more police and backed you up on that to
like, I think everyone wants the same outcome. But to add a regulatory burden like this is
where I think it gets kind of over, over overwhelming. My only statement I'll leave with
is alcohol is a highly regulated business. It is already highly regulated and
it's not if if alcohol were to come in today, you'd be banning the sale. But like it just we
kill a lot more people with alcohol than we do. And so alcohol already is a highly
regulated business. And I think most bar owners, most establishments do a phenomenal
job of what they do. But yes, they will have to, you know, track their server training.
that is correct. But we won't be tracking their server training, like through our
clerk. No, we it's only the permitting of the caterer. We're not going to be tracking
thousands of servers because that was, oh, we changed that. Okay. Because that's not I mean,
that was my when I heard you say that, I was like, no, no, no. And so I was double
checking that that is maybe that was probably something I missed. But on the slide is
that these previously, you're right, we did have something in there saying they, they provide to the clerk a list of everybody that's no longer there. All it is is a statement.
if I remember right, all it is now is a statement that they're in compliance with it. That's
good. I'm sorry, council member, when you had said that then I was trying to find it. I was
like, I know that we had that. So I apologize for not removed. So the only permit that you're
tracking is the catering permit, the alcohol license. Those are not the the clerk is not going
to have to track individual server compliance. Most. I want to be careful of saying every
album because there's. But most national chains are already in compliance with it because they
have. These are very common regulations all over. If anyone has enough assets, they're
going to be on top of it because they're going to get sued and they're going to. Most
of our local establishments. I think what you're hearing is they've already providing similar training, and again, they're already being compliant. What I'm saying is there's
enough noncompliance that that not having it be required is a problem with the environment
downtown and in other places for everyone to have a nice business model, have lots of
people want to come downtown and come and get a drink. You don't want that other stuff
happening. It will help prevent that. Councilmember radford, I hope that that was that
regulatory piece that you were thinking like, we're not going to be tracking all of the servers and everyone I've talked to has no problem require have the training
because they already feel like they're tracking it. I just didn't want to have. We don't.
yeah. Okay. Sorry for that, miss. That was a conversation that added no. Well, you know,
it's like those were some of those. It's been a long ordinance. It's been like, I'll
forward you the, the stats from boise that were generated. Actually, if you could just as
you mentioned these, would you mind sharing it with the clerk? Because we've mentioned it kind
of in this public setting. And so I think it would be good to include that as part of the
record of the of the meeting, if you're okay with that, even though. Yeah, that would be
helpful. Okay. Well, any further questions or comments? Otherwise we will see this in
its current version, june 22nd, with potential changes that either council members would
like to see or the public as we take this forward. All right. Thank you for everyone who is
really come together to try and. Get something that can help help the officers, help the
fire, help the residents, really have an enjoyable time down both downtown and in the
local establishment. We do have I want to push through, but I think we need to take maybe
just a few minute break. Then we're going to have a quick update on the erp status, a
couple of quick minutes on the citywide update and announcements. So we'll just take a five minute break, and we'll be back at oh, there we go now thank you for being mindful
of the time. We are back in session and we have a quorum. And we turn the time over to
our chief of staff and finance to just give us an update on the erp project. Yes. Thanks
for giving us some time today. I am here as a representative of the erp executive committee,
which includes pam, director alexander, director. Frederickson. Director jones.
and we've been working with the erp project team just through through the implementation. We
meet with the team about once a month to kind of work through issues. And believe it or not,
after more than a year and a half of a lot of hard work and planning, we are on the
countdown to going live with our new erp system workday. So we wanted to take just a few
minutes today to just provide kind of an overview of what employees can expect in the
next few weeks, and also wanted to make sure you were aware of sort of how this was going to
progress over the next two weeks. So mark hagedorn, our treasurer, is also the project
lead for our erp team. So I'm going to have him take just a minute or two to kind of
provide the overview, and then we'll kind of work through these these quick slides. All
right. So just give you an update of where we've been over the last 18 months. The city's
elected to go with upgrading its financial and hr system. I say upgrade hr, but really this
is our new first time integrated hr system with finance, where hr had multiple
different softwares to accomplish their tasks. And so this upgrade is to upgrade the
legacy system, which is over 26 years old, and meeting it was end of life. And, and so we
have been going through all the decisions daily to try and get this effective and operational
coming here in two weeks from today on the hr side. And then the financial side will go live
and 1st of july. So our first slide, it kind of gives us that go live countdown, the cut over
the cut over dates or sort of the cut over planning will begin today in our slides are
not. But so our cut over planning starts today. And that's going to involve some
blackout dates. And I did provide another handout that sort of shows those cut over,
you know, during certain periods. We want to try and limit the hiring and promotions
just because we're starting to update and finalize the information in the new system.
we've also got some blackout dates for purchasing and sort of step by step directions on
that. We do, we do have sort of other mechanisms. If there is an emergency and a department
needs to, to purchase something, we do have some some kind of workarounds, but we've been
sharing these with staff for about a month or so now just to try and help them to plan. And
then as mark said on june 14th, the hr side of the system will go live. And then on july 1st,
the finance part of the system will go live. So our next slide gives you just kind of a quick
view of what's changing for employees. And mark's going to walk through that one for you.
all right. So. There's a lot changing. And so information is more readily available. You'll
be able to see their job, the job position, the org charts embedded in in the financial
system. You'll have we'll have pictures there. So you can see employees. Employees will be
able to update and change all their elections within the system. There's no longer going
to be paper forms. It's all digital, all the the time off requests, everything's all in
one system. We are consolidating systems into one. And so a lot of these legacy
systems will be going away. There's going to be a task basket and an inbox for people
to complete tasks and know what their workload is for that day. And everything's all searchable
within the system. And you can jump from one area to another without having to exit and come
back in. So it is a highly functional, integrated system. And for employees, a lot of
this information has not been readily available, but they are now they will be able to go in
and make some of their own changes, rather than having to, to work through some of that
with hr. So for managers, they will see all of those same changes that employees will see.
but then in addition, there's some other things that they'll be able to to do. And again,
mark can kind of run through those quickly. Yeah. So for managers, they'll be able to do
approvals within the system. They'll be able to do it from their phone in the field. It's
cloud based. So you don't have to be you don't have to have a vpn to get into it. It's all
right there. All we have to have is the two factor authentication. Be able to validate who they are. And so with the credentials. And that just makes it easy for the
manager to do approvals in the field as well as at their desk, as well as see all the
information all in one place, instead of having to go to different systems. Mark has
access to this information can be secure. I mean, so each person it's it's the security
is role based. And so it's not an open system. You have to be assigned roles. And those those
roles are assigned to your credentials. And so you have to come in and you have to, to
factor in to get to the system. So it's not just a simple login. You are having to validate your
who you are. We just don't want the information getting in the wrong hands. That's great. And
so we can parse out who can see what and so the personal information or pii is
restricted to only a handful of people. So as mark said, this is really big changes for the
city as a whole, but also for all of our employees. And it's going to affect everybody from
the seasonal workers who umpire softball games to the, you know, the mayor and how she processes
things. So we are kicking off training next week with sort of a basic employee and basic
manager training. Those sessions will be online for employees and then in person
and manage for the managers. We've got 5 or 6 sessions planned for managers that will
include some hands on demonstrations, and then with employees that will be online.
but we're also setting up sort of some q&a sessions with departments to answer some
questions. The week of june 15th, we will start the finance parts of the training. So we
give employees who are involved in those those responsibilities. They'll have an overview,
finance, foundations, and then also some purchasing training. And then the week of june 22nd,
there's some additional finance training depending on roles that's more specialized. And
then we do have we will have ongoing support. We're creating an online resource center that
will include some videos that will cover these, these training sessions, as well as
some other information that will be available in our resource center. And then we
are creating some different in-person support systems to help employees as we work
through this transition. One of the big changes for employees is that everybody needs to have
an email address. Believe it or not, we have a few hundred employees, mostly seasonals in
departments like parks and rec that do not have not had emails. For the last 2 to 3 weeks.
we've been working with those departments to set up emails for all of those employees
because again, you do need an email to access the the system to enter your time to do any of
those kinds of things. Mark anything you want to add on the training piece? It's a lot of
training in the month of june, and we recognize that employees aren't going to be able to
learn their job 100% day one, that they'll be trained beyond the month of june to make sure
that people understand and can do their required job functions. And then again, just to
reiterate, throughout this process, we do have a number of different ways that we'll be
offering our employees support. And then even after we go live, we are starting to work with
strata who's been helping us with the implementation on sort of some ongoing support and
next, next steps. Because as mark said, the beginning is just sort of figuring out how
to get into the system. And then it's a matter of sort of making sure that we can utilize
and leverage some of the advanced features and in the system. And so we're trying to
make sure we've got support available in lots of different ways. We also have a group of
employees, representatives from all of our departments in a team called change champions.
they have been working with us for several months now, getting kind of a sneak peek in the
system, and then also sharing information within their departments. A lot of this is
going to be about change management, helping people understand how to get into this
system and feel comfortable with the system. That team has been fantastic and sort of
helping us share information. And then we've also, over the last two weeks or so, been
sharing lots of information with email, and we'll continue to do that. We recognize that
employees get information in lots of different ways. So we've also done some trainings
with admin assistants to make sure that they have a good sense of the system, especially
time keeping. That's going to be critical for for everyone. So we are, as I said, trying to
kind of anticipate needs and respond to, to those needs as they as they arise. So there
are certainly going to be tweaks to this as we go along as, as employees get into the
into the system. And then I do want to just give a huge shout out to our, our project team
project leadership, as well as the dozens of employees from different departments that have
been workstream leads or subject matter leads. This project has been incredibly
intense, especially the last month or two as they've been testing data as it's moved over.
and then there's 2 or 3 different kinds of testing that has to be done. And it's been
very challenging at times to do their work of the day, plus the project responsibilities. And
they've just done a wonderful job. But there is a big push before that. In the next couple
of weeks before we go, go live. Thanks, margaret. I just wanted to add that this has been a
truly a great experience for the city comes together collectively to work on
something as a complete unit, and it's been good to see. I was I had the opportunity
council members to be in just with our consultant and they. I think that this is what they
said. You both can correct me, but I think they said this is as well as any other
implementation to this point that they've seen and that they would use this even as a model,
you know, moving forward of how we, you know, had laid out the step by step process and we met
target goals. And then we had the next step of goals. And, and they were incredibly. Their
expression of awe was a little like, oh, wow. Yeah, this would this, they really did lay it
out. Well, that what our team has done. And so it is good luck. We know there's going to
be bumps in the road. We know that there's going to be bumps in the road, even though we've
laid it out as well as they've ever seen it laid out. We know there will be some bumps, so we
we're prepared for that. Absolutely. Thank you. Mark, can we go back a slide? What's
case. Case is a ticketing system within it that tracks when you have an issue the log
in the system, it'll put deadlines on it and response times so that they get
responded to because not everything can be resolved on the phone call at that moment.
okay. But we are working with it to kind of differentiate between regular it issues and
then work day it issues. I mean, it's not an acronym. It's just they just say case because it's
like a case. It's like it's a name, it's a name brand. So the case is the name of the system.
okay. Like centurylink's down the line workday. Okay. And I actually called that out too,
because I know it's the it ticketing system. I've never really looked at the actual name, but the actual name is okay. Mark pointed out to me. Okay, great. Yes, of course I
know. My point is the I think I know the utilities billing, peace building, work management.
once we complete this system, we are then moving on to look at our billing system, and
there'll be a separate rfp process that will kick off probably this summer. But it's
a completely different part, a totally different project. But there are this fry points fry
mobile piece has to do with aspects of. Mark can speak to that better than I. It's
basically a work management system where it assigns tasks to like building maintenance or
power or water about what tasks they need to complete for that day out in the field. So it
pulls inventory appraisal all together and it can sign into their time. They are
potentially one of them that they would respond to the rfp. Yeah, but but we have not moved
forward with that one as a. Yeah. So maybe that is part of that. Okay. Thank you. Any
other questions? Okay. I know council member damon, as also have a commitment with public
works, but I do want to address one thing before she takes off, which is as. I just want to
make sure that as we continue to move forward, that we continue operating under the
same understanding. I would like to just take a quick minute to discuss what gets put
on consent so that there is some consistency. And the council agreement. We've had
this conversation before. So kind of here is the proposal. Is that any item that goes on
consent would be something that is routine or is a replacement, regardless of the dollar amount.
it could be a million and a half dollars. But if it's, you know, polls for idaho falls
power, it would be on consent. The dollar amount is read into the record as part of the
reading of the record, so that, you know, purchase of idaho falls power poles, 1 million
whatever to this and read them to the contractors as well. If council wants clarification
from a director, wants to ask questions, wants more information than what is on
consent, we will just call up the director. You don't have to take it off of consent. It's
simply I'd like to have this director come and talk about consent. The reason you would
pull it off, consent if you intend to table it or vote no. That way. That way it's off of
the consent agenda. And then there can be discussion back and forth. But other than that,
that would be so you don't have to bomb the whole consent agenda. You don't know on this
one thing, correct. On this one thing. You just it doesn't take a first and a second. Any
council member can pull anything off. But this would be that regardless of dollar
amount, it's really about whether it is routine or replacement. We had something
that if it's if it's not routine, even if there's a lot of information in the packet
about it, it wouldn't be on consent. But routine replacement of things read into
the record conversation around it can still happen. You wouldn't pull it off unless you
planned on tabling it or voting no. I think that's a key piece, because I'm not used to asking
a director on consent. Yes, that's for me, new. So good. So then you can ask any any you've
done information and sort of set a precedent which helped this could, you know, we could
include this in our. Agenda just to make sure that everybody is kind of operating
from that same understanding. Council member larsen, did you have something you wanted to add to that? Thank you. I'm not sure. What are we missing? What is your. I just scheduled
something privately at home works. Not based on the agenda. We would have been done already.
I don't want to hold the staff infirmaries any longer, though. I have to make sense. Okay, I
do have a question. When you say, for example, replacement in what is in, what is read in
or what is in consent, does it say that this is replacement or it's in the existing budget or
something that just shows that basically it's already been approved? Yeah. And again, for
the record, I'm thinking about. Yeah, usually it says this is to replace a unit. So and so
that's it reached into blood. Yes. As part of that memo. And that's something else that we
will make, you know, clear as we talk through the directors that, okay, when you're putting
this on consent, make sure that you include that this is the routine purchase, the
replacement purchase, so that those are, are the clarifying language. Yeah. Already, you
know, it's in wherever so that it isn't just want to make sure that, you know, it works both
ways. We can train the directors, they can train us and we can move that, move that
through that we just have clarity on what what this will look like. I guess you would
have to say we wouldn't necessarily have to vote no. We could think, maybe I'm going to
vote no, but after a discussion. Correct, correct. If you if you think that there is a if it is
just not a clear. Yes, I will plan on voting yes on consent. No. And if you have a director
come up and you hear the information at that point, you can say, I want to pull this
off of consent. I want to have a broader discussion with council that would be
completely appropriate as well. Can I ask who's going to aic next week? I am going three of
us. Okay, okay. Someone's got to stay here. Sorry. One more. Sorry. You're going okay, okay,
okay. Council member. Council. Evening. Council member. Beekman. You are, you are.
thank you. Enjoy. Public works time and council member francis, do you have anything to bring
up? I just brought it up. Okay. I had a great experience with funland and their new food, and
it's way too close to my house. Oh, you can always just walk over weirdly. You also get an
employee discount. So if you go, yeah, they have an employee discount of 20%. Oh yeah.
that's good. I'm sorry I missed it. Council member friedman, do you have anything today for us?
well, that was actually on my list of funland being open in the log hut being open. I
wanted to let you know the islands is getting close to opening the new tortoise
exhibit. The well, the island exhibit. It's an old county building. Yeah, they're working
on getting it open. We had an interesting conversation today about the conversion of surface
water and parks. And, you know, we're converting freeman park right now. Some issues have
come up that you may have noticed that sunnyside park was kind of burned up, and so was
community in a couple places. And we got some complaints about it. And part of it is due
to the number of heads and issues we're having with mainlines breaking and stuff,
and it seems like it's related to using the water out of the canal rather than using the
water because it's not as clean, right? So it has more stuff in it that's injuring our our
sprinkler heads and so forth and plugging them up. So. Parks and recs is looking and they're
working on it. They're talking about, you know, fixes for it as far as better filtering
systems and stuff like that. But that's going to come with a cost. But anyway, just so you
know that they're looking into it. And if you get a complaint from somebody, you know that,
you know, they're, they're aware of the issue, one of the other issues they're having with the surface water thing is like a community park, particularly as they're limited
by the acreage on how much water they can draw. At certain times of the day, right. So
they have to water. We're getting complaints about because they're watering during the day, right? They're not just they can't because they can't get the whole park
watered in the, with the, with the gallons that they can draw. So they have to water pretty
much 24 hours a day, right? Or at least 20 hours a day. So, you know, there's an
explanation for the for the public on that too, why the sprinklers are running during the day, even though it's not as efficient, because we all know that it evaporates more if
you're watering in the heat of the day. But they have no choice. I guess that's all I
had. Yeah, that's all I had. Council, I would be willing to say as well that this is a city
wide project. It's not just a parks project, it's conservation of water. And so
it is part of our water department. So I think if if, you know, we've transitioned to
the new surface water, it's not just about parks, it's about our water department. There is
also opportunity for our water department to help with the solutions and have, you know, a
certain dollar amount set aside for sprinkler head replacement as well. They're not it's not
just about wells. They replaced 100 heads. Yeah. I mean, this is a community park quickly
into that budget. And this is about water generally. Yeah. As opposed to green grass. So I do
think that this is once again, not to think about departments in silos, but to think about
holistically what we do as a city and why we're doing water conversion. So, and it's not
just about parks. So, so back to just the water condition situation this year. So there's
still plans to put out. Some. Yeah, they're training information or whatever as far
as how to conserve aquatic conserve. Yes we are. There is still some of that. And, and
being able to really identify how the city is, is working and being a leader, you know,
leading out in that as opposed to wagging our finger at other people and then being very
complicit. But we will continue to work on that and get that out any, anything that needs to
be done with the jefferson city. You just reminded me of that after that comment about our
sidewalk. And we are still they are still moving forward, reaching out to homeowners to,
to talk individually with homeowners and then moving forward, a much broader
conversation about that process and how we will address it in the future. Well, well into the
future before we show up at our doorstep and send a threatening letter and send a threatening
letter. Yeah, all of that will be a bit of a balance, isn't it? Right. Because it's not like we
don't want code enforcement to go and fix some of the places that need fixed. But that was a
really weird blanket tennis situation that was different. Yeah. There, there will be
processes that that make sense for us to use. Like if this is the process we use in power,
this would be the process we would use for streets and water and sanitation. So yes, all of
that can come under one big. So what, what happens to the folks that already got the letter?
the letters? Ryan cardin has reached out. He's reaching out to every person from streets or
someone from streets is reaching out to have contact and connection with all of them.
and, and look at it moving forward. Okay, don't bring that back. We'll discuss this, but
next month. Okay. Is there anything else? Council. I'll follow up with that and give
you specific information on what is being communicated back to street the streets
department. I do have one more thing. There is a new housing coalition led by ali rabi. She
was a former state senator, and they did an analysis of statewide of all zoning codes.
and then they had specific cities. And I just got that today. So I'll be I'll send
that to you and to all of us. Okay. It was an interesting approach, and it has a lot of
information about what's required about the new law, two laws that were passed around adus and the density requirements. And so I think that's interesting to all of us.
one of them reminded me of what we talked about in adu was there. Now we can't restrict
them for less than 1000. Right. And we can't do setbacks, which was a big that was interesting.
so we don't have to require setbacks. Well, you can't require them for eight years.
you can't do. Anyway. There's those two laws were a lot more. There's a lot more in them. And
that we do have a year to comply with the comprehensive plan in the city zoning. Did we
reduce the the. Yeah. Setbacks. It's five feet instead of 15 or whatever when we did 20 to 15,
probably, but it's like five. It's all in a traditional neighborhood. We did have a
setback. We do have a traditional neighborhood number that's different than the rest of the city as well, which is why we're seeing around jefferson. There's new houses
going in there and so do lots and things. And so but there's also suggestions in this about
how to help build density without building apartments. And we did say that we couldn't
have adus above 800, but that cap has been lifted from the state starting. So yeah, but
the big thing that's across the state is looking at how to do density with parking
restrictions and getting not getting rid of parking minimums, but making them right so that
so that you can build a, you know, a small house somewhere and not have it be because I
can't tell you how many contractors have come to me and said I would do that lot like
the one that we were trying to sell by serenity hall. I think that one was impacted by
parking. No one is very interested because parking restrictions. So council member
radford, that does remind me that we talked about it being a moving our council priority
from being on how affordable housing to maybe specific things within our code that we
would like to look at, and forming a group of expert, not experts, but content experts.
and the first one that we have directed, director director sander to do is parking,
parking minimums and landscape parking. So that is something that is already underway. Every
time I do a good look at our code. And, you know, every time I drive around to sporting
goods at the grand teton mall and that it's a huge part, there is there's 300 parking
spots out there, not a car parked in it. Yeah. It's like this big advisory heat scene,
right? No, I'm not making any changes according to what? We have some people who live right
next door. Absolutely. Or a business owner, one of them who want who is willing to do this
was darren peterson from d and l cleaners, right? I mean, he has a business, multiple
locations. And so they they would be specific engineers, architects who are working on
this kind of. But when they move to another issue, it would be a different. It would be a
different set of people. Yes, but this would be getting into our code and making sure that
that the subdivision code is what we want. So yeah. And one other thing, any updates on our.
farmer's market? You should know more this week. Okay. And just one more thing I'm going
to do. As you'll see on some of my social media, I'm going to do an 8 a.m. Just community
walk starting in front of rec center on saturdays for a while during the summer. That's just
something I'm doing to teach architecture. Nope. Just to walk the greenbelt. Just just
walking together with other people. Just anytime we can move. I love that idea. And we
are adjourned and I will see