23 Mar SHCC March 2022 Meeting Minutes
Welcome to the Sugar House Community Council meeting the March edition.
This will be Meggies last meeting. I just wanted to say thank you from me and our entire board. She has done a wonderful job as a trustee and as the chair of the Arts and Culture Committee.
Secretary Report: Shane Stroud
As you know we’ve voted to update our bylaws in the last meeting. The only piece of that puzzle that was remaining to be settled was the attachment, c. to the bylaws, and that has to do with allocation of trustees based on the 2020 census data. So what you’re seeing there is a map of historical Sugar House, Community council districts, then what’s written on each of those blocks is the corresponding census tracked, and so you can see that some districts like Emerson, Garfield, Westminster. The boundaries of those neighborhoods correspond one to one with the census tract. And so for Garfield, for instance, you can look at census Tract E9, and you can tell exactly how many people the Garfield neighborhood gained or lost between 2010 and 2020 but there are other neighborhoods where that break across a census tract. So, for example, if you look at 2 Fairmont and Sugar House Park, those are both within census tract E14. And so, while it’s possible to tell how many people census track E14 gained or lost between 2010 or 2020. It’s not possible to determine at least I haven’t figured out a way to do it, and if anyone knows i’d be happy to reconsider my calculations I haven’t figured out how to break out that gain or loss across those 2 neighborhoods. And so what I did to reconcile that is For example, for E14. I divided it by 2, and then I assigned each of the quotient so half to Fairmont and half to Sugar House Park. Likewise you can see E15, which is highlighted there in blue, breaks across 3 neighborhoods, Forest Dale, Highland Park, and Grandview. I divided that by 3, and I assigned one part to Forrest Dale, one part to Highland Park and one part to Grandview. So this is the end result of that. So this is how the population of Sugar House changed over the last 10 years. You can see, we actually added about 3,000 people total to Sugar House increasing from 34,400 to 37,386. The interesting thing here is that the resulting increase actually resulted in a more equal distribution across various neighborhoods. Particularly for the Sugar House Park and the Fairmont neighborhoods. That makes a lot of sense. Fairmont used to be mostly commercial and even industrial. And now there are a lot of apartments and condos, and that neighborhood has increased in population.
We have 13 neighborhoods within the Sugar House Community Council. We can do one or 2 things. we can vote to adopt attachment, c. tonight or if we’d prefer I can send this out to folks so they can look at it, and we can vote to adopt it during the next meeting. We will vote in April.
Michael G.’s Spotlight On Business: Urban Sailer-owner Tyler Anderson We’ve got a family business that we’ve launched during the pandemic. Some of you may have experienced us. We used to park a sidecar motorcycle in front of a couple of businesses, including Liberty Heights Fresh. That motorcycle coffee bar has turned into a full-sized coffee shop in Sugar House, and we’re right across from Sugar House Park next to the Dodo.
And it’s basically myself and my 4 sons and my girlfriend and my girlfriend’s son. We’re kind of trying to recreate a little bit of an old school coffee shop kind of a neighborhood hangout.
Treasurer Report: Mike Bagley
US Bank balance is $6,591.56
Kristi Swett-School Board Update
To give a little background, I’ve been on the school board for 19 years and I represent precinct 7. Basically all the feeders for Highland High School. One of the things that we’re looking at is the decrease in enrollment, although the census showed that we had an increase in the city population, we are not seeing an increase in kids so you know all of our schools over the past 5 years have lost about 5,000 students. When you talk 5,000 students, our elementary schools were built for 550 kids. A couple of them have over 500 students, a good portion of them are right around 350 and some are below 300. Over the next three years we’re going to be looking at schools and clusters and making some decisions on whether or not we’re gonna have to close any schools. We are going to take 3 years to study the patterns. Looking at ways to increase enrollment at particularly the elementary schools. Looking at a couple of things: We have been having continual conversations with the city council and mayor’s office about affordable housing especially in our North and Southwest quadrants. That would be the Glendale and Rose Park area, that’s where we’ve seen the most dramatic drop in families, and it’s because the rents have gotten too high. When you look at residential units a school district should see about 10% of residents have kids or bring kids into the schools. Of the 4,500 units that have been built in SLC over the past 5 years we saw 58 kids in our schools. We have 42 schools in the Salt Lake District. But there are some good things going on…the relationship between the school district and the mayor’s office has never been stronger. Highland High is going to see over 2,000 kids next year which is the most it has seen in over 25 years. There is huge learning gap right now that we’re trying to deal with It’s been difficult, but I think that with the money from the Federal Government, we should be able to get more resources to kids to try to close this gap which exists because of the COVID year. We have about $50,000,000, which is an astounding amount of money. It is flexible, somewhat flexible, so a lot of resources will be put into the schools to address the learning gap that we see across our district.
Chick Fil’A Update: Owner/Operator Eric Champeu
First of all, I want to apologize for all the traffic problems that we’ve caused in the past. When we first decided to build at that location we weren’t able to build the way we wanted and factor in how busy that store has been along with the growth in Sugar House the traffic has been a nightmare at times. We have been trying for 5 years to get something done to alleviate these problems, well finally we have been approved. Between the Redman Building and our current entrance we will be adding another entrance into our parking lot. Still working through the logistics if it will be an exit or entrance but we think this will really help the cars that line up on 2100 South. We are also looking at another off-site location for all of our doordash or uber eats orders. We are waiting on permitting but we hope this project will be done in a month.
CIU Officer Update: Bob Norgarrd
A few things to talk about in the last month: Your community had 5 stolen cars, 4 of which were left running and unattended, so let’s not do that.
Last week we had an interesting call on Ramona. There was a domestic incident where an individual was pretty intoxicated, and he decided to point his gun at his wife, and then fire it into the air. We were able to get a bunch of officers there, pretty quickly, They formed some teams and we’re able to take him into custody safely. Nobody got hurt. No more shots are fired. so that was really good. There was a road rage incident right around I-80, and I think 1300 East. One guy cut another guy off. Both of them start giving gestures. One guy pulls out a gun and kind of starts trying to chase him down. So where I was going out with that if somebody cuts you off. We’re all adults. Just let it go please, we don’t need people getting shot over the traffic infractions. There was a robbery at the Mountain America Bank at 2000 East and 2100 South. Gentlemen passes a note and didn’t display any weapons and got away with a little bit of cash, and detectives are still working on it. Lastly at 1002 East Elm Avenue which has been a problem for a while. it has been taken care of. Compliance went out, They cleared out the house, reboarded it and we’ve got some no trespassing signs up. The gentleman who lives there is now in jail. I talked to his mom and I hope the house is up for sale soon.
Homeless Service Project Manager: Michelle Hoon
I am here today to talk about the Community Commitment Program. That is the city’s two-phased approach to addressing unsheltered homelessness. It is focused on clean neighborhoods. So, making sure that neighborhoods that do have homeless encampments in them are getting a little bit more attention, and that those homeless encampments are getting some services put to them as Well, so clean neighborhoods is the first sort of section about this that i’ll talk about, and then I will talk about all of the service connection work that our team has been doing over last year. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about is cleaning and abatement cleaning. We have 2 things that we do when we have unsheltered encampments that pop up throughout the city. The first thing is we send outreach workers out to those camps to try to engage with people who are experiencing homelessness. Then we send out a cleaning contractor to those encampments to try and clean up. What we know is that there is definitely a lot of just sort of stuff that can accumulate in these situations. So we want to try to just sort of remediate some of the negative things that can be associated with unsheltered encampments while we work to try to get those folks into shelter. That’s what we call single clean and single cleans. We did 4,386 single cleans in 2021 with a cleaning contractor called advantage services last year. I think everybody probably has heard of the SLC mobile app that tends to get a lot of good traction in our Community council meetings. My team, which is very small, I will say we are not a huge team we processed 4,517 slc mobile requests related to homelessness. That can be anything from reporting a camp to reporting abandoned material to everything in between. We ended up spending roughly about $1,000,000. We don’t go out to actual homeless encampments and provide outreach. We work with a professional outreach team, with volunteers of America, and we work really, really closely with them. To get them out to each instance that has been reported to us through that Slc mobile app.If you go to Slc Mobile, and you enter something like an encampment. That report goes to my team. We first engage with Volunteers of America, and we try to get outreach workers out to that camp to engage with folks and shelter. VOA was able to connect with 145 people. They were able to get case managers for 109, and they actually were able to permanently house 22 people off the street. That does not sound like a ton of people, but I have to say it is so much work to try, particularly to take somebody who has been living on the street for quite some time. You have to get them all of their viable documents. You have to get them through a lot of paperwork. and It can take a good amount of time for sure. It’s definitely a lot of work so the fact that they were able to house those 22 people off the street. They have a place of their own that they can call their home. We have been doing resource fares out at a few of our larger encampments. Some of this can be because we want to put a bunch of resources in front of people before we have to do a camp abatement. But a lot of it also is just trying to do a better job of reaching people who are on the street engaging them with services. We did 10 resource fairs in 2021. We had 400 plus engagements, which is pretty amazing 85 vaccines administered mostly COVID vaccines but some flu vaccines. The Salt Lake City Justice Court goes out to each of these resource fairs to engage with people who are living on the streets, and they heard 183 cases, which is pretty remarkable. We had over 400 sack Lunches donated to us from some awesome community members. 31 different service providers participated, and about 20 people volunteering to help us. We have some other justice court outreach activities. One is Kayak Court. This project goes along the Jordan River and makes the resources mobile. One boat will have legal defenders, another will have a judge. We go up to an encampment along the river and make sure, like just check in with people, and see if they’ve got any open court cases that they want to have heard, and then they hold court right there on the banks of the river which is a pretty big undertaking but has been very well received by the people who have been living out there. All of this is sort of done to the end of trying to get people to come out of the shadows, get the help that they need to be able to be able to turn their lives around. We have also been working with the Salt Lake City Justice Court on some high utilizer days. What that looks like is opening up court calendars for judges to hear cases from people who are coming from the homeless resource centers so trying to give a good amount of attention to people who are living unsheltered, but also want to make sure that we are getting those same resources to people who are in shelter, so that they can get some of those things resolved because open cases can definitely sometimes be an issue when you’re trying to get into housing. So we want to make sure that just isn’t a barrier for people who need that kind of help. Last thing we do is we have some overtime hours with the police department. They spent about 9,275 overtime hours and what that is is providing security to the County Health Department who goes out and actually performs camp abatements. But then it is also to prevent camps from reestablishing in what we call areas of special concern. We want to continue and improve our outreach efforts and events. So we are working even more closely with Volunteers of America to really kind of get granular with some of the encampments that we have throughout the city. We are planning on doing all of those again this year to try to just keep people engaging and get them connected to services. Get them hooked up with the stuff that is going to help them and get them off of the street. I say this over and over again but Salt Lake City is in the same position as every other city in this country. This is a national problem. We really need to see State level housing investments and really national level housing investments, too. We are involved with a lot of different advocacy organizations who are really kind of trying to push on the national level for greater investment in affordable and deeply, deeply affordable housing, homelessness permanent overflow shelter and a county receiving center. Those are both things that are kind of in the works now. There is some legislation that is working its way through the legislative session right now with regards to this. We are also going through some potential zoning changes right now. What has been proposed is to remove shelters from specific zones in the city and create what’s called an overlay. What that would do is, it would just kind of change the process for citing shelters, and it would offer the opportunity for more community input in the development of new shelter sites if that turns out to be necessary, we also as a city that hosts homeless resource centers are able to get money from the State to mitigate some of the impacts in neighborhoods around homeless resource centers. What we have used this money for historically is some outreach work from Volunteers of America.
We’ve recently started getting more funding from the State for This, which is great, and we were able to expand the downtown ambassador program which has been operating in the downtown area for several years. We were able to expand that to the homeless resource center areas. So those guys are working now in the ballpark and Central City neighborhoods, and we are working with the State on getting even more funding out of that, because Salt Lake City, despite having the majority of resource center beds in
our city has gotten very, very little funding from the State. The State has proposed adding I think it’s an extra $5,000,000 into that pot, and we would get a more equitable distribution from that and we want to continue with our outreach efforts. We have what’s called the streets for storage ordinance. We want to make sure that people who are living in their vehicles, if they’re parking on our streets that they’re just following the ordinance. We want to make sure that they are not accumulating a bunch of stuff and kind of becoming an issue for the surrounding neighborhood.
You can park for 48 hours on a city street. We want to make sure that you are moving a block face every 48 hours. You’re not able to do that if your car is not operable. We have a small fund that will work with Volunteers of America and we send them out to people who are living in their vehicles. If their vehicles aren’t operable but are a really quick fix up to $2000 someone from VOA will fix their vehicle. Don’t hesitate to put things into the SLC mobile, and let us know what you’re seeing out there.
If you are interested in volunteering for any of the things that we have put together any of these outreach fairs, or anything that we have put together, you can do that through SLC Core. Basically where you can pick a couple of different things that we need volunteer help with at the city.
19:56:12 And you can. you can fall into your to help us out a lot of what we use volunteers for is setting up and taking down our resources.
Mayor’s Liaison: Tim Cosgrove
The temporary Overshoot overflow shelter that’s open is in need of volunteers and or paid positions. March 7th the brown garbage cans are back. There is the Citizens Academy. You can sign up through the Salt Lake City Police Academy website.
Turning time over to Derek Williamson who will introduce our next speaker. I’m gonna take a quick minute and give a shameless plug for my business that is opening up this weekend. We’re definitely happy to tell you that Olio Skin and Beard, The Beanhole Coffee and Hello! Bulk Markets along with the Neighborhood Hive are soft opening this weekend starting Friday and opening fulltime in April. I’m a personal fan of Evan McMullin So I did reach out to his campaign last month, and I was excited that they accepted our offer to come and chat with the community Council and I’m going to turn the time over to Evan. Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s a pleasure to be able to speak with you. I just wanted to share a few thoughts. The deep reason why i’m running is that I am concerned that our country is abandoning its values and it’s making us weak, and what I mean by that is that our values are where we find common ground. it’s how we solve problems together that’s where it starts. We can disagree on lots of policy issues but the way I believe, and I found in my political life that we can find common ground is through our shared ideals, the same that our country was founded upon. I firmly believe that we are all created free, that we are of equal value, and that we must be equal under the law. And that’s why we have a government that’s accountable to us, and that’s how we remain free and that’s how we can all pursue happiness. Which I think is our most profound purpose as human beings. And that’s what drives me. Our politics have become so broken, now that we can’t solve problems on the national stage at least, and our problems seem to be mounting. You know whether it’s the high cost of health care, or you know our air or water quality or our broader climate issues or inflation. I’m also concerned about our very sizable national debt. I’m concerned about threats to our democracy. I think our democracy is at great risk. And so it just seems these days that our challenges are mounting. I’m running against an incumbent, who, I think, has become the poster child for our broken politics, for the politics of division and extremism that are tearing the country apart. But I still firmly believe that the country needs our leadership, our better kind of leadership that’s consistent with the Utah way, and I want to say that again I sincerely believe that the country needs Utah’s leadership at this moment. Usually independence doesn’t have much of a path. I’ve been there and done that. But there are Independents who have won Senate races around the country who are currently serving in the Senate. If you want to email me at Evan, Evan and Evan McMullin.com hard to forget.
Sugar House Road Construction Update: Lynn Jacobs SLC Transportation Engineer and Leah Jaramillo who is the public engagement manager for 1100 East and 2100 South sewer project.
Lynn Jacobs is managing our Highland Drive reconstruction, our 1300 East Reconstruction, and our 2100 South Reconstruction. Salt Lake City public utilities Plans to replace and upgrade the sewer under 2100 south between Mcclelland Street and Yuma Street, so about just west of Highland drive to just west 2100 East. We are very, very close to advertising for a construction contractor, which means that work could start as early as June. We are anticipating about 10 months of construction. So it will be this whole season. Originally we had scoped, or we were looking at whether a waterline replacement could happen from about 1300 East to Yuma Street, and there is not enough budget to do that so that has been removed from the project the water line is less old than the sewer line. The sewer line in this area. ranges from about 90 to over a 100 years old, and is not large enough to meet the current needs of area residents. So that’s what we’re doing. I wanted to talk briefly about this, because we have 2 very different sections. West of 1300 East is a lot of businesses. So we’re going to use something that they call pipe bursting. You can see kind of in the right hand side some big pumps and machinery and tubes and hoses, and that’s how we’ll continue to provide sewer service while replacing the
pipes with a pipe bursting method, which means they shove the new pipe through and break the old pipe as they go. That allows us to avoid big, deep trenches. The sewer line is 15 feet underground in some locations or deeper. We will use an open trench method which we will use more in the residential area to the East. That’s because it’s a little wider, and we have more room. So our intent there is to leave one lane in each direction through both of those sections. and that’s why we’re using those 2 different methods because they provide us with enough space to try to do that adequately, and also the pipe bursting allows us to leave more of the business driveways open as opposed to having to close them during normal business operations. This is gonna be a fairly impactful project. We do anticipate lane closures, noise, vibration, dust, narrowed lanes, and some access limitations. As we cross individual driveways, there will be side street closures where streets connect into 2100 south. We anticipate some work in the Highland Drive intersection with 2100 south as well where the two lines intersect. We want to make sure this is on people’s radar. We’ve been refining our engineering, getting our costing we’re just about ready to advertise. so we want to make sure everyone is aware that that’s coming. We have a public engagement team ready to help. We’ve been out talking to businesses and residents, and we do have an update list that will start sending regular updates. Our intention is to not reroute 2100 traffic on to residential streets. If we had to reroute traffic for detour traffic for any reason, we would use 1700 South or I-80. Our intention is absolutely to keep businesses open and accessible at all times.
We’ll hit on a couple things So first off our Highland Drive project is slated for reconstruction next year. It’s related for construction next year and essentially where we’re at right now is working with both third party utilities and other other people who have interest in this roadway, and then also we’re setting up a lot of one additional one-on-one meetings with property owners and business owners, along with Corridor, to make sure that we are fully aware of all the issues and just work through all the little details. And so over the next 6 to 9 months or so we’ll be doing that work and finalizing our design and engineering. And then our hope is that in October to November that will be ready to advertise, to pick a contractor to build this, and then That would tee us up for construction early next year. And so this is Highland Drive from essentially I-80 up to 1700 south. Then we will have a separate project that’s running concurrently between 700 South 1700 south, and 900 south, to the north so Highland Drive 1100 east, lots of construction slated for 2023, and then, just to kind of speak about what the bigger picture is.As soon as we’re done with that construction on Highland drive we are going to start working on 1300 East in 2024. We are currently doing a study to evaluate what we will be accomplishing with that project. We’re still 2 years out so kind of that preliminary initial design phase right now on that project we’ll have an open house on April 19th. We’re really excited we’re planning on doing that in person and so we’re out actively looking for a venue right now, and in and getting prepared to hopefully do that as long as our COVID numbers continue to decrease. As soon as we’re done with 1300 East we’re going to turn our attention and hit 2100 south. Our first 2100 south reconstruction area is from 700 east to 1300 east. Now, as we talk about what that striping or configuration looks like on 2100 South, we don’t know and we’re not going to know until we’ve actually taken a really hard look at that, and done a lot more study a lot more civic and our plan for that one is to kick off a study here in the next couple of months we’ve selected a contractor for that study, and we’re negotiating our scope and fee right now, and just getting ready to get going on that big study and try to figure out exactly what we’re going to do with 2100 south and i’ll tell you what we’re planning on doing for that we’ve done out in collected a whole lot of new traffic data. We’re looking at very detailed information about the people who are using that roadway, where they come from, where they go and how they travel in the area.
We are trying to work really closely with the businesses, and that is in the Highland Drive business district, and we will be hosting business roundtables every other month. So our next one is in April. and it’s the second Wednesday in April, and we’ll plan to do those, I think, at least through design, but ideally through construction as well. That Highland drive project is going to be hard to build in the north section in particular. That part of HIghland Drive and 1100 East is very narrow, so we want to figure out ways to build it and keep the businesses accessible and open. We’re gonna rely on you All here at the community Council as well to help get the word out about people still supporting our Sugar House businesses during that construction. We are also planning a resurfacing for 2700 south like you’ve seen us do in the past. It’ll be a chip seal and We’re looking at that area between 700 east and Highland drive. We are just starting on our design for that, starting our civic engagement. It’s really challenging with these surface treatment projects, we usually don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of civic engagement or design. It takes about a day to do that, maybe 2 at the most. That’s probably 3 to 4 months from now is when we’re expecting that to hit. So I’m actively looking at that roadway trying to figure out What if any changes we could make when we do that resurfacing? Now, whenever we do a resurfacing project it’s a little different than these bigger construction projects, we can’t move our curb or gutter. We can’t widen sidewalks, we can’t add new ramps for people, for pedestrians to use. So really all we’re looking at doing is if there’s any changes to any striping, and signing that we could make to that roadway when we do it. We’ll be evaluating those over the next couple months. Lots going on.
Sugar House Construction Update: Bill Knowles SLC Ombdusman
Sugarmont Apartments are so close to being done. I believe all that are left are the ground floor townhomes. They are cleaning up the street, starting to see the end. The hawlight should be up in the next couple of weeks. I’m told Rocky Mountain Power should be out there soon, and they will have a crosswalk turned on by mid-march, and so we’ll officially have a crosswalk there at 2150 South and Highland Drive. It has been a de facto crosswalk for the last 20 years, or whatever. So yeah that that’s after many many many many promises it is now getting finished up. So just a couple of other quick notes. The Mcclelland Street project will be starting up this spring, and we are hoping and praying that the Sugarmont apartment project will be done in time. The Altaterra project should get started in earnest by mid-April and the old Snelgroves site will begin in July. The sugar alley apartment should be leasing their first spaces in November and opening the second phase in February. It will be great to have that project done before we start working on Highland Drive next year.
Salt Lake City Council Update: Council intern Laura Stevens filling in for Councilwoman Amy Fowler. Redistricting is on its way. 9 people have been selected for the committee and are working on it. Right now the City Council is also looking at creating a community development block depending on the budget. Stratford Avenue has a proposal that City Council sent back to the planning commission to take a look at and reevaluate. City Council did write letters to the county about the mine being proposed in Parley’s canyon. March 29th is small business day. Amy encourages people to get out and support the mom and pop shops in Sugar House. 20:43:54 There’s been money there because she loves all of them.
Sprague Library Updates: Cherie Koford
Our downtown location and main library is open for patrons as of February the 20th. So we’re excited to have everybody back there and if you’ve noticed the West Side entrance. Looks like it’s done because that’s been under construction for a while. So we’re really excited to see progress. there. Masks are recommended but not required. We’re working on the Super Summer challenge. We’re gonna do our outdoor concert series that we haven’t had for several years. We’re really excited to start to get back to normal, and then the next thing that we’ll do is we’re looking at expanding our hours right now we’re closing 6 a lot of that was due to just staffing shortages and hiring phrases that we had. But we are slowly getting there. Hopefully, we can also get some approval for when we can have groups meeting back in the library to be determined on that.
Land Use and Zoning Update: Judi Short
Our next land use meeting is going to be Monday, March 21st at 6 pm. We have an ADU proposal and the affordable housing overlay, which is pretty comprehensive, hard to understand, and could affect a lot of us so I’m hoping for some good robust conversation. Just keep sending your comments
Parks, Open Spaces and Trails Update: Sally Barraclough
Our next meeting is March 14th at 6 pm. We’re going to have Luke Allen from the Salt Lake City Parks department come and talk about the CIP construction project for irrigation in Hidden Hollow. This project has been out there almost as long as that hawk light, and so we are really anxious to get some water into Hidden Hollow. We planted some new trees last fall, and you know they’re not going to survive without supplementary water so we’re excited to hear from you. They’ve actually put this out to bid, and we’re ready to go. I think it was an approved CIP project like 3 or 4 years ago. So this has been a long time coming and we may although I’m still working on the details of it. We are talking about possibly painting murals on the glass recycling bins. The friends of Fairmont Park would like to see a nice Sugar House mural on it.
Laurie Bray: We’re having our first sugar house art walk of the year on March 11th, so that’s the second Friday of the month, and they will be held every month for the rest of the year. Lots of local businesses participate, and this month Yoga 6 is joining us for the first time, so I’m excited about that and stay tuned for some events on monument plaza in the coming months. Look online on Facebook or Instagram for information about the art walk, and please come and support the local businesses as an artist. It’s so important.
Thanks for coming again.
We’ll see you in April. This is a great community!
