Eagle Mountain City Council, 15 November 2024

In short: This was the council's annual strategic planning retreat, held at the Chamber of Commerce with a state lawmaker, the mayor and a councilmember from Saratoga Springs, and two school board members joining at different points. No votes were taken. The council agreed to tell Saratoga Springs in writing that it will not fight a 162-acre annexation next door — while putting its traffic and child-safety worries on the record — and asked staff to merge the city's goal list with its list of pending tasks.

Present: Mayor Jared Gray (left before the end and listened in by phone from the road); Councilmembers Melissa Clark, Brett Wright, Rich Wood, and a councilmember the transcript calls Donna. No roll call was taken, so this list reflects only the members heard by name.

Staff: Cliff (legislative affairs director), Steve (community development and planning), Marcus (city attorney), and a contract lobbyist the recording renders as both "Mr. Stewart" and "Mr. Stern." Guests: Representative Stephanie Gricius (Utah House); Jim Miller (mayor, Saratoga Springs) and a Saratoga Springs councilmember; Julie and Joylin (Alpine School District board members, by video).

Decisions

No motions were voted on.

Settled without a vote:

• The council agreed to have the city attorney draft a letter telling Saratoga Springs that Eagle Mountain does not intend to protest the annexation, while stating serious concerns about road connections and the safety of children walking to nearby schools, and recording the two councils' shared understanding that the land is meant for single-family homes.
• Members agreed they would not keep pushing to move the new high school off the site now under contract, and would instead work on how future school sites get chosen.
• The council accepted a school board member's offer to hold a long planning session in March with each city — Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs separately — to map where schools should go over the next several decades.
• Staff was directed to merge the legislative priorities list with the strategic plan's objectives, break the combined list out by department, send it to members electronically, and begin working through it one department at a time starting two weeks from the following Tuesday, beginning with planning, which carries the most items.
• Cliff was asked to produce a shortened version of the priorities list — item titles and one line each — and to consider posting it as a view-only live document so it does not have to be re-emailed after every update.
• On committees, the council agreed not to create everything on the two lists brought forward, to start small and let successful ones grow, and that annexation and power generation are the two most urgent.
• Representative Gricius agreed to ask Senator Brammer why the new district's first school board election cannot be moved to June, and to check with Senator Sandall on what the draft energy bill would allow cities to build.
• The mayor asked staff and council to think about which other annexations the city should pursue so it is not caught flat-footed again; no direction was given on which ones.

Meeting map

Agenda ref	Topic	~Start (elapsed)	One-line note
1	State population estimates and redistricting	0:02	A bill would build Utah's population counts from the bottom up instead of the top down.
1	Power supply, data centers and city-owned generation	0:06	The longest item: three data centers want close to half of Utah's total power.
1	School funding, bonding for the new district, and the school board election	0:38	The council wants a June election so the new board can start work sooner.
1	Housing bills, affordable housing money, and a coalition of growing cities	0:55	The city is launching a mortgage assistance program and wants allies at the Legislature.
1	State trust land development	1:20	Both cities see a coming fight over the state's power to develop land without city input.
2.A	Annexation next to Silver Lake — with Saratoga Springs officials	1:35	Roads, density and who controls what gets built on 162 acres.
2.B	The new high school site — with two school board members	1:50	Frank exchange about traffic, safety and how late the cities were brought in.
2.C	Legislative priorities list and the strategic plan	2:45	Two lists have drifted apart; staff will merge them.
2.D	Project management software and city uses for artificial intelligence	3:05	Software choice expected by year's end; ideas for loading city code into a chatbot.
2.D	Possible citizen and council committees	3:35	The mayor and a councilmember each brought a list; roughly twenty ideas surfaced.
2.A	Decision on the annexation letter	4:25	The council returned to the question and settled it.
3	Adjournment	4:48	Closed at about 1:03 p.m. with no motion recorded.

Discussed but NOT on the agenda: the city's electricity shortage and whether Eagle Mountain should generate its own power; the timing of the new school district's first board election; the city's new mortgage assistance program; project management software and artificial intelligence tools; and a long brainstorm about creating citizen committees.

On agenda but little/no discussion: the "other master plans" half of the facilities item — master plans came up only in passing, when the legislative affairs director noted that tracking them falls under his job description. The council also never took a formal motion to adjourn.

What was discussed

1 — Legislative breakfast: counting people and drawing lines

Representative Stephanie Gricius opened by describing a bill she is working on with the state's population committee. Utah currently leans on census projections, which she called "very top down," and she wants to flip that so cities feed their own numbers upward. Road money and other state distributions are handed out on population, and she said the state's figure for Eagle Mountain runs roughly 18,000 people below what the city believes is true. She asked the city to cooperate when the population committee calls; staff said a meeting was already being scheduled.

A councilmember pressed on whether the same better data could be used to redraw representation more often than once a decade. Gricius said redistricting is set in the state constitution, so changing it would need a ballot question, and the next chance to put one to voters is two years out. She thought the idea might still work at the local level depending on how the language reads, and said legal counsel was looking at it.

1 — Legislative breakfast: power, data centers and whether to build our own

This was the longest stretch of the morning. Eagle Mountain's data centers need more electricity than the grid can deliver, and two projects have already put on the brakes. The figures given around the table were one project at 800 megawatts, another somewhere between 400 and 700 with room to scale, and a third quoted as "1.4" without a clear unit — together, members said, approaching half of Utah's entire consumption. The lobbyist told the group the state needs roughly the equivalent of Wyoming's total power use, that the governor, Senate president and House speaker had met with Rocky Mountain Power a month earlier, and that new transmission lines cannot be built without pushing consumer rates up sharply.

Members asked the obvious question: why not build a plant ourselves? The answer was that state rules would force the city to feed any power it generated back into Rocky Mountain Power's grid rather than keep it. Senator Scott Sandall is drafting a comprehensive energy bill with "triggers" — essentially, either the utility invests or communities get freed to generate their own. The city attorney confirmed later that Eagle Mountain could charge impact fees for electricity, though not for natural gas, and that it was an open question whether that applies to generation alone or requires distribution too. The council talked about small modular nuclear reactors, but was told a nuclear plant is a ten-year project on a fast track, and the shortage is now.

Coal and gas came up as the bridge. The lobbyist explained that the Delta plant is converting from coal to gas, that turning coal plants back up runs into federal air rules that cover the whole state rather than any one site, and that the state energy office has only recently been rebuilt under a new director. Members wanted to know who to lobby. The answer was the federal delegation as much as the state: Congressman Curtis had committed before the election to come out and talk, and the mayor said he would push to hold him to it. A councilmember summed up the frustration plainly — waiting five to seven years would simply send the projects to other states, and the problem is not only data centers but the homes, schools and grocery stores coming with the city's growth.

1 — Legislative breakfast: schools, taxes and the new district

The council asked whether school funding would take another hit. Gricius said the state puts more money into schools every year, and described an unusual shift showing up in the first numbers of the season: income tax down slightly, sales tax up slightly, which reverses the usual pattern of a surplus on the income tax side and a squeezed general fund.

Most of the energy went to the new school district split off from Alpine. The district needs new legislation before it can bond, and cannot build a school until that passes — a real problem when members put the timeline to open a school at six years and believe they are already behind. Gricius said support for that bill would not be a problem: "We'll lift the crap out of it."

The council's bigger complaint was the election date. The first board election was moved from a June special election to November, and members wanted it moved back so a local board could start making decisions sooner. Gricius and others walked through why that is hard — candidates have to file, ballots have to be printed, and a change would need to pass with an immediate effective date at the very start of the session. She also warned the council that not everyone involved wants June, and agreed to take the question to Senator Brammer. A related thread: the county has to draw board districts, and members were unsure whether that is done by registered voters or by census population, and how often it can be redone.

1 — Legislative breakfast: housing bills and a coalition of growing cities

The mayor asked to meet with the legislators driving housing policy, saying the bills coming out of the Commission on Housing Affordability land disproportionately on cities like his. He wanted to understand their pressure points and "become a partner rather than a resistant receiver of new law," and to explore tying infrastructure money to the communities actually absorbing the units. He put Eagle Mountain at 1,200 new residential units year to date and Saratoga Springs over 1,400, with 27 percent of them multifamily.

Cliff then described the mortgage assistance program the city has just adopted, funded by redevelopment dollars generated by Meta and Tyson — a couple of million dollars already in the account. Most homeownership programs cap out at 80 percent of area median income, where there is little product to buy; Eagle Mountain set its cap at 120 percent, which state law allows for homeownership, with public employees as the primary target. He expects it to start in January and to help roughly twenty to forty households in the first year, and warned the council that the state workforce services department has questioned the 120 percent figure.

The blunter part of the conversation was about who actually sets prices. A member argued that stripping zoning from cities does not produce an affordable product: "We do smaller units. We're doing more units per acre. And what do they do? They fill every single one of those with a million-dollar home." Gricius agreed cities get blamed, said she has fought those bills, and pointed to a road-funding bill she helped hold and gut in committee as proof that a couple of votes can matter. The strategy discussed was solidarity: a bloc of cities over 5,000 people signing letters together, a growth caucus forming in the House, and a January meeting in American Fork with the Utah League of Cities and Towns director, with seven cities already committed and hopes of reaching eleven.

1 — Legislative breakfast: state trust land

Both cities flagged state trust land as the coming statewide fight. The concern is that the agency wants authority to entitle and develop its land with little input from the city that will have to serve it — water, sewer, roads and schools all landing on the municipality after the fact. One participant called it "a battleground. Every city who borders [it]. If we lose, everybody loses." Members compared it to a large unincorporated development in Salt Lake County, and noted that Eagle Mountain's worst road impacts came from trust land, in a way the city still cannot catch up with. The counter-argument offered was that the agency has spent down its credibility at the Legislature, and that leadership is unlikely to hand it the keys.

2.A — Annexation discussion with Saratoga Springs

The Saratoga Springs mayor and a councilmember came to talk about 162 acres on the shared boundary. No formal annexation petition has been filed yet; what exists is a notice of intent from the church that owns the land, plus one from the school district as applicant, and a request that Eagle Mountain write a letter of support. The land sits next to Saratoga's district area plan, an agreement that gives the church 18,000 units across roughly 3,000 acres. Eagle Mountain members' first worry was density transfer — that the applicant could shift units from elsewhere in that plan onto the new ground and ring the future high school with townhomes. The Saratoga officials said their plan gives them legislative authority over the type and location of what gets built, and that they are not granting additional density. Eagle Mountain members suggested a cleaner approach: annex the land straight into a zone both cities are comfortable with, single-family lots under 6,000 square feet, rather than folding it into the larger plan at all.

The sharper worry was roads. Five streets could connect to the parcel — four out of Silver Lake and one out of the Kiowa Valley area — and three of them are residential. One runs past an elementary school on a roundabout; another is a 25 mph street that already carries school traffic past Brookhaven, where roughly 1,200 students walk because there are no buses. Members described traffic backing up from Mountain View Corridor past the shopping center each morning until about 9:30. Adding hundreds of inexperienced teenage drivers to those streets was, as one councilmember put it, "the hill I'm willing to die on." Both councils agreed the more useful outcome of the meeting was simply that they now hold the same position, so the applicant cannot play one city against the other — something both said had happened before on a project at 2100 North.

They also spent time on Mid Valley Road, the future connection from Eagle Mountain out to Mountain View Corridor. The two cities' maps do not currently agree on where it lands, and members want that settled before the school design fixes anything in place. The consensus was that it needs to be a fast road with no driveways on it, and that where it meets the corridor should eventually be a free-flowing interchange rather than a signal that would stack traffic back into neighborhoods.

2.B — The new high school site and how school locations get chosen

Two Alpine School District board members joined by video. Eagle Mountain's objection was that the site sits close to another high school, close to three elementary schools, and at a point where traffic is already the worst in the area. Members asked whether the district would consider a land swap with a property owner farther north; they said the landowner had approached the city, not the other way around, and that the site could be cleared within twelve months.

A board member pushed back on the timing. The property has been under contract about a year through four amendments, the current extension runs only to January, roughly $8 million has gone into architecture, soil work has been redone for the current location, and a contractor has already been engaged for that specific site. The school is not yet funded — the district still needs the Legislature to fix the code before it can trigger a lease revenue bond — and she was candid that going back to the board to restart would be difficult: "It's going to be a hard enough of an ask." She also said flatly that she does not like the site either, that traffic and safety problems will exist wherever a school of this size goes, and that the real driver is how many students Utah packs into each building. Washington County builds its high schools for about 1,500 students; this one is designed to open at roughly 2,100.

Once a map was finally shared, tempers cooled. The current location had moved south and east, closer to Mountain View Corridor, which several members agreed was "the least of the worst" because most traffic would come off the corridor rather than through neighborhoods. That map was the third version, and the first anyone from either city had seen — a point Eagle Mountain members returned to repeatedly: "we can see this property from Eagle Mountain without binoculars," and the district talked to Saratoga Springs but not to them. The board members apologized, committed to better communication, offered non-disclosure agreements if price sensitivity is the obstacle, and proposed sitting down with each city in March to look at long-range city plans and identify future school sites in advance.

The broader conversation was about the fact that cities cannot say no to a school location. Members traded examples — an elementary school built essentially against a highway, a road that was supposed to be a major east-west connection but was killed by school placement, and a case where the district bought the wrong parcel and later needed a swap. Ideas floated included requiring school sites in development agreements, having the city buy land and set the price, and — the suggestion that got the biggest reaction — writing a district policy that requires the board to coordinate with cities on siting. A board member confirmed the new board will be able to write its own policies and said she would want to be part of that.

2.C — Legislative priorities list and the strategic plan

Cliff handed out the legislative priorities list, and the council's main concern was that it and the strategic plan have drifted apart. As one member put it, "what's the part of a strategic plan if you have competing interests?" The direction was to find the overlap, identify the outliers, and then decide whether an outlier belongs on the plan or does not belong at all.

Members also asked for a more usable format: a shortened version with just item titles and a phrase, tabs broken out by department so the council can see that planning is carrying thirty or forty items before piling on more, and a view-only shared document so updates do not have to be emailed. Cliff agreed, and noted the tabs would mean reorganizing how he keeps the master list. The council decided to work through it in chunks at regular meetings rather than in one sitting, starting with the busiest department, and that members should read it individually first so they arrive with opinions.

A related thread was capacity. Several members said the point of the exercise is to have an honest conversation when the answer is that a task will bump something else or require outside help. The city is hiring a management policy analyst to support the legislative and strategic planning work. The council also praised the way the last legislative session was tracked, with one member saying advance warning on bills is what lets them make a phone call and say "you need to watch this one."

2.D — Project management software and artificial intelligence

Staff is demonstrating project management software, narrowed to three to five vendors, at least one of which connects to the financial system the city already uses, with a decision hoped for by year's end. The council's strong recommendation was to buy the training and setup help along with the product, and to hire outside help for the data entry rather than have senior staff spend months typing. As one member put it, the most expensive employees should not be the ones doing data entry, and a scanning company in Eagle Mountain could handle the old paper records. The goal described was an accountability structure where the council can look at a project's status without calling anyone, and the only conversation left is about priority and obstacles.

Artificial intelligence came up as a practical tool. Members and staff had returned from a city managers' conference impressed by what other cities are doing — Santa Clara used it to review bills and saved substantial hours, Saratoga Springs uses it on planning documents, and a city in Arizona was cited as going furthest. The concrete suggestion was to load the city's own code into a chatbot so anyone can ask what the setback is for a given yard, with whoever updates the code website also updating the chatbot. Staff reported that about half the department heads already use these tools for document review, and cautioned that answers still have to be checked — though checking is faster than searching. One member suggested bringing in an information technology director who lives in Eagle Mountain to run a staff training on how the technology can be misused; he has demonstrated cloning council members' voices from public recordings to make a fake call to a staff member about a check.

2.D — Possible citizen and council committees

The mayor walked through a brainstorm list, with the model being two council members of differing perspectives on each committee plus residents and outside experts. His ideas: art; annexations, tied to making the north end an outdoor recreation area and a possible rodeo grounds; power generation; open space, parks and trails; flood control; emergency preparedness, reviving the group that once linked the city with ham radio volunteers and neighborhood teams; a "large lot success" committee to work out why projects like one large-lot subdivision have struggled; venues; historical preservation, including the petroglyphs and local history that could support tourism; and agriculture as a business, asking what farming and cattle can realistically look like here given the soil, water and short season.

A councilmember produced a similar list written two years ago: economic development; roads and engineering; parks, open space and cemetery; planning, building and design review, possibly including an architectural review function; neighborhood improvement, beautification and historical preservation; water, storm water and sewer, with a public education component; public safety, military and veterans; community relations, events and recreation; library, public education and elections, which could take on candidate debates and voter information; and legislative and code. Another member added information technology, both for the mutual aid arrangements cities use after a cyberattack and to tap local talent for library programming. Health and wellbeing was added as well.

Cliff offered the caution that landed: committees generate work. He described a robust committee system at a previous city that was not a third this long, and warned about both staff time spent attending and the workload created by the ideas that come out. He still recommended them, along with keeping minutes so the rest of the council stays informed. The council agreed it is not comfortable creating all of them, that some should be combined at the start and split later, and that they might be organized under the city's six strategic goals. Annexation and power generation were named the two most important right now.

2.A — The decision on the annexation letter

Late in the meeting the council came back to whether to send the letter. The city attorney explained why it was requested: a city cannot approve an annexation that leaves an unincorporated island or peninsula unless certain conditions are met, one of which is that the land not sit inside another city's annexation policy plan — unless that city agrees. So Eagle Mountain's letter is the legal key. Members went back and forth on whether withholding it would accomplish anything. The consensus was that it would delay rather than prevent, that the city would be blamed for holding up a high school, and that saying yes to this parcel effectively gives up any claim to the strip running north to south behind it, which the city could not serve or reach anyway.

Members also asked whether refusing could protect the neighborhood streets. The attorney's answer was that it could not: if Saratoga Springs decided a road had to connect, it could acquire the right of way through eminent domain even inside Eagle Mountain's boundary. One member argued the city gets more from goodwill and influence with Saratoga's council than from a protest, and another that the road the city badly wants — the connection out to Mountain View Corridor — needs Saratoga's cooperation anyway.

The council settled on a letter saying Eagle Mountain does not plan to protest, while stating serious concerns and recording that the city is acting in good faith on Saratoga Springs' assurances that both councils want single-family homes there and will work together on roads and school safety. A member noted that none of it is binding, but "if they back out on it, they back out on it" — at least it will be on paper.

Notable moments

• "That's the hill I'm willing to die on." A councilmember said he could accept most compromises but not teenage drivers pouring onto 25 mph residential streets where a thousand-plus children walk to school: "I know all of them. This is my community."
• A board member's apology. After a tense exchange over the high school, an Alpine board member told the same councilmember she was sorry for "biting your head off," said she does not like the site either, and explained the frustration came from months of fighting over the project rather than from the city's questions.
• The petroglyphs. Asked why he distrusts assurances about land protection, the mayor described getting a call from the state that petroglyphs at a nearby development were being destroyed. He called the developer, who said he was on it. "They destroyed them all."
• "We're the state, we know what we're doing." A participant recalled a city inspector telling a school crew they were building on the wrong parcel and being brushed off; the district later had to negotiate a land swap with a bank that owned the property.
• The mayor on the road. Mayor Gray left partway through and stayed connected by phone, cutting in later to say he was still listening but could barely hear — prompting a scramble to move a microphone.
• "Straw poll, not offline vote." When the state representative suggested the council could just take a vote by text between meetings, the city attorney corrected the terminology on the spot, to laughter.
• An unplanned salary review. After a staff member suggested the city could buy land from a developer at a set price and sell it to the school district, a councilmember told him he had "just earned your salary today" — which turned into an extended joke about it being Friday.
• No public comment. The transcript records no public comment period and no residents addressing the body; this was a working retreat rather than a regular business meeting.

About this transcript

Several proper nouns are mangled by the automatic transcription. The visiting lawmaker is rendered "Representative Grecious" and is Representative Stephanie Gricius, whose first name appears correctly later. "Kimsky Gardner" and "Kim Gardner" refer to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute; "Scott Sandel" is Senator Scott Sandall; "Camdeal" and "Cam deal" are Cameron Diehl of the Utah League of Cities and Towns; "Mike McFell" and "McKellen" are Senator Mike McKell; "Ray White" is corrected in the room to Stephen Whyte. "IPT" is the Intermountain Power Project in Delta. "Simple land" and "Sittler" are the state trust lands agency. "Steve Monkford" is almost certainly Steve Mumford. School names appear as Brookhaven, Silver Lake, Desert Sky, Blackridge, Westlake and Cedar Valley; "Provolt" and "Provost" are Provo High.

The acronyms for the development agreements are unreliable throughout — the same document is called a DAP, MAP, MPA, NBA and MBA within a few lines. One power figure is quoted as "1.4 megawatts," which does not fit the surrounding discussion; the unit is likely wrong.

Speaker attribution is limited. There was no roll call, no one is introduced formally, and elected officials from two cities, city staff, a lobbyist and two school board members all speak. Where the recording does not make the speaker clear, this summary says "a councilmember" rather than guessing. One councilmember is addressed only as Donna; her surname is never stated on the recording. The same is true of the school board members Julie and Joylin, the Saratoga Springs councilmember, and the lobbyist, whose name is rendered inconsistently as "Mr. Stewart" and "Mr. Stern."

The long stretch spent looking at a shared map is the hardest section to follow: speakers point at a screen and say "this piece," "right here" and "that purple road," so the geography cannot be fully reconstructed from audio alone. There are also several minutes of crosstalk, video-conference troubleshooting and side jokes, and the opening line misstates the date as November 2.