Eagle Mountain City Council, 14 April 2026

In short: This was a budget-season work session, so no money was actually approved. The Utah County Sheriff's Office asked the city to pay for seven more officers, at about $1.44 million. Several council members said that was too few and pushed for eight to ten. Staff and council agreed the real problem is that the city does not raise enough revenue, and left the question of how to pay for it to a future budget meeting. The city engineer then walked through next year's road projects.

Present: Mayor Jared Gray (presiding), and Councilmembers Melissa Clark, Brett Wright, Rich Wood, Zac Huish, and Craig Whiting. No formal roll call was taken; the Mayor's opening remark ("oh, everybody's here — I thought you were online") and the closing motion, which the Mayor recorded as "moved by Councilmember Wood and seconded by Councilmember Whiting," indicate a full council.

Staff: The Utah County Sheriff's Office chief deputy over the Eagle Mountain Division, who delivered the law-enforcement staffing request (addressed once as "Eric" and referred to elsewhere in the recording as Knutson); the city administrator (greeted by the chief deputy as "Mr. Reeves"); Kimberly, the city's finance director; David, the city engineer who presented transportation projects; Chris Waldron, capital project accountant, recognized by name but who did not speak; Brad Hickman, who spoke on trail and road-profile strategy; and a staff member identified as Brandon, who answered a development question. Sheriff Smith was invited but did not attend, sending his regards through the chief deputy.

Decisions

#	Agenda ref	Motion	Moved / Seconded	Vote	Result
1	3	Adjourn	Wood / Whiting	Voice vote, no audible opposition	Passed

The agenda noticed the budget as a discussion item only; no action was taken on the Sheriff's Office staffing request, the transportation projects, or the capital improvement plan.

Settled without a vote:

• Consistent with the posted agenda, which stated "Discussion Item Only — no action will be taken on the budget," the council took no vote on the Sheriff's Office staffing request, on any transportation project, on a property tax increase, or on the capital improvement plan; all funding decisions were expressly deferred to a future budget meeting.

Meeting map

Agenda ref	Topic	~Start (elapsed)	One-line note
1	Call to order	0:00	Mayor Gray called the budget work session to order at 3:06 p.m.
2.A	Sheriff's Office staffing request — presentation	0:02	Chief deputy asks for 7 additional sworn positions costing about $1.44 million.
2.A	Council questions on backup units, animal control, and staffing history	0:35	Mutual-aid backup is unbilled; animal control officers are full patrol deputies.
2.A	Council discussion of property tax, revenue policy, and how to fund 8–10 deputies	0:50	Broad agreement that the city's revenue base, not its spending, is the problem.
2.A	Truth-in-taxation timing and residential/commercial tax mechanics	1:05	New state code delays spending any new property-tax revenue until September.
2.A	Transportation and the 5-year capital improvement plan — introduction	1:15	Finance director hands off to the city engineer; recognizes capital project accountant.
2.A	SR-73 / Ranches Parkway and the high-T intersection at Campus Drive	1:19	Adds dual rights, dual throughs, dual lefts and a continuous-green movement.
2.A	Mid Valley Road closeout and Frontier Middle School drainage	1:26	Small closeout funding; stormwater fixes in front of the middle school.
2.A	Trailhead and Pony Express intersection	1:28	Underfunded at $500,000; signal, bulb-outs, one roundabout removed, one kept.
2.A	Silver Lake and Woodhaven turn lanes on Pony Express	1:32	Adds dedicated right-turn lanes; a bolder "do not block" box at Woodhaven.
2.A	Ranches Parkway median removal (MAG grant application)	1:36	The city's worst corridor at ~33,000 vehicles per day; MAG decision expected May 4.
2.A	Pole Canyon Road and Pony Express Parkway	1:42	Intersection realignment, decel lanes, and a signal; developer participation uncertain.
2.A	Mount Airy widening / median removal	1:45	Geometry, not stop signs, as the preferred speed-management tool.
2.A	South-of-city connectivity study	1:48	Preserve future corridors before development forecloses them.
2.A	Corridor capacity ahead of the SR-73 highway rebuild; bonding idea	1:50	Engineer proposes finishing Ranches and Pony Express before highway construction.
2.A	Airport Road right-of-way, trail, and pedestrian access	1:55	City does not yet own the land east of Airport Road for a pathway.
3	Adjournment	1:58	Adjourned at 5:04 p.m.

Discussed but NOT on the agenda: A candidate debate held the previous evening, at which Mayor Gray and Councilmember Clark were both present and both objected to candidates boasting about never raising property taxes; a bomb scare the previous Friday at the new QTS building that drew roughly six canine units from around the county; the pending resignation of animal-control Deputy Walkenshaw to Salt Lake City; a request that the city weigh in on the renaming of a road, with "Lake Mountain Corridor" floated as an alternative; the long-deferred questions of a city justice court and getting Eagle Mountain ordinances onto the Master Offense Table; and a suggestion that the city lobby the Legislature for authority to split residential and commercial property tax rates.

On agenda but little/no discussion: The agenda listed only a single generic "Budget Discussion Item," so nothing noticed for discussion went unaddressed. Consistent with the posted notice, no action was taken on the budget itself — the only vote of the afternoon was to adjourn. The city administrator twice deferred the question of how to pay for any of it ("How we get there is the next discussion") to a future budget meeting.

What was discussed

2.A — Utah County Sheriff's Office staffing request

This was a budget-season request from the Utah County Sheriff's Office, which polices Eagle Mountain under contract, for seven additional sworn positions at an estimated additional cost of about $1.44 million. The chief deputy who runs the Eagle Mountain Division opened by insisting on the framing: "We are your police department," he said, noting that the Sheriff's Office has served the city since its inception, that deputies are assigned to Eagle Mountain rather than dispatched into it from elsewhere, and that they work out of city office space.

The division currently fields 35 sworn officers — a chief deputy, a lieutenant, an officer specialist, five sergeants, four patrol teams of four deputies each, two animal control deputies, two traffic deputies, four detectives, a victim advocate, and coordinators running programs such as RAD and the volunteers-in-patrol.

The heart of the presentation was a workload study the chief deputy said he undertook at the council's own request from a year earlier, when the body pushed back on being given only an officers-per-thousand figure. Eagle Mountain now sits at 0.45 sworn officers per 1,000 residents, or roughly one per 2,200 people across about 77,000 residents and 50.3 square miles. He offered neighbors for comparison — Lehi at about 0.7 (one per 1,429), Saratoga Springs and Bluffdale at roughly one per 1,000 combined — while explicitly declining to argue that Eagle Mountain needs those ratios.

What he leaned on instead were two benchmarks from ICMA, the International City/County Management Association. The first is the "Rule of 60," under which about 60 percent of sworn staff should be assigned to patrol; Eagle Mountain is at 68.5 percent, meaning it is heavy on patrol and thin on administration, supervision, and investigations. The second is the "saturation index," the share of available officer time consumed by calls. ICMA treats 50 to 60 percent as properly staffed and anything sustained above 60 percent as understaffed; Eagle Mountain runs 65 to 70 percent on average, and higher during afternoon and weekend peaks. Calls for service reached 25,699 last year, an 18.6 percent increase over the prior year — about 70 incidents a day, averaging 32 minutes each, consuming 38 officer-hours daily. Those figures, he stressed, exclude backup units, report time, and travel time, because he chose not to guess at data he did not have.

Asked by Councilmember Wood whether the call increase reflected growth or crime, the chief deputy was emphatic that it was population: "Eagle Mountain is not West Valley City. We don't have that crime rate. We are one of the safest cities in the state of Utah." Councilmember Clark asked whether community policing could address the specific complaints the council hears from the dais — she offered e-bikes as an example — and drew out what became the request's most concrete justification. Two dedicated community-oriented policing officers, he argued, could work with staff to get city ordinances onto the county's Master Offense Table so they can actually be charged in justice court, and could pursue permanent fixes for neighborhood traffic complaints alongside city traffic engineers rather than treating them with what he called the "temporary Band-Aid" of a traffic unit.

Patrol deputies, on rotating twelve-hour shifts that flip between days and graveyards every two months, cannot sustain that kind of long-term relationship work. The formal ask is six deputies — one added to each of the four patrol teams, plus the two community officers — and one sergeant, to relieve Sergeant Max Morgan, whose span of control the chief deputy called "beyond best practices." The workload study, he conceded, actually calls for 8 to 10 additional patrol deputies and 11 to 13 additional sworn overall; he trimmed the request out of deference to the city's finances. Seven positions would move the saturation index to 55 to 60 percent and the ratio to 0.55 per 1,000 — still low, he said, but enough that "our guys can breathe a little bit."

He closed with a cost breakdown intended to correct what Councilmember Clark later called "some really bad misinformation" circulating publicly. The average deputy's salary and benefits run about $140,000. The fully loaded contract cost per deputy comes to about $200,000, covering motor pool recapitalization, radios, radar, body and in-car video, human resources, evidence and crime lab, records, the Spillman reporting system, roughly $1,100 a year in state-required liability insurance, and shared access to SWAT, search-and-rescue, canine, and drone resources. A sergeant runs about $240,000 to $247,000.

He also presented, at Clark's earlier request, a mapping-grid analysis of the area around the new Walmart: police incidents in that grid rose from roughly 62 in the first quarter of 2025 to 108 in the quarter Walmart opened (August 27) and 141 in the fourth quarter, a 73 percent increase year over year into the first quarter of 2026. He was careful to say this reflects traffic and volume, not that "things are going downhill." His summary line, repeated several times: "We're lean, and in this case, lean means fragile. This is a need. This isn't a want."

2.A — Council discussion: revenue, property tax, and how to fund public safety

What followed was the most consequential exchange of the afternoon, and it was not really about deputies — it was about the structural condition of the city's general fund. Councilmember Wright, in his fifth budget season, described the pattern: every year the Sheriff's Office asks, every year the council tries to accommodate within constraints, and every year the gap widens. He recalled a previous cycle in which the council funded two more deputies than then-Chief McDowell had requested.

"The problem comes from the funding mechanism is not keeping up with the demand," he said. Residents object that new rooftops should pay for new service, "and they are, but they're paying for it at a rate that's 20 years old." He asked each of his colleagues to consider a specific question — what would it take to fund 8 to 10 rather than 7? — while naming the hard part out loud: roughly $600,000 in cuts to add three more, and an ongoing obligation once added. "If we're not providing adequate policing services, why are we sitting here?"

Councilmember Wood went further and made the sharpest remarks of the meeting. "I'm disappointed that we have not built this into our system, frankly," he said, adding that in three budget seasons "it seems like public safety is an afterthought every time." He argued the city is 13 sworn officers short of where it ought to be, that 8 to 10 is "not even an excess, it's just to get it to baseline," and that the answer is not another one-year accommodation but a standing policy tying public-safety staffing to population growth, with a tax mechanism to fund it.

He connected the problem to the city's earlier water and sewer rate reckonings — "we're acting like we can just keep band-aiding this" — and reserved real anger for elected officials who campaign on never raising taxes: "All you've done is make it so that we can't pay for anything." Councilmember Huish, a nearly twenty-year resident, supplied the arithmetic behind the frustration: his property tax bill from the city is unchanged from a decade ago while the cost per deputy covering his neighborhood has risen, so a coverage ratio that once stood near 0.7 has eroded to 0.45.

Staff confirmed the diagnosis. The city administrator said flatly that "we don't have an expense problem, we have a revenue problem," noting that Utah's property tax has no cost-of-living escalator, that years of running lean have left little to cut, and that funding a core service out of sales tax exposes it to the ups and downs of retail. He pointed to Saratoga Springs, which historically covered 57 or 58 percent of public safety from property taxes and is working to get back to that level — the balance, he noted pointedly, being covered by sales tax revenue that partly consists of Eagle Mountain's own roughly 70 percent retail leakage into Saratoga Springs and Lehi.

Two practical constraints were established for the record. First, Utah law does not permit a split rate: Councilmember Huish and Councilmember Wright walked through the mechanics, with the Mayor summarizing that a levy increase applies identically to commercial and residential parcels, with a 45 percent reduction applied to owner-occupied primary residences only — so a dollar of new levy costs a business a dollar and a homeowner 55 cents. The city administrator added that the city's data center agreements contractually bar changing property tax on those parcels alone in any case. Second, a change in state code this year means the city cannot spend any new property tax revenue until 30 days after the August truth-in-taxation hearing — which is to say, not before September regardless of what the council decides.

The Mayor offered the only concrete funding structure of the day, drawing on a phasing approach he and Councilmember Wright had used with Chief McDowell: hire four patrol deputies as revenue arrives (realistically September, not July) to bring every team to five, then add a second group of four at mid-year in January, which costs only half a year of salary in the first budget while establishing the ongoing expense. "Four and four gets us eight," he said, suggesting the sergeant and community officers could wait until January because immediate patrol coverage is the first concern.

Councilmember Clark endorsed the 8-to-10 target on the grounds that deferring only guarantees a harder decision in a less certain economy, and attached two conditions she wanted remembered: getting Eagle Mountain's ordinances onto the Master Offense List so they can be enforced, and finally moving on a city justice court after more than 18 months of discussion. No decision was made; the city administrator twice deferred the "how" to the next budget meeting.

2.A — Transportation and the five-year capital improvement plan

The second half of the work session was the city engineer's first presentation of a budget cycle, covering the fiscal-year 2027 slate of transportation projects built off the impact fee facilities plan and the Transportation Master Plan. He described a project-delivery change he and capital project accountant Chris Waldron adopted: fund design a year ahead of construction, so the following year's construction request rests on an engineer's estimate rather than the deliberately inflated numbers from the template used by UDOT, the Utah Department of Transportation, for long-range planning. That sequencing has both saved money — over $1.5 million on the current construction season — and exposed a project that had been badly underestimated.

The largest single item is the Ranches Parkway median removal, submitted to the Mountainland Association of Governments (MAG) two weeks earlier, with a presentation set for April 27 and an award decision expected May 4. The corridor carries about 33,000 vehicles per day against a capacity the engineer put in the neighborhood of 33,600 to 33,800 — "just a shy away from going over capacity." Because the existing medians run 36 to 38 feet wide and the corridor holds 202 feet of preserved right-of-way ("big props to past city folks who did that"), removing the medians yields two additional travel lanes and a center turn lane without acquisition, adding roughly 18,000 to 20,000 vehicles per day of capacity and giving emergency responders mid-block turnarounds.

The engineer's larger strategic proposal was to complete Ranches Parkway and widen Pony Express from Mid Valley Road to the Saratoga Springs border — coordinating with Saratoga, which he said has both the right-of-way and the willingness — before the reconstruction of State Route 73 (SR-73) begins. That project is expected to be programmed in 2029 with construction in 2030, and he warned that its detoured traffic will land on corridors already over capacity. Since MAG money for Ranches would not arrive until fiscal 2029–30, he floated bonding or another alternate revenue source to start now.

The Mayor, who sits on MAG, endorsed fronting costs and seeking reimbursement — noting he "fights with MAG all the time" over the unfairness of a system that rewards cities which wait and then amend for higher costs over cities like Eagle Mountain that prepay and save money. He also issued a sharp procedural warning: any project built before it is approved into the impact fee facilities plan and before MAG award is permanently ineligible for both. "We need to get those in now before we get in too big a hurry."

Individual projects drew detailed, and at times skeptical, engagement. At SR-73 and Campus Drive, a high-T continuous-green signal will let southbound traffic flow uninterrupted while a red phase halts northbound traffic so vehicles can egress into an acceleration lane; the scope grew to dual right-turn lanes after Walmart's traffic impacts appeared. Mayor Gray pressed hard on the geometry, arguing that only one lane is a true through lane and asking for both a deceleration right-turn lane and a deeper left-turn pocket; the engineer defended the model, explained that the left-turn pocket begins at the intersection and releases in a way the queuing analysis accommodates, and said space is simply too tight — "I wish we had more space." Councilmember Wood extracted the practical consequence that left egress east out of the Maverik will be closed by a concrete median, with drivers rerouted through the Stonehenge signal, and asked that residents and businesses be told before it happens.

At Trailhead and Pony Express, the engineer explained why a line item budgeted at $500,000 — the bare cost of a traffic signal — was wrong: geometry problems, islands, extensive flatwork, repaving of some of the city's oldest asphalt, bulb-outs, a truck apron, and the removal of two rectangular rapid-flashing beacons that, in his words, "no one pays attention to anyway." Councilmember Clark, who joked about "support groups for residents that are upset about the traffic circle being removed," also asked the substantive follow-up: how will people know not to cross where the flasher is being pulled? The answer was that the deviating trail, the medians, and the striping all disappear with it, leaving no crossing to find. The engineer's philosophy surfaced most clearly on Mount Airy: "stop signs are not a great way to manage speed, or speed humps. The best way to fix speed is geometry" — widening the appealing route so drivers stop cutting through a neighborhood.

Several exchanges pointed toward policy rather than projects. Councilmember Wood, describing morning queues that back up past Ridley's and cascade from Pony Express onto Ranches Parkway all the way to Lone Tree, asked whether the city should adopt a broader policy restricting left-turn access from intersections and driveways, extending beyond Pony Express to Eagle Mountain Boulevard as it commercializes. The engineer agreed and said the development review team is already having those conversations — citing the Eagle Crest project, where staff objected to left egress.

He also declined to add "do not block" striping to Pony Express, on the grounds that the underlying problem there is capacity, not driver behavior, "and if we do it there, we're going to want to do it everywhere." Wood separately invited staff to flag any project where a modest expenditure of one-time or utility funds would produce an immediate, widespread traffic benefit. Councilmember Wright offered unprompted praise: "It's super refreshing to me to see us proactively planning to fix some of the mistakes we've made in the past."

2.A — Airport Road right-of-way and pedestrian connectivity

After the Mayor excused the finance director and offered to adjourn, Councilmember Wood asked to continue, and the remaining time went to a question Councilmember Huish had raised privately with the Mayor. Airport Road is wide enough for two cars, but residents jog and walk along it, and Huish wanted to know whether the city owns enough land east of the road to build a roughly seven-foot pathway connecting the north and south halves of the city. The answer was no — the city holds the large parcel where Airport Road angles off Pony Express, but not the stretch going forward. Staff are currently preparing the legal descriptions to secure the additional right-of-way.

The engineer treated Airport Road as a lower priority on volume grounds — "it's a great secondary or third relief," valuable as redundancy when Eagle Mountain Boulevard is closed for paving, but not carrying the loads that Ranches Parkway and Pony Express do. Councilmember Wood accepted the assessment as honest while noting the discomfort of it: "it was a lot of money to build that road that nobody's using."

Brad Hickman added the strategic caution that closed the meeting's substantive discussion — that dropping a trail in before the full road profile and adjacent development grades are known risks building it twice, "and those are some of the mistakes that we've made in the past too, where we've jumped the gun." A trail network is on the plans for the corridor; he would not commit to a timetable. The same widening question turned up at Pole Canyon Road, where Councilmember Wood asked whether the developer holding the west-side frontage — identified as Firefly — might build the roadway in exchange for something of value to them; staff reported hearing nothing from Firefly about developing that road anytime soon.

Notable moments

• The chief deputy's framing sentence. Having declined to argue for a national officers-per-thousand target, he reduced the request to one image: "We're lean, and in this case, lean means fragile." He paired it with a warning that cities typically fund police after a tragedy rather than before one — "we would like to see action taken before tragedy strikes."

• The council was more aggressive than the request. Both Councilmember Wright and Councilmember Wood pushed past the seven positions the Sheriff's Office asked for and told the body it should be funding the 8 to 10 the workload study actually supports. Wright asked colleagues to identify where $600,000 could be clawed back; Wood called 8 to 10 "not even an excess, it's just to get it to baseline."

• A debate the night before became the meeting's subtext. Mayor Gray and Councilmember Clark independently reported attending a candidate debate — the same event Sheriff Smith spoke at — where candidates boasted of never raising property taxes. The Mayor said he heckled from the audience: "every time I would holler out, irresponsible. All you did was kick the can down the road for us to do it." Clark said she spent the drive home ranting to her husband, who despite hearing about it constantly still did not fully understand the 55/45 residential tax reduction — evidence, she argued, that the city has a communication problem.

• Councilmember Wood's broadside against his predecessors. "Other city councils did not have the backbone to do it, and they're so proud of not raising taxes like that's some big beacon to shine in the sky to say, I screwed all the future residents of this city, because that's what's happened." He tied it to the same deferred-maintenance logic that produced the city's water and sewer rate increases.

• A staffing loss announced in passing. Asked about the two animal control officers, the chief deputy revealed that Deputy Walkenshaw has given two weeks' notice and is leaving for Salt Lake City, which will leave animal control short-handed until the position is filled. He described Walkenshaw as "absolutely a great guy" who received a better-paying opportunity.

• A bomb scare, mentioned only as a cost illustration. Explaining what the contract's overhead covers, the chief deputy referenced "a big call down at the new QTS building this last Friday of a bomb scare" that drew roughly six canine units from agencies across the county — offered as an example of shared resources residents never see itemized.

• Only four protesters. Asked by Councilmember Clark whether the city would need "support groups for residents that are upset about the traffic circle being removed," the city engineer noted that the last roundabout removal drew four protesters, and pointed out that one roundabout at the Trailhead intersection is being kept: "we should get some props for that at least."

• A road name nobody understands. Councilmember Wood interrupted the Mid Valley discussion to object to a recently changed road name, saying "Lake Mountain Corridor makes a lot more sense than the whatever ridge we're calling it that has no — no one has any idea what that even means." The engineer agreed to raise it at a Thursday meeting.

• The council chose to keep working. When Clark reported that the Planning Commission had canceled its evening work session, the Mayor offered to run past the 5:00 hard stop. After the finance director was excused for a personal commitment, the council continued for roughly four more minutes on Airport Road before Wood himself said, "If there's no reason to stay, then don't stay."

About this transcript

Several names are almost certainly mis-heard. "Councilmember Herish" and similar spellings mean Zac Huish. The transcript also has "Councilmember Pugh" and "Councilmember Ryding" in places where no matching councilmember fits; the latter may be a mishearing of a MAG or regional colleague's name. "Cory Bee Ride Memorial Highway" and "Corey Ride" are almost certainly Cory Wride Memorial Highway (SR-73), named for the fallen Utah County deputy; the same name shows up once as a former sergeant the chief deputy served alongside, which fits. "Lehigh City" throughout is Lehi; "AF" is American Fork; "MAC" appears once where MAG (Mountainland Association of Governments) is meant. "John Magnus," named as a legislative contact on split property tax, is likely a state legislator whose surname the software did not get right. "Bonney Express" is Pony Express Parkway. "Mount Saratoga," "Trail Box," "Braxton," "Stone Ridge / Stonehenge," and "Scarlet Ridge Parkway" should all be checked against city maps. "Planet" appears as the name of budgeting software. "ICMA" was described on the recording as the "International City Council Management Association"; the group is actually the International City/County Management Association.

The recording was split into consistent speaker channels, but those channels were never matched to names, and at least two are unreliable. In one exchange someone says "Eric?" and a different channel answers "Yes, sir," which strongly suggests the channels bleed into each other at turn boundaries. Likewise, the adjournment motion and second appear on channels that do not match the Mayor's spoken record of who moved and who seconded, so this summary follows the Mayor's announcement. The staff channel that answers the Firefly development question and the channel that later speaks as Brad Hickman appear to be merged, even though Councilmember Wood addressed the first question to "Brandon." Councilmember Craig Whiting cannot be identified anywhere in the transcript except as the seconder of the adjournment motion, so no discussion has been attributed to him.

Two important numbers are unclear as transcribed. The Walmart-grid incident counts come through as "61 or 62 … 62 in quarter 2 … 63 in quarter 3 when Walmart opened … we had 108, and in quarter 4 we had 141," which does not add up; the likeliest reading is roughly 62, 63, 108, and 141 across the four quarters of 2025, which matches the stated 73 percent year-over-year increase. Similarly, "27 transportation projects" at the top of the engineer's presentation is almost certainly "FY27 transportation projects," since he later refers to "the breakdown of the 27 costs" and repeatedly discusses fiscal years '27 and '28. The chief deputy also gives Saratoga Springs' ratio as roughly 0.9 early in the presentation and as 1.1 later. Two moments — the Mayor's aside about the last tax increase being "like 2003, I believe, which we'll learn from Kimberly," and Councilmember Wright's "22 years" of unchanged city property taxes — were hedged by the speakers themselves and should not be treated as verified.