Eagle Mountain Community Services Board, 22 July 2026

In short: The Community Services Board spent most of this meeting building Eagle Mountain's application for a state "Healthy Utah Community" designation, settling on nine things the city already does and three new commitments for the next three years. Members also shaped two birthday-year events, a month-long fitness challenge and a 30-backpack treasure hunt, and began designing the rules for handing out RAP tax grant money. Only two votes were taken: approving past minutes and adjourning.

Present: Jessie Southworth (chair), Melissa Clark (City Council), Zac Huish (City Council), Mare Burningham, Cherie Curtis, Jay Johnson, and Charlotte Ducos, who arrived roughly 45 minutes in and asked to be noted in the minutes. Steve Conger and Liz were excused.

Staff: Steve Mumford (staff liaison, presented the Healthy Utah and America 250 items), Jason Hall (Recreation), Don Hamm (Events), Soraya Farmer (digital communications specialist, attending in place of Kyle Ireland).

Decisions

#	Agenda ref	Motion	Moved / Seconded	Vote	Result
1	2	Approve the minutes of the previous two meetings — the June regular meeting and the special meeting on recreation sponsorships — with one correction, that the minutes render Mare Burningham's first name as "Mayor"	Moved by Cherie Curtis / seconded by Mare Burningham	Voice vote	Passed
2	9	Adjourn, at 8:28 PM	Moved by Charlotte Ducos / seconded by Zac Huish	Voice vote	Passed

Settled without a vote:

• Recreation soccer jerseys will be printed without a number on the front, saving about $1,000 of a roughly $12,000 order; the board treated the final call as Jason Hall's design decision and agreed the number can be added back next year if parents complain.
• Requests for help from the communications team will travel from board members to the chair, then to Steve Mumford, then to communications — the board advises rather than directs city communications, and individual members will not send requests directly.
• Communications will design a Community Services Board banner and logo so the board can identify itself at booths, ideally in time for the August 1 back-to-school event.
• Banner sponsorships will be promoted on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, framed as helping children play rather than as a request for money, with the recreation department's shared email as the contact rather than a staff member's personal address.
• Unauthorized banners in parks and routine maintenance problems should be reported through the city app rather than raised at board meetings.
• Steve Mumford will get cost estimates from the Parks Department for the board's eight-item priority list and bring it to a City Council work session with a dollar figure and an eligible funding source beside each item.
• The board identified nine strategies Eagle Mountain already has in place for the Healthy Utah application and committed to three new ones over three years: joining the Communities That Care coalition, starting an adaptive sports program with Special Olympics as the longer-term aspiration, and adding trail wayfinding signs showing time and distance alongside a campaign telling residents where the trails are.
• The board declined to pursue a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, one of the options on the state's list.
• Steve Mumford will draft the Healthy Utah letter of commitment, send it to the chair to review, then forward it to the City Council, which would formally designate the board as the city's health coalition by resolution. The application is due in August.
• An informal group — Steve Mumford, Mare Burningham, Melissa Clark, Jessie Southworth, with Jay Johnson researching — will study what a community garden actually requires and bring recommendations to the City Council.
• The August event will be a "Walk 30" or "Move 30" challenge, deliberately loose: 30 miles, or 30 of nearly anything active. Everyone who finishes goes into a drawing, and Melissa Clark will ask Anytime Fitness whether it will donate a one-year membership as the prize.
• September's treasure hunt will run on Wednesday evenings and Saturdays, with Steve Mumford working out the staffing and the exact time of day. City staff, their families, and elected officials will be ineligible.
• RAP tax grant criteria will be built over several meetings rather than one, starting at the next meeting with the Parks and Recreation scoring rubric. The board wants the program in place by January.
• The board will staff a booth at the August 1 back-to-school night, using safe routes to school as its angle for gathering resident input.
• The amendment allowing remote participation in meetings was pushed to a future agenda.

Meeting map

Agenda ref	Topic	~Start (elapsed)	One-line note
1	Call to order and roll call	0:00	Called to order at 6:03 PM; members stated their names in turn.
2	Approval of minutes	0:32	Two sets of minutes approved with one name correction.
3–4	Recap and project updates	2:09	Jersey numbers, sponsorship outreach, off-street trails, and the board's priority list.
5	Communications team	23:46	Soraya Farmer introduced herself and set out how the team can help.
6	Healthy Utah Community Designation	41:34	The longest item; picked nine existing and three new health strategies.
7	America 250 / Eagle Mountain 30	1:24:26	Walk 30, the 30-backpack treasure hunt, and the fall events calendar.
8a	RAP tax funding criteria	1:52:22	Early design of the grant application, rubric, and review process.
8b	Board comments and announcements	2:16:41	Booth plans, the volunteer policy update, and remote participation.
9	Adjournment	2:25:02	Adjourned at 8:28 PM.

Discussed but NOT on the agenda: community gardens as a land-use and open-space question, an unauthorized football banner on the pickleball courts, the city's scorpion hunts, and whether RAP tax money can be banked across years.

On agenda but little/no discussion: the 9/11 Day of Service and the rules-of-order amendment for remote participation, both carried to a future meeting.

What was discussed

2 — Approval of minutes

Two sets of minutes were before the board: the June regular meeting and a special meeting held to approve recreation sponsorships. The only correction raised was that the minutes had written Mare Burningham's first name as "Mayor," a mistake she said happens constantly — "It's one syllable." The motion passed on a voice vote.

3–4 — Recap and ongoing projects

The largest thread was the recreation soccer jerseys. Steve Mumford explained that the vendor's quote came to nearly $12,000 with a number printed on the front of each jersey, and that dropping that number would save about $1,000, because the front is a separate press. Mare Burningham said she preferred the front number as a spectator, since it makes players identifiable whichever way they run. Cherie Curtis agreed the number matters more for older players on crowded fields, but not for five-a-side games with small children. Charlotte Ducos reframed the question: how many more children could be sponsored with that $1,000? That argument carried the room. The board's consensus was to print without the number, treat it as Jason Hall's decision to finalize, and add it back next year if parents object.

Sponsorship work is not finished. All the jersey sponsorships are covered, but banner sponsorships are not, and the chair asked members to keep approaching businesses. The board decided to advertise on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, on Melissa Clark's point that businesses look for these opportunities there, and agreed with Charlotte Ducos that the pitch should be "help kids play" rather than "sponsor us," so the city does not read as needy.

Steve Mumford reported that the off-street trails master plan had been approved the previous night. He has been working with Ty Shepherd of the Lake Mountain Trails Association, and a memorandum of understanding with SITLA that would give the city legal access to trails in the Hidden Valley area went over to the agency the night before. The association would take on most trail maintenance, and this year plans to focus on the safety and rideability of existing trails rather than cutting new ones. Zac Huish's assessment of the timeline: "Just imagine like the slowest government possible and then multiply it by 10."

The board also pressed on what happened to the priority list it produced last month. Steve Mumford said it had only gone out as an email update to the council and mayor. Zac Huish asked what would make it actionable and answered his own question — estimated costs beside each project. Melissa Clark first suggested holding the list until after August 18 because of existing criticism about city spending, then reversed herself once she understood the list was small, quick items such as benches and two parks that are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those, she noted, could be covered with leftover Community Development Block Grant funds: "let's ADA this place on up." Steve Mumford will bring costs and funding sources to a council work session.

5 — Communications team

Soraya Farmer, the city's digital communications specialist, came in place of Kyle Ireland to introduce herself and ask how her team could help. She offered photography, video, blog posts, calendar listings, and newsletter space, asking only for as much lead time as possible — ideally two weeks.

The substantive outcome was a workflow. Steve Mumford was direct that what the city does not want is individual board members telling the communications department what to post, since the board is advisory. Melissa Clark argued requests should route through the chair so that the chair can always answer for what the board is doing publicly. The agreed path runs from members to Jessie Southworth to Steve Mumford to communications, with Steve Mumford adding that people can copy him and the chair at the same time to avoid a game of telephone.

Two asks came out of the discussion: a banner and logo so the board can identify itself at public events, and a design template so sponsor banners on the pickleball courts look consistent. Melissa Clark also proposed featuring board members in the city's social media reels to give the RAP tax a human face during the gap before any funded project exists, and Charlotte Ducos suggested that completed RAP tax projects carry a plate reading that residents' RAP tax dollars paid for them.

6 — Healthy Utah Community Designation

This was the meeting's main work. The state designation requires a city to identify nine strategies it already has in place, three in each of three categories, and commit to at least three new ones over the following three years. Melissa Clark, who said she had been asking for this designation for three years, noted the city already does most of what the list asks.

Working from a handout, the board assembled the existing nine: for active living, the Turkey Trot, Safe Routes to School, the newly approved off-street trails master plan, the bike and pedestrian master plan, and the city's Wellness Wednesdays; for healthy eating, a farmers market that accepts SNAP benefits, the library's seed exchange and food pantry, and ordinances permitting backyard poultry; for mental health, naloxone access, free gun locks at the library, the medication drop box, Believer City status, the Motivational Mile, and senior lunches and bingo. A recurring question was whether a plan counts once approved or only once built — the board leaned on approval being enough, since it had more than three candidates in every category regardless.

One option was rejected outright. Reading down the list, Melissa Clark hit the sugar-sweetened beverage tax and said, "I'm a hard no on this one... I don't drink sugar, but still, no, hard pass."

The three new commitments took longer. Jessie Southworth proposed joining the Communities That Care coalition, a prevention program the city participated in years ago through a coordinator shared with Saratoga Springs, and which lapsed when the staffer left. She argued there is a large gap in the city's mental health resources. Steve Mumford will contact Saratoga Springs to learn what the city had to do to take part. The second came from a resident who approached the board at the farmers market about adaptive sports; Melissa Clark's daughters had been on a Special Olympics bocce team that won a state silver medal, and the board settled on an adaptive sports program with Special Olympics as the aspiration. The third combines trail wayfinding signs showing time and distance with a campaign telling residents where the trails are — Charlotte Ducos noted that people hike Turtle Hill but many residents do not know what Turtle Hill is, and Mare Burningham asked for trails to be graded by ability so families with strollers or wheelchairs can find suitable routes.

Community gardens came up as a possible commitment and were set aside precisely because the board did not want to promise something it had not researched. The discussion was substantial anyway. Melissa Clark said the city had tried edible gardens before to check a box and they were "just garbage within a year," and that the answer is requirements: if the board works out what a community garden actually needs, the council could adopt it as an alternative to the pool that multifamily developments are currently required to build, or grant open-space credit for it. Charlotte Ducos argued the gardens belong where residents lack their own land — apartments and condominiums. Zac Huish raised maintenance, warning against scattering small plots a parks technician would have to remember. Don Hamm noted the senior center already has garden boxes that residents use, and more could be added along that stretch of trail.

7 — America 250 / Eagle Mountain 30

Steve Mumford proposed a "Walk 30" for August, modeled on the national Walk 250. Charlotte Ducos suggested "Move 30," and the concept loosened from there into 30 of nearly anything active — walking 30 dogs, a group of 30 walking together. Participants would submit a photo or video through a simple form, with entries going into a drawing rather than being judged, after Cherie Curtis pointed out that judging the "most original" entry raised the question of who judges. Melissa Clark suggested asking Anytime Fitness to donate a one-year membership, which would give the sponsor real publicity, and volunteered to take part in her eagle costume.

The treasure hunt is larger. Thirty backpacks will be hidden across the city, and Steve Mumford passed one around: a water bottle, a 30th anniversary hat, an America 250 fanny pack, a t-shirt, sunglasses, a lapel pin, a keychain, stickers, and a city-branded pickleball paddle. Suggestions came quickly — a book from the library with a card promotion, mini binoculars and a wildlife guide, black-light pen lights for scorpion hunting, and contributions from the Chamber, the Wildlife Alliance, and the Arts Alliance so the bags read as community partnership rather than city merchandise.

The scheduling question was left partly open. Steve Mumford laid out options from one backpack a day for 30 days to all 30 at once. The board converged on Wednesday evenings and Saturdays, then complicated it: soccer games run Saturday mornings from August 15, so afternoons may be better. Steve Mumford took the logistics away to solve. Everyone who arrives within the window gets a shirt and sticker even though only one person gets the backpack, and city staff, their families, and elected officials will be ineligible. Don Hamm gave the sharpest warning of the night about site selection: do not forget a drop in White Hills, a neighborhood he described as feeling excluded from the city — "You will be hung."

Don Hamm also walked through the fall calendar: the summer bash and fireworks that Saturday, which drew 20,000 people last year; a back-to-school clothing swap on August 1; Shop Fest, Prep Fest and the 9/11 Day of Service in September; Halloween Town, an adaptive trick-or-treat, a movie in the park and the half marathon on October 3; and the Turkey Trot and Veterans Breakfast in November. He offered to send the board a calendar marking where volunteers are needed.

8a — RAP tax funding criteria

The board began designing how it will award RAP tax grant money, with a target of having the process settled by January. Melissa Clark described Lehi's model, where 70 percent of funds go to council- and city-designated projects and 30 percent to grants. Charlotte Ducos objected to fixing any percentage, arguing the board should judge projects on merit rather than against a quota — a genuinely strong community project should not be turned away because a bucket is full. Melissa Clark's counter was that unlimited flexibility could let a single project consume most of a year's funds, and she proposed tiers instead, with a higher bar for larger requests. Zac Huish supported keeping room for something ambitious, raising the group that wants to build a recreation center as the kind of project that might be worth one big allocation in a year.

Several design points drew agreement. Applications should require the number of people served, the number of volunteers involved, cost information, and a specific plan for acknowledging RAP tax funding. Projects must have a presence in Eagle Mountain rather than merely operating in the region — Melissa Clark described a theater group in another city seeking Lehi money because two Lehi residents attended, and called it a "hard no." Melissa Clark, drawing on writing and reviewing grants, argued the application should be standardized enough that inexperienced organizations are not outplayed by those who know how to work the process. City projects and community projects will be assessed separately, or through one application with conditional sections, since the board cannot realistically score a city trail project against a neighborhood request. The board liked rubric language that ends in "defer or revise" rather than denial, and agreed any denial needs a written explanation and an invitation to reapply. Melissa Clark noted RAP tax funds can be banked toward a future project, though not turned into a permanent endowment. The next meeting starts with the Parks and Recreation rubric.

8b — Board comments and announcements

The board decided to staff a booth at the August 1 back-to-school event, where Don Hamm said 2,600 people attended last year, using safe routes to school as the theme and collecting reports through the city app. Don Hamm gave a concrete example: children in one neighborhood walk along Eagle Mountain Boulevard where no trail exists and the city cannot connect one because it does not own the land. Charlotte Ducos asked whether running the board's booth next to her student council booth at Shop Fest would be a conflict; Melissa Clark said no, since no money changes hands.

Steve Mumford reported that a volunteer program meeting had taken place with Melissa Clark, Charlotte Ducos, Jessie Southworth, Don Hamm, and communications, and that management interns Ethan and Addie are drafting policy to bring back to the board. The amendment allowing remote participation was deferred, though Steve Mumford noted the room's new system now supports it.

Notable moments

• A late arrival, on the record. Roughly 45 minutes in, Charlotte Ducos interrupted to ask whether she needed to note that she had entered. "Charlotte Ducos is here." The chair had also meant to excuse Steve Conger and Liz at the start and had forgotten.
• The minutes misspelled a name into a title. The single correction to two meetings' minutes was that "Mare" had been written as "Mayor" — which is also why the recording is full of references to "Mayor" that mean a board member, not the city's mayor.
• $1,000 reframed as children. Charlotte Ducos turned a design debate about jersey numbers into a budget question in one sentence — how many more kids could play for that money — and the room shifted immediately.
• Technology did not cooperate. Steve Mumford's laptop would not drive the display and the printer was uncooperative, so the meeting's central item was run largely from memory and a paper handout. Melissa Clark: "We know you can't print."
• A movie credit surfaced. A digression established that Jay Johnson appeared in a film, which drew the observation that this is why he is on the board — "for the star power."
• Do not skip White Hills. Don Hamm's warning about leaving that neighborhood out of the treasure hunt was the most emphatic advice of the evening, grounded in a previous giveaway.
• Scorpions are a civic asset. The city's scorpion hunt has run four times and packed the building, prompting a suggestion to advertise a habitat-restoration planting day as a scorpion hunt to boost turnout.

About this transcript

This is an automated transcription with automated speaker separation, and names were assigned afterward from evidence inside the recording — people stating their own names, members addressing each other, and the chair naming who moved and seconded. The published agenda independently corroborates that Steve Mumford led the Healthy Utah and America 250 items.

Speaker separation found nine distinct voices for the eleven people present. Jay Johnson and Jason Hall speak rarely, and some of their remarks are attributed to Zac Huish and Don Hamm respectively. Long stretches of speech are reliably attributed; one- and two-word interjections are the least reliable, and a few of the chair's turns absorb a short question from someone else.

Several proper nouns are likely misheard. SITLA, the state trust lands agency, appears variously as "Sedla." Lehi is rendered "Lehigh" and Midvale as "Midville." Cory Wride Park appears as "Cory-Ride," "Quarry Ride," "Cordy Wright," and "Cory-Wren." The RAP tax is sometimes "WRAP" or "route tax." At adjournment the chair credits "Jane and Cherie" with seconding, where "Jane" is probably Jay. Names such as Chris Diep, Ty Shepherd, Cam Wixom, Caleb Warnock, and the former mayor referred to as "Gus Morlan" should be verified before quoting. The recreation group referred to as "NOA" or "NOAA" is unclear from audio alone.