Heber City’s rapid growth has brought and amplified challenges for the city to address.
After a weekend of planning and discussion Heber City Council identified seven priorities to focus on during the fiscal year 2019/2020.
The two-day strategic retreat at the Public Safety Building on Heber’s Main Street saw the council discussing a multitude of issues that they plan to address in the coming months. At the end of the two day retreat the council spent over an hour discussing and giving City Manager Matt Brower a list of seven priorities to focus on for the fiscal year 2019/2020.
Councilman Jeff Bradshaw discussed the priority to revitalize downtown and how a potential zone change could play into that.
“I want to develop a plan to make changes in commercial areas downtown. How do we proceed with it? How much is it going to cost to get it off the ground and started? See if we can’t take care of that in the next two or three years.”
Council discussed looking at the zone change as part of a vision to transition downtown into a destination place. The zone change would possibly come as an update to the city’s master plan. One potential change would be to expand commercial zoning in the downtown area a block to the east and west. Councilman Ron Crittenden noted the importance of communicating to homeowners in the area that the zone change would not happen overnight.
“We’ve got to help them see the vision that they don’t have to sell their home. They don’t have to be commercial but when they die their kids have that option and it’ll be a gradual transition. Nobodies making them sell their house.”
An additional priority was to address secondary water use and conservation. Another priority mentioned by councilman Jeff Smith was to enhance proactive communication from the city.
“One of my big frustrations is it seems like there’s so much misinformation among the public that I think, for the most part, could be taken care of really quickly. Then we can have meaningful conversations with the public. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of that needs to be proactively coming from us.”
Another priority Councilman Smith identified was to give merit-based pay raises to city employees and match trends for cost of living increases, Councilman Wayne Hardman agreed.
“I think our biggest asset is the people that work for us. Having them having good feelings and a good morale goes a long way to get good productivity out of them.”
Councilman Ron Crittenden prioritized getting rid of code that is not being enforced.
“We need code enforcement. If parking isn’t important then don’t cite anybody, or cite everybody, but we need to be consistent. I’m not saying get nitpicky with people I’m saying get them off our books if they’re not important enough. I don’t think all of them are important enough.”
Councilwoman Heidi Franco wanted to increase police resources, including hiring at least one additional officer for the city per year to try and catch up to the recommended two officers for every 1,000 citizens. Heber Chief of Police Dave Booth says right now the city has around 1.5 officers for every 1,000.
“Do we have enough officers to accomplish what we need to? We do. Can we do more? Absolutely. We just had to alter our schedules, back in July, and go to a 12-hour schedule to get more coverage. We’re starting to find that we’re getting busier later at night for example. We went to the 12-hour coverage to give us two officers 24-7. That’s something that we did for officer safety purposes as well as we’re just getting busier.”
Finally, the council prioritized creating a master plan for the city’s parks. Mayor Kelleen Potter proposed a citizen committee to aid with the planning.
“I would like the council to consider a parks committee. A citizens committee, an advisory board type thing where those people could bring recommendations to the council help make that master plan. Work with Mark say we walked this, we got the numbers, we talked to the neighbors. Just bring more information and get the community involved. Midway has good luck with that and some other communities that I’ve talked to. Just to help with that overall planning.”
Although not identified on the council’s list of seven priorities, they also spent the weekend discussing the bypass, affordable housing, and clean air monitoring amongst other issues they plan to address.
