Gilbert accepts 2021 election canvas 7-0 despite sign removal allegations and voter trust concerns
GILBERT, ARIZONA — November 17, 2021

Gilbert accepts 2021 election canvas 7-0 despite sign removal allegations and voter trust concerns

Gilbert Council meeting featuring election interference allegations, firefighter morale crisis, small business concerns, and contentious rezoning proposal for high-density apartments on commercial land.

Gilbert Council Accepts Narrow Bond Election Amid Explosive Claims of Town Sign Removal, Election Interference, and Eroded Public Trust

Gilbert Town Council voted 7–0 to accept the canvassed results of the November 2, 2021 transportation bond election—which passed by only 164 votes—but the unanimous procedural vote masked a profound crisis of confidence. Council Member Lauren Hendricks delivered a sweeping on-the-record indictment of town conduct during the election, alleging that town employees photographed political opposition signs, removed 57 to 83 of them within 24 hours of posting, coordinated overtime to pull them down, and that town management and elected officials made pro-bond arguments at a farmers market using town resources—all raising questions about compliance with the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reed v. Gilbert, which prohibited Gilbert from enforcing sign ordinances based on content.

The meeting also surfaced a firefighter morale collapse (engagement fell from 80% to 10%), allegations that the town is categorically denying COVID-19 workers compensation claims in violation of Industrial Commission of Arizona policy, and public anger from small business owners over pandemic stress and vaccine mandate concerns. A separate contentious rezoning vote—Alta Gilbert's proposal to convert 13.46 acres of commercial land at McQueen and Elliott roads into a 278-unit apartment complex—passed 5–2, dividing the council over whether to preserve employment land or welcome higher-density housing.

Key Speeches

"I looked at the canvas of election results and I found some troubling items. There was a voicemail from the town engineer calling into the compliance department complaining about a political sign which he referenced the content specifically… It reminds me of the 2015 supreme court ruling against the town of gilbert that specifically instructed the town of gilbert not to use content-based means of regulating political signage. So it's only been six years, it's short-term memory." — Council Member Lauren Hendricks

"What we clearly have is without any question… there were town staff, elected members making these representations [at the farmers market about traffic benefits], and there are many people that have made statements. At the end of the day, the bond passes by was it a quarter of a percent, a third of a percent? The question comes down to: with just what we know so far, because there are hundreds of emails in this freedom of information request, probably a third of them have been reviewed, I can't even venture to guess what else might come up in these emails, but I have to wonder when the signs that were removed and not put back up the person that put them up had to pay to put them up again—could that have influenced 164 votes?" — Council Member Hendricks

"I wanted to just make it known that I was the council member that attended a Saturday farmers market in the spring of 2021 to help educate the public with facts and have them better understand what was going to be coming to council in June for the transportation bond election. I believe that the statements and allegations that Council Member Hendricks just stated are not factual." — Vice Mayor Yung Koprowski

"I do think there's a distinction that's important to be made: that council members and public officials can go out and advocate and obviously promote or discourage a particular vote… but the distinction being made is that you can't use town resources to do so… with these kinds of swirling [concerns] out there I definitely have concerns doing that [accepting the canvas]. But with these kind of swirling concerns, I definitely have concerns accepting this without more investigation." — Council Member Amy Yentes

"Your firefighters and first responders feel disconnected from the town, unheard and disrespected. We are experiencing staffing challenges that continues to add stress to an already difficult job made more difficult by the pandemic… Within the last three years our engagement levels has steadily dropped and today we're showing only around a 10 percent employee engagement [versus] over 80 percent [before]." — Mike Rudolph, President, Gilbert Firefighters Union

"We have had some significant concern with our firefighters being categorically denied working workers compensation claims that deal with COVID-19… The Industrial Commission of Arizona came out with a policy regarding this specifically… [which states] COVID-19 workers compensation claims cannot be categorically denied… A study… in the journal of american medical association… found first responders are 60 to 100 percent more likely to get COVID [than] just health care workers. Mesa Fire Department has had 43 firefighters come down with COVID from work exposure—all 43 were accepted." — Chad Rice, Gilbert Firefighter

"I have to wonder if retail is the best fit here… [This site has been vacant for 35 years.] We look up the road to the north, we see the retail hasn't really been successful… We're starting to see some deterioration that we don't want to happen. So we want to see some investment in this area that will help bring it out of that situation." — Sean B. Lake, Attorney for Alta Gilbert (Wood Partners), on why residential makes more sense than commercial

"This property has sat and we've had residential come several times and it's been turned down several times… [but I called Mike Orr from the spectrum project to the south, and] he made it very clear that they're very interested in expanding what's going on the south side into that north parcel… I consider an infill project one that is not on a major corner and not surrounded by industrial. That doesn't qualify as an infill project. It should be a continuation of a business park… This will be giving away precious non-residential land." — Council Member Kathy Tilke, explaining her no vote on Alta Gilbert

"These are people that are in the development business talking about exactly what that northwest corridor needs… [The ULI study] talked about residential helping this particular area… I think this fits and I think it works… I'm super excited that you have a letter of intent from the company that you mentioned for a restaurant… [The developer] lives within walking distance if not biking distance from this location and drives by it every single day." — Council Member Lauren Hendricks, explaining her yes vote on Alta Gilbert

Timeline

Election Interference & Trust Crisis

Public Comment on Election

Firefighter Morale & COVID Workers Comp

Small Business Concerns

Opposition (Alta Gilbert Rezoning)

Number of speakers against: 4 in-person public comment; 13 survey responses opposing; 1 commercial property owner letter (to north) stating opposition to setback impacts.

Main concerns:

  1. Loss of commercial land on major arterial: Town staff recommends denial because 11.09 acres of commercial property at McQueen (principal arterial) and Elliott (major arterial) in the northwest growth area—Gilbert's largest employment corridor—should remain available for employment uses, not residential.

  2. Setback impacts on adjacent industrial: Rezoning would increase required side setbacks from 15 feet (current CC zoning) to 75 feet (MFH zoning), "essentially prohibiting future expansion and limiting redevelopment opportunities" for the sunrise business park (west) and spectrum industrial park (north/south).

  3. Setback impacts on commercial to north: Small commercial parcel to the north would see required setbacks double from 15 feet to 30 feet, making it "very challenging to develop given its relatively small size."

  4. Visual and traffic impact: Two 3-story apartment buildings (36 feet tall) fronting McQueen, set back 42 feet from property line and 220 feet from single-family homes across the street on east side; 388 feet total building frontage will have "very significant impact"; 278 units = 9,057 daily vehicular trips (vs. 346 for low-intensity commercial, 627 for industrial).

  5. Lack of true mixed-use integration: Proposed commercial pad (1.63 net acres, phase 2) is separated from residential by large parking lot; staff requested applicant consider vertical mixed-use (loft-over-retail model, allowed by-right in current CC zoning) but applicant declined; design does not meet quality standards of recent approvals (San Tan Town Commons, The Flats at San Tan, Novel at Val Vista Square, Quintana at Verde Pointe).

  6. Water demand increase: Conversion of 11.09 acres from commercial/industrial to high-density residential (25 DUA) generates increase of 16.21–24.10 acre-feet per year of water use.

  7. Inappropriate MFH zoning location: MFH zoning was designed for intense mixed-use urban environments (near freeways, regional shopping centers, hospitals). Only one other MFH project approved in Gilbert (Novel at Val Vista Square, in 34-acre master plan with hospitality/retail, near Loop 202, San Tan Village shopping, San Tan Motorplex, Gilbert Regional Hospital). This site is neither.

Most compelling arguments:

Organized groups: Home Builders Association (feedback on fees, not rezoning); Chamber of Commerce (letter of support for Alta project).

Support (Alta Gilbert Rezoning)

Number of speakers in favor: 4 in-person public comment; 44–45 letters of support submitted to council (one later withdrawn as opposed); 2 additional slips from residents not wishing to speak but in favor.

Main arguments:

  1. Property has sat vacant 35+ years: Owner has held since at least 1985, paid property taxes, repeatedly sought commercial tenants without success; no credible non-residential interest has materialized despite decades of effort.

  2. Commercial market has failed in corridor: Retail on McQueen/Elliott has struggled; shopping center to north (8–10 acres on other corners) is deteriorating; retailer exodus is ongoing; pandemic and e-commerce have shifted commercial landscape; staff itself did not recommend office use.

  3. Residential is compatible with employment use: Wood Partners develops high-end apartments; average household income in their projects ~$100k; workers living near employment hubs makes sense; ULI study (2-year-old) on northwest corridor recommended residential as part of redevelopment strategy; general plan workshops supported residential in this area.

  4. Economic analysis favors residential: Elliott Pollock (economist) study: multi-family generates $3M more in one-time construction/fees vs. industrial; four times more ongoing town revenue; three times more school district revenue.

  5. Market demand for housing: Gilbert has 2.3% multi-family vacancy (astonishingly low); 28% rent increase this year; ~5,000 permitted but not-yet-constructed multi-family units in town; still undersupplied.

  6. Applicant qualifications: Clay Richardson (Wood Partners) is local (lived 20+ years in nearby Islands neighborhood), committed to high-quality design; company portfolio includes downtown Chandler, downtown Phoenix, San Marcos golf course area projects.

  7. Letter of intent for commercial corner: Square One (restaurant developer, affiliated with Bourbon & Bones concept at San Tan area) has signed LOI for 1.63-acre commercial phase (phase 2); sit-down restaurant will activate corner and serve residential.

  8. Letters of support: 44–45 letters from neighbors, businesses, residents in area; Chamber of Commerce support.

Most compelling arguments:

In-person speakers for:

Project Details

Vote Breakdown

Alta Gilbert Rezoning (GP 21-05 / Z 21-07)

Election Canvas Acceptance (Item 10)

Liquor Licenses

Water System Development Fees (Public Hearing; no vote taken tonight)

Community Engagement Task Force Activation

Outcome & Next Steps

Election Canvas:
Accepted 7–0. Council Member Hendricks voted yes but flagged allegations of election interference and requested further investigation into town employee conduct during the election, sign removal coordination, and content-based regulation of political signage. No formal investigation or remediation action was initiated during the meeting. Council directed staff to clarify signage enforcement standards going forward and study state campaign finance law to ensure clarity and consistency.

Alta Gilbert Rezoning:
Approved 5–2 for general plan amendment and rezone to Multifamily High on 11.09 acres; Community Commercial with PAD on 2.37-acre corner (commercial pad locked in to design standards). Applicant will proceed to design review phase. No deviations; all current exceedances exceed code minimums. Next step is detailed site plan and design review application; council invited applicant back for design phase and signaled openness to working with applicant on visual and massing concerns raised during hearing.

Firefighter Morale:
No formal council action. Union president invited all council members and town management to December 14 servant-leadership training event. Council Member Tilke endorsed the invitation. No commitment to comprehensive engagement review or specific remedial action was secured from council or town management.

COVID Workers Comp:
No formal action. Issue was raised for council awareness; no council direction to town management to review or revise denials policy.

Small Business Support:
No formal action. Council acknowledged comments; requested that business owners and town staff hold roundtable discussion on pandemic recovery, payroll stress, supply chain, and vaccine mandate concerns.

Water System Development Fees:
Public hearing held on land use assumptions and infrastructure improvement plan. Adoption of assumptions scheduled for January 11, 2022. Subsequent notice of intent public hearing and fee adoption hearing in early 2022; fees effective June 2022. Projected 36–37% increase (~$313/unit for single-family; ~$1,500 for commercial example). One offset: existing system development fee expected to cease by May/June 2022, timing before new water fee increases take effect.

Community Engagement Task Force:
Activated 6–1. Council will accept applications and set work program for task force. Regular feedback to council will occur.

Controversies & Context

Election Interference Allegations

The sign removal controversy invokes the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in City of Gilbert v. Reed, which struck down Gilbert's sign ordinance as unconstitutionally regulating speech based on content. The ordinance had allowed certain types of signs (directional, temporary) to be much larger and longer-lasting than political signs, and the town enforced it selectively. SCOTUS ruled that if the town wanted to regulate signs, it could regulate all signs equally and by size, location, or duration—but not by content.

Council Member Hendricks' allegations suggest that in 2021—six years after Reed—the town again engaged in content-based enforcement: a town engineer called to complain about the specific message on an opposition sign ("don't trust the mayor, no on bond"); town employees photographed and removed opposition signs en masse within 24 hours; town employees coordinated overtime to remove them; no similar action was taken against other "illegal" non-political signs (meth awareness, diabetes strips, cash-for-houses) that lacked required attribution. Meanwhile, pro-bond signs were left up even past the legal 15-day window. Hendricks also alleged that town staff and elected members made substantive pro-bond arguments at the farmers market (e.g., "less traffic," "better transportation") using town resources—a use of public funds for campaign advocacy distinct from neutral voter education.

Yung Koprowski denied making substantive pro-bond arguments and stated she was providing factual education. Council Member Yentes called for investigation before accepting the canvas, noting the 164-vote margin could shift on 82 votes either direction. Town Attorney Chris Payne stated the town regulated signs by statute (identification, size, public safety)—not content—but did not address the content of the engineer's voicemail or the coordination emails.

This controversy feeds a broader narrative of eroded trust. Council Member Yentes noted that the pro-bond side had "every advantage": off-cycle election (lower turnout, traditionally favors high-engagement voters), better financing, mail-in voting, and a town-commissioned polling firm that predicted 60%+ support (versus the actual ~50% result). The opposition lacked organized coordination and was outspent. Yet the bond nearly lost—a potential "wake-up call" that the town's messaging and process caused distrust rather than enthusiasm.

Firefighter Morale & COVID Workers Comp

The firefighters union president reported a collapse of engagement (80% → 10%) tied to pandemic stress, workers compensation claim denials, and perceived disconnection from town management. Chad Rice testified that the Industrial Commission of Arizona issued policy in 2020 prohibiting categorical denials of COVID-19 workers comp claims; a JAMA study showed first responders are 60–100% more likely to contract COVID than general population; yet Gilbert Fire appears to be denying such claims systematically while Mesa Fire accepted all 43 firefighter COVID claims. No council action was taken to review or reverse the denials; firefighters were invited to a December 14 training event.

Water Demand & Growth

Kelly Foster (town water system manager) presented the water system development fees update. Key point: the conversion of 13.46 acres from commercial/industrial to residential will increase water use by 16.21–24.10 acre-feet per year (versus what commercial/industrial would use). The town is updating system development fees to account for expansion of the north water treatment plant from 45 to 60 million gallons per day. Fees will increase ~36–37%, effective June 2022. This reflects Gilbert's continued growth, though Foster noted growth is expected to slow over the 10-year planning horizon as the town approaches build-out.

Northwest Growth Area Redevelopment Vision

The town has been studying redevelopment of the northwest growth area (Gilbert's largest employment corridor, representing 21% of Gilbert's employment base) since at least 2018. A ULI (Urban Land Institute) study two years ago recommended mixed-use redevelopment with residential components to support employment uses. However, as Council Member Yentes noted, the "visioning is very much in draft stages" (per town retreat on November 9). The property owner has been waiting since at least 1985; staff now recommends waiting for an industrial expansion that may or may not materialize. This tension between property rights, market realities, and town planning goals ran throughout the council debate. Scott Anderson (who served as planning director for 13 years) expressed frustration that staff raised water and traffic concerns for this project that were never raised for similar projects, and that the town is raising standards selectively to block residential while still lacking credible industrial interest letters.

Campaign Finance & Sign Law Ambiguity

Council Member Yentes and Hendricks both noted that state campaign finance and signage law contains "wide gray area." The applicant's attorney (opposing the sign removals) contended the signs' sponsor was an individual, not an organized PAC, and thus campaign finance laws did not apply. But public comment and emails suggested it was an organized group, which would trigger different rules. Town Attorney Payne did not clearly resolve this ambiguity or provide guidance on how to distinguish individual from organized opposition in future elections.

Duration

Other Notable Items

Firefighter Morale Crisis & Engagement Collapse: Gilbert Fire and Rescue engagement plummeted from >80% (exceeding national average) to ~10% in three years, driven by pandemic stress, workers compensation denials, and perceived disconnection from town management. Union President Mike Rudolph requested inclusive joint planning, comprehensive engagement review, and servant-leadership training (December 14). No formal council action.

COVID-19 Workers Compensation Claim Denials: Firefighter Chad Rice testified that the Industrial Commission of Arizona policy prohibits categorical COVID-19 workers comp denials; a JAMA study shows first responders are 60–100% more likely to contract COVID; Mesa Fire accepted all 43 claims while Gilbert appears to be denying claims systematically. No remedial action initiated.

Small Business Pandemic Stress & Vaccine Mandate Concerns: Owners Larry Melton and Emily Barton testified about payroll strain, supply-chain disruption (cups, lids, straws up 30¢), and mounting stress over potential vaccine mandates. Requested town roundtable and leadership support. No formal action; noted for future discussion.

Community Engagement Task Force Activation: Council voted 6–1 to activate the task force to solicit applications and establish work program. Regular reporting to council expected.

Gilbert Days Proclamation: Mayor Peterson proclaimed November 13–20, 2021 as Gilbert Days, celebrating the town's western heritage. Rodeo events November 19–21 at Horseshoe Park in Queen Creek; parade November 20 at 8:30 a.m. on Gilbert Road.

View source transcript ▼

Source: Town Council 11/16/2021 — November 17, 2021. Auto-generated YouTube transcript; may contain transcription errors.

seriously good evening everyone if you could please take your seats we'll get started in one moment thank you i will go ahead and call to order the november 16th 2021 gilbert town council meeting and the first thing on our agenda is the presentation of student citizen of the month award we are still doing these electronically and virtually for our student citizens of the month and i apologize to the people that i have to read your names because some of them are um a little dif more difficult then i think i will get them i think i will get a few of them wrong so i apologize in advance usually we have the students present and they can correct us and we can we can say it again for them so we'll have group one which is elementary schools a through j student citizen of the month is presented by the marin town council students are nominated by their teachers and principals for demonstrating outstanding citizenship and displaying good character schools a through j are ashland ranch elementary nolan zamora bridges elementary madison roethlisberger burke elementary angela diesdado carol ray ranch elementary aubrielle root chaparral elementary siena varela charlotte patterson elementary madison baserto coronado elementary mason davis eduprise school rowan brunson highland park elementary matthew hunt islands elementary ryan matson next we have group two elementary schools k through z mesquite elementary jared ramsey nearly traditional cara algebra oak tree elementary alex alexia rivera patterson elementary maximiliano gonzalez pioneer elementary madeline stoutenberg playa del rey elementary caden ortiz riggs elementary maddie matajek santan elementary louis morris settlers point elementary ethan battaglia spectrum elementary alexander white town meadows elementary dennis nielsen val vista lakes elementary van johnson next we have group three is our middle school and high school students campo verde high school nathan ozozon canyon valley high school leah curcio christ greenfield lutheran school eden farrell cooley middle school miana gonzalez gilbert classical academy megan cockman greenfield junior high marshall disney highland high school michael nielsen higley high school chase farnsworth mesquite high school elizabeth romero mesquite junior high healy durham payne junior high emily vals perry high school samantha armstrong and south fair valley junior high emma dascum congratulations to all of our students of the month this month i can't wait till we can get these kids back in person again and be able to present them with their certificates in person next we will have the invocation led by um i don't see rabbi shimi here this evening rabbi are you oh you are here i didn't see you back there rabbi right over here to the podium rabbi thank you good evening everybody we can rise isaiah 45 18 states he is the god the one who fashioned the earth and its maker he established it he did not create it for emptiness he fashioned it to be inhabited or settled a vital aspect of god's plan in creation based on the verse in isaiah is for the people to live and work together for a civilized society that operates in harmony where people join together to enact a legal system for the purpose of building an environment where people are free to grow free to produce free to pursue better lives for themselves and for others this is the purpose of government to build a community where people can thrive as only human beings are capable so that they are free to serve god to their best ability honorable mayor and town council members it is easy to lose sight of this lofty goal when you are bogged down in deliberations in that which demand your attention therefore we turn to god to bestow blessings on our town's leaders to provide them the wisdom to balance the rights of individuals the community and businesses to enact laws and institute policies that will bring god's blessings of peace goodness and blessing upon them and upon all the citizens of this great town may be favorable in god's eyes to bless our mayor and town council members and all the citizens of gilbert at all times and at every moment with his peace and blessings may god bless the united states of america the state of arizona and the town of gilbert and let us say amen thank you rabbi so nice to have you here this evening now we'll have the pledge of allegiance and we may have some mayak students present or they may be running late i don't see any so cathy if you'd like to lead us sorry council member toki thank you please stand and join me i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all council member tilkee do you have a proclamation to share with us i do thank you mayor we don't have any one here today to present it to so i will just um read the proclamation in um recognizing small business saturday and i really appreciate that we're taking the time to recognize all of our local businesses as we enter into the holiday seasons i hope that you'll take time and visit them and make your purchases right here in gilbert for your family and loved ones whereas the government of gilbert arizona celebrates our local small businesses and the contributions they make to our local economy and community and whereas according to the united states small business administration there are 31.7 million small businesses in the united states they represent 99.7 percent of firms with paid employees and they are responsible for 65.1 percent of net new jobs created from 2000 to 2019 and whereas 88 of us consumers feel a personal commitment to support small businesses in the wake of the pandemic and 92 percent of small business owners have pivoted the way they do business to stay open during the pandemic and whereas gilbert arizona supports our local businesses that create jobs boost our local economy and preserve our communities and whereas advocacy groups as well as public and private organizations across the country have endorsed the saturday after thanksgiving a small business saturday now therefore i bridget peterson mayor of the town of gilbert arizona do hereby proclaim november 27 2021 as small business saturday and we urge all of you to support our local businesses and i want to thank all of our citizens for the support they've given our local businesses through the pandemic you've helped them keep their doors open you've helped our community thrive and so let's go out and say thank you again on saturday thank you very much thank you councilmember tilke could we have the roll call please mayor bridget peterson here vice mayor young kaprowski council member scott anderson here council member lauren hendricks president council members got september here council member kathy tilke here council member amy enthus here a quorum is present you should thank you chevelli could i have the members that are here from gilbert promotional corporation please join me we have a proclamation yes straight down this way please thank you thank you elena hello how are you nice to see you again you look beautiful oh thank you this proclamation is for gilbert days whereas the gilbert promotional corporation has actively promoted gilbert arizona through the annual celebration of gilbert days for many years and whereas this event has become an occasion enjoyed not only by the residents of gilbert but by citizens from around the state of arizona and visitors to arizona and whereas the gilbert day celebration provides entertainment for spectators as well as participants in a week-long celebration of western festivities the official opening will begin november 12th with a pony express hundred mile ride that we kicked off on friday now therefore i bridget peterson mayor of the town of gilbert arizona do hereby proclaim the week of november 13th through the 20th 2021 as gilbert days in the town of gilbert and do hereby call upon the citizens of gilbert and all visitors to join with me in celebrating gilbert days i'd like to give you each an opportunity to state your name and what your position is with gilbert promotional course starting with our queen hello my name is jessica wolfe and if you haven't guessed by the big hat in the crown i am honored to be the 2020 2021 gilbert days rodeo queen i'd like to thank you all for being here as we kick off for our gilbert day celebration and we'd love to see you all at the rodeo as well it's going to be a wonderful event celebrating not only our gilbert history but our western heritage and we can't wait to see you all there thank you my name is patty williams i'm the royalty chair sort of like her boss and i've been a member of gilbert promotional for 43 years thank you mayor i'm bobby padilla long-time member of gilbert arizona and i'm proud to be here thank you for having us and uh on with the upper days hi my name is kathy padilla and i'm a board member of the gilbert promotional corporation hello my name is jd mcgee and i'm a board member my name is megan miller and i'm the treasurer for gilbert days my name is kim graziano and i'm the secretary for gilbert promotional corporation my name is paige nelson vice president gilbert's rodeo ed musgrave tammy board member ed musgraves staple to gilbert promotional core i've been having meetings with you for 20 plus years sir um i would love to get a photo of us if if someone on my staff could help me out by taking a photo since i don't have an aid this moment dawn would you be able to take a photo of us together please i'd love to be able to share that on my social media who wants to hold this madam queen there we go it's okay thank you all thanks for all you do for gilbert days every year look forward to seeing at the road area yeah oh you are oh great [Applause] we were able to be on fox 10 news on friday morning to kick off the pony express ride that was fun next on our agenda is communications from citizens our vice mayor couldn't join us for this part of the meeting so council member september will be taking over this portion of the agenda thank you mayor so now it is time for uh communications from citizens the town of gilbert the gilbert town council values citizen comments and input anyone wishing to speak before the council must fill out a request to speak card for each item they wish to speak on and submit it prior to the beginning of the meeting the communications from citizens portion on the agenda provides citizens an opportunity to identify for the town council matters of interest or concerns related to town government that are not on the printed agenda tonight under the provisions of the arizona open meeting law the town council is prohibited from responding to issues that have not been properly noticed therefore the town council may only listen to citizens who wish to address them on non-agenda items we regret that the town council cannot respond beyond thanking you for your comments when your name is called please come forward to the right-hand side there's a podium state your name and place of residence and then begin speaking all speakers are expected to observe common standards of decorum and courtesy personal attacks political speeches or threats of political actions are inappropriate in this forum and will be grounds for ending a speaker's time at the podium the first person to speak will be zane hameed followed by brandon riff hello mary peterson and all the gilbert council members i am here today to tell you about project 1060.

um i feel like you guys should look at all the options possible and we should come together to look at the best decision that can make us all happy um we need to work together in order to make the best decision and to make all our citizens happy you guys are all great you guys all work hard you guys need to make the best decision you guys are doing great so far especially you mary peterson please look at all the decisions and please go with the best one thank you thank you next is brandon reef followed by larry melton good evening can you hear me okay there we go all right so i i have a couple things um somebody took out a public records request and and provided me with some documents asked me to look through them i looked through them and i found some troubling items that i want to bring up it started with a voicemail there was a voicemail from the town engineer calling into the compliance department complaining about a political sign which he referenced the content specifically what the sign said and that he thought it was in violation there are all kinds of signs across this town about diabetes strips things i won't mention and more and um unless this same standard was applied to those signs which i doubt they were because none of them have been taken down they're all over um i it kind of reminds me of the 2015 supreme court ruling against the town of gilbert that specifically instructed the town of gilbert not to use content-based means of regulating political signage so it's only been six years it's short-term memory uh next was a bunch of photos and a photo of private citizen his vehicle a screenshot of his business website his company logo even the corporate records for his business and this is an outspoken uh resident who has made his political beliefs you know quite apparent and um i don't know is this is this like the guy in scottsdale the school board guy i mean are we making dossiers on private citizens here or what what what exactly are we doing because this is alarming i don't think anyone in this room would appreciate having all those photos taken of them because they're putting political signs during an election so who took these photos well i happen to know it was town employees someone was in a town vehicle taking photos sneaking photos of this gentleman without him knowing apparently they're in the compliance department if their main intent was to enforce code compliance why don't get out of the car and walk over to the gentleman and have a conversation instead of taking photos of him and trying to trap him and catch him so that you can then go do what you want to do and take down the man's signs again you had business website you had his business address you had his email address his cell phone and his business phone none of those were utilized to contact this gentleman and make him aware of the issues with his signs next thing i see is a bunch of emails between town employees coordinating to remove in a very systematic fashion his political science they removed 80 something signs somewhere between i've heard different numbers somewhere between 57 and 83 signs and um didn't put them back up it's it's very interesting i i don't know uh why we would have an email from a town employee trying to recruit asking for volunteers to work overtime and into the weekends to remove this man's signs this is a threat to our freedom everyone in this room should be concerned regardless of where you stand on the election issue thank you thank you next up will be larry melton followed by emily barton good my name is larry melton resident gilbert i'm happy to see all the fire in the back of the room so that's awesome happy to be here my biggest concern is uh for small businesses i'm a small business owner myself luckily the pandemic hasn't you know been detrimental to me but i have a lot of friends i have a lot of people who own small businesses throughout the town and who are no longer you know they don't own their business anymore or they're just barely scraping by to hit their payroll so i'm here for them i'm here for those people i think we've seen a lot of things in the town that a lot of people such as a gentleman before me not really happy with i come from the military background so i hold leadership at an incredibly high standard and when i look at up on the board right here bridget i've talked to you a couple times unfortunately no response but the the leadership level has fallen far below on what a lot of us expect so what we're asking for is these small businesses have just taken a beating over the last almost two years what i'm asking for is to really do some soul searching deep down inside and understand what your role is for the small businesses not just putting a proclamation for you know a saturday but being a voice for small businesses being there for them and standing up when the time comes i know we see what's coming down with mandates and vaccines we saw that businesses small small businesses cannot weather the storm another storm is about to hit and these businesses cannot handle those things so when when vaccines come i know it's a hundred hundred more employees and it's currently being challenged right now at the federal level in the fifth fifth circuit but if that fails and that starts coming down and keeps trickling down lower and lower i think we all know it started with two weeks to stop the spread and now people are losing their jobs if they don't get vaccinated i think we ask a lot to people in the back of the room fire to do a lot of things that most of us aren't willing to do and it should be their choice on what they have to do in order to keep their job there's a lot of great men and women not just fire not just police but there's a lot of people throughout this town that they have principles that they live by and i don't think that we as a town should ever trample on that i know gilbert is known for trying to be you know gilbert kindness city of the future all this really cool stuff but it really doesn't matter much once you start trampling on those people's principles um again thankful to be here thankful for not trying to play favorites with fire uh please as well everyone in our in our public sector um thank you for what you do um i'm happy to be here and i would just ask again for everyone that sits on this board right here or this dias or whatever it's called just take a look just deep inside and really and really think about what you're willing to stand up for for the people who mentioned before 65 of new jobs across this entire country and all the revenue that's made is small businesses so keep them in mind when you go home tonight and think about the decisions you will ultimately have to make in the coming weeks thank you thank you mr melton next up is emily barton followed by mike rudolph hello i'm at mayor peterson happy to be here thank you council members this is not the first time i've been up here in regards to small businesses um you guys actually helped me stay open while we were trying to get our shop off the ground out of our kitchen and i can't thank you guys more for doing that that's a big deal we're coming up on five years in january in our space and as larry just said there is a lot of small businesses that are hurting um we are in a large community of small businesses and we don't have a luxury of opening up 10 different drive-throughs just to keep us open and floating and like larry had said during last year that was probably one of the most challenging times as a business that we've had and we just had a meet-up on friday we had another one last month and one of the common threads is i have never in my whole history of owning our business been so stressed out over payroll as i am now which is crazy because last year tested everybody it tested everybody's patience it tested everybody's you know there it was there's so much division happening right now and where there's a bunch of companies that are out there supporting our public safety supporting our military supporting all of our you know officials that stick up for us i would love to come up with a solution and i will champion that i you already know i am happy to help in any way that i can but i think that there's a lot that our small businesses are needing and it goes far beyond just the regular you know helping with payroll is great there's a lot of us that haven't gotten rid of any employees zero employees and we've made it work and for that i'm super grateful because you guys have done grants there have been things that have come down that really saved all of us um and now we are down to cups lids and straws which seems so simple and so silly um but those are some of the strange challenges that all of us small businesses are facing is how do you provide the products that your customers want and you can't get your hands on it so everyone's costs have gone up exponentially i mean cups alone right now are 30 cents more so i actually had a customer really upset that i had to sell her cups um and it seems really silly but we want to continue supporting our public safety our military we want to do all of those things all of us little guys really would love to give our employees all the hours that they want and health benefits and all of the things and we can't get there if we don't have the support from our community and from our leaders so again just to reiterate what larry said i think there's some solutions that we can all come up with together happy to champion that for you guys if you guys are open to a discussion and maybe a round table is in our future so that some of these small businesses can get together and really come up with some solid solid plans to make us you know survive so i thank you all i really appreciate you guys listening to us thank you miss barton next is mike rudolph followed by chad rice mayor peterson and members of the town council my name is mike rudolph and i want to thank you for this time i've been a proud member of the gilbert fire and rescue department for 27 years and i currently serve as the president of the gilbert firefighters i want to respect the time limit so i'll get right to it i'm here tonight to shed light on a problem we hope that you can help morale us our workplace has never been lower your firefighters and first responders feel disconnected from the town unheard and disrespected as we stand here 20 months into a pandemic that has pushed every man and woman on the front lines to a breaking point i want to say two things clearly with clarity first your firefighters and police officers support our mayor and the town council which bears no responsibility with uh with the issues are bringing up tonight and second we just feel town management must do a better job taking care of the concerns of the first responders who take care of our residents we are experiencing staffing challenges that continues to add stress to an already difficult job made more difficult by the pandemic we have experienced serious issues with our employees coven 19 workers compensation claims and now we're faced with a challenge of a disengaged workforce as you're aware the town commission's frequent employee engagement surveys at one time engagement within the gilbert fire and rescue department was over 80 percent well over the national average per gallop studies within the last three years our engagement levels has steadily dropped and today we're showing only around a 10 percent employee engagement participation this underscores what i see every day a public safety team giving their all to serve our citizens but at the same time struggling because of a disconnection between the policy makers and the people who actually do the work the 2021 resident survey asked how much influence certain aspects of life had to do with the decision to live in gilbert 93 percent of residents said the feeling of being safe creating that feeling making residents feel safe does not happen by accident it's not a result of new logos or better social media it demands a total team effort where people generally work together and respect the contributions everyone can make to better serve each other and our citizens we have three suggestions tonight that we hope you'll take seriously and act upon first let's practice being more inclusive we're asking the town council to ensure a commitment from our town manager to practice joint planning and problem solving through processes that allow the men and women who serve as the boots on the ground a real opportunity to bring their first hand knowledge to bear on public safety and its policies second let's practice humility we're asking the town council to hold town management accountable in 2022 to work together with us as a team to perform a comprehensive review of our engagement surveys so we can create solutions to improve morale because workers who fail and heard are not workers who thrive in a dangerous profession and third let's put service at the heart of everything we do we would officially like to invite every council member and our town manager's team to join us in this building on december 14th so we can learn and grow together as leaders captain nick destrini collaborated with chief gary hildebrand in our health and wellness division to secure brian willingham as a keynote speaker brian is a respected servant leader in the arizona fire service and he's going to speak on mental resiliency mission focus and teamwork we don't come to the council with these issues lightly and we thank you for listening we hope what we have shared tonight will inspire you to take action as we await your help your police officers and firefighters will continue to do what we do staying mission focused and responding to calls for help for the citizens we care for thank you thank you mr rudolph next up is chad rice followed by gary harvey mayor council members thank you very much for this time and this opportunity to speak to you i too have been a firefighter here in gilbert uh well over 20 years and i've come to speak to you on behalf of your firefighters we have had some significant concern with our firefighters being categorically denied working workers compensation claims that deal with covet 19.

um 18 months ago the the industrial corporation of arizona came out with a policy regarding this specifically and i'll read some of that quote please be advised that covet 19 workers compensation claims cannot be categorically denied and arizona law requires all denials to be well grounded in fact and warranted by existing law it goes on to say that the commission asks the carrier and self-insured employer community to be especially diligent when investigating and reviewing claims filed by first responders health care workers and front line employees who have developed covet 19.

a study actually recently was done and it was in the journal of american medical association uh actually done here in arizona that studied covet 19 with health care workers first responders and essential workers what they found was first responders are 60 to 100 percent more likely to get coveted even than just health care workers um so that being said with our workers compensation laws industrial commission policy and with the jma published article these things i don't feel can be ignored and case in point this doesn't seem to be i would say the standard of care we look north in mesa mesa fire medical department has had 43 firefighters come down with covid uh from a work exposure all 43 were accepted so 43 got it from work none of them denied something i think we need to look at thank you thank you mr rice next up is gary harvey garrett sorry looked like he looked like gary h harvey garrett sorry about that mr harvey you're fine thank you for the time council my name is garrett harvey east valley arizona firefighters for freedom is an inclusive kind humble and non-partisan 501c3 where a stakeholder group comprised of east valley firefighters that believe in our god-given human rights in liberty free choice and in this great country and in the freedom that it provides we strive to maintain human rights constitutional rights civil rights and liberties as sovereign and natural free citizens we believe in the right to work free will personal choice medical freedom and consent without coercion retaliation threats disciplinary action or termination this is why we are against mandated vaccinations for all city employees and the citizens of this state and the country for that matter this is not a vaccinated versus non-vaccinated issue it's not a left versus right political issue this is a human rights issue and we actually have common ground which is our freedom passports and mandatory code inoculation policies and practices are divisive invade privacy and have no place in a free society if we adopt and allow medical mandates from the top down then what we are left with is a takeover of body bodily autonomy it is unbelievable that public servants who have served throughout covid without due regard for their own safety are now being seen as a threat they've gone from hero to zero we respect the choices of our brothers and sisters in the fire department as well as those people in our community to get vaccinated or not as a personal choice between a person and their doctor we want to bring education and truth to the people of this community we will always respond and provide care for anyone in our community vaccinated or not vaccinated no passport required we hope that you will stand with us and we believe all members and citizens have the freedom of choice and natural rights we would like to publicly thank mayor peterson as well as the town manager mr banninger for their willingness to uphold our freedom by allowing us to have personal choice and continue to do so going forward i hope that we can count on you to stand with us thank you thank you mr harvey that concludes our communications from citizens now we have our consent calendar can i interrupt for one second sure my mayor's youth advisory council students all came in just a few minutes late i'd like to have them stand if i could and be recognized they've already had an hour and a half session with our inner gov department rob born amy arguelles and they had a presentation by jordan ray judge jordan ray and representative jennifer pollock thanks for being here students it's nice to have you thank you for the indulgence no any time now we have our consent calendar so far we have item 5 item 6 and item 10 that there's been a request to pull them from the consent agenda for further discussion council members or mayor are there any other items that you'd like to be removed from the consent item consent calendar nope hearing none great then i will entertain a motion to approve items 7 8 9 and 11 from our consent agenda it's all moved second we have a motion in a second please vote i don't have a voting screen kelsey please it says waiting for presentation to start you oh the motion passes uh council member yentez would you like to discuss item number five and number six uh sure thank you so i pulled item number five because i i do i looked through the the contract that was um in our packet and um do believe that we have the expertise within our department to do a study of this scope we've got a talented economic development team we've got a staff person who's dedicated to the the tourism aspect of their strategy and i just don't think this is a wise use of money when it is something i think that is it didn't strike me as any particular secret sauce here that that we have the talent and the know know with how to do ourselves so i'd like to vote on this separately thank you council member yantez so uh i'd like to hear a motion for item number five is there a motion to approve item number five so moved second we have a motion in a second please vote motion passes council member yentez would you like to discuss item number six i'm sure i'll be brief i've voted um i haven't supported this in the past for a couple aspects one i think we've you know this particular project is one that's more gold-plated more so than is necessary and so as we did as i did on the last council meeting we just want to vote separately on this one as well thank you council member uh do i hear a motion for item number six move approval second we have a motion in a second please vote motion passes uh council member hendricks and council member yentes would you like to discuss item number 10 you want me to go first item number 10 is the acceptance of the canvas of the election for the bond i'm concerned about the outcome of the election because i'm concerned that the town may have illegally interfered in the election no matter which side of the bond or any election you're on you should be concerned if we can't trust the integrity of our elections i'd like to talk about why i'm concerned about the town's interference in the election we heard from a speaker tonight some of his comments i'll reiterate but there was a individual or a group i don't know who put the signs up but there were signs around town that were opposed to the bond and they had various reasons on them for opposing the bond and my understanding is the gentleman put him up over a period of about a day and the following day the signs were gone turns out the town instructed town employees to take those signs down immediately urgently without delay so the individual or the group or whoever put them up retained an attorney and their attorney sent a letter to the town and said these signs are legal and you're interfering with free speech you're interfering with an election and the town responded and i'm going to read the response i was given the response that this group received by them with the approval of their attorney so this is a letter from the town attorney to the attorney representing the person that put up the signs it says while i strongly disagree with the number of legal and factual assertions you make in your letter this notice is to let you know that the town will not remove and it has the gentleman's name i'm not going to say will not remove his signs for failing to provide a contact name on the sign so one day the gentleman puts up the signs they're illegal and they're such a danger and a harm to the public that we need to take them down immediately expediently at all cost they need to be gone right now the next day we don't agree with the reasons that his attorney claims that they're legal we claim that those reasons are questionable guess you could say that we think they're still illegal but even though they're still illegal because we disagree with the reasons they've stated for making them legal it's okay to leave them up now not a problem yesterday they're illegal and it's urgent we need to get rid of them now they're still illegal but they're okay to stay up i'm not clear on that but that's that's what the letter says as time went on there were freedom of information act requests given to the town regarding these signs and how they came to disappear and part of what was handed out for the freedom from information act was we got a voicemail from a town engineer not a code compliance officer a town engineer and i listened to the voicemail when it came out and i don't have a transcript of it here but it's available to anybody else who wants to ask for it it's public information but the the message says something to the effect of this is so and so i'm in my truck i'm driving through the town i'm on this corner and i see a sign and it says don't trust the mayor no on the bond something to that effect he says i don't think it has any fine print on it saying who put the sign up i think it might be an illegal sign you've all seen signs on the street from your vehicle you looked on the corner of the street i would imagine most of you have probably noticed that they didn't have the name who paid for the sign that's written in about quarter inch print from your vehicle he finishes his voicemail to code compliance i also think i might have seen another one over on another corner i don't think it had the name on there of who paid for it either we probably need to check on these and get those removed because they might be illegal signs makes sense i can imagine the town engineer that'd be a high priority that's something he'd want to be on top of driving past a sign at 30 miles an hour maybe sitting at a red light with his binoculars you're right on top of that i would imagine all town employees are on top of that sort of thing not just code compliance they need all the help they can get so i'm concerned when i see that and then i look through the emails that were communicated back and forth between town employees these were also part of the freedom of information act request there's one email that went out to not only code compliance officers but to other town employees we've got to get these signs down i may be looking for volunteers to work overtime now i believe that means we're going to pay you time and a half to help get these signs down this weekend we've got to get them down now we're willing to pay overtime these signs are a danger to the town it sounds like we need to be on them right now now i don't think anybody accepted over time or not i haven't finished going through all the emails a few years ago and reed versus gilbert went all the way to the supreme court because gilbert chose to enforce laws based on the content on signs and we lost you'd think we wouldn't be doing it again so i look at this election as i say it's election interference and when i when i first heard about this the gentleman to put the signs up he sent emails to summer all of the council i he sent an email to me so i knew about him and i i looked at it and i i was just i was curious at first i thought well this must be something seriously wrong and they apparently had some deficiency that made them potentially illegal so as i was driving to work that day this is the day where the signs came down they went up one day we use half the time to take them down the next day i'm driving to work that day i'm driving from pecos and lindsay to baseline and mcqueen that's my drive to work okay that morning as i'm driving i'm looking around to make sure the sound the town is safe from any illegal signs and as i'm driving that 10 mile drive on that day this is the day following we took down essentially every one of these illegal signs here are the signs that i passed that i made a note of as i was driving i wrote it down okay because i was just curious hopefully we don't have any of these i didn't i probably should have called code compliance we had a sign that said christmas lights installation i couldn't see a name from my car on that sign so i'm assuming it was an illegal sign frank could be illegal anyway because it's not a political sign you can't put it up i see another sign and i wrote down nometh.com but it's a sign to get away from meth addiction it's got a phone number and a website on it i find a sign that says cash for diabetic strips i was curious what those were for i understand they use those to manufacture illegal drugs that signs up i get up there around guadalupe and cooper i see a sign advertising discount adult had to take a picture of that one i find another one cash for your house today okay so that's one two three four that's five different signs on my 10 mile drive to work i shudder to think how many of these signs are endangering the town if you go through the rest of the town all of these illegal signs i didn't see any emails offering overtime to take these signs down i didn't hear any voicemails from the town attorney the town whatever else none i don't know why i mean i guess these signs are okay but signs that say don't trust the mayor no on the bond those create a danger for the town i was driving to this meeting tonight just now hour ago lindsay and pecos that's where i live i drive to here what's that four miles as i'm driving keep in mind the political sign can be up for a very specific number of days after the election and days passed well signs are no longer legal they can't be up i passed four different signs that said yes on question one now what do you suppose question one is those signs are okay those signs are still up nobody's out working overtime tonight to get those signs down this is a legal election interference let's get past the signs and election interference if anybody should know about election interference i had to sue the town so they'd seat me on the council seat i'm familiar with the town's election interference there's a half a dozen people that have signed statements and i'm relying on what they've said i didn't see this apparently the town maintained a tent or a table or some sort of a place at the farmers market on the weekends in downtown we had actually elected members of this body who spent time working in that tent as well as town employees handing out town literature to make people aware of the bond what it is that's perfectly legal back the town should make citizens aware that there's an election coming up and they should vote but they were making comments like if the bond passes we'll have less congestion we'll have less traffic we'll have better public transportation those are not factual statements those are a conclusion that you make from what the bond is paying for if i tell you i'm going to put in a 10 lane road through downtown gilbert for two miles now you may choose to conclude that traffic will be less but that's not a fact you may have more traffic backed up in downtown gilbert because you put in a 10 lane road that is trying to encourage someone to vote in favor of the bond by sharing your conclusions of the facts that it's not factual information that isn't as stupid those statements were never stated that is an effort to persuade someone to vote in favor of the bond i'd like to finish my comments first we thought you were finished sorry there was a long hesitation i'm not finished but when i am finished i will i will let you know so what we clearly have is without any question i want to be clear i didn't name anyone i said we had town staff elected members making these representations and there are many people that have made the statement at the end of the day the bond passes by was it a quarter of a percent a third of a percent in the election where we had 23 percent of the population voted it was 164 votes was the difference so the question comes down to with just what we know so far because there are hundreds of emails in this freedom of information request probably a third of them have been reviewed i can't even venture to guess what else might come up in these emails but i have to wonder when the signs that were removed and not put back up the person that put them up had to pay to put them up again could that have influenced 164 votes or when people read in the newspaper the following day that there was this dishonest behavior putting up science so the signs were taken down did anybody get confused and think i don't know what's going on there's some dishonest guy putting up signs the sound's taking them down this might improve traffic it might not did they not vote at all 164 people did they not vote at all did they maybe vote yes when they would have voted no if you flip them the other direction you only need 82 votes if somebody voted yes it would have voted no for that reason i'm going to vote no by accepting this resolution now i am finished thank you councilmember councilmember uh koprowski did you want to speak to this item i do thank you i wanted to just make it known that i was the council member that attended a saturday farmers market in the spring of 2021 to help educate the public with facts and um have them better understand what was going to be coming to council in june for the transportation bond election i believe that i want to put on the record that the statements and allegations that councilmember hendricks just stated are not factual and we've tried very hard to state the importance of the transportation bond and encouraging our residents to vote and i think on the other hand of that if it if it's not okay to say that it's that people should vote for the bond then it's also not okay to say people should not vote for the bond and that has been done on the diocese in past meetings i just don't appreciate allegations being made when they were not said at all thank you council member yantez our council member koprowski vice mayor caproski my apologies uh councilman bientez do you want to speak in this item as well um i do thank you and i do think there's a distinction that's important to be made that council members and public officials can go out and advocate and obviously promote or discourage a particular vote and influences they see fit um the distinct distinction being made that you can't use town resources to do so um which you know makes sense we don't want government putting their thumb on the scale one way or the other when it comes to these electorate issues so um i've you know councilmember hendricks i think has brought up some issues and some areas of concern that i think are definitely need some further investigation and we need to look at look at these very closely and because the margins were so close um that's really where the rubber hits the road here for me at least as you know if this was kind of outside the margin you know this was a landslide election and um there really wouldn't have been made a difference all these factors that have brought up then i would feel comfortable moving forward and doing just what our legal obligation is um by a statute which is except the canvas but and with these kind of swirling out there i definitely have concerns doing that i'll bring up a couple other points that aren't necessarily legal issues but i think that they're important to discuss now that the dust has settled and we've got you know what the election results are and um some of that some of that is the concerns i had with putting this and sending this referring it to the ballot um you know in general the timing that we did so uh this is i think this should be a reality check this is the organization should be looking at this election and and using it as an opportunity to digest and be a very thoughtful about the direction our town is going because whether this was a transportation bond or issue i think there was a lot of things that people were voting on with this particular election um one only being transportation and so the town so to speak had every advantage and i use that as the town like the government and obviously the taxpayers weigh in as voters but we had an off-cycle election so you know cities and towns and school boards and whatnot fight tooth and nail to get you know fight consolidated elections and make sure that we have issues that are specific to localities on special elections and off election cycles because it maximizes advantages for them they they call it you know we get more educated voters on these specific local issues uh but the reality is is you get poor voter turnout and poor voter turnout does not advantage the taxpayer generally speaking so um you know we really did have every advantage as far as a organization as far as a town and getting this pass we had you know the the pro side was better financed they had the election cycle timing on their hand they had the whole mail and ballot um kind of method to their advantage and so for this to be as close as it is is um should be a earth-shaking wake-up call um and i think i'm sorry i'm not sure who that was but anyway uh sir excuse me that's not acceptable to speak out during the council meeting councilman began please continue thank you mayor and so uh you know that that's when you're looking at a margin so close to that when you know the the opposition it was um not as organized and uh didn't have those same advantages i think that this is should be a wake-up call um you know that we've had some other public records requests that have been filed previous to this months months prior and and i do think that there are elements of this that are you know should also be looked at more closely i mean the the towns pays political consultants to do polling prior to us sending us to the ballot i think we've overpaid for that i think you know that showed overwhelmingly over 60 percent of you know our taxpayers were going to support this that's not nearly any anywhere close to what the results were so um we should all be scratching our head at the discrepancy there um not to mention you know paying political consultants to do polling at all let alone overpaying for them and these are issues that i think that we just need to think long and hard about as we move forward with other issues that we're going to you know either build trust with a community or or break and fracture trust with community and i think this election is is a reflection of the fact that clearly we have some trust building to do with the community because it's not there um if you know overwhelmingly the last transportation bonds have received you know upwards of 60 70 percent and um you know obviously that was a long long time ago 2006 2007 and so gilbert's grown a lot um i was never out now opposed to a transportation bond in conception but the way that this has been rolled out i think is is problematic and and i don't want to continue to make the same mistakes but it's kind of the combination of those things that i i don't feel comfortable at this point um accepting the the canvas of results because it really is in that margin of call it whatever you want cheating or the you know the thumb on the scale or just when you have to suss out some of these irregularities before you can truly feel like you can confidently accept an election result thank you councilmember yantez any other council members like to comment on item number ten yes please thank you somebody's mic is open that we can hear that's virtual i thought somebody was telling me what to say thank you first of all thank you to the voters who did come out and vote it's so very important to our community and i was co-chair of the transportation bond committee and so um i will say in all respect to council member yantas and hendricks that um it isn't easier being on the pro side because we are very limited in how we can communicate and what we can communicate we have a more difficult time of explaining complex issues the opposition can seems to have a little more leeway at least in this particular election and one of the things i'm just a little confused about and i i think deserves us to dig a little deeper and and that is into the the current statutes that deal with political signage and political campaign finance all of those types of things there seems to be a very wide gray area and when i look at the comments that council member hendricks mentioned about those signs i'm getting different stories about it the the letter that he's referencing said that this person was an individual was not connected with anybody else and therefore because the statute said you had to be an actual pac or a candidate that those those laws do not apply to an individual however through public comment and public emails we continue to hear that it was an organized group and once it becomes organized they need to be following campaign finance laws i i'm not looking at going out after anybody or or even going backwards what i want to do is i want us to look forward as you mentioned that this is kind of a wake-up call that the way that we conduct elections should be very clear the law should be very clear so that we understand if you are an organized opposition the rules that they need to be playing or not and whatever that is it's fine with me i just want it to be very clear the other thing is over the many years i think we have done less on code enforcement for different things whether it's sign usually signage flags whatever you you want to say and we've turned that over to people if they submit a complaint they'll enforce it so i think that's an area we need to be looking at if we have illegal signs that are out there all the time that don't need to be there then this council needs to be very clear that those signs either need to be ignored or be removed so i think that would address some of the comments that mr hendricks made but this was a very difficult election during a time where there is a lot of distrust amongst each other amongst government amongst a lot of different things and i think because of that it really took on a different flavor than what most elections would but i think clearing up some of that will help in the future i wish it was a landslide i i understand your perspective that the the pro has the um advantage in a off season yet two of school districts lost in landslides so if there were i i believe there's still that opportunity for not always to be favorable in a um in a mid election cycle so um with that if i don't know if anybody else wants to speak of z don't then i'm ready to make a motion to accept any other comments on item 10 i'd just like to clarify something um our town attorney chris payne is it 15 days for the signs to be removed which would make it actually end of business tomorrow that all signs would need to be done and that would be the yes signs and the no signs it's 15 days after the conclusion of an election and if the no signs and the yes signs are not down then code enforcement will go out and pull them all at this point in time so the town will pay for that that's the process is once that time period's passed they will go and retrieve all the signs so they have another 24 hours before those signs all need to be down all over town i just wanted to clarify that thank you and mayor i've asked people to let me know if there's a sign up for the yes campaign we have been out pulling signs so if you do see one please let me know we will send somebody out to get it right away we've been working non-stop trying to get those signs taken down there's one at power in williamsfield um council member did you council member anderson sorry council members just a quick question of our attorney we're not in violation of that supreme court ruling we're not regulating any content we're regulating what's required by the arizona revised statute is that correct mayor councilmember anderson yes there's a statute that well the town's general position prohibits all signs in the right-of-way but there's a statute in title 16 that requires cities and towns and counties to allow political signs and rights of way under certain circumstances so that's the statute at issue but we haven't regulated any content on any sign for that that uh judgment that that's correct the the statute has certain provisions one of which talks about public safety if you put a sign where you can't see when you're turning right it has what we talked about about certain there's provisions related to size limitation there's provisions related to identify identification of who's putting it up so that's correct thank you any other discussion on item 10 okay i'd like to entertain a motion thank you i'd like to make a motion to approve item number 10.

second we have a motion in a second please vote item passes mayor that ends the consent items thank you very much council member september you did a great job pitch hitting this evening for vice mayor koprowski we'll now move to the public hearing portion of our agenda we have um i didn't count one two three four five six liquor licenses on our agenda an item for a general plan zoning potential change and fees would the council like to do one motion for the liquor licenses would you like to include the fees or would you like to discuss those separately mayor i'd like a presentation on the fees please okay then i would open the public hearing and accept a motion to approve the liquor licenses that we have on our public hearing this evening so moved can i have a second second second i have a motion by council member september second in by council member yentez please vote excuse me mayor did you close the public hearing close the public hearing please vote thanks for keeping me honest there chris pass that motion passes 7-0 moving on to item number 18 on our agenda it's general plan gp 21-05 zoning z21.07 we will have a presentation this evening by keith if you could introduce yourself when you come to the podium keith i don't know that you've presented to us since we've been here at the public safety training facility i'll go ahead and open the public hearing for your presentation mayor peterson members of the council good evening it has been quite some time since i've actually presented in front of the council never in this building though but um it has been some time so i gotta make sure this clicker works let me see here where am i pointing it to over here um mayor pierce this doesn't seem to be my presentation mine this is the this looks like it's the applicant's presentation yes thank you is that yours keith or is that still the problem this is still the applicant's presentation there it is there it is now we just gotta get the clicker to work here it's working fantastic all right technical difficulties it's okay okay mayor peterson members of the council good evening my name is keith newman and i am a senior planner here with the town and as i've stated before it's the first time i've been able to present to you in this building and it's been a couple years since i've presented in front of the council most of my projects are are just on the consent agenda and smooth sailing um the proposed vacant 13 well first of all the project tonight before you is all to gilbert which is i'll go into a little more detail here in a minute it's a minor general plan amendment and a p-80 rezone the proposed vacant 13.46 acre property is located at the northwest corner of mcqueen road and elliott road highlighted there on your screen in front of you and is in the located in the northwest growth area of the town the property which is currently zoned community commercial fronts onto mcqueen road and elliot road and is adjacent to the sunrise business park to the west and a little bit to the north which are zoned for light industrial uses south of the site across the other side of elliot road is is zoned community commercial and light industrial and is parts of the gilbert spectrum industrial park to the east to the site across mcqueen road is commercial zoning at the corner and single-family residential further to the north please note that the subject site has been envisioned by the town and the original developer as a prime commercial center or commercial corner providing needed support and complementary uses to the growing employment base in this area the current property owners are now of the opinion that the inclusion of a multi-family resident of multi-family residential with a small commercial corner provides critical housing not currently available for the workforce in the area we'll talk a little bit more about this so the request is on a 13.46 acre gross acre property the applicant is requesting a minor general plan amendment on 11.9 grow gross acre portion of the overall 13.46 acre site from general commercial on this 11.9 acres to to residential 25 to 50 dwelling units per acre and to rezone from community commercial to multifamily high on 11.9 acre gross acres and on 2.37 acres at the arterial corner at the hard corner they are proposing to rezone that from community commercial to community commercial with the planned area development the applicant is proposing a pad in order to lock in their proposed design approval of this request if it was deemed to be approved tonight will allow for the development of a multi-family residential apartment complex consisting of 278 units in three and four-story buildings in addition to the request also is that small commercial corner uh pad on the corner totaling 1.63 net acres so this slide shows the general plan exhibit and highlights that area for you which is 11.9098 gross acres from general commercial to residential 25 to 50 units per acre as part of the general plan request the applicant has provided a project narrative in your packet which i'm sure you've all all read that states how they believe the amendment meets the goals and policies of the general plan however staff finds that the overall proposal lacks the design elements needed to to realize the mixed-use vision of the general plan as a result staff does not support the proposed general plan amendment request a critical component of building a resilient gilbert is ensuring that our community has a balance of land uses and job opportunities commercial land commercial land uses provide supporting goods and services to large employment areas such as the northwest growth area protection of land designated for non-residential uses such as the subject site is a key to achieving long-term sustainability several policies in the general plan as listed in the staff report support the existing non-residential land use or would support a change from community commercial to an employment land use classification that would remain compatible with the development on the west side of mcqueen road to the north and south of the subject site that you see all along mcqueen road so this next slide shows you the zoning exhibit which includes a request to rezone the site as i've already stated from 11.09 acres of the site from community commercial to multifamily high and including the the 2.37 acres of of community commercial on the corner and this is a pid request with no deviations so the development plan that is before you on the screen is proposed by the applicant consists of four total residential buildings that contain as i said earlier 278 apartment units for a total of 25.1 dwelling units per acre which just meets the minimum density range allowed for multi-family high zoning the buildings on the site will be three and four store three to four stories in height with a max around 45 feet tall the two you can see on the screen in front of you the two buildings at the rear of the site that also contain garages on the ground floor are four-story buildings and they're approximately 55 feet or so in height the buildings that are along the queen road are three-story buildings and they will be about 36 feet in height the apartment complex portion of the site is actually 9.67 net acres and there and i've already stated the commer and that's part of phase one and the commercial piece on the corner which is kind of highlighted by the red with the red line is going to be in phase two and that's about 1.63 net acres here's the pretty picture the pretty color narrative illustrative plan for you the applicant has provided has provided on this site various project amenities and as you can see in the little table there in front of you on the screen a resort style pool they'll have game lawns um a tree a tree bosque if i'm pronouncing that right 24-hour aquatic center a business center a clubhouse with a kitchen and a dog park for residents in the center which are all typical amenities that you would see at an apartment complex such as this so the applicant has provided this detailed development plan is include which includes no deviations in order to allow for a clear understanding of what is proposed please note that that if this were to be approved this site must be constructed in substantial conformance to this development plan a detailed development plan is a good path when the neighbors staff in the town council want assurance regarding project development nonetheless the difficulty with the detailed development plan in this situation for the proposed project is that if approved it would lock in a plan that represents a standard multi-family development and commercial corner that contains no inter-relating unique design features typically provided with the planned area development and severely limits the ability of the project to create a holistic mixed-use community-centric environment that the marketplace is hungry for and that the general plan supports in short there would be little room for site plan modifications during the design review process and no flexibility to improve the design of the site and resolve some of the issues that i'm going to now go over so the first issue that we wanted to talk about tonight and this is the meat and potatoes is the loss of commercial staff does not support the loss of 11.09 acres of non-residential property on a major arterial corner in the northwest growth area slash employment area it has been communicated to the applicant that this site can be developed to supplement the existing employment uses in the area or re-zoned to permit further growth of light and light industrial employment uses in the northwest growth area lastly please note that a vision plan for the northwest growth area is currently under review and i believe it's a plan you have seen our economic development team is here tonight in just a few minutes jen graves will go into more detail on the northwest growth area plan or the northwest growth area in general and discuss other uses that are in demand on the site to further illustrate that a change to residential is not appropriate on this site the next is in dust is the setbacks the the proposed residential development would create increased side setbacks for all industrial sites abutting the subject property to the west and to the north and it would increase those setbacks which are exist which exist at 15 feet today based on the current zoning it would increase those setbacks from 15 feet to 75 feet essentially prohibiting future expansion and limiting redevelopment opportunities for adjacent properties in the future as this site is in a growth area with a proposed redevelopment plan it is anticipated that the adjacent industrial sites would expand or redevelop in the future allowing residential to join the join the industrial would severely limit future reinvestment and redevelopment opportunities the next are the commercial setbacks to the north the side setbacks of the vacant commercial parcel to the north would be doubled from 15 feet to 30 feet as a result of this proposed development making making the commercial property very challenging to develop given its relatively small size another set of issues that we have with the project the visual impact along mcqueen road the development plan has been modified from the original submittal to include two three-story apartment buildings along mcqueen road whereas before there was only one that will be set back 42 feet from the property line and 220 feet from the existing single-family residential homes across the street the impacts of 36 foot tall buildings where the long side of each building faces the street totaling 388 feet of total building frontage will have a very significant impact on the existing existing single family homes on the east side of mcqueen road the next is the lack of integration even if staff even if staff was supportive of a rezoned to residential this site is not appropriate for mixed use and i'll explain why it does not include include an appropriate level of integration between the multi-family and the proposed commercial and is not what was envisioned upon the creation of the mfh zoning district a more vertically and horizontally integrated mixed-use environment was envisioned which would be which would place apartment buildings much closer to non-resident residential uses where they can conveniently be accessed by residents through a highly landscaped and unique walkable pedestrian scale environment the current design completely separates the commercial from the residential by a large parking lot making it feel highly disconnected and not one cohesive development the proposed design has no unique or integrated design features or elements it is a standard commercial parcel during the review process for this project the staff asked the developer to consider a loft above vertical mix use development concept on this site featuring commercial and retail uses on the ground floor and residential on the upper floors please note that an example of such a development we provided to the applicant is under construction at the corner of higley and ray which is epicenter the applicant was highly and was highly encouraged by staff to consider moving in a similar direction it should be noted that residential loft above is a permitted use by right in the community commercial zoning district and would require only a design review application but not a general plan amendment or a rezone it's allowed by right in that zoning district um so the next conceptual next issue is conceptual elevations upon the general review of the conceptual elevations that provided to staff and that you can see on your screen we are highly concerned with the design and that it does not meet the same level of quality as other higher end apartment complexes recently approved by the town and i'll give you a name of a few of them such as the elevations at san tan town commons the flats at san tan novel val vista square and quintana at verdi coulee station just to name a few of them the next issue please note that that so as i talk about this slide please note that town staff is not a plo opposed to multi-family residential and are aware that there are housing shortages throughout the town of gilbert and other locations in the valley however we are opposed to the rezoning of a major arterial corner to multi-family high and that this site is not the right the right location for this type of important housing in the town multi-family high is a new housing option in the town of gilbert which was incorporated into the land development code in august of 2019 in order to ensure that housing at higher densities is located in the right location around intense mixed use environments such as near freeways regional shopping centers and hospitals to name a few so currently there's and it's on the screen in front of you currently there is only one project that's zoned mfh in the town that has been approved by town council and that is novell at val vista square which is located within a 34-acre master plan and you can see that on the screen in front of you in the top right corner and this master plan will include employment hospitality and retail slash restaurant uses when fully built out in keeping with the description of mfh zoning as outlined in the land development code as as mentioned in the land development code the novel val vista square is appropriately located in a much more intense mixed-use urban environment north of the loop 202 freeway and adjacent to the san tan village shopping center across the street from the san tan motorplex and less than one mile from the gilbert regional hospital so again from a design standpoint novell is much different than the proposed project and where it's located in a much more intense mixed-use urban environment from a design standpoint novell in in and is much different from that standpoint as well as the as the novell the units are taller and very close to one another and in front of an urban streetscape that runs right through the middle where the units front the street that and creates a walkable connectivity type of environment allowing residents and future employees restaurants that go to restaurants and the guests from ho for the hotels and the shoppers in the master plan to be able to free flow between uses and that does not exist with the with the current uh project that is before you tonight so this slide i wanted to show this slide to make you aware that building similar to this one right here this is a quite tall building are are proposed on the corner or proposed on the corner on this corner which consists of of three or four stories in a much less urban environment than what you have just seen on the previous slide which is which was the vision for the town for mfa mfh zoning like novella this val vista square presents um presented to you just a minute ago um some additional information provided by our water resources department is another issue that i wanted to bring to you that we'd like to highlight as we have stated the primary issue with this development is the loss of commercial of a major arterial corner which will not only impact the use of the land and its impact on surrounding properties but it will impact the amount of water that this new use would generate which is much higher than if the property was to remain as commercial or industrial uses so based on a conversion of the 11.09 acres of land from some type of commercial or industrial use to high density residential at 25 million units per day per acre the water use increase is somewhere between 16.21 acre feet per year on the low end and 24.10 acres of acre feet of water per year on the high end for for more intense type development i'm getting close guys so so as far as traffic demand traffic generation i think i told you the wrong slide i skipped so oh something's messed up the titles are switched i apologize for that but this is the traffic generation slide so from a traffic generation standpoint vehicular trip generation for the proposed development compared to other potential uses that could be developed on the subject site which include low and high intensity commercial uses and industrial development within a range of about 150 000 square foot industrial are in front of you on the screen so as you can see the current proposal is about 9057 daily trips with 280 units and a restaurant on the corner for low intense intensity commercial uses there that would which is about a self storage facility not saying we want a self storage facility on the corner but just to show you the low intense use that it could be there is about 346 daily trips a high intense intensity use would be a shopping center which would would generate about a little over 10 000 daily trips based on the uses allowed in this zoning district and then for industrial uses about 627 daily trips would be generated if it was zoned for industrial uses so now i will turn the presentation over to our economic development team who will present more information on land uses in the town and key characteristics and importance of the northwest growth area in relationship to the subject side thank you keith hi jen graves we don't please folks we don't clap during the council meetings thank you thanks jen hi jen how are you hey good how are you good so much mayor council jennifer graves deputy director for the office of economic development and so of course thank you to keith um one thing i would with this slide i'd like to highlight is that um excluding the public right-of-ways gilbert has approximately 38 000 acres of land split about 70 30 between residential and non-residential land uses of the four types of non-residential land so that's commercial industrial office and public lands public comprises the single largest share of non-residential land in gilbert at 12 town wide only 4.3 percent of the commercial industrial or office designated land is vacant and available for future or future employment oriented development at this time and as keith also mentioned earlier in the presentation the proposed change would represent the loss of an additional 11 acres of non-residential land in one of gilbert's only employment corridors the northwest growth area represents 21 of gilbert's total employment and this area continues to be one of the most sought-after locations in the east valley and in gilbert for employment-oriented business growth and attraction the market is experiencing a surge in demand for industrial and flex real estate since july 60 of the new leads coming into the office of economic development have requested industrial locations while non-residential vacancy in the northwest grows area has dropped from 10.2 percent to 5.8 percent in just the last year as you can see on the chart about non-northwest growth area non-residential land uses vacant acreage for additional non-residential development in this critical employment area is extremely low and preservation of these non-residential land uses is vital to gilbert's mission to become the city of the future the applicant has previously asserted that this property is not well suited for any other type of non-residential uses however our experience and research suggests that this is not accurate staff has spoken with developers and brokers working in the southeast valley and both jones lane lasalle as well as gilbert spectrum developer have indicated that this specific property is of interest to them and their clients for industrial flex development that would complement sorry the surrounding land uses in employment uses it's also been argued that staff initiated research for potential reinvestment opportunities in this area support the need for this site to transition to multi-family housing when in fact council heard at the november 9th council retreat that no plans have been finalized in this area and that visioning is very much in the draft stages at that retreat council directed staff to among other things begin public outreach to understand the preferences of the community and report back to council for further direction so at this time i'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to keith for the remainder of his presentation thanks jen thank you jen for that important information um so as we get near the end of our presentation we would like to reiterate that we are not opposed to multifamily but just wanted to quickly share with you on this slide that shows that we have 167 acres approximately a vacant multi-family land within the town boundaries which equates to almost 5 000 units approved and not constructed so i wanted to reiterate that and show you that on this slide i know it has a little more information on there but i just wanted to really reiterate how much vacant multi-family land that we have left in the town so on this slide are some graphics created by our town ecomm economic development department and they have done a fantastic job assisting us that shows all multi-family that is existing under construction and currently proposed hope it's kind of cut off at the top within a 12 mile radius from the site as you can see there and all i know there's a lot of numbers on the screen as you can see there are nearly 1900 total multi-family properties and 185 that which 185 000 units of multi-family within a 12-mile radius and and you can also see on the left is a 30 minute commute shed which is a little bit larger area than that 12 mile radius but you can see how many multi-family units there are within this radius from the site the next slide shows a three and a five mile radius three miles on the left and five miles on the right again um you can see that as we zoom into this graphic a little bit more that all the multi-family within three and five miles in short there is a total of sixty about sixty four hundred multi-family units within three miles and there's about um a total of twenty one thousand units within five miles from the site also note that within a one mile radius of the site which i don't have that graphic for you um along arizona avenue shows that there is a total of 72 units that are currently under construction on a mile away and they have 200 there's 250 units proposed with construction to start in april 2022 so this last graphic that i wanted to show you tonight is an overlap that shows um how both of these radius graphics three and five miles relate to one another so i thought this was kind of a cool graphic to show you um where that is in relationship to the subject site so lastly public participation the applicant um has met all minimum public notification requirements held two neighborhood meetings um please note that staff was recently um made aware of 44 letters of support sent to the council members which have been included in your packet however in the last week i was notified by the commercial property owner to the north that he was recently made aware of this request and is opposed to the negative impact on his property town staff has also received within the last several days and emails were coming in today we received one phone call from a resident who is opposed and 13 public comment survey responses from residents in the adjacent neighborhoods who have stated they are opposed to the applicant's request so i'm almost done so based on what we just informed you staff is recommending denial of the proposed alta gilbert minor general plan amendment and rezone due to the loss of commercial land on a major arterial corner that is not located in and around an intense mixed use environment and it lacks unique site design elements and horizontal integration between different use types also the negative impact on the building setbacks of the industrial and commercial developments and the negative visual impact on abutting residential developments to the east of the site is the reason why towns are the main reasons why town staff is recommending denial of of both of these cases before you tonight so this concludes my presentation i'm happy to answer any questions you have economic development staff can answer any questions that you may have and and i also believe the applicant is here tonight and i'm sure they have a presentation as well so thank you thank you keith don't move please councilmember anderson has a question where do i begin where was his presentation on the cooper and baseline parcel that had existing buildings on it and was being converted to apartments um mayor peterson um councilman anderson i'm i'm not sure i i did the design review case for that one i know there were a lot of residents on that one that were highly opposed to it but i'm not i'm not exactly sure what uh what your question is but my question is this this is being referred to as a prime commercial piece it's been a prime commercial piece for over 30 years that i'm aware of probably longer than that um for the 13 or years or so that i was the planning director i can't remember if or when anybody even approached me to develop this site and i know you're aware of the uli study for the northwest corridor and the uli study suggests what in this corridor suggests that we want commercial development we want mixed-use development but we have to have residential development to support that and if we keep turning them down uh especially on parcels that have no foreseeable future to be developed and and i realize that economic development believes that there is interest in the property bring me a letter of intent bring me a contract so i can see that i i'm i'm just at a loss how we brought up issues on this project that i have we haven't had before talking about traffic generation talking about water use we've never had that before for similar projects i'm just really confused about where we're going with this and and i'm not buying right now that this can't this will develop something other than what is being shown mayor peterson um councilmember anderson i i respect all of your comments um i think this site is quite a bit different than the one on cooper and baseline that is a redevelopment site that was redeveloped obviously there was commercial there before that had vacant suites and they have chosen to redevelop that and it was off of the principal arterial corner it was not right on the hard corner and also that project is also a multi-family medium designation it's not a multi-family high multi-family high as i've stated in my presentation was envisioned by the town to go in much more dense urban environments whereas multi-family medium is a little bit different so those two projects are quite a bit different from each other in that way or the zoning district zoning categories so i think that and that is a little bit different from those two project sites um and like i said that one's not right on a major arterial corner it's off the corner kind of way off setback off the road which would be more appropriate in a situation like that versus right on the arterial corner it's super highly visible so i think that's the difference with the project um i don't know what else um i can add to that but i think that's the difference um between the two projects and why we would not support this project and we also i don't believe we recommended support on that one either but i know i know it got approved but they're quite a bit different from each other the two projects hope that all makes sense and and providing no it doesn't help god's memory understand making me laugh yeah councilmember tilkee do you have a question actually just a comment to council member anderson i wish these this presentation would come up more often when we look at removing commercial inventory from gilbert um i a lot of these issues raised here are the same ones i had at baseline and cooper and mcqueen and guadalupe quite frankly and i think if we would have had a more in-depth presentation from staff maybe other decisions would have been made so i would like to see more not less of this i just don't want to see this site sit vacant for another 35 years councilmember anderson hold those thoughts and we'll get to the discussion in a bit council member yen test you had a question uh maybe it's more of a comment but i guess i'll piggyback on the confusion and just sam you know we did have a pretty in-depth uh conversation presentation just last week at the council retreat on you know making a pretty big swath of this northwest area of gilberta redevelopment area and so i'm hearing a bit of mixed messages as far as the desirability and how much interest we're getting from uh potentially different users in this area and yet uh that would be counter-intuitive to you know needing to you know designate this area to gin up that kind of supported interest so um a little bit of a disconnect there for me as well but um you know that the point that connects this project specifically is just that that has been being discussed since 2018 so um maybe this is a hypothetical question but you know how long are we going to continue to you know go through this process of visioning from the town's perspective while property owners sit on their property and obviously that's there's a whole host of reasons why that can be problematic and expecting people to just wait when this continues to be a very evolving uh process it's hard for people to make plans and um you know dedicate resources and and you know there's one thing that's from the town's perspective which is visionary and then there's you know the people in the marketplace that go out and and have to make real decisions about building things and so um i guess more of a comment but look forward to the presentation and other comments from the public and thanks for the presentation thank you thank you councilmember vice mayor um kaprowski did you have any questions for keith before i asked the for the presentation by the applicant i do not at this time thank you thank you thanks keith i'm sure we'll be calling you back up and if the applicant would like to make a presentation mr sean lake for the applicant good evening mayor council members my name is sean lake i'm here on behalf of the property owners and wood partners to talk about this project at mcqueen and elliot first before i get started i want to take the opportunity to introduce clay richardson who's with the wood partners he is the one that is proposing to develop this property those of you who are familiar with wood partners are familiar with some of the very nice high-end multi-family projects they do throughout the valley they can be found in downtown chandler right next to the san marcos historic golf course they can be found in chandler in downtown phoenix they do first-class high-end multi-family projects they do not do uh affordable housing type product projects the projects that they do quite honestly the average household income and the projects that they're building is around a hundred thousand dollars so these are very nice employment hub apartment where where employees want to have their employees live uh so it's a great uh use to be next to an employment hub where these employees can then go live and we think this is a great and prime location for the insertion of some new residential that hasn't been seen in this area for employment type uses this type of residential in a very very very long time so we appreciate clay uh being here this evening i'll also point out clay lives here he lives and has lived for over 20 years directly east of this property and so he lives in that neighborhood directly to the east he is a local guy he is a local developer that has done projects all over the state all over the valley very nice high-end projects but he wants to do something in his own backyard he wants to do something special in an area that he has lived for several decades and so we have an opportunity to have a local developer who lives there who is going to continue to live there if this project is approved who wants to see something nice for his family to go to i also wanted to take the opportunity to announce we do have a letter of intent for that commercial corner we have those that are familiar with square one square one is a restaurant concept uh local developer they have bourbon and bones for those that are familiar with bourbon and bones at the san tan area is a very nice restaurant square one has given a letter of intent and they want to do a concept restaurant sit down restaurant on this corner so we're excited to have that local uh use on the corner we think that will be a great addition to the project that we're trying to develop here and so we think that will be a great use on that corner so we're excited to announce that here this evening let me go through the project i think staff did an excellent job of presenting where the site is i'm not going to repeat that or go go over that this site has been zoned community commercial now i joked at the planning commission but it's true this site was zoned or they were working on zoning this project when i was in high school and so those that can see my gray beard and the gray in my hair it has been a very long time that this property owner has been holding this site trying to develop it for retail uses 35 36 years for a very very very long time and continue to take pay taxes on it trying to get a user in this location we've seen a lot of development come and go in this corridor over those 35 years and this site has passed been passed over we are proposing to change the zoning after this 35 years to something that we think it will allow the property owner a right to use their land that is consistent and compatible with the area a good use that we think will fit right into an employment area if we think of some of the higher employment areas around the valley you have multi-family mixed into those employment districts employment areas multi-family is needed when a big user comes to town one of the first things that they talk to is they want to know about housing and where can my people live so when they're coming they want to know about housing that's employment from that is important for employers that are coming to town again i've already talked about this the use is what do we do with this piece of property if i were on the council and i were sitting in your shoes i'd say okay what do we do with that piece it's sat vacant for 35 years and retail is not working we look up the road to the north we see the retail hasn't really been successful we look a mile to the south we see the retail really hasn't been success successful has been struggling so we're not sure that retail is the best fit here office we think has struggled in this area as well in fact the staff report even admitted that we don't think that office is an appropriate land use for this property so we really think it comes down to a residential use or an industrial use and and what is the the best use of this land residential multi-family residential or industrial use industrial use has their development standards you could build a building up to 50 feet and light industrial li zone or you could build a multi-family project what's more intense for the area we went out and we held meetings with the neighbors and we talked to neighbors and we also talked to the businesses in the area not only the people who live there but the people who also live and work there and got a substantial number of uh support letters i'm sure you had in your packet of the 50 i think it was 50 letters of support in your packet of the people who not only live but also live and work in the area this project is supported or comes to you supported by the chamber of commerce as something that will provide a quality housing option in the area one of the things that we did is we did an economic analysis to compare industrial to multifamily because if i were in your shoes you just don't represent this one property owner and what's the best interest of the property owner but you represent the town as a whole and the town wants the highest and best use of the property as does the property owner and so this we had elliott pollock who is a very renowned uh economist in the in the state prepare an economic report to compare these different uses what would have what would be the beneficial to the town as a whole versus uh for with an industrial development versus a multi-family development and the findings were quite staggering this project would develop or would produce three million dollars more to the town coffers in one-time construction and fees with a multi-family project versus an industrial project this project would produce four times more in ongoing revenue as an as a multi-family project as an as opposed to an industrial project this project would produce three times more revenue for the school districts and the schools as a multi-family project as opposed to a uh industrial project so from a town perspective we want to allow property owners to have a right to develop their property but we also want it to be beneficial to the town this use that we're proposing produces more revenue it produces a significant investment in the area that we haven't seen in a long time and it will bring people and better architecture we think with multifamily than uh with an industrial development that will help activate this area and kind of help that mcqueen corridor with a very nice high-end project this i'm sure you looked at this and read through the elliot pollock study that did this analysis that talked about how this will generate more revenue so i won't spend a lot of time on this because i'm sure you read through that study that we submitted in our packet here's a letter from the chamber of commerce saying that they've looked at this area and they do support residential here one of the things that staff brought up there was a lot of talk in the general plan area when there were general plan workshops talking about this northwest corridor and one of the recommendations was hey we think residential option in this area is a good option it might help spur some of that redevelopment and so a general plan workshop even supported residential the uli study that was referenced of that's a two-year-old study that talked specifically about this area had one of the suggestions thinking maybe we need to do something in this area and multi-family residential is something that we need to do in this area it's interesting the staff was bringing up all the multifamily going on the area we did a quick analysis of that the town of gilbert currently right now has a 2.3 vacancy rate for multifamily that's astonishingly low and what happens when you have an under supply of demand or under supply of supply and an oversupply of demand well we have a 28 rent increase in multifamily this last year because there is an under supply in the town of gilbert and so we think the uli study was right it will not only help this corridor with some investment and new capital dollars and people actually in the area working and shopping and living it will help this corridor we believe to not be the panacea or the fix for it all but it will be that first step of somebody investing something in this area and people living and working and shopping and eating in this area we went out and met with the neighbors and businesses the stars represent letters of support that we have received you can kind of see we really focus at this intersection and obtain letters of support from a lot of people who live and work in this area so the preliminary plan that has been proposed and i'm not going to go over this we think it's a very high quality project it has a lot of amenities i i i kind of shudder when it says oh these are just typical amenities these aren't this is a very high-end nice project wood partners does that we've been through their projects in scottsdale and in phoenix and in downtown chandler they do a very very nice project this is not a typical multi-family this is a very nice high-end project and as i mentioned the residents who typically live in wood partners projects have a household income of about a hundred thousand dollars so we think it's something that's very very nice as staff indicated planning commission recommended approval of this project we originally submitted the application when we submitted for a pad we had deviations that's why we had a pad planning commission told us get rid of the deviations we want no deviations so we work with staff and we redesigned the plan and eliminated all the deviations and what deviations we do have are exceeding standard deviations and so the pid is a tying us to those excess standards where we have excess building setbacks than what the code requires we have more space be built between buildings than what the code requires we have more recreational amenities than what is required uh and i mentioned the sit-down restaurant on the corner but we exceed the standards and that's what the pad is tying us to is a higher end nice project here are some of the representative quality images of what this project will look look like very nice i don't know that anybody disputes that wood partners does a very nice quality project again very nice high end that will be developed here so with that we think this is a good use for this property we think this property owner has waited long enough we think there should be some accommodation to allow this property owner to develop their property with something that we think is consistent and compatible with this area and we would request that you approve this application for rezoning so thank you very much thank you sean any questions i see council member anderson turning your mic on yes thank you um can you give us an idea why this property has been skipped over for 35 years when a lot of the development you would know more so than i having been the planning director for for a lot of years in the town we did see a lot of development with the islands and it went forward and it kind of went down into warner we saw commercial development going in at warner and mcqueen that commercial shopping center thrived for a lot of years but has since as that this area has struggled and transformed it's kind of fell by the wayside and has struggled you drive through that center at warner now i think that's the goodwill center you would call it now it's struggling right now you go to the north it struggle i think this area has gone through ebbs and flows several over the many years and we're starting to see some deterioration that we don't want to happen and so we want to see some investment in this area that will help bring it out i think the comment was made we don't want to see this northwest quadrant of gilbert become like this south part of mesa we want to see some new investment we want to see some things happen in here and that's what we're trying to do is bring some new investment i don't know why the retailers didn't go here they went down the road a mile they went over to gilbert road they went elsewhere how many acres focused around freeways yeah how many acres of commercial exist at that intersection now there's existing i i'm guessing around eight to ten acres on the south west corner there's an existing retail shopping center on the south east corner and then there's commercial existing on the north east corner as well so there there's either zoned or developed on all four corners and we think that is is too much there in the during the uh staff's presentation there are some concerns with design elements is your client willing to work to address those those concerns i have some concerns too about the massing along the streets i think that's something we need to cons to concern ourselves with with design when we get down the road absolutely unequivocally yes we have stated that from the beginning that we're willing to work we haven't submitted a site plan or design review application to the town we're willing to work with the town on that process and if it gets appealed up to the council we'll work with the council we we want to work with the council and the planning staff to have a very nice high-end project at this project that's what wood partners and clay who lives in the area would like to see thank you thank you mayor vice mayor kaprowski do you have any questions for the applicant i do not thank you thank you any other questions here on the dice um mr lake you and i have looked at this project i think i mean this property at least twice since i've been on the council and both times it was residential it was two different types of residential we haven't i haven't seen anyone come forward with industrial or commercial or anything of the likes for that property have you talked to anybody that has wanted to come forward with this property mayor i've only worked in the town for 27 years but i have worked on this property several times some of which we brought forward to the town and presented to the town staff and the planning commissioner and and some we did not and we have i've never worked on a non-residential project on this site i couldn't remember any it was always residential on this um location so thank you for that any other comments or questions for mr lake at this time we'll ask you to come back potentially thank you i'm going to go ahead and ask the residents to come up and speak we did receive 13 emails opposed that have been mentioned we received 44 or 45 letters in support one that has been pulled back as opposed and i have two slips from people that do not wish to speak this evening but are in favor of this project and then i have i think five residents that would like to speak i will call the first person and have the second person on deck to be ready to come down and speak first person is richard blake if you come down to the podium introduce yourself and just let us know if you are a resident of the town of gilbert next up will be earl shaffer mayor excuse me three minute time thank you patrick three minutes please mayor counselors good evening thank you for having me here i want to be brief i've lived in gilbert for quite a few years now i'm a homeowner i don't live too far away from this particular development and i think this is a good use for the property in particular when i was driving to mesquite high school on a regular basis i saw that as one of the empty lots i thought this could be better i also live near the cooper baseline apartment project and when that was announced my first thought was well at least something will be in there that's been empty for a long time it's been empty since i've lived in the town and it doesn't seem right but these are the decisions that get made aren't they overall i'm very happy and pleased with my town government i think you have a vision i think you work at it i see downtown i see the heritage district i see developments here and there my wife and i agree we live in a great town i think this is a good use of this property i think it's a proper use of it now given all of the factors that are at play and it's been empty for how long now and i don't hear anything about a competing purpose to it anymore so i strongly encourage you to look this over carefully and to vote in favor of it that's all i have to say thank you so much thank you mr blake earl shaffer next and then it will be steven steele hi my name is earl shafer i live on the islands or in the islands right across from the proposed property that you're talking about and the one thing i noticed that i'll and i'll go on the other stuff the one thing i noticed by the gentleman just made that presentation is all the people that he spoke to were commercial compa properties he didn't talk to one person in the islands i did speak to people in the islands there was a sign that was put up i guess and i don't know how long it is but i don't look at signs but i i did see the sign that was there that apparently has been there for a while that said that there was a proposal made and i probably crossed that a couple times a week and most of my neighbors probably do too and never noticed it but the first time i ever heard about this thing was yesterday nobody talked to me this gentleman up here never talked to anybody in the islands i know a lot of people in the islands and i tell you right now that if they would have heard this they would have known about it they would have been here or at least they would have sent you a a notice every person that i spoke to is negative dead negative that is in the islands about this whole proposal it's going to cause a lot of problems for the people in the islands and we all know it uh one of the reasons why it hasn't been made residential in the past was the gentleman before said there was some really good reasons why not to put residential air but there's some other reasons that are even more important and that's the people who live in that area not the commercial the people that live there right across from that that place it's going to bring in more people in the community there's going to be a school problem because you're going to have to increase the schools you're going to have a police problem because you're going to have to police your police increase the police department you're going to have road problems because there'll be increases in the road usage there's a lot of other little things and i'm sure i've got some people following me they're going to talk to you about the same things but all those things have to be taken into account this gentleman right here never took into account any of mr anderson never took any account of the people that live in the community come down and live in the community and then tell me you'd like to have that property may come residential especially the residential he's talking about that's not what i would consider high end all right and none of the people that i live around would consider that high in and as far as commercial maybe the price is wrong there's a lot of reasons why you're not selling the commercial property right across the street that exxon seems to be doing fairly well over there and i noticed that all the shops over the cross cater county there are doing fairly well too the shopping mall that he brought up that's got the goodwill unit in there maybe if they put some good shops in there people would stop shopping there i know years ago when there was a supermarket there they did damn damn well okay so get some dan get some good stores in there and you'll see people going there that's what the problem is it's not what this gentleman has got through saying it's not because there's not people that want to shop that is a high-end community that i live in and we live right across the street on the other side of elliot is also high-end and they don't want that property there either they don't want a commercial a residential put in there not that type of residential that you're talking about you want to put some single units in there maybe but not high high-rise apartments multi-apartments and a hundred thousand dollars that's what he's saying per unit not even close mr schaefer your time is up thank you okay mr steele steven steele next and then roger weissman i think it says good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is steven steele i'm a resident of gilbert when people ask me where do you live what's your cross streets it's elliott and mcqueen my home is within about five blocks of elliott mcqueen it's a beautiful home it's a single family residence and for residential development in this area if you need to rezone that as residential and make it single family residential to coincide with what is directly across the street and what is in the area to the south and east away from the other commercial areas it's all single-family residents i think that might be agreeable to the people who live in that area some of my greatest fears of that residential going up there is 278 units 278 people trying to exit through three driveways going to work every morning coming home every night on two very busy streets if you look the police records up which i wish i would have you'll find that there are a lot of accidents at mcqueen and elliott it's just a bad intersection okay so the other thing i want to do is just quote some of the statistics that mr newman went over directly from the first news article that i read within 12 miles there's 1989 multi-family properties totaling 185 thousand 170 units that's a ton of multi-family units available further down and it says that in all approximately five thousand multi-family units have been permitted in gilbert that are not yet constructed so there's another 5 000 that are coming up already that we don't need this additional 278 units i just think it's a bad plan for that intersection i think it's a bad plan for our neighborhood it's going to be bad for our schools islands elementary can't take on even 278 new students if it's one child per family the high school there at mesquite high school cannot take on 278 students just again one student per family i think this is a really bad idea for gilbert i think it either needs to stay as a light industrial or potentially single family residential at the very least thank you for your time thank you for your consideration thank you mr steele roger weiss i'm sorry i can't read your last name weisse tur weissman i don't see anyone moving so i'll move to tracy robb please hi my name is tracy robb and i've lived in gilbert for 21 years we're a military family we've lived all over the country when we decided to settle when my husband retired or kind of got out of the navy we chose gilbert because it was such a sweet town and it was family oriented and there was all these great little family homes it's been kind of distressing a little bit i mean we understand that things grow all of the apartments they're everywhere and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with apartments i mean my grown kids all live in apartments but in the area that we live this gentleman and i don't know him the developer he said that the residents had all been notified or he'd been talking to them well i live in the el dorado lakes community and i have a lot of friends in there and i found out about this this after actually this morning and i sent out some emails no one had heard of this no one had any idea i mean they were shocked um same thing with my friends in the islands we weren't talked to about this there's so much traffic on mcqueen on a daily basis it's just unbelievable i have nothing against necessarily apartments as a general thing i mean there's apartments all up and down arizona avenue they're all over the san tan mall i just don't really understand why it has to go in there it doesn't really make sense to me as far as the location and i just really want gilbert to kind of keep who gilbert is and i think this is really wrong for our neighborhood and like i said i know a ton if people had known about this earlier i found out today the our land use projections in the town and where we're at right now and and what we're trying to do in that northwest corridor is a very important issue for you because you may be included in that corridor at some point but thank you for your time and with that i will be supporting this tonight uh mayor and i'll pass it back to you thank you councilmember councilmember tulkey i see your hand yeah thank you um [Music] the one thing i disagree with councilman anderson is i don't find this a hard decision in this particular case this property has sat and we've had residential come several times and it's been turned down several times because of what is happening south of this property which sat for 30 some years before it ever started moving with northrop grumman moving in and the other development when this property came forward i felt very strongly that continuing that development from the south into this north product and connecting to what else is going on in those business park areas there was extremely important but i shared your concern about well where's the interest so i did a little homework and i called mike orr who represents the spectrum project south of there and he made it very clear that they're very interested in expanding what's going on on the south side into that north um parcel however and i'm i'm not in the development business so i just want to make that clear so i don't understand the ins and outs of when property is available when somebody is in negotiation do you go in and try to undercut somebody else to try to get a deal going i i don't know if that's the way it works in that business but what i do know is that mr orr said that until the current project comes to a close he was not going to insert himself into a discussion other than if asked say yes they did have interest and so when we ask for something in writing it's very hard to do when there's a plan in place and and you're going through all of the entitlement processes for that particular piece of property so when i think of an infill project i i i consider an infill project one that is not on a major corner and not surrounded by industrial that to me that doesn't um qualify as an infill project it should be a continuation of a business product there so for me it's not a hard decision i i respect sean i respect clay thank you very much for the time that you've spent with us i i think it's probably a great project somewhere else this council had no problems telling a recent applicant that that it was a great project just didn't belong where it was so we we have done that we've made those hard decisions and in this particular case i'm i'm prepared to try to wait and see this develop as it should be developed in my mind as light industrial and connecting those business parks and not giving away precious non-residential land as we go towards spilled out so i will be a no on this thank you councilmember tilke councilmember september thank you mayor first i want to thank everybody who sent me emails and who came here tonight to speak you took time out of your lives to to be here to sit through this really long hearing to articulate what you wanted to communicate to us and i appreciate you being part of the process no matter what side of the issue you are on because i got emails from from both sides and i think that's healthy i did meet with the applicant got to meet clay and uh i'm so glad that he's a part of our gilbert community he lives near this proposed development i really like the alta product got to see you know not only photo simulations of what it would be we got to see some actual empirical photos of products that they've done in the past it seems like a really nice product very nice amenities but i'm having a hard time with this particular location for this product the northwest corridor is gilbert's largest and oldest employment and revenue generating area it's a very important part of gilbert and it's a part that's so important that right now the town is entertaining the idea of of including this area in a redevelopment redevelopment area and that the intent of that is to attract new interest and new investment in this corridor and hopefully that it will do that i also read the uli study and it did talk about residential helping this particular area but it also said something else which is kind of conflicting for me because it it also talked about protecting the uh the employment inventory and the ability of this area to generate continued employment growth property rights are important but property rights are important for everybody and one of the things that i don't like about this is that it is that it puts the burden of an increased setback on the parcel to the north that is undeveloped and to the parcel to the west that even though it is developed today it's something it's developed but who knows what that would be in the future and what someone might want to do with that parcel and i think it unfairly puts a burden on those on those parcels um i don't i won't be able to support this this proposal tonight and those are the reasons why thank you mayor thank you councilmember september um vice mayor kaprowski would you like to comment i don't have any additional comments to what others have stated this evening um it is a difficult decision and hopefully will um be how it turns out tonight thank you thank you council memberentes uh thank you mayor for the opportunity to talk about this item appreciate everybody coming forward tonight sending emails i know there's always a consistent frustration because you know there's kind of legal notices that are required that um you know the developer checks the box and they only reach so many people in the community and then there's cut-offs and boundaries and then they don't need to exceed those and part of that in my opinion is you got to kind of cut it off somewhere because um you could exhaust the number of people who have a property interest in in whatever the development proposal is and so um i think it's been mentioned this is uh we talked about from a property rights standpoint that's um always the perspective fundamentally i i go into these kinds of proposals when their rezones i look at them a little bit more carefully because now we're talking about decisions that people have made previously based upon what was agreed upon in in you know voter approved general plan plans and such and so making changes to that um i do raise the level of scrutiny um as far as you know this proposal i i do think that um you know deferentially that the impacts to the property owners surrounding this area are either people that are the probably the most impacted are the ones that are most supportive you know the businesses you know we always hear can you know issues with traffic or schools um water is a new one i haven't seen that on previous presentations but all those things we do have to take an objective look at make sure that we're not negatively impacting surrounding private property holders i don't believe this project will do that i graduated from mesquite high school that we had probably three over 3 000 students that went to that school and over the years those numbers have definitely dwindled the schools in that area are in desperate need of more students to be enrolled and so i do look at this as kind of an opportunity to um you know increase the people in the area that are going to support you know future development um the schools and the and the you know the the resources we need to invest in everything like traffic um and better roads and things like that so um i feel comfortable where this is at right now and i don't have no idea obviously where the vote's going to be but um happy to have you to make a motion when everybody's had their their time to speak thank you councilmember yantas councilmember hendricks okay um i look at this property a little bit differently it has um i've talked about what i think infill is and what infill isn't this piece to me does come under the infill in my opinion because it has write in write out only from mcqueen right in right out only on elliott it has a well site on the corner that inhibits the the what can be developed there um the the support that we've rece the the letters of support that we've received council member yanta has just pointed out from the commercial is very telling because i've watched the commercial on that southeast corner of mcqueen and elliot just suffer over the years and i've seen businesses come and go and commercial in our world has changed dramatically and the pandemic changed it even more we're seeing huge companies that are closing down and becoming online only deliver straight to your house only they're going to pick up some warehouses here and there to be able to or working with other major commercial stores smaller businesses are going into larger commercial stores so we're seeing a huge difference i have never had anyone mention oh no i think i had economic development mentioned to me once that someone might be interested in this property to park delivery vehicles on so i don't really consider that employment or light industrial it might fit that in the code but i don't really consider that employment or light industrial you'd have vehicles coming and going day and night to making deliveries out of that location and that didn't come to fruition the property to the south has been being planned and developed for many years now and i haven't had them approach to come forward with this property like i mentioned earlier i've had i think at least two residential with mr lake himself besides this one for that property i haven't had anyone else come forward with commercial or industrial i i struggled with this because the neighbors are going to be impacted the traffic is difficult in that location no matter what develops there that won't change there will still be traffic there will still be issues coming and going i've driven through there at four or five o'clock at night at elliott mcqueen i i live off of elliott east of there um i know what that traffic looks like and i like to visit lisa's rum cakes which is right off of the right behind northrop grumman the schools great great great comment a couple of years ago we talked about a multi-family project and there's actually a calculation of residents that live in multi-family complexes and how many children actually go to the surrounding schools or the neighborhood schools as we like to refer to them it's actually very low in arizona we have school choice and for the most part parents are driving their children to whatever school they want them to a lot of times when you're living in multi-family and you have children it's because you're in transition from something else you're transitioning from moving from another state to gilbert moving from another another city in arizona to gilbert and you're waiting for a home to be built and so this is a temporary situation for you these are high-end developed multi-family and the only reason that it fits into mfh is by like a tenth of a percent of density because it's 25.1 and that's what makes it mfh otherwise it would be if we could get under that 25 it would be mfm it would be multi-family medium but because it has that 110th over it goes up to mfh which i think sounds a lot more drastic to most of us when you're talking about a multi-family high residential product i want to see us bring residents to the area i sat through the uli discussion in the old council in the old council chambers in our council chambers that are under construction um i watched almost the entire presentation that day and i heard the discussion about multifamily and i don't really think that full discussion is represented in the report from what i heard those folks talking about that day these are really these are these are people that are in the development business talking about exactly what that northwest corridor needs there's a there's another location up at um mcqueen in guadalupe that was um that was rezoned to multi-family in 2015.

i remember that because the only night that i missed a council meeting and i would have voted against that one because i didn't find that one to be an infill project i didn't think it was the right location for multi-family this one i think it fits and i think it works i think i'm i'm super excited that you have a letter of intent from the company that you mentioned for a restaurant i met with clay and he said no matter what he would bring something to that spot that we would love he lives within walking distance if not biking distance from this location and drives by it every single day so i will be in support of this project and i will be the council member jensen said interested to see how the vote goes um you said you would like to make a motion if you would motion to approve item 18.

thank you council member um do i have a second second i have a motion by councilman marientes a second by council member anderson please vote motion passes with a 5-2 vote i want to reiterate what's been said here tonight thank you all for coming out for this discussion we appreciate all of your time we appreciate all of the facts that you brought forward and look forward to clay and mr lake bringing a really great project to design review thank you we need to take a five to ten minute break please because we have another topic to get into and there's no way we're going to make it thank you we'll recess for about 5-10 minutes okay 30 second warning 30 second warning thanks everybody 30 second warning we're going to get started coming back from recess to our regular meeting kelly foster is going to do a very short presentation on the fees because we're just here to basically kick off this discussion this evening thank you kelly one second i can't hear kelly's mic is that she's too tall again not a problem i have now i still can't hear her through that mic it's not it's not coming through our speakers here if i turn it off and back on does that help there we go perfect thank you kelly reboot i i t guys tell me that all the time okay so we are updating the water system development fees we talked that with the uh we needed to do it in order to include the increased capacity at the north water treatment plant not the rebuild of the existing capacity only the new capacity from 45 to 60 mgd that's what's included in the study there is a long timeline and this is a very collaborative and transparent process so even before that notice of intent in late august i sent an email out with a copy of the study a request for feedback and information from the three stakeholder groups that usually interact with us on this process earlier today we received an email from one of them they had some questions we were able to answer it and they didn't feel like they needed to be here tonight working with one of the other stakeholder groups i was able to go to their policy committee meeting in october they have some additional questions so i'll go again in december and continue to work with them on their questions so very collaborative process with lots of public input if anybody else has questions i'm happy to answer them from the public as well so tonight's meeting is a public hearing on the land use assumptions and the infrastructure improvement plan and then the adoption of that information wouldn't be until january then there would be a notice of intent public hearing and adoption for the actual fees and then they wouldn't be effective until june of next year so long process the land use assumptions do assume that gilbert work will continue to grow probably more slowly over time as we reach build out but continuing to grow over the 10-year period the infrastructure improvement plan follows all of the state statute guidelines it only includes the infrastructure needed for growth and again only includes that 15 mgd only the expansion part of the north water treatment plant the fees would be increasing by about 36 37 percent which is quite a large increase but it is the amount that's needed to cover the growth related projects that are planned the good news is that we have one of our other system development fees that should be finishing so we have about 3.4 million dollars of expenses yet to cover in that area last year we had 4.1 million dollars of revenue so if if growth continues in a similar pattern towards the end of this fiscal year in the may or june time period we should be able to stop collecting that fee which would be before the new increases to the water fee are in effect so hopefully that timing works out really well what that net effect looks like between the two would be about a three hundred and thirteen dollar increase for the single family side and then we have a commercial example here where it would be about a fifteen hundred dollar increase for this commercial example obviously commercial the makeup of square feet and water meter size are different for every development but we tried to provide at least some knowledge here with this and example there should be another slide after this if somebody could help me advance it might need to reboot here we go so tonight we are here to get public feedback on land use assumptions and the infrastructure improvements the next step would be adoption of those assumptions at the january 11th meeting with that i'm happy to answer any questions thank you kelly any questions for kelly at this time or could i just make a comment absolutely um just just for the public to understand that system development fees many people um in everyday language may call them impact fees but there are fees that are associated with new growth so it's only on if you build a new home or if you build a new building business or through that permitting process of growth not this this isn't going to be um part of anything that me as a resident would be paying mayor councilmember tilke that's exactly correct and these don't have anything to do with the bond that just passed these do not have anything to do with transportation improvements it's for water infrastructure that's my realities other than the home builders association has there been any feedback from other stakeholders yes the home builders association did provide an email earlier today they asked questions earlier we were able to give them answers and they felt like the answers were responsive for what they needed thank you for reporting that email to us um kellyanne for being so responsive to his questions to mr mull's questions vice mayor kaprowski do you have any questions for kelly or comments i don't have any questions or comments i think a lot of the information was covered in our fall financial retreat or our fall retreat thank you um councilmember hendrix sending comments thank you okay kelly thank you very much um i don't remember if i opened the public hearing but i opened the public hearing i will close the public hearing bring it back to discussion for discussion and a motion i would say a motion to um move forward with the process of the fee hearing the hair the fee hearing structure so moved second motion by council member september 2nd and by council member telke please vote and motion passes 7-0 thank you moving on to administrative items boards and commissions item number 20 consider activating community engagement task force setting the assigned tasks and duties number of task force members and the means of selecting those members um council member tilke would you like to take this thank you mayor we had an in-depth discussion about this item at our fall retreat what we're asking tonight is to go ahead and activate the community engagement task force so we can begin the process of accepting applications and setting out a program of work for that task force and with regular feedback to the council and i will make that motion if that's appropriate that is great any comments or questions by anyone we have a motion on the floor do i have a second second motion by council member tulkey seconded by council member anderson please vote motion passes six to one moving on to boards commissions and committees do we have any reports from council on any of your boards and commissions and committees that you serve as liaisons seeing none i will move to communications from our town manager mayor council and none tonight report on from the council on current events seeing none okay report from the mayor sorry i'm good i have a few i have a bunch of things to announce because this is our last meeting until december 14th then defense december 14th will be our last meeting for this calendar year i wanted to let everyone know that the mcso lieutenant brachman that was killed last week in scottsdale is actually a gilbert resident so please keep him and his family and the members of mcso in your thoughts and prayers i wanted to thank everybody for the veterans day event the veterans day committee did an amazing job thank you to all of the council members that attended representative pollock was there and um the event was very well attended at the gilbert regional park this friday saturday and sunday at gilbert regional from 4 to 9 pm will be the gilbert music festival this is the first time that we are holding the gilbert musical festival down at the gilbert regional park during gilbert days the gilbert days rodeo will be friday the 19th at 7 pm saturday the 20th at 8 p.m and sunday the 21st at 2 p.m being held at horseshoe park in queen creek it is a beautiful facility if you haven't been out there for a rodeo the gilbert days parade will be saturday 11 20 8 30 a.m on gilbert road that runs from juniper to just south of elliott look forward to seeing all of our residents out there enjoying this momentous historic occasion in gilbert for gilbert day's parade that same day the gilbert half marathon in 10k will also be taking place saturday 11 20.

that kicks off from higley high school at 7 30 a.m and creates a multitude of rolling street closures so please please keep that in mind for this saturday 11 20 check gilbertaz.gov for any of that information or all of the town's social media thursday thanksgiving um 11 25 at 8 30 a.m there will be a one mile family fun run and a 5k at 9 00 am for the gilbert turkey trot which i will be there for so i'm excited about that on monday 11 29 from 6 to 8 30 pm we will be holding the water tower holiday lighting at our water tower park in downtown gilbert this year's event will include free family activities food trucks and live music i'm very excited to be part of that this year and look forward to seeing lots of residents down there and i just wanted to mention that i am fortunate enough to be traveling to oahu for pearl harbor day which will be the 80th anniversary commemorating that fateful day in our nation's history and i'm very excited to be making this trip to tie in our u.s host town for the uss arizona submarine and no town funds will be expended for my trip so thank you all very much i will go ahead and wish you all a happy thanksgiving see you back here on december 14th and we will recess this meeting and move back to our special meeting oh adjourn this meeting adjourn this meeting this evening thank you

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