Goodyear launches tourism strategy, pursues $64 million I-10 Basins sports complex partnership

baby. Everybody Hey feel me. buy. [Music] Bybody. [Music] Heat. Heat. N. [Music] Hey hey hey. Heat. Heat. [Music] like to call the work session order for June 16th, 2025. City clerk raise a roll call. Let the record reflect that all members are present. Thank you. We have four items on the agenda tonight. We'd like to remind uh council that staff will be pausing every so often to answer any questions. First item is the 2025 community survey results.

We will hear from Janna go uh strategic planner and organizational performance manager. We'll spread the item. Second item is the FY 2025 strategic plan evaluation sports and tourism strategy. Wendy Bridges, economic development director, will kick that off. Our third item is the internal audit program update and report on payroll and timekeeping assessment. We'll hear from Jared uh finance director. And fourth item is the fiscal year 2025 strategic plan capital project management action item.

Kiny Kunen uh deputy city manager and Steve Sinto. Uh see if I got that right. Director of engineering will present the items. Um go ahead. You're up. All right. Well, good evening mayor and council. I'm Jenna Go. I'm the city strategic planning and organizational performance manager. I'm joined tonight by Aaron Caldwell, a survey research principal with PCO.

The city has used PCO to conduct our resident surveys since 2014, allowing us to compare our results to hundreds of other communities across the country and to track our results over time. So, I will now turn it over to Erin to walk you through the survey results and pull those findings. Thank you. I am happy to be here um to present a summary of the findings from your Goodyear National Community Survey.

Um before I begin, on behalf of myself and my PCO co-workers, I would like to thank Jenna who was the primary contact throughout the survey development and implementation process. She provided thoughtful feedback um throughout the project. And I'd also like to acknowledge my colleague Lily Vasquez who was Goodyear's NCS project manager for this year's survey. and she actually did the bulk of the work for this project. I just get to come here and present the results to you.

So, um, as we dive into the results, I want to emphasize that there's a variety of ways, uh, that these results can be used. U, most commonly, the jurisdictions we work with use their survey data to monitor trends and resident opinion over time, um, to inform budgeting processes and strategic plans. And as Jenna mentioned, the results also allow you to benchmark your community's specific characteristics or ratings against um communities in our benchmark database.

And our hope is is that these findings are presented, it will spur ideas for you about where you might want to dig deeper. When we developed the National Citizen Survey, we did research into models of community livability and we came up with our 10 facets um of community livability that are kind of anchored or centered around the idea of the overall quality of the community.

And we include items on the survey within all of these facets to provide a picture of how residents feel about their community. I am not going to give you information about all of these just to reassure you. Um, I'm going to try to be brief here, but I did want to give you an overview of the methods we used to collect the data that I'm about to present. All the households within Goodyear were eligible to participate in the survey.

We chose a random sample of addresses from a list of all households based on what um the United States Postal Service calls the uh delivery sequence file. And that's pretty much one of the most complete lists of addresses that you could get. Um, these households received two mailings. The first was a postcard that was mailed on March 14th inviting participation in the survey online.

It also let them know that a hard copy was survey was coming in case they would prefer to do the questionnaire that way. And that was followed then by that hard copy survey had a cover letter on it and it could be returned in a postage paid envelope. Um, the survey was available in English and Spanish. Um the hard copy survey was only in English, but on all the mailings there was a Spanish paragraph letting um recipients know how they could do the survey online in Spanish.

Through these efforts, a total of 415 completed surveys were received providing a response rate of 11% and a margin of error of plus or minus 5%ish. Um, we then compared the demographic profile of a survey respondents to that of adults in Goodyear and we employed one of these survey research best practices called waiting. So for example, we know that younger um residents are less likely to respond than older residents.

So we kind of rebalance the results so that they will be representative of the community and kind of give less weight to the results from older um respondents and more weight to that from younger. And that's just one of these survey research best practices. Um, in addition to this random sample survey, there was an open participation survey um that was available for about two weeks and we got 328 responses to that survey.

But the data I'm going to present tonight just come from that probability sample, that random sample survey. So, um, Jen and I have both mentioned about PCO's benchmarking database. Um we actually started this uh the founder of national research center that you know was acquired by PCO several years ago when my boss wanted to retire. um he used to run a little uh research and evaluation division within the city of Boulder.

And when we would present these survey results, he one time came uh uh the director of the streets came up to uh my boss Tom and said, "Could you please try to find ratings from other communities we could compare to?" Because we always get beat up. People love the library in Boulder, not so fond of city services and those or pardon me, street repair or street maintenance and they always got compared against each other. And that's not really the most fair comparison.

It would be how do people rate street repair in other communities. So that the idea was born. So we um actually now have about 1300 communities in our database, but there's only about 500 from the last five years, which is what we use for these comparisons. And so finally, I'm going to move into a summary of the survey results. And again, I'm not going to cover every survey statistic that was in there. Um hopefully you know this will spur ideas if you want of where you might want to dig deeper.

I'm going to start with sort of a zoomed out view of the big picture of your results. Oh, I'm sorry. I should have stopped. I forgot to pause. No, that's okay. I I just I just think the waiting is interesting and I appreciate what you're trying to do, but the reality is when we have votes in the city about 80% of the people are 50 and older and about 20% are under 50. So just just to take that in consideration because as elected official I'm always curious about who's voting and what they think.

Yes. You know and there's different reasons to No, I understand why you did it. I'm just saying from a from an elected position. It's always nicer to know who's voting uh in the older age as a because they're the ones to be honest with you that are actually voting. Yeah. And I'm sorry. Were there any other questions? No, that's all. I just want to make a note of that. That's all. Very good. Thank you. Oh, sure.

So, when you you say you uh benchmark 1300's cities across the nation, is that correct? How many are in Arizona or local or compared? Are do you have comparisons local? Uh that is an option for communities um to create what we call like a custom benchmark cohort. Um we I'm not presenting that tonight. This is No, I I don't I don't mean off the top of my head. you're you're benchmarking us against the 1300 others. Are does that include Arizona? Does that include in the the metro Phoenix area?

There are other communities in this area who do particip and I do want to say you probably saw the 500 on that slide uh wherever that was back here. Um we have been doing this like I said it started when I was working at the city of Boulder back in the 90s. Um, and so the the database goes back a long ways, but there's only about 500 or so that we have who've done a survey in the last five years.

And we do like to limit it to those more recent in time so that you know you're not being compared to somebody who gave a rating in 1995. Okay. So in the survey we have two questions that ask directly about those 10 facets of community livability that I showed in sort of that honeycomb design. Um the first is this where we ask residents to rate the quality of each of these facets and that's shown here. Um and you can see a pretty wide variation in the ratings.

We kind of start down at the bottom with mobility with only 43% giving an excellent or good rating and then going all the way up to the top um like parks and recreation and safety getting uh positive ratings from uh about eight and 10 of residents. However, what you can see on this um chart is that all of the bars are this sort of middle green color which means all of these ratings were similar to the benchmark.

kind of points out why the benchmarks are important because otherwise you might think mobility is doing very poorly and it is similar. Um the good news is that these top ranked items here um are the ones that are generally deemed most important and in fact we ask residents to rate how important they felt it was to focus on each of these facets in the next two years and safety and economy are near the top. um with utilities also being up here.

So, one of the lenses you might use when you're looking at these results is this one of well, what were the things that um residents considered most important? We have another way of looking at this where we sort of compare the quality and importance. Um and so you can kind of see those gray bars are sort of the the gap. How big is the difference between the percent giving an excellent or good rating and the percent rating the importance?

So you can see mobility down here close to the bottom um has a very big gap which might be a while mobility wasn't one of the top most important there is this big gap that kind of analysis can be another lens you might use to look at these results. Oh yes go back to that slide if you would is is when you're saying importance that means what people want versus what they think they're getting. Is is that how I read that?

Uh it it kind of is like that although as I said often safety and economy are at the top and you saw that you had actually very high quality ratings for that. I think there's a if you think about Maslo's hierarchy of needs or something that even if people live in a safe community they still feel it's very important to focus on safety. So um so it doesn't necessarily mean a high importance rating that you must focus on it.

You may already be doing sufficiently there and need to maintain what you're doing. Hold on. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Did they drill down at all to any comment section about like for example community design? Is there any comments on what that is to a resident? I'm I'm wondering if it's like apartments like maybe they don't want apartments in their community. So, they don't think it's designed very well. So, but I don't know, maybe they just don't like the way it's set up.

Did you ask an open-ended question? So, Mayor and Council Member Hampton, um there are some additional questions that get to um sort of different facets of community design, land use, and zoning. Nothing specifically that mentions or reference departments. Um but there might be some um some other conclusions that you could draw from that additional data in the other the other areas. So, I I what to do with that. That's all. Yeah.

How do how do I raise that up if I don't understand what the resident wants? That's that's a good question. And in the report, you'll see that we, you know, have um information in each of these facets. And that's how we group the questions that we ask on the survey. So, there were 121 um questions. We're going to get to that real soon. Um evaluative questions on the survey. And so, we group those into those 10 facets.

And that's one way to dig deeper into what is it that's going on with community design and housing. And that is one of the ones I'm going to talk a little bit about tonight. But I think you were also asking like did we just ask people to tell us in their own words what we we're thinking. And there wasn't that kind of opportunity. Um one of the things we often say about these surveys is they're good at telling you what people think but not necessarily why.

So that might be one of those things you want to dig into. Yeah. Okay. So, as I said, there were 121 um survey items for which residents provided evaluative ratings. And here you can see that 18 of those received ratings that were higher than the benchmark in Goodyear. 101 were similar and two received lower ratings. I sort of know what one of the follow-up questions will be.

So, I'll tell you the two that were rated lower were air quality and preservation of the historical or cultural character of the community. And among those 18 that received higher were uh I'll just give a few examples. Goodyear is a place to retire, recreation centers or facilities, yard waste pickup, um street lighting. I'm not going to give you all 18, but we can also look at those 121 items and see the last time you did the survey in 2023, were there changes in the ratings?

And for the most part, the results were fairly stable. 104 of the items received similar ratings, 11 received higher ratings, and six received lower. So those six that were lower were adult education opportunities. Um, pardon me, the K to2 education, getting to community developments or yeah, community design and housing, well planned residential growth, variety of housing options, um, also land use planning and zoning.

Um, some of the ones that were higher were vibrancy of the downtown or commercial areas, code enforcement, and that the city government generally acts in the best interests of the community. So, um, I'm going to move now into some other highlights of our findings with a little more specificity. I'm going to point out a few things that stood out to us as survey researchers. And obviously, there's lots more data that you can look at. So, if other topics interest you, please dig deeper.

So, um, our first finding is that on average, residents report enjoying a high quality of life in Goodyear. Um about nine in 10 residents said that Goodyear is an excellent or good place to live. It's an excellent or good place to raise children and that they feel the overall quality of life in Goodyear is excellent or good. And also nine and 10 residents plan to remain in Goodyear for the next five years and would recommend living in Goodyear to someone who asked. I'll pause this time.

Okay, so next is a topic of special interest I think to elected officials um in particular and we have good news. Residents gave relatively positive ratings to many aspects of the Cedars of the city's leadership and governance. Um, I'll start out by saying all of these items that I'm showing here uh were rated as excellent or good by more than 60% of respondents. And I have presented results for um this set of questions in many communities. And they're not usually this high.

It's usually more about the 50% mark of people giving excellent or good ratings. So, in particular, eight and 10 residents gave positive ratings to the city, treating residents with respect. um and treating residents fairly and these ratings were above that benchmark comparison. Um I'll also point out that two items saw statistically significant increases compared to 2023.

I mentioned one of those about generally acting in the best interest of the community and also that overall confidence in Goodyear's um government and that also that rating in particular was above the benchmark. So our next finding is that um as we saw when we looked at the overall facet ratings, the local economy in Goodyear received positive ratings and this also was seen as an important facet by residents. So this is more good news for you.

Um as I said we already saw that about eight and 10 residents applauded the overall economic health of Goodyear. Over seven and 10 gave positive ratings as Goodyear as a place to work and the overall quality of businesses and service establishments.

Um several of these items related to the economic health of Goodyear have trended up um in 2025 including when I mentioned before that vibrancy of downtown or commercial areas and also the variety and the quality of businesses and service establishments. Um, and now if we look down at the bottom of the chart, um, you can see cost of living was only rated as excellent or good by about half of respondents.

However, I think this is one of those things that almost nobody's going to say cost of living is really awesome. And so that rating is actually above the benchmark comparison. Okay. So, community design and housing availability may be an area of opportunity um for the city. Um and we do find that this tends to be a hot topic in growing communities like Goodyear. Um the overall appearance of Goodyear was viewed positively with about threequarters of respondents giving an excellent or good rating.

Other items were um considered a little less positively. The variety of housing options in Goodyear was deemed excellent or good by about six and 10 respondents. And while this is higher than the national benchmark, it does represent a decline since 2023. Almost about half of respondents rated well planned growth and land use planning and zoning as excellent or good. And a couple of these items have also decreased since uh 23.

Um however, all of these ratings are similar to the benchmark comparison. Oh yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, I just the reason why I find that interesting, you have land use planning and zoning at 45%. And our general plan passed with 75%. So it almost seems like there's a contradiction there. Preservation of historic or cultural character of the community. Is that the ones that want no growth or low growth?

Possibly they want to go back to farming or it's possible, you know, but you don't know you don't know what's behind that. You don't know what's behind that. And it, you know, it's not like that these were all necessarily grouped together on the survey. So they may be considering that they don't like the change in the growing community or they might feel that something is being lost of historical or cultural importance.

And then with the wellplanned residential growth, I'm wondering where they sometimes I wonder if we got to delve into that a little bit deeper because what is it about the wellplanned residential growth that's at 48%. I know it's similar, but still, is there something that uh we're not doing better or what? And if the state ever takes away our ability to zone and and whatever, that number is going to really really be impacted. But uh um yeah. Yeah.

I mentioned to the city manager, maybe next time we need to ask the question, do you feel comfortable with the city controlling zoning and and that or do you want to turn that over to the uh to the state government? You know that to me that's a question that I think we need to ask on the next one. But with that, did you say you had a question? Yeah. No, I was just commenting on that too. So like overall appearance that's good.

Um I think the well planned residential might be the lack of like executive housing for example. There's plenty of we have a lot of apartments. So like maybe people are saying they don't they're not excited about the apartments potentially. I don't know in the historic we don't really have very much historic here and the historic that we had some council members got got rid of those historic stuff that we had. So, so um yeah, so we don't have too much cultural historical stuff here in Gir.

So, yeah. So, I don't know. So, it's in Yeah, it's just in You don't know what you don't You don't know. So, yeah. Like I said, this is how they rated it, but we don't know why from these. So, that could be something to dig deeper with your residents. It seems like sometimes the why is the question we need to get to as council members, you know. Yeah.

Well, and you know, these ratings are a little lower than you saw in some of the other items that I've presented, but they are still similar to the benchmark. Um, and so it just might be that growth is one of those things. I have lived in very many over the years faster growing communities and it does cause some tensions and conflicts and that could be part of what is being reflected here. Um, so and I'm going to turn to our next section about mobility.

Um, and I did want to qualify this headline just slightly. As we saw previously, 80% of residents did did deem mobility to be essential or very important facet of livability on which to focus. Um, but there were other facets that were maybe even more important than mobility. Um, what did really stand out was that gap that I showed you. that was the largest gap between the quality and the importance ratings. And so we'll explore this a little bit further.

Here we're asking um about the ease of travel and also um sort of traffic flow and ease of public parking. And actually about seven and 10 respondents felt that the ease of travel by car was excellent or good. And even seven and 10 u rated the ease of public parking as excellent or good.

Um, you can see as we go down we get some lower ratings particularly and one that was sort of interesting to me was that traffic flow on major streets had a much lower positive rating but nevertheless people say it's pretty easy to get around by car. Um, I think people never love traffic. So that's why again even that 45% rating is similar to the benchmark. Um, ease of travel. Oh, was there some ease of travel by walking and by bicycling were given lower ratings than the ease of travel by car.

And again, looking down at the very bottom of the chart, um the rating of the ease of travel by public transportation was was quite low. But again, these are all similar to that benchmark comparison kind of typical pattern of what we see in other communities. And that ease of travel by public transportation has increased since 2023. Um survey participants also rated a number of the services provided by the city or other agencies related to mobility.

Street cleaning was given high marks by about eight and 10 um respondents and street repair by about seven in 10. Um and that rating was higher than the benchmark comparison. Uh traffic signal timing ratings did experience a decline, but as we saw with the ease of travel by public transportation, resident perceptions of transit increase also of transit services um did increase in 2025.

Um local governments implementing the NCS are given the option to ask some custom questions of their residents and fittingly the city of Goodyear asked some questions related to transportation. Um residents were asked how important they felt it was for the community to invest in pedestrian, bicycle and multi-use paths, sidewalks and facilities and in public transit.

And what we can see here is that the highest priority was given by residents to providing additional sidewalks and pedestrian facilities and improving the existing facilities. Multi-use paths both improvements to the existing and getting new was the next one. And then m followed by microtransit. Um there was a lot less emphasis to bike lanes and and bus routes. Um it was definitely higher for the pedestrian and multi-use paths. Um go back. Sure. Yeah. But you got was it bus routes?

But additional bus routes, industrial bus lanes are down at the bottom. Extended bus service or increased frequency. Is that saying that's not a top priority or am I reading that wrong? Definitely. Relative to these other items that were asked about, higher emphasis is being given to the pedestrian um facilities or maybe these multi-use paths that would serve um multiple modes of transportation. The only reason why I asked that is biking seems to be very popular here in the city.

You know what I mean? They're out on the weekend all the time. So, I'm just surprised that number is Yeah, I thought it would be rate a little higher than that. That's all. Yeah. Okay. I would I'll just comment. I would guess that among the biking community, they probably give it very high importance, but not everybody uses a bicycle or is comfortable on a bicycle. Um while we saw earlier Oh yeah. Okay. Got anything you guys? No. Okay.

Um while we saw earlier that only 46 to 56% of residents rated the ease of travel by walking or bicycling as excellent or good. Nevertheless, over three quarters said that they were satisfied with the bike and pedestrian infrastructure. Um, and this is one that we could puzzle over what this means. And it could be that perhaps residents are placing less priority on these modes of transportation.

And while acknowledging that the ease of travel by these modes is of lower quality, they are mostly satisfied with the infrastructure that does exist. Um, and finally, there was also a question asking residents where they obtain information about city government activities, events, and services. The most common sources used by residents are those provided by the city, the InFocus magazine and the city's website.

Um, local media outlets um are still being used as at least a minor source by about three quarters of residents and about twothirds obtained information through the city's email communications and social media accounts. And then one that I always like to point out, this word of mouth. While it was a major source for only about a quarter of residents, um it was at least a minor source for about eight and 10 residents. And we know that can have both positive and negative impacts. Yes. Yeah.

I u talked to a lot of people. I'm not surprised with that in focus magazine because I've been told that a lot of uh city residents get their information in that infocus magazine. So it's very popular among our residents. That's why we went at one point from what was it six per year or seven per year to to 12 because that's where they're getting their information. So that kind of confirms when we decided to actually increase the number of uh things that we sent out as a result of that.

So yeah, thank you. Confirm that. Hold on a minute. Go ahead. I also I'm I'm glad to see the city websites being used as much as it is because for a while there people weren't using it and we were trying to tell them to use it more for different things especially during elections and things like that and they just weren't using it. So I'm kind of excited to see that that's about 50%. Yes. Anything else? Okay.

Well, this is actually um bringing me to a conclusion of what we um chose to present to you today. Um and it is my hope and that of the organization I work for that you and really staff will dig deeper into the results. Um like I said, there's these 10 facets of livability, 121 evaluative items so that even departments can kind of dig into the results and create um plans uh based on these findings.

Um, so we hope that you um andor city staff will dive deeper into the data and um use these data to help make Goodyear a great place to live, work, and play. Any questions? Go ahead. Uh, yes. As a new uh council member, I dug deeply into um the survey and looked at every little aspect of it. I think I was spent like an hour and a half going through everything just to get a good feel for what our citizens and our residents want.

Um I just like to say that um in general, our residents like what we're doing as a city and that we attain attest that to our leadership um within the city itself, not just the council. And I wanted to acknowledge that. Council member Ko, can you put on the summary of conclusions? Oh, sure. Just the next slide up. Um, I think this is really telling.

Uh, there's um you you made a comment about uh cities with growing pains or are in development and I think that that is uh where we are and it's no surprise that traffic and mobility is an issue. I uh I can't think of anywhere I can drive across the valley or maybe elsewhere where there isn't construction or road work going on. So I I think that's just the the uh time and season that we're we're in as a community.

But um the resident confidence in uh the quality of life and the the leadership is is are very significant um marks and um and also Goodyear's economy being a strength and um I think that that you know getting a Trader Joe's is a testament to that because if our economy wasn't good uh I don't think they would come and the community design and housing availability uh may be an opportunity but I I I think that we're just kind of caught up been changes in the housing market that are even outside of our control.

The uh there's been a significant investment in multifamily which has led to increased um retail and uh the types of things that Goodyear residents have wanted and unfortunately the high interest rates right now are contributing to the reduced home purchasing and things like that. But I think uh we've done a lot of work on on design and uh community our our our staff really work hard on that.

So I think that there could be other factors besides just um uh sort of the anecdotal ones that people are thinking about uh doing that. And then mobility. Uh back to mobility. Um I I know that we have a very active biking community that has probably not recovered from a significant accident um that had happened here in Goodyear and they have expressed uh over the time uh interest in improving bike lanes and bike safety and I know that we did a grant for that and things like that.

So I look forward to our continued work in that area to improve bicycle safety. That is um very critical. So um I think we got a good report. Thank you. Thank you. Anything else? We're good. Mayor, if I could just close real quick by um thanking Aaron for sharing that information with us. Um there's certainly a lot a lot to be proud of in these results. Um and some areas for for opportunity, too. Um just to remind council, we'll be conducting our annual update to our strategic plan in the fall.

And so council and also the staff leadership team can consider these results when we're contemplating um changes or additions to the strategic plan. And if there's any particular topic that council would like to dig deeper into, please just let us know and we're happy to explore that. Yeah, I think I really appreciate the report. It's a great report.

Uh we have, you know, as council member Keno mentioned, we have growing pains right now and I think part of it and that's where sometimes the end focus comes in handy as far as educating our public out there. you know, why the diversity of housing, why and some of that stuff is not in our total control and that uh if you want these retail items, you want the shopping items and the things that our community wants.

Unfortunately, you know, what happens is uh retail follows rooftops, you know, so you need that density and and and I know we've done a uh you know, several opt things out there in the in focus to explain that, but I think that's probably part of it. And with the growing pains as well, traffic has come with it. The lights, the roads, you know, the 479 that we got for the half a centur sales tax. All of that is going to take time.

But I think staff uh management and council looks really hard at trying to stay ahead of all this growth. And that's why if you take a deep dive of our capital improvement plan, you will see that there's a lot of money in there to deal with this infrastructure as we move forward. So, and I appreciate the presentation and thank you. So just clarifying.

So you said that you're going to take this and then you're gonna all the departments are going to look at it and they're going to present to us during the strategic plan meeting or we're going to tell you what we want you to look at from this during the strategic plan meeting.

Mayor and council member Hampton, I I was just suggesting that when we go through the process of doing that update, the survey results um might be something that you would consider as you're proposing priorities for the future. Okay. But the departments are taking this and going to apply it as best as they can with the feedback. We're not putting on a shelf. We're going to use it. So, okay.

But we do use it and we will also consider the survey results as we prepare our um suggestions for the strategic plan update also because we prepare just as you do. So, and then combine them. So, thank you. Okay. Thank you. Next up, economic development director is going to kick off the strategic plan evaluation sports and tourist strategy. Go ahead, Wendy. You're up. Thank you. Good afternoon, mayor, vice mayor, and city council members.

I'm Wendy Bridges, the economic development director, and the item before you is from the city's strategic plan, an action item for safe and vibrant community to evaluate a sports and tourism strategy. This evaluation was a collaboration of multiple departments in the city. So, we'll have several presenters that will be sharing information with you today.

You will hear about what is tourism and why do we care about it, current tourism efforts by the city of Goodyear, summaries of our research and the opportunities we've identified. And finally, we'll finish with our findings and request council feedback, questions, and direction. Okay. So, um, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about what is tourism and why in Goodyear. Tourism can be defined in a lot of different ways.

I think generally most of us would define it as when people visit a place for fun, for events, activities, festivals, but even business travel. And in Goodyear, we see a lot of travel for sports and leisure. As Goodyear continues to grow, sports tourism and other forms of tourism present significant opportunities to enhance our community's economic vitality and quality of life for our residents.

To understand why we care about tourism, we can take a look at some of the positive outcomes that we see from it. Travelers stay in hotels. They shop at our stores. They eat at restaurants. And by doing that, they boost our business activity and our revenue um our local tax revenue. Brand recognition. Just like companies, cities can benefit from having a clear recognizable identity that sets it apart from every other community across the country.

that can help a community to communicate its value and that value can in turn attract investment by signaling economic stability, growth potential and a favorable business climate. And finally, community engagement and quality of life. We already are seeing some community engagement and quality of life increases just happening right around Goodyear's downtown with the addition of amenities. It's so wonderful to see the community out enjoying those amenities.

And that is also one of the the wise behind investing in tourism. Now, I'm going to pass it over to Joe Stewart, senior business development manager. Thank you, Wendy. Uh good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. Um before we talk about future opportunities, it's important to recognize the tourism related efforts that are already underway in Goodyear, as we do have a foundation to build from.

Uh our marketing efforts include leveraging Proposition 302 funds through the Arizona Office of Tourism to support initiatives like print and broadcast ads, digital media campaigns, and our dedicated tourism website, visitgoodyear.com. These tools help us tell Goodyear's story and promote the city to a wider audience. From an asset standpoint, um we have a few key draws.

The Goodyear ballpark, home to spring training, is a signature venue that brings thousands of visitors to our community each year. Our widely recognized BMX track is another example. It attracts large-scale competitions, bringing in athletes and families. In addition, we've supported various regional events that provide moments of activation throughout the year. These include cultural festivals, sporting events, and other community gatherings that help elevate Goodyear's profile.

But what we found is while these efforts are meaningful, they're largely fragmented and reactive. There hasn't been a unifying strategy tying all these pieces together into a cohesive tourism vision. And that's the opportunity in front of us to take what we have and organize it more strategically to drive broader economic and community impact. As we explore the potential for a tourism strategy in Goodyear, we followed a thoughtful evaluation process.

First, we assess our current strengths, focusing on what sets us apart today. That includes the Goodyear ballpark, our fa favorable weather, and key facilities and events that already bring people into the city. These are strong assets that give us a foundation to build on. Next, we took an honest look at our challenges and risks. We asked ourselves, what's missing if we want to be seen as a real tourism destination?

The answer included gaps in amenities, lack of destination travel attra destination level attractions, and the need for infrastructure that supports longer stays and broader experiences. It was important to acknowledge where we are today so we can better plan where we're going. We then look outward. We researched tourism models by meeting with partner cities, tourism organizations, and others who have successfully built their own strategies.

These conversations gave us valuable insight not only into best practices, but also the pitfalls and lessons uh learned from those who have been through it before. And finally, from that research and our own evaluation, we were able to identify and validate the key areas of opportunity where Goodyear can grow. These aren't just our opinions. that are backed by what we've seen in other communities like ours.

And from our evaluation, we've identified five key pillars where Goodyear has the greatest potential to grow its tourism presence. These pillars work together to support a balanced yearround visitor economy. They are sports, outdoor and nature-based recreation, arts and culture, shopping, dining, hospitality and entertainment, and conferences, professional events, and meetings. Each of these areas complements the others, and together they build a stronger, more attractive Goodyear.

Now, I'll pass it to parks and recreation interim director David Side, who will discuss more of the first three pillars that we've identified. Thank you, Joe. Good evening, everyone. Uh as we look at opportunities to increase tourism in Goodyear, we quickly identified core areas found in parks and recreation and when you start talking about tourism, one of the first things that comes to mind is sports tourism.

We already have a substantial footprint with Goodyear ballpark that welcomes over 350,000 visitors annually. But as we look to the future, there are also great opportunity for the city to rec consider additional multi-port use facilities. These facilities are versatile venues that provide year-round programming opportunities. Another big market for tourism is in youth and amateur sports through hosting multi-day tournaments, which drives local economy through hotel stays, dining, and retail.

As you are aware, one area of opportunity for Goodyear is the future development of the I 10 basins and deputy city manager Justin Fair is here to share more on this. Justin, thank you, David. Good evening, mayor and council. Just a we'll kind of pause and pivot just a quick moment to give an update on the basins um in a bit of background for um the the newest council members um here that weren't involved in the previous conversations.

But a little bit of a backstory to the basins that you see in the picture here. Um the city acquired those a little over 10 years ago from Maricopa County Flood District with the intent that they would be used for a park or recreational amenities. So there are restrictions in place for how we can utilize the basins. In 2022, the city we were approached by a few different groups interested in um trying to find ways to activate these these basins.

Um at the time um we identified that there's some difficulties to gaining access. So we commissioned a study in 2023 to evaluate the feasibility of um making these basins usable. And so through that we presented um back to um council in 20 in June of 24 where we presented a summary of those findings in that in that study. And while the study showed that it showed a rough cost of estimate um which was substantial but it did show that there was feasibility and opportunity there.

Um with that we had direction to perform an RFI or request for information which we did in the fall summer and in the fall and with that we had seven responses respond to that RFI. Um and the responses varied anywhere from if you build it we'll operate it um to a few that actually did approach and and show that they have um potential interest in investing in that as well.

While and one of the things that came out of that study was is what you see on the screen is what we had proposed and what drove this original design was were the top two amenities from our parks and wreck master plan which identified the the need from our citizens for multi-purpose fields and pickle ball. Those were the top two amenities as part of our parks and wreck, our recently updated parks and recck master plan. So that's what drove the design.

When we completed the um RFI, those responses um came back to it's really doesn't pencil out. It's not necessarily economically um viable for an organization to just come in and build exactly what we want. But what it did identify is there are um um individuals and private in um individuals that are interested in discussion to see could we make something work while what we have proposed and designed um necessarily doesn't work. Um is there opportunities?

So um a couple of amenities that were proposed are racket sports such as pickle ball or tennis. Um we had another group reach out regarding cricket. Um can we build a cricket stadium? um as well as if you build a cricket stadium, maybe we can put in some multi-purpose fields there as well.

So I think and there are other groups like I said there were three groups that um had engaged around some type of partnership and so um where we've landed on that is while and what we identified from the RFI was that while nobody directly said hey we will come build this for you um at no cost to the city what we did identify is there are individuals interested in potential partnerships.

So what we've done um is for our next steps is we will be um looking at coming back in the fall and as we look at our strategic plan um for the city side if we want to design and build this as designed um this will be something that we look at performing an RFP and looking at um adding into our future CIP projects. So that is what we will do for next steps is to bring this back in the fall for that.

In the meantime though, those individuals that have reached out from a um public private perspective, we'll continue engaging in those conversations to see if there's some sort of partnership agreement that that makes sense, something that allows us to um uh come in and as an example is can the city provide the infrastructure, the roadway infrastructure if they help provide the facilities in those sorts of agreements.

So, we'll continue with those conversations um as those investors look to partner with the city. Um but we'll also bring it back in the fall to look at incorporating it into the strategic plan uh for actually for the city developing it on themselves in the future.

So um with that um I think again just to summarize it and this ties it back to the conversation tonight is that you know the IT 10 basins they truly are an amenity and opportunity for the city and the location of this right next to GSQ um into what David was alluding to. Um, this is where it could be that multiport multisports um, opportunity to bring in events. Um, visit our BIES, um, visit our retail, visit our restaurants that are directly right around this area.

So, it could be a great amenity, but um, that's where we're at. So, I'll pause there and ask if there's any questions before I hand it back over to Dave. So, yeah, don't go anywhere. You're going to get some questions there. Hold on one second, Vicki. Before you go anywhere, I think it's real important when you get to the strategic plan. We've got a lot of big dollar items that are sitting out there, not just this. You've got uh the stuff that's coming due on the uh Guardians and the Reds.

We've got a um what is it? A garage that has been requested that we build to to expand over there at Bullard. I think you need to lay out all those dollars and what you have on there. So, almost like a shopping cart if we decide to do anything. I mean, unlike we're not like the federal government, we can't print it. So, we got to make sure we have enough to be able to do that. So, with that, we'll start with Vicki first and then Trey and then Okay, go ahead, Vicki.

I 100% I 100% agree with Joe on that except for um if we can get a backer, somebody that will put out the money for us that wants to be an investor, then we're in a different position. If we can get that, then that's that's what we should be doing. Um, I wanna for sure I'm really wanting to get these soccer fields especially. How many soccer fields does it take to have an act a big tournament like we were talking? Was it 12 or was it 18? I can't remember.

It's 10 to 12 to be able to host a regional tournament. Um, but we have um we have enough room for that, right? With these fields, but also with other fields within the city that we could look at activating in coordination with that. Yes. Okay. Because that's from what I've heard and what I have been checking out. I know Buckeye was offered this at one point and um and my feeling is is if somebody's going to get it, I want to get it because I want the money to come into Goodyear.

That's the whole idea. We you know what we've been looking at. Um soccer fields are huge. They've been closing a lot of them down around us. And Goodyear is a perfect place with our c culture and everything that we're doing here. It's a perfect place to get that to get this. And if we if there's some way we can do it, I think it would be a really good thing for the amount of money that this city could bring in.

I do realize that there needs to be pickle ball and I think the raetball sports, you know, that's part of it, but I mean, you know, if you were going to do something else and if you were going to do what was the other one you were talking about, oh, cricket. I think that's awesome. So if we can somehow these three fields or these three areas, there's enough to do all of that to do the 12 field to do the 12 soccer fields and pickle ball and the cricket or do we what's the deal?

If we were to bring in a cricket um opportunity would reduce the footprint for available soccer, but there are cases where they utilize the cricket stadiums as soccer um fields as well during Is that inside then or is it outside? It's an it's out it's an outdoor. It is outdoor. Okay. So So well then that would be one way of doing it because we'd be able to offer a lot.

The amount of money that could be brought into this city if we were to get this is huge and you know better us than somebody else. That's the way I look at it. But again we have to see how we're going to do the investment in the beginning and hopefully one of these investors and you do have a couple that are interested in investing.

you said there were there were three groups that had responded um showing expressed interest and those are the further the conversations that we need to continue on um is um to work out what that design and what that could look like. Um again, nobody came saying they're going to build this for us, right? Um but it would take We haven't gotten there yet. Correct. We need to okay that to get there, right? So we'll we'll look to continue those conversations.

Um but by no means get ahead of council, right, um with either with any of those as well. Well, I'm I'm all for this because I think anything we can do to people are into the sports thing and I think anything we can do to to cater to that is a good thing. Um, but I think that for the city to put the money out, that's a whole another thing. We do have I'm I agree with Joe. We've got a lot of money going out a lot of different places and we have to take care of that.

But if we can get somebody to fund this, I think it's a great idea and better us than somebody else. Thanks, Justin. Good. Good job. All right. Thanks, Mayor. Um Justin, kind of piggybacking off this, I guess. First off, I want to say um my boys play soccer quite a bit. I'm quite uh aware of the lack of fields that we have here in the West Valley. Uh it's they rarely play in the same place uh week after week just because of the lack of um lack of fields and availability and things change.

So I do want to preface with that. You had mentioned how I think your words were no one's saying that they would you know build this just maybe partial investors. What is the price tag for this um RFI? Just kind of a a a guess. The the original Great question. Thank you. Um the original study um for full phase buildout was around $64 million to do the full phase buildout. that is for any one individual whether it's the city or a private investor to build that out.

So that's where there's opportunity. You can phase it. Um you can if there are um public private partnerships that can help supplement that. Um those are the conversations that um and that's full phase buildout. That does that include roads uh utilities and everything else? It did. It included the infrastructure um as well as the amenities. Okay.

Um it's quite understandable I think that you know why no one is willing oh we'll we'll build that it it's hard for me again I don't work in this industry but it's hard for me to see how a developer would make um would make their money back or be able to be a worthwhile investment. You mentioned early on, very briefly, when we bought the land from the county, you said about a decade ago, maybe a little longer, there are restrictions on use.

Um, I only mentioned that because there's a reason we see a lot of mixeduse development these days. um because there are opportunities for uh you know developers to you know they they put in a whole bunch of money and then they can get some back over time. So I was curious about that but you kind of answered that question early on. Um so yeah I guess just to wrap up um kind of piggybacking off of what the mayor said, what Councilwoman Gillis said, we do have a lot of high dollar items.

I know we have, you know, municipal building maybe near the water treatment plant. We have so many things in that shopping cart um at, you know, when we're talking 60 million previously, I'm sure now it's a little higher. Uh that seems to be the trend. So, um yeah, I this is something that we would be really nice to have out here. Um, I do think we have a few higher priority needs, but I definitely want to keep this on the shelf or in the cart um, as it is. So, I appreciate the work there.

Go ahead. Yeah, thank you so much. Um, I was on I think it was less than 10 years because I think I was on the council when we got this land for like a dollar or something from the county. So, uh, yeah, I think this is a great opportunity even before the people that originally were the nonprofit that was formed to look at different things for this area and the grant that they got. So, it's overbuilt, so there is plenty of extra space there to put things there.

And it's right up against the I 10, so it's definitely higher visibility and with all the shopping that's all there already. So, I do think it's a great lo great place. Um, I do appreciate uh the you going out for the RFI and bringing uh those results back. I was look looking forward to seeing what that would be and it's really encouraging that there are some partners out there that you found that might want to also invest in it as well. Really good infrastructure.

So if they want to build it and we provide the infrastructure, I think that'd be a good a good thing to create a green field type project where we're bring the infrastructure and then we are able to benefit from the investment that they're taking the risk on to put in here as well. So definitely I'd like you to continue to pursue that. Um I I would like you to pursue that. I think that'd be great.

and all the things on the beginning here you said about the return on investments and things like that and how we're marketing and how it incur increases enhances our attractiveness and all different things. So I know we're a baseball city but also we're also a BMX city and I wouldn't mind being uh used some other options other than baseball here too.

those traveling teams spent a lot of money um with all their kids traveling and traveling and traveling and with the fear farm shut down with all of their soccer fields. There's really no you got to go to like Mesa to play soccer. So, um it'd be fantastic to have more options here for our residents, especially all of our all of our kids that are here. So, um but yeah, no, I really appreciate it.

Obviously, funding is always going to be a question and priorities, but um I think this would be a great use of of some of our our budgeted monies uh to be able to provide more opportunities and also more tourism dollars here to the city as well to be the only I mean, I don't know that much about cricket, but I'm sure it'll draw people and we'd be the only cricket stadium in Arizona that I know about.

So, that'd be a pretty uh I think that'd be pretty unique and something that we can uh stand out from the crowd with and a place that people would travel pretty far, I'm sure, to come come here as well. So, yeah, I'm excited for that. I'm excited uh for all potential opportunities there, but yeah, continue to to pursue it. So, and then we'll talk about more about the next slides right here. Okay. Thank you, Council Member Beckles.

Well, prior to me being on council, I was on Parks and Rex Advisory Commission when we were visioning this. So, I'm excited to see that it's not a dead issue, but it does have a steep steep financial climb. I get that. One of the things that we really talked about was we didn't have anything like this in the West Valley as the West Valley continues to grow and it will continue to grow.

So hopefully somehow someway we can um move this keep this issue uh on on our um agenda and and hopefully keep it step by step moving forward. Thank you, Vice Mayor. You're on. Thank you. Well, when we got this property, um, we got the property because the former city manager had a friend who visioned that this would be an amusement park area. And the city manager convinced us to buy the land and they set up a foundation to to put a amusement amusement park there.

and the foundation went out and could not find anyone that would back them or give money to them to do this. Um, this is really just a basin, a runoff basin from I 10. So, of course, it has no enhancements or utilities or streets or and I think the $64 million price tag is too low. I think it's going to cost a lot more than that because there's no streets to get to anything except when you come in on Lichfield Road and you're right behind the hospital and this that and the other.

But I think the soccer fields are a great idea. I had hoped that we were going to develop the second phase of our park, our recreation park, and put the soccer fields out there because we already have so much infrastructure in place. And I thought that that would be the wise thing to do. Maybe this could be our overflow as well.

Um I just uh I I won't be alive to see it when it's developed because it is just an astronomical amount of money to put there and I I just don't know how we're going to do it. I know I'd much rather redo our bridges. I'd much rather redo our roads. I don't want any more scalloped streets because it's important that we get all this work done that we've kind of bypassed all these years. Now, we need to catch up and once we do, then we could really move forward with that.

But, um, oh, and when the foundation couldn't raise the money, they gave the land back to the city. They couldn't do anything with it. So, that's how we got it. I think it's for for what it's worth, that's about all we can do with it. We certainly don't want to put houses there. We don't want them right up beside the freeway. And, um, I think that the soccer fields are great. I have a granddaughter that is a professional women's soccer player in Sydney, Australia.

I have flown all over the United States seeing that child play. I just got back from North Carolina last week and saw her play in a million-doll tournament. So, I'm stupid. I'll spend the money. Grandparents will spend the money. So, we know we can get people here. She played at Reach 17, I think, or reach 12 11. Reach 11, which is out by the the national cemetery, and she flew in from Washington with 21 of her players, and all of the parents came. So, you know, we're spending money.

So, it's a it's a wonderful thing to have for these kids because it's such a big deal. Um I just know it's going to take an awful lot of planning. It's going to take an awful lot of um arm twisting, I think, to get this vision done. Uh I don't know what else to do with the wing. So, I think it's a good idea and we'll just see have to see how it it plays out. I just don't know. I'm not necessarily in favor of it and I'm not opposed to it because I don't know what else to do with the land.

And I think by saying you're going to do soccer player soccer fields, I'm sorry, that's a that's a good idea. I don't know so much about the pickle ball if unless we're going to do a lot of pickle ball courts. We can't just do two or three because I don't think that will suffice the need. We may have to think about more than that because we just put 17 new pickle ball courts into Pebble Creek. So, and that's not enough. They want more. They're trying to get 22 more which is astronomical.

But that's they still have 1900 members in their pickle ball club. So, good. I mean, it's rooftop pickle ball. You bet. But anyway, I'd like to to see the plans develop a little bit further and u just keep coming back to us when you think you've got an idea and let's figure out in our priorities what we can do. We always want more parks. Everybody's in favor of it. Everybody wants to do what's right for the citizens and this is a great quality of life for them.

I just don't know if we have the money to do it. Okay. Um Justin, I want to preface. We're talking about We're not putting out the money. We're talking about the investors putting it out. Correct. That is correct. So our Sorry, go ahead. No, but go ahead. I was going to say that is correct. And and to loop back, just to be clear, um we will continue the conversations with those groups that are interested in having conversations um from a public private um perspective, right?

But we will um bring this back in the fall conversation for the strategic planning. So where does it fit amongst all the other priorities, right? if we were to develop it themselves. So, those are the two directions we're going to go. And and you, if I'm not mistaken, have actually had investors that have said they're interested in investing the full amount, correct? For Yes, we have had groups reach out showing that they are invested in uh now let me clarify that you said full amount.

They are nobody has approached saying that they want to develop the whole thing and they can cover those costs. So we could have a couple of investors that would go together on it. Is that the deal? There's opportunity for multiple de um developers to partner on that. There's opportunities for us to partner to where we cover some of the costs just as an example. I mentioned infrastructure, but that would just be a hypothetical example to where we as a city contribute to some of the development.

Um but even that would we would need to bring that back to council and bring that back into the strategic plan for budgeting. Um, but it's really just to continue the conversations. But to clarify my point, sorry, nobody came and said we have full funding to build this whole thing. But we between everybody, we might have full funding. There are without the city being involved. Um, right now everybody I don't know that's where we need to have the further conversations.

I don't know that even we'll know that as time goes on. Correct. Correct. And also there is room to bring the county into it because it'd be to their advantage also. Correct. I believe there is interest in the county being able to to help with some of the So that would be good because that takes it off of the city.

So the whole idea is for us not to bear all of that to bring in some other people to help us with this and end up, you know, being able to make some good money so that we don't have a problem paying anything back. That's what I wanted to check. Thank you. Y go ahead. So when it comes back in the fall, be sure to be ready to talk about water. Yeah. Uh so if if I if I can uh council member, thank you.

Um we through the conversations from the RFI, we did take your feedback and explored water options and we do believe we have some water solutions specific to this location using some of the um uh the PASS water. Um as well there is infrastructure near these to support that as well as Liberty reclaimed water and they have expressed interest in uh using some reclaimed water. So, so more to come in the fall as we build this into the future plans. But yes, great.

And if if I can, I just do want to clarify. Um, Vice Mayor, you mentioned phase two. Just for awareness, phase two is is right now currently designed for two additional fields. So, that would bring GRC to four fields total. So, that's from a regional um tourism perspective. That's not enough for a large tournament. Um, and what was originally designed on here is actually shown as 48 pickle ball courts. Um, is what was showed in the conceptual design on the study.

So, um, hopefully that gives some clarity to to your questions there. So, so thank you for the dialogue and the conversation. More to come. Um, and yes, we'll bring it back as part of the strategic planning amongst other things. So, with that, David, I will hand it back to you. Thank you. Okay, we got another slide. All right, we have a couple more slides. Yes. So, thank you, Justin.

Um it's exciting to think about the many possibilities um for Goodyear and we know that visitors to the city are multiaceted and are looking for more than just one type of activity. Uh that brings us to outdoor recreation uh sector and celebrating the natural assets that are available to expand tourism. We all know the five C's of Arizona and climate is one of the most attractive elements that visitors are looking for and we have great climate in Goodyear.

The city has opportunities to continue to invest in outdoor spaces for events, races, ad and adventure challenges in natural settings. We're excited about the upcoming expansion of the Boulder Wash Trail and the connections this extension provides and also the Australia Mountain Regional Park that is a hidden gem that provides over 20,000 acres of natural open space for visitors to hike, bike, and explore.

These outdoor spaces appeal to visitors and promote activities such as stargazing, bird watching, and taking a nature walk. Future opportunities with our partnerships with the lower Hila River Collaborative, which is a part of the Rio Reimagine vision. This has the future potential of positioning the river as a central ecoourism attraction. Future focus on leveraging open space gives the city many opportunities to appeal to those passionate about outdoor recreation. Question. Thanks, Mayor.

Um, I just had a question on the Bullard Wash Trail uh about the timing of that and the overall plan is getting all the way down to the ballpark with that. Is that correct? Uh, mayor, council member uh Terry, yes. Uh that portion of the trail extension is currently in design. Uh design will conclude in FY26 and then construction is set to begin over FY 27 and 28. Okay. Thank you. Go ahead. Next we transition into an area that also has great appeal to tourists. Arts and culture.

Re research shows that today's tourist wants to pursue personal growth and enrichment and the arts provide this. As we look to communities with strong tourism appeal, these places have dedicated spaces for arts, such as performing arts centers, galleries, and concert halls that can host traveling Broadway shows, nationally recognized performers, and upandcoming fine artists.

Dedicated arts venues can be leveraged to provide year-round signature events and programming that visitors connect with and travel for. In the future, as council considers long-term cultural assets in Goodyear, we want to highlight the important the importance of partnerships with the private sector and collaborations with universities, cultural institutions, artists and residency, and cultural exchanges that will support a vibrant and successful arts landscape.

Now, I will pass this back to Joe to continue sharing more about the final two tourism pillars. Thank you, Dave. Um, experiential tourism is on the rise and that includes where people eat, shop, and spend time between events. Uh, Goodyear has the potential to elevate this space significantly. We see opportunity in creating more more destinationdriven experiences, unique shopping and dining areas that people will travel for, not just stumble upon.

Events can drive traffic to these destinations and give people a reason to explore and stay longer. While growing, our nightlife and entertainment offerings are also a gap area. By investing in a more vibrant mix of live live music, patio dining or evening evening events and entertainment retail, we can extend the visitor experience well beyond daytime hours.

And importantly, efforts like the Goodyear Ballpark Village RFP show that we're already thinking in this way, connecting entertainment with hospitality and placemaking to activate key parts of the city. F in the final pillar uh we when we look at tourism in a broader sense one of the most commonly identified needs is more hotels and meeting space especially here in the southwest valley. Is there a question you did you have something? Yeah, appreciate. Sorry again.

Um, on the shopping, dining, hospitality, I I ask a lot about, you know, timing for issues. I that's probably the biggest question I get. So, um, see the Ballpark Village on here. Um, similar to Bullard Wash, I know we have an RFP going out for that soon. Um, just kind of what what are we looking for in that area?

Um, and just kind of details there just on the growth if that's all right because I get a lot of folks saying, "Oh, well, you you ruined what we can do around the ballpark because of all the apartments that are that are there." So, I'm using this as an opportunity to at least have a conversation not only with yourselves, but so the public can see just what exactly we're looking for and uh where we're going with it. Thank you for the question. Thank you, Mayor. Council member Terry.

Um so in the new fiscal year, one of the items that we will be um taking action on from the strategic plan is to release a request for proposals for a developer to essentially come in and um create some proposals for how we might activate the 50 plus acres that surround the ballpark, which is Ballpark Village. And what we're looking for um in that request for proposal is something that has a bit more of an entertainment retail focus.

Joe mentioned experiential retail um and something that would differentiate itself from the GSQ area. We don't want it to compete with GSQ, but we want it to be something unique and separate from GSQ. So that in a nutshell, it would be a a multi-use development with a focus on uh experiential experiences. Okay. And so that if I'm not mistaken, that goes out next month. And then any sort of timing I'm I'm I'm sure it would be up to whatever developer.

But when you know you get a citizen asking about, well, when can we expect to see something? We're probably still a few years away, I'm sure. But that's at the end of the day probably up to the developer. Is that correct? Yes. Thank you. Uh the timeline I think would be dependent on what sort of proposals we see and what the city ultimately decides to move forward with.

Um I can't really speak to when we would see things going vertical, but the uh RFP will be released the first or second week in July. July 7th, I believe. Okay. Thank you. That's Thank you. Yeah. The way I kind of see it is for any of those asking about around the ballpark, nothing's happened there forever because there's been no seating. There's been no density.

So, you can explain to them that the density around that ballpark with the apartments and the housing is the seating so that it can support retail when it gets into the stuff when you go out for your RFQ. So, again, you know, um retail follows rooftops. So this is kind of the seating to get it started. At least that's how I kind of see it. So yeah, good question. Go ahead. Thank you.

Um and the final pillar, uh when we look at tourism in a broader sense, one of the most commonly identified needs is more hotels and meeting space, especially here in the southwest valley. These are essential components for attracting conferences, business meetings, and professional events. Right now, there's a gap in the region.

Many organizations are looking for convenient venues outside of the east valley and downtown, but there simply aren't enough facilities to accommodate them here in the southwest valley. Goodyear is well positioned to meet that demand. Having more full service hotels with conference or event space would not only fill a regional need, it would also drive weekday visitation, support local businesses, and open the door to new economic opportunities.

One of the main things that we heard from communities that we interviewed was the critical importance of having ample hotel rooms to support a tourism economy and maximize economic impact. This kind of infrastructure helps diversify our tourism offerings, creating steady year-round activity beyond seasonal events. In our city and the southwest valley continue to grow, the ability to host professional gatherings here will only become more important. Now, I'll pass it back to Wendy.

Thank you, Joe. So, as a result of our research and analysis into other communities and tourism models, we've drafted a sample tourism strategy, which was included in your packets that combines all of these pillars into a cohesive approach focusing on destination marketing to enhance Goodyear's visibility, attract visitors, and drive economic impact. Based on our research and the best practices identified, I'm offering the following recommendations.

What you'll see on the slide is a list of short-term recommendations. These are recommendations that we could implement today with no additional funding. We can use existing resources that the city already has in place. So the first thing is to create an office of tourism as a division of the economic development department. Tourism is a major economic driver and it aligns with the goals for economic development with a business focused approach with regional and industry relationships.

This approach provides structure and momentum and it also p provides strategic alignment operational efficiencies and reflects industry best practices. The Arizona Office of Tourism Prop 302 funds currently have a narrower focus and we can leverage them to include the pillars that we've identified in this presentation. We can also begin stakeholder and partner engagement by assembling our key stakeholders that would be those in the hospitality industry, sports teams, tourism industry, etc.

to serve as a collaborative body to support the development implementation and evolution of a tourism strategy. This kind of group can provide local insight, help us build community alignment, and also help the city identify opportunities to enhance tourism and the visitor experience. And finally, we can begin a targeted outreach to an industry called the small groups meetings market.

This market focuses on meetings and conferences for small groups which are about 50 to 100 attendees that Goodyear can presently accommodate this size of a group. Um, and as hotel offerings expand, we can easily adapt to enlarge these efforts to larger groups. And again, these are all things that we could implement right away using existing resources. There's no additional funding required. The next strategies are broken down into medium-term and long-term.

In the medium-term, uh we can develop and launch a formal citywide destination strategy. We can also expand and we can expand on existing and foster new partnerships with sports organizations, tourism boards, cultural institutions, and local businesses and explore options for public private partnerships to to invest in key infrastructure. In the longer term, we can support future opportunities for expansion of Goodyear's amenities such as event venues and multi-use sports facilities.

In conclusion, Goodyear has a unique opportunity to transform tourism from a mostly seasonal asset to a yearround economic engine. Through deliberate planning, investment, and leadership, we can unlock Goodyear's full potential as a vibrant destination city. That concludes our presentation, and I would like to turn it back to council for feedback, questions, and discussion. Thank you. Any questions? Followup. Yep. Yeah, I'm excited for the uh office of tourism. I think it's a good idea.

Um is there one person in your is under your organization? Is there one person going to be heading that or is it you're absorbing you have enough resources to be able to do that? Right now we can absorb it. Um I have the good fortune of having launched two tourism programs in different cities um in my resume. So I have I have done it before. Good.

actually already has uh an official destination marketing organization and we would be expanding on that creating an office of tourism as part of this strategy. Okay. You can still absorb what you have going on. Okay. And is the 302 funding enough for now or will you need more funding potentially for the short term? We can continue using the 302 funding the way we're currently using it.

If council desires to um uh explore one of the other strategies, we'll want to take a look at that maybe through the strategic planning process in the fall. Yeah. I mean, I'm personally I don't know what it would look like, but I know we give what do we give our arts and culture commission like is it 2% of our general fund right now? I think for capital. So yeah. So maybe there's something that we earmark manager. It's based on capital project expense overall expense. Excuse me.

For arts for the arts commission. So yeah. So maybe there's something we do that where we tie one or two% or something addition for tourism. I think it's a good priority. So but I don't know what that looks like dollar wise. So or if it's enough or not or maybe 302 is good for now, but I just make sure we don't have it languish. We should get it go off the ground.

Hope it's doing well and if you need more resources, I just want to know about it so I can help you help you try to get those resources that you need. So, thank you. Thank you. Um Wendy and Joe and Justin, I think you all did a great presentation here. You made it very clear where it was not made clear before to us when we were talking about some of this stuff and now I think it's been pretty clear because what you need from us is just the information to go ahead with it. Right. Pretty much.

Okay, thank you. Good job all of you. Go ahead. Yeah. Um Wendy, just clarification on uh one of the last points for an office of tourism. You said you could do that in the short term without any other financial uh needs from us. Is that is that correct? That's correct, sir. Okay. Thank you. Laura, I like your uh five pillars. I think you made a a sound reasonable plan to get us started.

Um reflecting on the long-term things and you know, you talk about the the um we're going to have great assets. I mean certainly like you mentioned GSQ uh the ballpark's already a proven uh tourist attraction, but then when we do the ball park village as that comes to evolve and has its own identity, that's going to be powerful. And then I think we just can't underestimate the power BIES is going to have on tourism in our city. I mean, it's it it's going to be a massive draw.

Uh it really it's going to put Goodyear on a map in a brand new way. So, I think having your office of tourism to kind of capitalize on that um is definitely going to be helpful. Um we do have a uh a pretty full shopping cart of uh capital improvement plans. I think like over a billion. So, there's going to have to be I mean, so we start talking about performing arts, conference centers, um the Basin Sports Complex.

I mean, there's going to have to be a lot of decisions made on what's really going to be the best return on an investment and and where we can find those good partnerships. So, it'll be a lot of creativity uh there. But, um it's exciting. I think we've got a good plan. So, thank you for your work. Thank you. Well, thank you. Great presentation and looking forward to your office of tourism. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Next third item is the internal audit program update and report on a payroll and timekeeping assessment. Where's Jared? Here you go. Thank you, mayor, members of the council. February 24th of this year, council took action to establish an internal audit program. and I'm here tonight in my role as secretary to the audit committee to give you an update on that internal audit program. Three main things we're going to be talking about tonight is the status of the city auditor.

It was a position that was also included in that authorization from council back in February, the audit committee and then we'll also talk about the first audit report that came before the audit committee which was a payroll and timekeeping assessment. We'll start first with the city auditor. the city auditor position. We closed the job announcement back in May and we had our first interviews last week on June 11th.

At the time when we put this presentation together, we were still scheduling interviews for our finalists. We actually are going to be doing those interviews tomorrow with a couple of our finalist candidate candidates. Our expectation is that we want to have a July start date for that for that position and looking forward to bringing them to the audit committee in August. With that, I'll pause right there so we can maybe have a discussion about the city auditor. Go ahead. Appreciate it, mayor.

Thanks, Jared. You knew was coming. Uh, I had mentioned in committee just kind of the role and authority of the auditor. And I wanted to ask um not only you but the city manager um what would be the process to have this auditor become one of the employees that reports directly to council. Um maybe that's for the city attorney too. I am looking at I don't want you to feel left over here. Yeah. I believe it's a charter change but I'm going to I didn't I'm don't have my law degree. The m council.

Yes, the the charter designates which city employees report directly to the city council. So, it' require a change to the city charter, which would be drafting the question, submitting it to the voters at a an election. Okay. I I asked that kind of knowing that answer, but I did want to um in a setting like this, I know I expressed it on committee, but fact that it's on our agenda here in a work session, say uh a long-term goal.

I I do think it's beneficial just observing best practices um for other cities. I know the county does it. Um, it's one of the very few uh people who would report directly to the council and that's some uh that's a long-term goal that I would like to pursue. But I am excited in the short term that we are hopefully getting uh getting started with this uh this summer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And I know because I was freaking out about this and I admit it when when you guys told me you didn't know if you would have that internal auditor this year and and I was to the point basically I think probably very to the point and I am so thrilled that you guys made it happen. I told you in that session I was thrilled. I am beyond thrilled. I feel like my head's going to pop off because we're going to have this person soon and we're going to get started on this. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. The only question I have is typically when you have a boss, somebody's giving you assignments on where they want you to take a look at. At least as a chief tax auditor. I did that when I was a sales tax. So if the position does report, this is something we all have to think about to the city council. Who's the one who's going to be directing the auditor on which specific thing? Do you pull them in and have a vote for the to whatever? Do we have a council meeting?

say this is where I want you to focus on, but just kind of keep that in mind with seven bosses on how you're going to direct this individual as you move forward. So, mayor, just on that, I I would hope it would, and again, this is something we can talk about maybe this fall or next year because, you know, it would require a charter change, but very similar to um how we handle our city attorney or even the city manager. Um, you know, it it's kind of a we give guidance and direction.

I I assume it would work uh something similar to that. As long as it's not seven gardenses, we'll be good. All right. Thank you. Yes. Go ahead. I think we really have to credit the strategic plan for us even getting a a city auditor and um I'm really I'm grateful for that because I think it was important to a number of us and since this is a new position for us, the decision was made at the time to report have it report to the city manager because we have to get the program up and running.

But we also wanted to ensure that um you know if there in the future there was any unscrupulous city manager that there would be an equal reporting or or release of information to the committee so that there wouldn't be a way to hide things. And I think that you're you've put those kinds of structure in place.

So if we look longterm about making it a council, let's get the program up and running and uh fully functional and really hit some of the big items that we've got and then we can make decisions in the future. Thank you. Go ahead. Next up, we'll talk about the audit committee. The audit committee made up of three council members. Council member Hampton, Councilwoman Gillis, and Council Member Terry are the audit committee. So, everybody on my right side is on the audit committee.

Uh, we've been fairly busy over the last few months. We've met four times now in about two and a half months. Uh, normally the audit subcommittee, the audit committee replaces the audit subcommittee. the audit subcommittee would meet four times in about two years. So, we've been very busy over the last couple months. Uh April 9th meeting, we set up our bylaws uh that were required as a part of the ordinance that was adopted. We also elected our officers. So, Council Member Hampton is our chair.

Council member Terry is our vice chair. We then approved an interim audit plan much like in the future the internal auditor will be bringing an annual audit plan forward. So, we put together an interim audit plan that was approved and the audit plan was very brief because it just runs us through the end of this fiscal year. We actually had two studies that were underway. One for payroll and timekeeping and the second was a followup for capital improvement program.

We're actually going to be talking about that on the next item. So, since we had those already underway, we decided to bring those in front of the audit committee and use those as an audit report. sort of get everybody used to the the cadence of how this will be going in the future. Uh couple of the things because we kind of did this underway. We had these studies underway already.

Uh we did have to work a little bit on the timing of the deliver the deliverables, most specifically the payroll and timekeeping assessment uh finished up in late March and it took us a little time to get the management responses together. Originally there wasn't really a process in place for that but uh we did bring that forward on May 12th and then on June 12th last week it was actually June 11th is when we presented the CIP followup uh as this slide here shows.

Uh so we brought that CIP follow-up actually a day earlier than what was originally planned. And then we did meet today to talk about our annual financial audit which was formerly a process that the audit subcommittee would go through and now the audit committee has those those duties.

Uh looking forward we will have a followup on the payroll scheduled for August 25th when we come back from break and right now the next meeting after that is scheduled for November 17th followup on the financial audit. However, at the August 25th meeting, we hope to bring the internal auditor forward and possibly a partial or a full annual financial audit plan, I mean an annual audit plan adopted so we can move forward into the next fiscal year.

And with that, are there any questions on the audit committee? So, next we'll move on to the first audit report that was received by the audit committee, the payroll and timekeeping assessment. This was conducted by a third-party consultant. Proivity, you'll recognize the name when we talk about the CIP audit. Again, use the same third party for consistency. Uh the this assessment was very comprehensive in nature in that it looked at all aspects of payroll from onboarding and offboarding.

It also looked at timekeeping. uh as in in addition to looking at the process of generating the payroll itself because of its comprehensive nature natur nature it took about five months to complete and involved just about every department was questioned or interviewed as a part of this assessment. Coming out of that assessment we had three major categories of recommendations. Standardizing our processes, automation of our systems and optimizing the payroll system.

Underneath those three categories, we had 12 recommendation themes and 70 tactical recommendations. And as a part of the management response, we actually went through each one of those and responded to each one of of those recommendations. And on this next slide, I've taken the recommendation themes and group them into their categories. And then on the far right, you see here the completed date.

So as a part of the management response, we put a timeline of when we will be completed with each of these items, the recommendations with each of these items. So you see the numbers of the recommendation themes are out of order uh because we've reordered them based on when we will be completed with each one of these. Uh the first the first item that talks about cross departmental coordination.

uh one of the things that was discussed was how we generally would look at the coordination between the finance department and HR. However, we have other partners that also are involved in the payroll process. So, in each of the departments, we have a timekeeper who essentially is the person that communicates at on each payroll to the individual employees what's the best way to get their timekeeping in and also following up with them. So every department has a timekeeper.

Additionally, the police department, the fire department, and the parks and recck department have administrators that work on their own timekeeping systems. And then additionally, we have partners within the police and the fire associations that we work with. So as part of this recommendation, it's it's looking at having standardized communication with all of those groups and most importantly creating a feedback loop.

A lot of the communication is one way coming down from the HR and finance staff to the individual departments. And now we're creating a feedback loop to bring that back back information back from those departments to the the core functions of payroll. Following that, we're looking to actually strengthen the communication to the individual employees about their paychecks and also creating that feedback loop from the individual employees.

So giving them a route and telling them here is where you go to ask questions about your check. This is the route that you go. Creating frequently asked question pages for them and creating ways that we can communicate with the departments and they or the employees and they can communicate back to us. From there in the standardization we're looking at standardizing our timelines and our processes. And this will do a few things for us.

uh one, it'll be easier for us to communicate those and to to do the comprehensive payroll training program that we talk about in the next item once we standardize those processes and create those timelines. The second thing, it will also allow us to track when we have variances in our payroll processes, when we're not meeting timelines or when we have errors in the process. Uh finally, uh looking at process improvements in the compliance tracking.

Again, once we standardize our our payroll timelines and processes, then we will create a more a more centralized way to track our compliance. Right now, each of our compliance efforts is tracked by individual departments and isn't necessarily standardized and tracked centrally. You can see that these efforts are all occurring now through September and are the foundation for many of the items that we have on the next slides. Uh next we talk about automation of systems.

Uh the very first item uh standard standardizing access credentials and monitoring payroll systems is most specifically about our part-time staff. So within the parks department, we have some part-time staff that it isn't our current practice to give them access to our network. And if they don't have access to our network, they can't do their time sheets in our timekeeping system. So we actually have a side system for them.

So, as a foundational item for later making improvements to our timekeeping processes, we're updating our access credentials to allow those part-time employees to be into the system. Uh, the payroll and compliance and risk mitigation, automating those will follow the previous slide when we talked about standardizing the reporting of those. Then we will look at automating the systems involved with those. And finally, streamlining onboarding and offboarding processes.

And it has a completion date of January of 2026. But because this involves multiple systems, we're actually beginning this now and looking to have it fully implemented by Janu January of 2026. Finally, we have the payroll system optimization. Most of these have to wait for another one of those items to be completed such as enhancing the payroll data accuracy through validation.

We want to make sure that we have all our processes standardized and documented before we go and enhance the accuracy of them through validation. We want to create the validation steps by documenting those processes and timelines. Then we'll be looking at automating the processes within payroll itself and then optimizing the payroll system and then optimizing the timekeeping system. One of the key things right now is we actually have multiple timekeeping systems.

We have executive time which is used by most of the staff. Then you have teles staff which is used by police and fire and they actually have those set up differently. So they administer them separately. And then we have sub it up which is used by our parks and recreation mostly for their part-time staff. But we have multiple systems that we need to do needs assessments with each of those departments and then look at the capabilities of our systems to see if we can consolidate those.

But all of those have a a longer time frame uh looking into April of 2026. Most of that is because we're waiting to complete other processes or it involves crossing multiple systems and getting integration set up for each of those. So key things about this assessment and what's going on after that. So first of all, all the progress is being tracked centrally by the city manager's office.

So that we have one source of truth of what's going on with the followup that we're going to be doing with the audit committee in August. And with that, I'll turn it over for any questions or discussion. Go ahead. Yes.

um up in standardized payroll not that one comprehensive payroll training program and who is that for mayor council member Beckles it's comprehensive in nature so we're actually looking at training for the core payroll staff everybody involved in in in in payroll along with the employees so once we standardize all of our processes then we need to train everybody that these are what the standard processes are.

These are the expected timelines and we need to be delivering on those and here's the feedback loops that we're going to have. Additionally, it will be down to the individual employee of here's what here's what the rules are for your timekeeping. Here's what the expected timelines are so everybody's on the same page. Okay. Uh one other question. Um is there a plan in the future to come under one program or you going to stay where you are? Uh thank you mayor council member Beckl.

So as part of as part of this effort one of the key things is to do a needs assessment. So we have to go to the departments because the needs for the fire payroll is drastically different than the needs for parks and recck part-time staff for instance. So we're going to be doing needs assessments with each of them and then looking for the best fit for the system. So we would love to get to one system.

However, we need the needs assessment and then the evaluation of those systems to see what we could possibly consolidate. Thank you. I just asked because I've come from a system a citywide that had one system. Wasn't perfect, but it was one system. Good. I love the fact that you guys um are getting the employees involved where they're going to be able because the paychecks, the problems with the paychecks have been such a big issue.

And so now they will be able to take care of their I mean if people if they're not people aren't getting back to them soon enough or whatever, we have hopefully helped that so that they can get on that and take care of it sooner. Um I also want to make sure that everybody's aware that you guys have put a lot into this to because I'm a follow-up freak. Everybody knows that. I know you really know that.

But I really believe that um to have everything back to us by August, the end of August is amazing because we really, you know, that's amazing with having a break in there and stuff with us having a break. Um so I'm really thrilled with how quickly this is being implemented because we always complain because things aren't going quick enough. You know that. Uhhuh. Very happy. I think you're you're doing it very quickly and I think it's awesome. So thank you again. I'm thrilled. Thank you, Mayor.

Councilwoman Gillis on the communication to the employees. Two things. There's there's direct communication and training that that we will be doing with the individual employees. Uh the the other thing we kind of noticed is we probably aren't training those timekeepers essentially those super users in the indivi in the departments as much. We're not utilizing them as much as that as we should. Uh they're the ones interacting with employees.

They're really our first line when there's a question that comes up on timekeeping or even paychecks. that's usually the first person they go to. And if we can get the information and have them educated on it as well, I that'll help the employee, it'll it'll it'll get them that answer a lot quicker, for sure. Quick question for you. Uh, is the um internal auditor going to be a CPA registered? U, thank you, mayor. Not necessarily. Uh, we weren't necessarily looking for a CPA.

There are other there are other uh certifications that uh internal auditors usually there's a there's actually a series of them. So we're not necessarily looking for a C CPA, but I I can tell you that our finalists do have other very um pertinent certifications that will help in this area. The only reason why I ask you that is if you have a CPA license and you run across fraud or whatever, you can lose your license by not disclosing that. So there's a little more of a level of CPA.

They have a little more risk. If they run across something and they don't disclose it, they could actually lose their license because they have a code of ethics. Now, I don't know on the ones that you're interviewing for finalists whether they have that type of code of ethics where they can lose their certification if they run across something and they don't disclose it. So just kind of keeping that in mind.

That's what I like about the CPA license is because it's very valuable and if you run a file on that, you can actually lose it. So, just some thought for you. Thank you, mayor. Thank you. Go ahead. That's it. That's it. All right. Do we uh Does do you need a short break before we do the last one? We got one more. Yeah. Yes, we are. But what I'm saying that's very short go through that and then we can break because we're going to have to make Okay. Okay. Let's Okay, let's do that. All right.

We have our marching orders. Go ahead. You're up. Yeah, good evening, Mariam and council. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Kenya Kudson. I'm deputy city manager here. And I'm joined uh with me by uh Steve Cinto, our engineering director and city engineer. And uh we're here tonight to be able to give you an update on a fiscal year 25 strategic plan project in the infrastructure focus area.

Um the goal of the capital project management uh project was to identify and implement best practices to manage the city's capital improvement program. So the agenda we have for tonight's brief presentation going to provide a background on uh this project as especially why it's in the strategic plan.

We're going to talk about a third party evaluation that we had conducted of our CIP um program and then we're going to talk about uh city actions we took in response to that review um and then and the keeping of continuous improvement we had conducted a similar 2025 risk management review and then finish up by talking about progress and next steps.

So the background behind this uh we had a number of challenges going back several years to the the successful implementation of our capital improvement program uh was a lot of it was due to our growth trajectory as a city but I think there was also some things that we had to do to better manage and control our cost growth and some of the scoping as aspects of our projects and to make sure we were focused on on time delivery. Uh the city staff took action um to address these issues.

We did a number of things and uh beginning with some internal and external surveys we did, but aside from those, we actually took an action to be able to um bring a independent auditor on to be able to uh look at our pro program. And then also um because council was very focused in on that, this became a strategic plan project um because of his importance and criticality to as we grow as a city to be successful.

Um and I would also note that it was a city um managers is listing as the facilitator for this project. That's because uh even though even though Steve is engineering director role is primarily responsible with the CIP uh we have a number of other departments including information technology the finance department and also Steve's customer service customer departments as well that are all involved in uh making these improvements and making it happen.

So as I mentioned uh we engaged a firm in 2023 um Proivity which is a global risk management and consulting firm. They were tasked with uh conducting a review of CIP processes and assessing the health of our management of our CIP. To assess that health uh productivity uses an organizational maturity model that scores a program from between zero and five and we'll cover that model a little bit more in detail a little bit later but they finalized the report in June 2023.

Now, out of that, um, we took the city took a number of actions to be able to make sure we were looking at those, um, 23 or the 32 recommendations that Proivity listed for improvement. Um, engineering staff worked with other city departments to do that as um to take action to be able to assess and implement those recommendations.

uh the stakeholder surveys I mentioned earlier that Steve's team did it both internally and externally uh they took that provided a lot of valuable input and feedback into how we would um improve our CIP processes and there were some was some overlap between those the surveys and what productivity found but there was some standalone items as well.

I'll mention that Steve was up here if you remember back in February talking about some improvements they were making to the CIP program and one of those uh some of those areas is what um they were focused in as well. Uh now moving on to 2025 this year uh even though Steve's team and a lot of the other city partners and stakeholders have been working to be able to make significant progress in improving our CIP processes.

Uh you know one thing is for us to say it but another one is to be able to bring back a third party and to be able to have those eyes on the pro pro on the progress that's been made. So we brought Proivity back to reassess our program. Now uh they were looking not just at how we had were doing and assessing the or taking care of addressing those 32 recommendations but also to be able to look how we were addressing best practices in our um and adopting those.

And so we've been making these uh improvements but we as we've been doing that we want to make sure also in productivity scale are we becoming a more mature organization and how we address our CIP. So, uh, the next one, um, is is really going to be, uh, looks like I lost a slide in there, but, um, I would mention that, uh, that the scores go from zero to five. So, a zero, um, score when you're looking at, and you can go to the next slide, I think.

Um, so this looks at how we have scored, um, as a a um, organization. Now, zero is the lowest and five is the most mature. Um what you see up here is the seven areas that um Proivity looks at um when they're looking at a CIP program. It starts with governance, policy, standards and procedures planning design procurement, construction, and closeout. So when you see three bar bars on each one of these areas, the leftmost one, the navy blue, is based on our 2023 scores.

The middle bar, the light blue one, is our 2025 scores. And the far right one, the grayish blue, is actually what would be kind of be the desired outcome. Now you notice that some of the desired outcomes aren't all the way to five. And that really is based on the fact that the amount of effort and work it might take to get from four to five may not may have diminishing returns and investment.

So, but you want I do want to note that if you look at this is you have those first three governance, policy, standards and procedures and planning where we've made significant progress and Proivity noted that um even though we did not move up in the scores in the other four areas, uh we did make a lot of improvements in those areas, it just didn't move the needle on the overall score.

Um, I don't want to bury the lead on this, but Protivity said when they came in at after two years, it's not normal that an organization would see this much improvement over just two short years. So, it really is a testament to the work that Steve has worked with the other departments to be able to really focus in on making sure our CIP management practices were improved.

So, um, to take you through a little bit more of the 2025, uh, recommendations because they did have some recommendations for improvement that we're working on. I'm gonna turn it over to Steve to take you through that. All right. Thank you, Key. So, as in 2023, Proivity provided some valuable insights into helping us to continue to increase our CIP maturity model. Um, I'm going to cover their themes and recommendations and our planned actions in just a little more detail.

Uh, this will be very familiar to those on the right here who were in the audit subcommittee because we just presented the findings last week. Um the recommendations are across four themes as we said uh manual data governance, JOC procurement, inconsistent data system use and reporting and ongoing project management manual improvements. So the first 2025 theme that proivity uh addressed deals with manual data governance.

Their observation was that our financial and project management software they're not integrated uh which does create some redundant work. Naturally the recommendation is to connect uh the systems to reduce that redundant administrative work. So uh our action longterm will be looking into integrating the software solutions. However in the near term we can work to better define the source of truth uh for the data and provide better standardizations for updates within the system.

The second theme deals with job order contracting or JOCC's uh which is essentially a list of on call contractors that are efficient or advantageous to use for certain types of construction. So currently the city utilizes shared contract language uh with other agencies which is valuable to us but it does limit our our control over the vendors contract terms and reporting.

uh Proivity's recommendation is that we develop a JOCC program tailored to Goodyear's needs and uh our action item or as our action item engineering and finance. We've already uh partnered to start the development of a citywide JOC program which will include a procedure manual and training for all relevant staff. So the third theme identifies that inconsistent use of portions of our project management software hinders detailed project tracking and communication.

Their recommendation is to standardize use of TDX software to ensure consistent data entry and reporting. And um our action item here is to create a job aid uh to assist with the data entry and then train our PMs across the city in its use and to work with it to further streamline um the TDX software for project management within the CIP. And finally, the the final theme is related to the ongoing PM manual improvements we're working on. The recommendation here is very straightforward.

It's to finalize and circulate the PM manual for citywide use. And our action item is to complete and publish the manual, which we're on track to do by the end of this month. And then we'll develop a citywide rollout strategy to train all CIP project managers across the city. Uh so to wrap up, I'll summarize uh the latest progress and next steps. Uh the 2025 audit as we mentioned was completed in May and we presented the details of the findings to the audit committee last week on June 11th.

U moving forward we'll be working on implementing the new recommendations some of which we've already started. And finally staff uh we do plan to re-engage proivity likely in two years in 2027 at the same interval to further assess the maturity of the city's CIP management and to identify any additional opportunities for improvement. So, thank you for your time. That concludes our presentation and now we're looking forward to any feedback or questions you may have.

Any questions and we can break. Thank you. Thank you. So, now it's got to get reset about 10 minutes. We got to close all this out. Okay. Yep. And then we'll go into special meeting. Let me go ahead and read this before you go anywhere. Like to call the special meeting to order. June 16th, 2025. City clerk, please read the role. All members are present. Okay.

Uh, everybody here, a vote may be held to call on executive session for the following pursuant to ARS number 38-431.03A3 and five discussion and consultation with the city's attorney for legal advice regarding meet and confer ordinance and memorandum understanding with employee organizations and to instruct the city's designated representative regarding the negotiations with employee organizations on salary and benefits negotiation. Can I get a motion? Second. Got a motion in a second.

Uh, now we're now um going to take a break. And what? Oh, that's All in favor? I All right, then. Now, let's take a break. All right, now we're good.