Grand County Commission Meeting, October 7, 2025 (Video & Transcript)

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Melodie McCandless: Hi there, I’d like to call for the County Commission meeting for October the 7th at 4.01.
Melodie McCandless: In attendance is Commissioner Hedin, Commissioner McCurdy, Commissioner McGann, Commissioner Martinez, and myself, Commissioner McCandless. And still online. I don’t see Bill yet.
Melodie McCandless: I think that Commissioner Winfield will be joining online and Commissioner Hedin is absent.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, I’ll stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
Melodie McCandless: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Melodie McCandless: All right, I have a quick announcement before we start.
Melodie McCandless: And that is that the following items will be moved to the next commission meeting, which is scheduled for October 21st.
Melodie McCandless: These items are all in legal review and they will not be discussed or voted on tonight.
Melodie McCandless: Those items are item number four, the major utility overlays for Moab City, item number five, the Novak Rezone, item number six, the Grandview subdivision final plat, and item number 13, the public defender contract.
Melodie McCandless: I want to let everybody know before the meeting gets started, and if we have any citizens to be heard in the audience. Citizens to be heard. What about online?
Speaker 17: I don’t see anyone online.
Melodie McCandless: And has Bill made it online yet?
Speaker 19: Okay, great.
Melodie McCandless: That’s like, that’s a first. Citizens to be heard. So go ahead and move on to our first item, which is recommending Bill Jackson.
Melodie McCandless: After 36 years of serving in Grand County, with dedication, integrity, collaboration and skill, Bill Jackson is retiring as road supervisor.
Melodie McCandless: Bill began his career with the county on October 1st, 1989.
Melodie McCandless: And fittingly, Claude chose October 1st, 2025 as his last day.
Melodie McCandless: In true Bill fashion, he selected those dates for practical reasons.
Melodie McCandless: He had elk tabs for both seasons and didn’t want to be that guy who asked for time off and starting a new job or leave.
Melodie McCandless: That kind of integrity and responsibility has defined every day of Bill’s service.
Melodie McCandless: Over more than three decades, Bill has guided the road department through tremendous change, strengthening the foundation of our county’s infrastructure and leaving behind the legacy of progress that will serve Grand County for generations to come.
Melodie McCandless: In the county’s archives, there’s a copy of the first recommendation made to the Commission for Bill’s advancement from 1991.
Melodie McCandless: It recognizes his strength, his strong leadership, his work ethic, and his commitment to the people of Grand County.
Melodie McCandless: Those same qualities have never wavered.
Melodie McCandless: On behalf of the Grand County Commission and our entire community, we thank you for your service, Bill, and the years of outstanding service, and we wish you the best in your next chapter.
Melodie McCandless: So may your aim be steady, real smooth, and your elk tabs well used. Thank you.
Cody McKinney: Did you and Tammy collaborate?
Melodie McCandless: Now, did anyone else have anything else to say?
Mike McCurdy: Bill, you’ve helped me already countless times in my short tenure here, but thank you.
Mary McGann: Yes, over, you know, for all the years I’ve been on, you have been so, you know, quick to respond to questions, you know, professional.
Mary McGann: I’ve really enjoyed working with you, and Cody has some big shoes to fill.
Jacques Hadler: It’s been a pleasure working with you, Bill. That’s, yeah, definitely very much appreciate everything you’ve given to the county.
Melodie McCandless: Thank you so much. Good. Thank you all. Period.
Speaker 19: Love that elk tag though.
Melodie McCandless: All right, so up next is our Grand County Recreation Specialist, Mr. Robert.
Robert Hollahan: I did join the Zoom, so you can share my screen.
Melodie McCandless: Hang on. That looks like Commissioner Winfield has joined us via Zoom.
Speaker 19: And you should be able to share now.
Patty Robinson: Oh, I’m not the best in technology.
Robert Hollahan: Thanks, everybody. I’m Robert Hollahan.
Robert Hollahan: I’m here representing the Grand County Special Service, our Grand County Recreation Special Service District, which I’ve been a member for four years.
Robert Hollahan: And first and foremost, we need to thank you all for supporting the Special Service District for a number of years now in the form of a pot of TRT money that we’ve been receiving and has been a fairly significant portion of our budget.
Robert Hollahan: And in particular, we need to thank you for filling in for that pot of TRT money for 2025 once it was determined that that outlay was not in compliance with TRT.
Robert Hollahan: And by making good on that, you prevented us from having a gigantic hole in our budget for 2025.
Robert Hollahan: And I did also want to thank everybody for numerous members of the County Commission have attended our board meetings over the course of this year, and we really appreciate your guys’ interest and engagement with our board and what we’ve had going on.
Robert Hollahan: So I did want to talk briefly just on the kind of overall budget picture that we’re looking at at the Recreation Special Service District.
Robert Hollahan: A significant portion of our revenues, the vast majority, come from mineral lease royalties, which in broad strokes, broad trends, are kind of decreasing year over year and pinching our budget fairly significantly.
Robert Hollahan: On top of that, they’re often very unpredictable.
Robert Hollahan: Budgeting for our board is a game of darts.
Robert Hollahan: I’m sure you guys have no idea what this is like.
Robert Hollahan: I’m trying to guess what our revenues are going to be in a given year.
Robert Hollahan: Sometimes the big mineral lease payments we just do not receive as anticipated.
Robert Hollahan: And so the kind of reliable piece of TRT money that we have been receiving for the county for the past five years really aided our budgeting process just from kind of a certainty perspective.
Robert Hollahan: On the expenditure side, a large portion of our annual expenditures are kind of like fixed obligatory expenses, paying down the debt from building the Recreation and Aquatic Center, paying M&O on Old Spanish Trail Arena.
Robert Hollahan: And some of those expenses, particularly those to M&O, continues to creep up along with inflation, while our revenues are thus creeping down.
Robert Hollahan: That county support that we’ve been receiving via TRT until this year, when it came from the general fund, has enabled us to have enough wiggle room to make kind of any discretionary expenditures, which for us largely is improvements and projects to Old Spanish Trail Arena, as well as our recreation grant program, which helps fund a number of different organizations, which I’ll speak to a little bit more in a second.
Robert Hollahan: So, yeah, we’ll just jump right into that.
Robert Hollahan: So I just have a quick slideshow here to just share with everybody, you know, the recipients of our recreation grant from this year, 2025.
Robert Hollahan: 14 different entities in Grand County received some amount of money from our recreation grant.
Robert Hollahan: It was a total of $35,000.
Robert Hollahan: That was less than the last couple of years, kind of as our budget was pinched a little bit.
Robert Hollahan: But these are all programs that we’re really excited to be able to show support to from the Recreation Special Service District.
Robert Hollahan: They’re all providing programming that reaches kind of a wide swath of Grand County citizens.
Robert Hollahan: I just wanted to highlight a handful of these that kind of gave us a little bit of info, like pictures and so forth.
Robert Hollahan: So we provided a chunk of funding to the Fast Pitch Elite softball program, which is one of the main, among many others, users of all fields out at Old Spanish Trail Arena.
Robert Hollahan: Y’all can review this at your leisure, but we did have a letter of encouragement from Fast Pitch Elite on behalf of further support for recreational infrastructure out at OSTA.
Robert Hollahan: We were able to support and sponsor Beacon providing a climbing after school club for some of their after school students.
Robert Hollahan: We supported Outward Bound in a collaborative program with the Multicultural Center to take some of their youth students on a rafting trip as well as a climbing trip.
Robert Hollahan: We helped fund tuition assistance for the Youth Garden Summer Camp, enabling some students who might not have otherwise been able to afford that program.
Robert Hollahan: And lastly, I’ll just mention we supported Science Moab and their Science on Tap lecture series, which I just wanted to highlight here because some of the programs we’re sponsoring do meet the full age range.
Robert Hollahan: Definitely a majority of them are more youth oriented, but here we see a full packed house at Woody’s Tavern from an event that the rec board was able to help support a science lecture.
Robert Hollahan: So that’s kind of what I had from the grant program.
Robert Hollahan: For this coming year, we received requests from 16 organizations for a total of $68,000.
Robert Hollahan: Looking at our budget, it’s very unlikely we’ll be able to pay out even half that, but it’s always one of the hardest things we have to do in a given year is decide who among all of our really deserving grant applicants can get a piece of that money.
Robert Hollahan: So, kind of giving you that background in the recreation board and kind of what we’ve been up to recently and understanding that the county is undergoing significant budgetary constraints of its own.
Robert Hollahan: I do say before you and humbly request the county continue to support the Recreation Special Service District, you know, in an amount kind of similar to the pot of TRT money that we had previously been receiving in recent years, which was for the last four years, $137,000, which would enable us to, you know, as a Recreation Special Service District, you know, disburse money for any discretionary expense, whether that be continuing our grant program or funding improvements for Old Spanish Trail Arena, which has been the other kind of big discretionary expense that we’ve had in recent years.
Robert Hollahan: And, you know, we were able to collaborate with the county to pay for kind of the new rodeo panels out there over the past year.
Robert Hollahan: We’ve helped fund scoreboard at the ball fields, a bunch of maintenance equipment for the ball fields out there, and that’s just a prized and ever improving recreational asset for our community and kind of support to our board will enable us to keep pushing towards that.
Robert Hollahan: So, thank you all very much for giving us the opportunity to present in front of y’all, and what questions do you have that I can answer.
Mary McGann: Thank you.
Mike McCurdy: No questions? All right. Thank you for the continued support of DOSTA.
Mike McCurdy: It was, just so everyone’s knowledge, it wasn’t just the few things that were mentioned.
Mike McCurdy: It was the front doors, it was the roll up doors, it was the grant grounds, it was quite a few projects out there that we’d like to see the Special Service District help with.
Mike McCurdy: Well, appreciate it, Bill.
Speaker 20: Thanks so much. Thanks. Thanks for coming. Thanks.
Melodie McCandless: So our next presentation is the cloud seeding presentation. Jared.
Jared Smith: What works better, I think I preset the slides, I don’t know if you can pull them up or…
Stephen Stocks: What works best, normally if you can, if you connect the… And then, yeah.
Jared Smith: Okay, let me do that really quick.
Melodie McCandless: And we might need to have… Yeah, I’m trying to get that. Let’s see, WiFi.
Patty Robinson: Actually not. Sorry, I should have done this before.
Jared Smith: All right, there we go. Oh, you got it for me? Okay, good. I’m having trouble syncing to Zoom.
Jared Smith: Okay, so my name is Jared Smith. I’m with Rainmaker Technology Corporation.
Jared Smith: So we presented to the Grand County Water and Sewer Board about two weeks ago, presenting an opportunity to bring cloud seeding to the LaSalle range here. And I think part of the funding discussion was we wanted to present it here with the county.
Jared Smith: And then after, I think, supposing that you are interested, can work with Grand County Water to see how funding could work for it. So we can go to the next slide.
Jared Smith: So in brief, obviously, I don’t need to talk to you guys here. You know, America’s in drought.
Jared Smith: It seems like the West is always in drought. You know, one year where we didn’t have too many water issues, but we’re back in it again.
Jared Smith: And so the solution, if you go down to the next slide, from our perspective, is in the sky. So this is just a quick statistic.
Jared Smith: The atmosphere at any one time holds three times more water than the entire Earth’s annual usage, humanity’s annual usage. And that’s at one moment.
Jared Smith: So just kind of brings to understand the scale of water that’s in the atmosphere at one time. And at Rainmaker, we feel like the solution to helping mitigate future drought is by accessing this water. Next slide.
Jared Smith: So, yeah, so we use cloud seeding. The focus is to release this water.
Jared Smith: We’re very pro-humanity, pro-growth farmers, making sure there’s enough water for the farmers, for the cities. And then obviously the ecosystems.
Jared Smith: The nice thing about cloud seeding compared to other infrastructure investments is that it’s not only the people that benefit.
Jared Smith: It also is, you know, it rains and snows on all the wildlife and they benefit as well.
Jared Smith: So how it works, just that’s probably the most interesting question you may have, is some clouds are, you know, the clouds that you see in the sky, they’re actually liquid water droplets.
Jared Smith: And as they get really high, they’re pure water.
Jared Smith: And the interesting thing about pure water is it doesn’t freeze at zero degrees Celsius or 32 Fahrenheit like normal water in a water bottle would.
Jared Smith: It’s pure, so it doesn’t, you need some form of mineral or purity to cause that to start freezing.
Jared Smith: And so what cloud seeding is, is you take these clouds that have water droplets that are floating by and wouldn’t naturally fall.
Jared Smith: And they’re below freezing temperature.
Jared Smith: And you introduce a mineral that has a similar shape as an ice crystal.
Jared Smith: Once that touches that water droplet, it turns that water to an ice crystal.
Jared Smith: And then that crystal runs into other water droplets and they grow into a snowflake and eventually falls out.
Jared Smith: So the idea is that you’re taking natural clouds.
Jared Smith: You’re not creating clouds.
Jared Smith: You’re taking natural storms that come in and you’re introducing this material to help enhance the process.
Jared Smith: You’re not doubling your water.
Jared Smith: You’re maybe getting, you know, 10 to 20 percent increases over a season.
Jared Smith: But it is, you know, a significant amount over a large surface area. Next slide.
Jared Smith: So cloud seeding has been done for a long time.
Jared Smith: Utah’s got the longest continuous program in over 50 years.
Jared Smith: And it’s proven to be safe, effective.
Jared Smith: Yeah, they’ve, you know, the two big questions are how effective are at which historical TARC control analysis has shown, depending on the area, but it’s between five and 20 percent increases over a winter season.
Jared Smith: And then as far as the safety aspect of it, which people are concerned about, they’ve done studies on land after 30 years of seeding an area to understand, you know, how much of this material is accumulating.
Jared Smith: And what they found is that it’s five orders of magnitude, so 100,000 times lower concentrations after 30 years than the EPA is concerned about.
Jared Smith: So it’s very safe, proven to be very safe. So next slide.
Jared Smith: Basically, why isn’t it everywhere?
Jared Smith: There’s a lot of challenges with cloud seeding, the technology, both in the way that you deploy the material.
Jared Smith: Historically, they’ve used either ground generators or aircraft.
Jared Smith: The problem with aircraft, you have to fly into clouds that are below freezing, which they teach pilots not to do because you get icing on the wings and then you can crash and die.
Jared Smith: So it’s obviously dangerous.
Jared Smith: And then ground generators, particularly in the La Salle, they have had the programs here in the past, but it’s a challenge because the range is so small.
Jared Smith: They’re dependent on larger ranges of the wind lifting the material up into the clouds.
Jared Smith: So the La Salle’s haven’t been an ideal target historically with previous technologies. Next slide.
Jared Smith: So what we’re focusing on is basically implementing new algorithms to identify these cloud conditions that are ideal for cloud seeding, deliver the material using a new weatherized drone that’s capable of flying inside of icing clouds.
Jared Smith: And then we’re working on new radar validation techniques.
Jared Smith: We’re able to see ice forming as the material deployed in the cloud, basically speeding up the validation process.
Jared Smith: I mean, numerical modeling, we can skip that.
Jared Smith: It’s a little nerdy for the meteorologists. So these are our drones.
Jared Smith: They’re capable of flying up to 15,000 feet. They fly into cloud.
Jared Smith: They have anti-icing systems on the props that allow them to shed ice so they can sustain deployment in cloud.
Jared Smith: The idea is that they can deploy this mineral into the clouds correctly instead of being dependent on being on the ground or having some pilot putting their life at risk to fly in there.
Jared Smith: And then we have radar systems and weather stations that we’re deploying.
Jared Smith: We actually deployed a nearby here for monitoring the cloud and understanding the structures of the storms coming in.
Jared Smith: And we’re operating all across the West.
Jared Smith: So one of the reasons we came to the LaSalle, Walter Brown County, is because the state of Utah is funding a cloud seeding program, pretty much every county across the state.
Jared Smith: And the LaSalles kind of have been supported just due to the technological issues historically.
Jared Smith: But with this new dispersion method using drones, we thought it would be – there’s funding from the state of Utah.
Jared Smith: They’re basically funding $350,000 of a $400,000 cost to run a cloud seeding program with a drone.
Jared Smith: And we thought LaSalles have no funding from the state.
Jared Smith: So we thought this would be a really good opportunity to see these mountains and hope to increase that snowpack a little bit more starting in November. And I mean, that’s it. I’ve got any questions?
Jared Smith: I’ve got some frequently asked questions on the slide. Yes?
Mary McGann: You know, I was reading through it. It said that it’s 20 percent of the increased rain by 20 percent.
Mary McGann: Is that 20 percent developed before this technology, or is this – Yes.
Jared Smith: Yeah, so that’s the historical methods. And that’s primarily probably looking at aircraft that have flown into clouds.
Jared Smith: You know, you can buy some really expensive aircraft that have anti-icing technologies. And they’ve done a lot of studies on that.
Jared Smith: And it’s up to 20 percent. You know, California sees closer to 20 percent because their clouds are coming fresh off the ocean. They’re very big.
Jared Smith: I would say in Utah it’s probably closer to 10 to 15 percent is what the historical target controls have shown.
Mary McGann: So are you predicting that it’s going to be 20 percent or with this technology where you can get the – you know, from the reading, you can get – the drones can be there quicker than an airplane.
Mary McGann: Is that going to increase the probability of having rain more than, you know – Yeah, yeah.
Jared Smith: It should be at least as effective. I’ll say that. I don’t want to overpromise.
Jared Smith: But at least as effective. But you’re right. It’s getting directly into the cloud position.
Jared Smith: So the effectiveness should be – I mean, theoretically, more material is getting into the icing conditions compared to, like, the ground generator systems, which sit on the ground and kind of have sort of that material lofted up to the clouds. So this is our first – this is kind of a pilot year with the state.
Jared Smith: So I don’t want to – I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s 50 percent or anything like that.
Jared Smith: But I would suspect it would be the same as historical or more.
Mary McGann: How long is this technology with the drones?
Jared Smith: The drones is this year. This year? Yeah. So we operated one program in Cache Valley, Logan, last year.
Jared Smith: It was with kind of a very initial proof of concept. And now this is being deployed in Camas.
Jared Smith: Fillmore is sponsoring this. It’s the Avanti range. They wanted to operate there.
Jared Smith: And then we have another 12 drone teams in southern Idaho and northern Utah to support the Bear River watershed for the Great Salt Lake.
Jared Smith: So it’s new, but it’s at least gone through one winter.
Mary McGann: But technology is not new. It’s how you deliver.
Jared Smith: It’s how you deliver. Yes, precisely.
Mike McCurdy: Yeah, Mike. Okay. Yes. I like it. I talked about cloud seeding previously a few years with many of our different other counties. Yep. Our county partners.
Mike McCurdy: It’s been through Utah Association of Counties has presented on it, too. Yep. Mostly ground-based, but I like hearing the drone-based. Yeah.
Mike McCurdy: Hey, if I like it, we get it to go through. We get the funding from the state.
Mike McCurdy: This thing, a quicker timeline. How long until you guys are out there doing it?
Jared Smith: November 1st. I mean, so we’ve already submitted, and we told Grand County Water that’s kind of in good faith. We were just going to go.
Jared Smith: Our operational season with the state is from November 1st through April 30th. So we’re targeting snowpack.
Jared Smith: Not the snowpack, because that’s that reservoir that you get a pull from. But we’re ready to go November 1st.
Jared Smith: We’ve got a radar system deployed already in Moab. We’re working with the state to get land access to kind of some state-owned land where we can launch from.
Jared Smith: Because these are mobile. You know, it’s one team, but they’re mobile.
Jared Smith: They can go to the northwest or the southwest, depending on the direction the storm’s coming. But, yeah, November 1st is the plan. Okay. Thank you. That’s fast, too. Yeah, yeah.
Jacques Hadler: Okay. A couple questions. So the EPA has a level for acceptable amounts of silver nitrate. Is that right? Silver iodide, yeah.
Jacques Hadler: Or silver iodide, I’m sorry. And what negative aspects does silver iodide have in the environment?
Jared Smith: If it’s in high enough concentration, it can have a negative impact. I mean, they haven’t studied it on humans.
Jared Smith: They’ve studied it on the kind of the water, like aquatic. I think the statement is at risk to aquatic life.
Jared Smith: It’s at about, I think it’s 1 billion parts per trillion. Or, sorry, parts per billion in concentration.
Jared Smith: And what they’ve found, or I think it’s 100 million parts per, 100 million, 100 parts per million. And what they’ve found after operations in the order of 10 to 50 parts per trillion.
Jared Smith: So the concentrations are much lower. How do the negative aspects of it manifest themselves in the water quality?
Jared Smith: I can share the research they did on it. Okay. It’d be interesting anyway. Yeah, yeah.
Jared Smith: No, we’ve got the papers. And I’m happy to share. I don’t know the exact details of what the impacts are.
Jared Smith: They’re focusing on the bacteria, which is, I think, the most sensitive kind of form of life to these materials.
Jared Smith: So that’s kind of the, if they see it there, then they kind of, that’s their baseline of that could potentially cause risk to larger life forms.
Jared Smith: But I don’t know the exact details of what they saw at those native sites. But I’m happy to share.
Jared Smith: The state of Utah has a really good fact sheet with all these studies cited.
Jared Smith: I’ll be happy to share that with you.
Jared Smith: Yeah, email that over if you would.
Jacques Hadler: What does the operation look like on the ground? Do you guys just come in once? Or is it like every storm that comes through, you send a drone up?
Jared Smith: Yeah, yeah. So it’s every storm. We’re going to have two trained operators who are licensed with the FAA.
Jared Smith: And we’ll have a meteorologist who will be monitoring a storm system coming in. And then they’ll direct this team of two people who will drive.
Jared Smith: And they’ll say, hey, go to the, you know, whatever, 10 miles northwest of the mountains. And they’ll go there, launch up for about 30 to 60 minutes with one drone.
Jared Smith: And that whole time it’s dispersing about three grams per minute of silver iodide. Then they’ll bring it down and they’ll launch another drone.
Jared Smith: So you’re kind of juggling drones up and down during a storm. And then they leave when they’re done.
Jared Smith: And those teams are based in some central location. They go out to various places. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jared Smith: So we either base them out of here or right now they’re based out of Salt Lake. We’re looking into the logistics of whether, you know, we’re going to just get them an apartment here to operate out of or something like that.
Jared Smith: And it has to be in wintertime? Yes, yes.
Jared Smith: So the focus is that there are some technologies that maybe aren’t as heavily backed by the research for summertime seeding.
Jared Smith: We’re primarily focused on the wintertime with the state because that’s the, I guess to them, the most interesting water that can be produced if it’s that that reservoir of snowpack essentially. Right.
Jared Smith: The other thing that’s interesting is we’re working a lot of research with the University of Utah and Utah State.
Jared Smith: One professor is very interested in the effects of seeding in April and how that affects the runoff.
Jared Smith: Because, you know, I don’t know if your snow gets kind of dirty here towards the end of the season, but that dirt actually attracts more energy from the sun, which causes it to melt faster. Right.
Jared Smith: So his thinking is that even if you can get an extra tenth of an inch fresh layer on top of that, that can help slow the energy absorption of the sun.
Jared Smith: Yeah, so it’s interesting technology.
Jared Smith: I mean, we see it as, I mean, sky taunts us.
Jared Smith: It’s like having a river go through your town and you can’t access it.
Jared Smith: We feel this is a tool that’s been given new life to access water.
Jacques Hadler: Are there any other outfits similar to yours out there?
Jared Smith: Are you kind of the only game in town? We’re the only one in town that’s doing the drones.
Jared Smith: There’s other operations that will do aircraft. There was another one in Utah that was doing the ground-based stuff.
Jared Smith: I actually came from that company. We were acquired by this drone company, Rainmaker, North American Weather Consultants.
Jared Smith: Maybe, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. So I’ve actually built all the ground generators here.
Jared Smith: There’s over 200 of them. So I’ve done a lot of that work.
Jared Smith: They worked with the ski industry previously? Yeah. I’ve heard about that. The biggest one is really the Chinese Communist Party.
Jared Smith: They actually put billions per year. They have over 40,000 employees in their government that are seeding their farms and mountains.
Jared Smith: Are we privy to their results? Probably not. Yeah, they’ll publish results.
Jared Smith: Some of it, you know, maybe you question the accuracy. I mean, is it true? Is it propaganda? I don’t know. But much of their results kind of supports previous research.
Jared Smith: They’re adding some new stuff in using satellite views of clouds and stuff. But yeah, they’re pretty much all in on it.
Brian Martinez: Interesting.
Jared Smith: Thank you.
Brian Martinez: I just had a couple of questions. First off, what are the range of the drones?
Brian Martinez: You said they’re up there between 30 and 60 minutes. And so when you’ll basically leave from a spot, the meteorologist will tell people that might be based here in Grand County, hey, go out and go chase this cloud, and they’ll go out.
Brian Martinez: And what’s the range on that drone?
Jared Smith: Yeah, so it can go up to 15,000 feet. It ends up being all an energy challenge, right?
Jared Smith: Like the range at what altitude.
Jared Smith: For our operations, what we’re kind of focusing on is less than a one mile radius strafe back and forth.
Jared Smith: The thing is, is when you deploy the material, you know, the dynamics of the flow of the air, it has a natural dispersing and mixing effect.
Jared Smith: And so, you know, you might have a point source, you know, from whatever, a one mile radius or half mile radius downstream that, you know, that expands to a much larger area.
Brian Martinez: And I can’t remember, but the previous silver iodide that was done in Los Alamos, those planes, did they come at a price?
Jared Smith: I don’t think they were using planes. I think they were using ground generators. Were they? Okay.
Jared Smith: I think, I can’t remember, at the previous board meeting, I can’t remember his name. He was part of the operations, and he said he was operating a ground generator.
Brian Martinez: Okay, so it was ground generators.
Jared Smith: Ground generators. Yeah, they kind of look like these old, like, rusty trash cans that you light on fire.
Jared Smith: In this case, there’s no fire. There’s no flames. So that’s also an added benefit.
Brian Martinez: And then just a little bit about the funding. Something about the funding could be put off on a 2026 budget.
Jared Smith: Yeah, so I spoke with Ben, and I spoke with the Cloxene coordinator at State of Utah. We are okay.
Jared Smith: Obviously, we know this is, like, very short notice, and budgets haven’t necessarily allocated, you know, $50,000 in discretionary spending.
Jared Smith: So we’ve gone ahead and said that we’re okay with signing a contract, but we can make the payments due January of 2026, if that helps smooth over, you know, the short window, obviously, for funds.
Jared Smith: Because we want to get water.
Brian Martinez: Let me share that.
Brian Martinez: And then, so, working with Monticello, I believe, as well, and the Abajos, would this same team right here be able to cover both ranges, you think?
Jared Smith: Yeah, if they’re funding, I mean, obviously, they can’t hit both at the same time, necessarily. I mean, if the flow is correct, like, possibly they can.
Jared Smith: I think the way it would work out, if Monticello provides funding for the Abajos, we just have to have an understanding.
Jared Smith: There’s going to be some distribution where there may be a storm that, you know, we target the Abajos, and we don’t hit the La Salles, just because they’re sharing in the funding.
Jared Smith: It’s kind of the whole, you know, if local people are paying for it, you got to give everybody a piece of the pie.
Jared Smith: So, but the Abajos, yeah, we’ve looked at it.
Jared Smith: An even harder range to target, because it’s just basically a volcano, but we’ve looked at it, and we feel we could hit several storms there, as well.
Brian Martinez: Do you think that it would be reasonable to say, like, if we looked at, you know, get a partnership of this $50,000 between Wissop, Moab City, maybe even Paradox, San Juan County, and Monticello, that that would be a reasonable area for you guys to cover?
Jared Smith: Yeah, we would, I mean, we’d make it work. Basically, if storms come in and they’re going to hit the Abajos and not La Salles, we would just go to the Abajos.
Jared Smith: I think we would have to, if they’re hitting both of them, we’d have to find the balance. I suspect most of the funding is probably coming from La Salles, so I’d say most of the seeding would still probably happen here.
Jared Smith: But, of course, we’d have to be mindful of the Abajos, as well.
Stephen Stocks: So, when you’re doing the seeding, is there ever going to be a question of doing the seeding over a certain location rather than another?
Stephen Stocks: Like, is there any competition or differing?
Stephen Stocks: Is there ever a conflict between different potential groups that would want the seeding to be occurring in their area?
Jared Smith: I mean, splitting between the La Salles and the Abajos does introduce some element of conflict, right?
Jared Smith: So, I think that would just be something we’d have to be in discussion with the sponsors.
Jared Smith: So, the groups are involved.
Jared Smith: I think that there would be enough opportunities that, you know, if we hit 90% of the storms in La Salles and 10% in the Abajos, maybe that coordinates the amount of funding that is provided by the other groups that are focused more on the Abajos.
Jared Smith: But, yeah, inherently, there would be some degree of conflict. It’s one drug team.
Jared Smith: They can move, but they can’t be in multiple spots at once.
Mike McCurdy: That was my only question. His question line answered everything I had to say.
Mary McGann: Mine was a question about funding. If we could ask other agencies to help with the funding, it would be, like, Long City and other organizations. But you asked that, so thank you.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, I was following that as well. You know, just the idea that if we don’t get Paradox involved in this, it would be nice to make sure that it’s still a follow-up.
Jared Smith: Yeah. We’ll do our best. You know, we’re not perfect at that. We’ll do our best.
Jared Smith: I would just say, you know, thank you for your time. And this is one of the cheaper and fewer technologies that’s immediately available to increase water without a big, you know, infrastructure investment.
Jared Smith: So, thank you for your time.
Jared Smith: And I’ll, you know, speak with Ben Mussell-Lace, Brian, as we go forward. Thank you. Thank you, Brandon.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so our next presentation this evening is the Grand County Clerk-Auditor for Plow Street Administration. It looks like Gabe .
Gabe Woytek: Thanks, Vice Chair.
Gabe Woytek: So I prepared a pretty detailed proposal that’s available in the packet, so I won’t take a lot of time sort of reviewing there.
Gabe Woytek: It’s all there, sort of pretty well laid out as well as I could.
Gabe Woytek: But I just wanted to sort of bring attention to what I see as a golden opportunity for Grand County to restructure the Clerk-Auditor’s office in order to achieve improvements in compliance and performance.
Gabe Woytek: And so in my proposal, I try to give an overview of the duties of these two offices, which are currently combined, which I lead.
Gabe Woytek: The impact to staffing of a proposed restructure as I currently conceive it, which includes voluntary reduction of staff that I will be proposing for the new year 2020.
Gabe Woytek: The accompanying fiscal impact of a proposed sliff.
Gabe Woytek: And then just a very clear, concrete idea.
Gabe Woytek: I thought it was important to offer all of this context, just so everyone could visualize what’s happening now and how this could be a very successful structure moving forward.
Gabe Woytek: And so I believe with that, especially with increases in scale and complexity of the Grand County government over the last 10 to 15 years in particular, along with ever-expanding statutory duties and demands, that having the Clerk and Auditor offices combined creates unavoidable challenges, given the tools and resources available to our county.
Gabe Woytek: One of those things where when I meet with other Clerk Auditors around the state, especially via the Utah Association of Counties groups, there’s a lot of frustration.
Gabe Woytek: There’s a lot of, you know, folks are having the feeling that they’re just merely surviving and not thriving.
Gabe Woytek: And that’s kind of what I want to point to in terms of, you know, what my experience is.
Gabe Woytek: You know, I have high professional standards, and I want to be able to achieve the highest quality work on behalf of the organization and for the public that receives services.
Gabe Woytek: And a lot of times I feel like, you know, the best that I can do is to, you know, uphold and carry on processes that have existed in the office that I currently hold.
Gabe Woytek: You know, but these processes need improvements.
Gabe Woytek: They need to be brought up to compliance.
Gabe Woytek: There’s just a lot of things that I have, you know, I’m fully capable of, you know, implementing, drafting new policy, improving these things.
Gabe Woytek: But given the demands of my current role and the, you know, not only on my own, you know, the duties that I have to take on in my, you know, in the leadership role, but also just being able to take on those duties while also effectively managing a staff that I need to delegate tasks to as well. It’s very challenging.
Gabe Woytek: I’m sure you can all appreciate it.
Gabe Woytek: The Lieutenant Governor’s Office, the election coordinators that, you know, I asked them, hey, I don’t expect that you would sort of speak up on it or stick your neck out necessarily because we’re talking about another county, you know, a county’s own autonomous choice and decision on its structure.
Gabe Woytek: But do you, you know, is this something that you generally support and that it’s a full throated without hesitation?
Gabe Woytek: Yes, we, you know, we think every county at this point, you know, in their case, they feel like clerks need to have their duties separated from the auditor role.
Gabe Woytek: You know, one great example is elections.
Gabe Woytek: Right now, you know, ballots are going to be hitting mailboxes by the end of next week.
Gabe Woytek: And failure is not an option for elections.
Gabe Woytek: I’m sure everyone can appreciate that.
Gabe Woytek: And I have to turn, you know, I definitely have to turn my focus to elections for the next several weeks.
Gabe Woytek: This all also happens to be pretty much getting into the hottest part of our budget season.
Gabe Woytek: And so I’m going to do it because I have done it before and I know I can.
Gabe Woytek: And I’m very glad that I can be a valuable player with this team.
Gabe Woytek: But I’m sort of, I see an opportunity to do better here.
Gabe Woytek: I think, you know, I have to have a gentleman from Omaha and also from our local, our state representative from our equipment and software company ES&S here today, helping us get some equipment set up for elections.
Gabe Woytek: And so they were in the office the entire day.
Gabe Woytek: You know, as I was doing my best to focus on that, you know, they got a chance to see all of the myriad types of requests and things I’m responding to over the course of every day.
Gabe Woytek: And, you know, it’s often, you know, seeing the look on their face.
Gabe Woytek: You know, they’re seeing that breath and just, you know, how there’s so many things that are seemingly uncorrelated and unrelated.
Gabe Woytek: And again, I’m proud that I’m able to stand in and be there for that.
Gabe Woytek: But I think specialization, focus, definition within these offices and within all the roles within the offices is going to have this snowball effect in terms of everyone’s ability to perform, you know, to a higher standard.
Gabe Woytek: So there’s a deadline of November 1 for the commission to consider passing a resolution that would formalize this type of splits to be reflected in the 2026 election cycle.
Gabe Woytek: And so I wanted to bring this up for conversation and discussion right now so that the currently the resolution that I’m working on and reviewing with the attorney’s office can be considered at the second meeting in October.
Gabe Woytek: And hopefully this very common sense action, you know, can be formalized and, you know, next year in 2026, I would intend to run as the clerk under this scenario, leaving the auditor seats open for another individual to run for.
Gabe Woytek: I’m trying to think if there’s any other items.
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, probably don’t need to go on any further.
Gabe Woytek: It’s mostly about getting the idea out there and seeing what sort of questions or concerns might exist so I can address them.
Mary McGann: Yeah, my question was, if I understood when I read it that you’re talking about for this next fiscal year, taking your staff from six to five.
Mary McGann: So I can see how that works with the proposed restructuring, but I’m confused to how it’s going to work with the current restructuring.
Gabe Woytek: Well, there wouldn’t be a restructure that would officially take place until January 2027.
Gabe Woytek: So the, the, the, the reduction in staff is most is, you know, it’s sort of is it does sort of come along with this proposed restructuring, but it is also just targeted at a general need and responsibility that I feel like I have to the county and to the taxpayers to seek efficiency in my department, and I’m doing I’m, you know, I’m taking that, you know, responsibility.
Mary McGann: I guess my concern is, to begin with, I really admire your dedication your willingness to look at ways to save money.
Mary McGann: But second, I don’t want the staff that remains to feel like they all of a sudden have more, they already have a hard job and then now we’ve, you’ve reduced it to five.
Mary McGann: That’s where I’m having, I’m having a hard time seeing how it’s going to work. Yeah.
Mary McGann: In 2026, I can see how having five people will work with the restructure.
Mary McGann: But I don’t know how you can take an office that is already working incredibly hard has a lot of responsibility and reduces staff prior to the restructuring.
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, can I respond to that vice chair before the next commissioners question. Yes. Yeah, I think I can articulate pretty clearly how that is going to work.
Gabe Woytek: And so there’s the finance director position was added to my office. At the start of the 2024 budget year.
Gabe Woytek: And it took about a half a year for that position to be filled.
Gabe Woytek: And that has been put that that position is, has, has sort of operated and existed on and sort of in a.
Gabe Woytek: How do I say they’ve been in an office that they have been outside of my office physically and not involved in the day to day operations.
Gabe Woytek: And so what this reduction is going to allow me to do is to open up a seat in my office and bring that role directly physically into my office.
Gabe Woytek: And the person currently filling that role is is highly capable and familiar with operations related to government in their experience with the city.
Gabe Woytek: And so basically they’ll be able to assume a role that’s involved in some of the daily operations and providing backup and being available to maybe handle deposits or, you know, me and my team are going to sort that out.
Gabe Woytek: But by virtue of bringing that person physically into my office, and then some of those duties that may be, you know, might only be an hour a day.
Gabe Woytek: But I need to have someone available to do it.
Gabe Woytek: It’s not going to take them too far away from their finance director duties.
Gabe Woytek: But since they’re going to be physically in the office now, they’ll be able to chip in that way.
Jacques Hadler: So is this this is this opportunity only come once every four years like we couldn’t pass a resolution and then split the clerk auditor office out when there wasn’t an election for said position. Is that right?
Gabe Woytek: That is my understanding. Yet the statute reads that it would have to happen in the, you know, by November 1st of the year before the elect, you know, a formal separation would have to occur by the 1st of the 1st of November of the year before the election of the seat.
Gabe Woytek: You know, and and my clerk auditor seat is up for election next year. Yeah. Okay. And I’m not sure.
Gabe Woytek: I guess there would have to be more analysis done.
Gabe Woytek: I mean, I think, like, I’m not sure what what what type of action would have to be taken.
Gabe Woytek: But I think we all agree that we would rather avoid a situation where we’re appointing these roles.
Gabe Woytek: We’d rather allow the voters to decide who’s filling these important roles in the county.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, exactly.
Jacques Hadler: And then how many counties have in Utah have split out the clerk in the auditor offices and are most of I’m sure most of them are larger, but counties are size of their considerable number.
Gabe Woytek: There haven’t been any other counties are size.
Gabe Woytek: I know that there’s a lot of desire to.
Gabe Woytek: I know one of the limitations or things that have held, you know, I believe that people that have held my office previous to me have expressed the same desire.
Gabe Woytek: I think physical the fiscal impact of adding another elected role and the compensation that’s associated has been a hold up in that.
Gabe Woytek: And I think that I think that this introduction of this finance director role in the office and the other transitions and this restructuring that I made, I think it I think it gives us this opportunity to sort of fold things in and kind of consolidate.
Gabe Woytek: I guess it’s the opposite of it is consolidating in some ways while also separating. Right. But specializing. It makes sense.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, currently in place. So, the commission at our next meeting would likely have to pass a resolution calling for this.
Jacques Hadler: Is that a simple majority resolution or is it a super majority?
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, I had to double check that because I wasn’t sure and it appears to be a regular majority.
Mary McGann: Okay, so I’m good.
Gabe Woytek: Those are my questions.
Mary McGann: So you have it. You’ve seen it be easy to create that resolution and get it to Stephen for him to look at.
Gabe Woytek: He’s got a draft already. Oh, and it’s based off of Dave.
Gabe Woytek: So, Davis County did this split. They’re obviously not in size to us.
Gabe Woytek: So, that’s that was Curtis Coke and Brian McKenzie both leaders in their own respect. But that so I was able to pick their brain about it. And yeah.
Melodie McCandless: Any other questions. Besides, I’m building a whole bunch.
Mike McCurdy: I’ll talk to you during the week. Don’t worry. I saw you were busy today. I mean, keep up.
Mike McCurdy: You let me be part of a lot of the election safety and or double checking several times. And I know you guys are buried over there.
Mike McCurdy: But I love to talk to you a little more about this. Please.
Melodie McCandless: You have another question. No, I’m good. Thank you. Well, good online. Sounds like a good idea. All right. Thank you, Dave.
Melodie McCandless: Let’s move on to our next, which is our general business action items.
Melodie McCandless: And I guess commission side first commission member disclosures and future consideration.
Mary McGann: But man, a future consideration to make sure that we have on our next election resolution. And if we are interested in the cloud scene, it sounds like that’s going to.
Mary McGann: Maybe that seems to have a bit of a deadline.
Mary McGann: And the next meeting, if it’s just getting a group together to talk to other entities, but to make sure that we are formally.
Mary McGann: But then it’s not just something we talk about that it goes into the info.
Mary McGann: So something about, you know, I’d like those things on the next. Okay.
Jacques Hadler: And was that the first time I read the resolution about the car covers during them.
Mary McGann: And I don’t know. Do you know if they’ve done a presentation to the city, the rain. I don’t think so.
Brian Martinez: So, so far, what I’ve known is they’ve presented to. And they’re going to go present to city of Monticello. And I think they’re going to also try to get San Juan as well.
Mary McGann: This next week is the cities. Commission me, counsel me, counsel me.
Mary McGann: So, it’d be nice if I can chat with them and see if you could do that. Get on their agenda because I’m sure they’re kind of like, that’s.
Mary McGann: Getting that agenda ready right now.
Brian Martinez: If you’re from a minor, though, at our last one. They have been pumping or irrigation for the last 2 months already. So, we have.
Mary McGann: It’s going to help.
Jacques Hadler: It does seem like on the cloud seeding, like maybe speaking to some of the counties in western Colorado or even Grand Junction would be ideal since the weather moves that way. So seating here might benefit.
Brian Martinez: My understanding was that we definitely want to talk to paradox at least just because I mean I think that we might be filling up.
Speaker 19: Right. Okay.
Melodie McCandless: Even a little bit. All right. No disclosures today.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, yeah, I’ll just make quick. Which one was it is. I don’t remember 11 me and Jack both.
Brian Martinez: Oh, the bicycle in the national parks. So, just wanted to put that out there.
Jacques Hadler: I was there too.
Melodie McCandless: So move on to number 2 is the approval of the consent agenda items. So, minutes for the meeting of September 16, 2025.
Melodie McCandless: Ratification of the payment of bills total bills is 2,000,334,000. $200 and 81 cents. Total payroll, which is 2 payroll cycles is 881,000, $50 and 81 cents.
Melodie McCandless: So, the total bills and payroll together is 3,215,769 dollars and 62 cents. We have a ratification of the 1st amendment to the parking contract at the airport.
Melodie McCandless: Ratification of the emergency purchase of backflow assembly for fire suppression system. Ratification of the national settlement participation contract.
Melodie McCandless: Vacation of local consent liquor license for the Utah center. Ratification of local consent liquor license for grand year October 1st.
Melodie McCandless: Letter to legislators opposing any legislation that would allow bigger and heavier trucks.
Melodie McCandless: Board member applicant considerations for the old Spanish trail arena advisory committee.
Melodie McCandless: Board member applicant considerations for the grand county fair board.
Melodie McCandless: A recommendation to the state of Utah for 2 appointments to the grand county water conservancy district board.
Melodie McCandless: The ratification of the all American wash emergency watershed protection construction contract.
Melodie McCandless: Contract approval for the parental defender.
Melodie McCandless: 2025 to 2027, the contract approval for the conflict parental defender 2025 to 2027.
Melodie McCandless: The contract approval for the conflict public defender for 2025 to 2027.
Melodie McCandless: And the separation agreement general release and waiver.
Speaker 20: Mike so moved.
Melodie McCandless: 2nd, okay, we have a motion from Commissioner McCurdy. 1st and 2nd from Mary McGann.
Mary McGann: I wanted to, we don’t normally discuss that. I just wanted to say, thank you for composing and getting that letter on concerning the trucks.
Mary McGann: I think that’s a real important letter and it was well, thank you for doing.
Stephen Stocks: All right, so I make 1 more note on the appointments. I know that this is normally when you guys have your appointments, you guys put it on the general business item.
Stephen Stocks: It’s my understanding that the number of applicants to the number of positions would be equal to or less than the number of positions.
Stephen Stocks: That’s why it wasn’t on the public discussion, just noting.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so I’ll call for a vote all in favor. Aye.
Melodie McCandless: All right, so that’s six zero with Commissioner Hedin absent.
Melodie McCandless: And we’ll move on to number three, which is the street life led conversion project agreement with Rocky Mountain Power and Cody is here with our roads department.
Cody McKinney: Thanks for the time. This kind of was brought to my attention kind of last minute, but the city is kind of jumping on board with this.
Cody McKinney: So, I figured we better take a look at it from the county’s perspective. One main point is the high-pressure sodium bulbs that the county currently has.
Cody McKinney: We’ve got a few more lights in 47, but this is going to cover 47 of our street lights. They’re starting to get dated.
Cody McKinney: It’s a couple of $300 an hour to get the power company to come out to change those bulbs and those, and the life cycle on them doesn’t really push the 10-year initiative like the upgrades would. Looking into it, I feel it’s going to be a pretty good deal.
Cody McKinney: I think the conversion with the comfort lenses will be in that dark sky initiative.
Cody McKinney: So, I think it’s going to be a good benefit to the county to get these upgraded, put us on a kind of a 10-year life cycle with a warranty back on these lights as far as maintenance.
Cody McKinney: I don’t know if you guys have any questions on that.
Cody McKinney: How long has the sodium bulb last, Cody? I don’t really know.
Cody McKinney: Usually, they’re three to five years.
Cody McKinney: It’s kind of what I’ve researched.
Cody McKinney: We’re kind of working on two to three years is about what our, kind of since I’ve been in the road department, that’s about where it’s at.
Cody McKinney: So, one thing that I did talk into Pacific Car and Rocky Mountain Power, these do have a 10-year warranty on them to switch these to LED.
Cody McKinney: Does that include putting them out there?
Cody McKinney: Yeah, this is them coming in and putting them, installing them on contract, yeah.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so Mike has his hand up first.
Mike McCurdy: I’d like to make a motion. I move to approve the LED street light replacement quote and authorize the roads department to proceed with the project with Rocky Mountain Power. I’ll take the quote.
Mary McGann: I don’t think you can take the quote.
Cody McKinney: There is a quote there. So, there was a quote with the…
Mike McCurdy: Do I need to take the quote? Yeah, you might as well.
Cody McKinney: I’m sorry. I thought these were attached.
Mike McCurdy: That is. That’s the total. That’s going to max $10,837.22. Correct.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. I think not seconded. Do we have any more discussion?
Gabe Woytek: Thank you. Oh, sorry.
Melodie McCandless: Go ahead, Gabriel.
Gabe Woytek: I just wanted to clarify.
Gabe Woytek: I did add it into the agenda summary.
Gabe Woytek: I wasn’t sure if it made it on there, but given Cody’s description and of this crew coming in already making replacements here in the valley and trusting his discretion and understanding of this kind of work, I did authorize this as a sole source purchase rather than going out for informal quotes for this work and that this would be coded out of the Roads Capital Project Fund, which is Fund 35.
Gabe Woytek: Just clarifying those two items.
Brian Martinez: Thank you. All right. We have one more question. Okay.
Brian Martinez: And so, is there any specialized skill to install these lights? As far as replacement? Yeah, as far as replacement.
Brian Martinez: Like after the 10-year… Well, even in the 10-year, I mean, are we going to be stuck waiting for the crew to come out from Salt Lake to help? I don’t think so.
Cody McKinney: It sounds to me like they’re pretty much plug and play. Talking to Pacific Corp and their contract is going to… It’s something that can be done locally. Yeah.
Mike McCurdy: Correct. Yeah.
Cody McKinney: Mike?
Mike McCurdy: I really like that you included power savings of approximately $3,500 per year with the knowledge of the product.
Mike McCurdy: I can only say from my own experience, first day I go into a house or a rental, change them all over to LED, yeah, it saves us money.
Cody McKinney: And this is, it’s roughly a three-year return on investment too, so it’s not a… I mean, we’ll definitely have the return on investment before the warranty period’s up. Perfect. So, it should be peace of mind for the county for sure.
Melodie McCandless: All right. Any other questions, comments? Okay, call for a vote. So, we had a motion by Mike and a second by Jacques. So, all in favor?
Speaker 19: Aye.
Melodie McCandless: All right.
Melodie McCandless: 6-0 with Commissioner Hedin absent. Thank you, Cody. Thanks for your time.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, and then I’m just going to reiterate that items number four, which is the ordinance for the major utility overlay for the water tank of the Moab City, and number five, the ordinance for the rezone parcel for the Novak subdivision, and number six, the Grandview Business Park subdivision final plan approved have all been moved to next meeting, October 21st, because they’re all legal, along with number 13, which is the contract approval for the public defender.
Melodie McCandless: So, those will all be moved to the October 21st meetings.
Melodie McCandless: However, even if you’re here at six o’clock, you can still speak if you want to, but just letting you know that those will not be voted on tonight.
Melodie McCandless: So, we’re going to go ahead and move on to number seven, which is the acceptance of the FAA Airport Improvement Program Project Grant.
Melodie McCandless: Here you have 49-0020-049-2025, and I think Commissioner Winfield is going to talk about that.
Bill Winfield: Sure, and that’s just an expansion of the concrete parking for the larger jets.
Bill Winfield: Currently, I believe that parking pad can only house one larger jet or two smaller ones there.
Bill Winfield: This is going to allow us to park other jets that currently will drop off their customers or their clients and then fly on to somewhere else and park their equipment, because we don’t have adequate parking, and so they end up over in Grand Junction or somewhere else where they can get better service and have parking.
Bill Winfield: This is a big plus for the county, for sure.
Bill Winfield: I believe this is just over $9 million with a 5% match by the county.
Bill Winfield: I think it was $453,750, and so that’s a huge return on our money there with being able to come up with an improvement that’ll be with us for the lifetime of the airport out there.
Bill Winfield: This was started by the former or applied for by the former airport director, Tammy Howland, which has subsequently been worked on by our current director, Steve Gleason, and I think through the efforts of both of those and what little participation I’ve had, this is an easy win for the county in my mind.
Bill Winfield: That’s all I’ve really got to say about it, unless anybody wants to have any questions or whatever.
Melodie McCandless: All right, Mike, you can get your hand up first.
Mike McCurdy: To make the motion, I move to accept the FAA Airport Improvement Program Project Grant 3-49-0020-049-2025 of up to $9,075,000 in grant and with a 5% match up to $453,750.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, is there a second for any seconds? Any more discussion?
Jacques Hadler: Jaques? Yeah, I had a question. So it says the county’s on the hook for matching grant up to $453,750.
Jacques Hadler: It says it is approved and within budget.
Jacques Hadler: Was that budget before last year or is that just because it’s not out of budget on account of it should be drawn from the capital improvements? Do you know, Gabe? I don’t know. Anyone know?
Bill Winfield: I’m not sure. I believe this was on the former Capital List budget that was put together back when Ms. Halland was still the director there.
Jacques Hadler: It was on that list?
Mary McGann: My memory is it was. She talked about it.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. Unless it’s coming out of capital then?
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, so it’s capital improvement. Yeah, one other question real quick.
Jacques Hadler: And then it includes the payment. It says in the background, it also includes the payment for the Redtail hangar. Is that adjacent?
Bill Winfield: Yeah, and so that is a stretch of pavement that starts near our terminal and then goes in front of actually our hangar, although Redtail is currently leasing that from us.
Bill Winfield: So these improvements go all along the front of Grand County’s property there along the all the way up, I believe, to just what would that be north of the building that we have our fire trucks in there. Okay.
Bill Winfield: So it does go in front of what’s considered the Redtail hangar, but that Redtail hangar is owned by the county and leased to Redtail.
Gabe Woytek: So just to clarify, I just pulled up the 2020 VOT pre-authorized capital procurement list. It’s not actually on that list. Just wanted to clarify that.
Jacques Hadler: So, do you mind if I? Go ahead. So it’s not on that list.
Jacques Hadler: So it’s ostensibly not in the budget? Or is it just it doesn’t matter because it’s a capital improvement, but it’s not pre-authorized?
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, so it’s budgeted for by virtue of what we budget to expend out of capital.
Gabe Woytek: But I can’t speak to the degree to which this has been raised or contemplated or considered, right?
Jacques Hadler: So this, along with the previous capital improvement that we allocated to the airport a couple meetings ago, would bring those total allocations up to over, what, $1.2 million or so, right? Yeah.
Melodie McCandless: Yeah, I mean, $725,000 was a loan to the airport. So we’ll pay back. And then this is a $9 million grant with the 5% match.
Jacques Hadler: So. But we’re pulling $1.2 million out of capital improvements. Okay. Okay, thanks. Just wanted to clarify that.
Bill Winfield: Sure. We’re pulling $1.2 million out to gain $10 million, basically, worth of grant money here.
Brian Martinez: $700,000 of that is going to be repaid.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, we’re all having questions right now.
Speaker 19: Sometime.
Mike McCurdy: Thrown it at me.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. So we have a first by Commissioner McCurdy and second by Commissioner Martinez.
Melodie McCandless: I’m going to call for a vote. So all in favor.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so we have five with one abstention as Commissioner Hadler and one absent as Commissioner Hedin.
Stephen Stocks: And just clarifying your vote, Mr. Hadley, because we didn’t ask for it in a standard way.
Stephen Stocks: You’re abstaining, correct? Correct. Yes, thank you. Just yeah, we just make sure that otherwise, if the record didn’t catch him saying he’s abstaining. Great.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so moving on to number. Eight.
Melodie McCandless: Which is the award for the contract for Grand County external audit services for the 2025 audit. That is Mr. Winfield.
Bill Winfield: Yes, and so in our recent audit committee meeting, we went over the proposals. We had one. We had one from the rich may.
Bill Winfield: We had a second one from Larson’s and the third one was from, I believe, Squires.
Bill Winfield: And it came down to a discussion and a vote over the rich may. Client and Larson’s.
Bill Winfield: And there was a split vote to send a recommendation to the full commission from the audit committee to go with rich may.
Bill Winfield: And that was a vote of two in favor, one against. And Mr.
Bill Winfield: Hadler voted and discussed, I believe, wishing to stay with Larson’s.
Bill Winfield: And so that’s where we are with that one.
Bill Winfield: And we can open it up for discussion.
Jacques Hadler: Go ahead, Jack. Sure. I’ll just say why I thought that Larson’s was the better choice.
Jacques Hadler: I think our consultant that we pay, Karen Curtin, said that generally up to five years is a kind of a standard or a good amount of time to stay with one auditing firm before switching them out. We’ve been with Larson’s for three.
Jacques Hadler: It was also discussed that it can be an advantage staying with a firm that is familiar with the county.
Jacques Hadler: So we have strong familiarity with Larson’s.
Jacques Hadler: I think they’ve done a great job in the past three years. They’re efficient.
Jacques Hadler: Also, on the Richie May proposal, it looked to my part of this proposal was doing the audits for our component units.
Jacques Hadler: And Richie May kind of just gave a very low but also a kind of an ambiguous proposal for those units.
Jacques Hadler: And they were all the same, even though the size of those units varies greatly.
Jacques Hadler: I think Larson’s a lot more familiar with what they’re getting into as far as the whole audit goes.
Jacques Hadler: And lastly, I think the Larson’s proposal, if you look at some of the variables, I think would end up being less expensive.
Jacques Hadler: The Richie May proposal doesn’t include travel, of which they suggested that it might take three or four people a week of time in the county to work on that.
Jacques Hadler: So that could add up to another, I don’t know, three to four people eating and staying here during our busy season, which would be April, would cost up to $10,000 to the county in addition.
Jacques Hadler: But those are some of the main reasons that I thought that Larson’s was better.
Jacques Hadler: Also, if you look, they’re all attached.
Jacques Hadler: I just thought that Larson’s proposal worked better.
Jacques Hadler: I think it presented better also.
Mary McGann: It was clearer. It was more concise.
Jacques Hadler: And they also have, to keep going, they also have a lot more county experience. Richie May didn’t have any experience auditing a county, at least in the state of Utah.
Jacques Hadler: I think the city of Tooele was the only kind of municipal or county entity that they’d done previously.
Jacques Hadler: And Larson’s is very experienced.
Mike McCurdy: I think Commissioner Winfield was up before me.
Bill Winfield: Go ahead, Commissioner Winfield.
Bill Winfield: Yeah, Jacques, maybe you missed it, but I do know that after our discussion with the audit committee, that Richie May sent in an email with a laundry list that was quite lengthy of government entities that they’ve worked with.
Bill Winfield: So I do think that they covered that base quite well and that their experience is pretty extensive in that area.
Bill Winfield: So I wouldn’t think that that would be a concern with this moving forward.
Bill Winfield: And I do see some value in sticking with somebody, as you suggest.
Bill Winfield: But I also think that after coming through the trials and tribulations that we’ve had between the state audit and other thoughts, that it would be worthy to get a new set of eyes on our books and to get a little bit different look at it.
Bill Winfield: So I think there’s high value going to Richie May.
Bill Winfield: And, you know, speaking to the additional costs, I think that we can hope and expect that maybe they’ll do their best to keep those down.
Bill Winfield: So I think that a move forward here would benefit the entire county, and I look forward to it.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, Mike.
Mike McCurdy: Sorry, I’m still on this one. I just want to be a talk.
Mike McCurdy: You said that the Richie May gave lower numbers to component units and special service districts as well. Right. Yeah, there’s component units.
Mike McCurdy: I think they’re listed out on the other thing. I just just remembered from the audit. I know.
Mike McCurdy: I know a lot of my special service districts as liaison as voting member would love to pay lower bills on that with continued good service. So no lack of service and lower bill.
Mike McCurdy: But a lot, even a lot of my boards that I’m on, they don’t use Larson, Richie May or anyone. They use a third party.
Mike McCurdy: So I would love the audit committee to at least get a mention out there that Richie May is offering those services to component units.
Mike McCurdy: Also, it’s the conversation that’s going to be here. Right. Then.
Mike McCurdy: Yeah, like, I would love I would love that conversation, even if Larson was willing to to in any reduction in cost of services to our special service districts.
Mike McCurdy: Gives them more more financial assets.
Mike McCurdy: But either way on this, I would love for that to continue further after this conversation.
Brian Martinez: OK, yeah. So just real quick, maybe just one of the things that the audit committee has discussed is one of the reasons that our audit is late every year is because the component units on this is due at the same day that our audit is due statutorily.
Brian Martinez: So basically, the component units can wait all the way up until the same date as we are required to post our audit. So the idea of including the component units is that the county might be able to fund some of these component units and also that we might be able to get a little bit of a deal because we’re basically buying a volume for all of these audits.
Brian Martinez: And if the person that’s doing it, there will be incentivized to make sure that that audit is put is done on time. Right. Rather than having three or four different auditors who are sending in the reports come. I can’t remember. What is it? Is it July 1st?
Brian Martinez: Yeah, I think it’s July 1st. And then the county having to go through, go through those audits and then present our own audit.
Brian Martinez: So this is going to be an incentive that we will be able to provide for these folks. Just a couple of other things right there.
Brian Martinez: So when we did talk about the price on there, it really looked like the price was probably going to be pretty similar because as Ritchie made, did not include the travel to come out here and provide onsite services.
Brian Martinez: Larson’s does not include the single audit, the county single audit on there either.
Brian Martinez: So when you actually took those two, it looks like they kind of balanced out when we were looking at the price also on that five years that that Karen had kind of quoted on right there.
Brian Martinez: I did go back because I mean, I was trying to remember where I heard that the three to four years at, because that was the question that I asked them.
Brian Martinez: I looked here and here’s our internal audit finding October 1st, 2020.
Brian Martinez: I just want to read a couple of things real fast.
Brian Martinez: So on September 23rd and 24th, the county internal auditor, Cody Dieter with EFG consulting, along with John Hatterley with Larson company met with county staff.
Brian Martinez: Our goal was to review both the written policies and procedures along with observing actual procedures.
Brian Martinez: Our interviews included staff in the county clerk’s office, the treasurer, the reporter, the county commission.
Brian Martinez: We are also received written comments and concerns by county administration prior to meetings.
Brian Martinez: And then hold on to the next page.
Brian Martinez: I had to do a quick screenshot because it was old. Yeah, so yeah.
Brian Martinez: And then second, the current audit is four months late.
Brian Martinez: The clerk auditor and the county administrator were both unsure why there was a delay.
Brian Martinez: An external auditor should be proactive in communicating with the county data needs and timing.
Brian Martinez: We suggest that an external audit function should be bid out every three to four years to ensure top service and market rates.
Brian Martinez: This policy should be added to the clerk auditor’s written policies.
Brian Martinez: Now that’s coming right there directly from Larson and John Hatterley.
Brian Martinez: The third thing that I just kind of wanted to bring up right there is the experience.
Brian Martinez: And I think that both of the firms carry the experience that we’re looking for.
Brian Martinez: So I think that sending this out to bid, right?
Brian Martinez: Or I’m sorry, just selecting a new auditor, I think was a wise choice by the audit committee.
Jacques Hadler: Go ahead, Jacques. Just the point that it says it should be sent out to bid. It doesn’t say replaced.
Jacques Hadler: We paid Karen a lot of money to sit on those audit committee meetings and advise us. She seemed to think that the way I took it anyway, was that the standard was five years or possibly even more.
Melodie McCandless: I have a comment.
Melodie McCandless: Today, I mean, I was in my meetings with other component units, and they mentioned that three to five year timeframe to switch up their auditors as well.
Melodie McCandless: So I mean, I don’t know if that came from John’s recommendation, or if it’s standard auditing procedures, but definitely that three to five year. And go ahead, Mike.
Mike McCurdy: I’d like to make a motion.
Mike McCurdy: I move to award the contract for Grant County external audit services for the 2025 audit to Richie Mae proposal, or following the Richie Mae proposal of Grant County. I’ll second.
Melodie McCandless: All right. Mike is the first, and Brian is our second. And go ahead, John.
Jacques Hadler: I was just wondering, since our third works closely with the auditor, if there’s anything he might care to weigh in on, or not.
Gabe Woytek: You know, I think like my own ethical compass in my particular position, given that the external auditor is independent from my office and audits my work.
Gabe Woytek: You know, my goal is to seek a quality professional relationship with whomever is selected.
Gabe Woytek: I will, you know, I’ll offer that I do have a, you know, quality working relationship with our current auditor, but, you know, that’s, yeah, I feel like it’s, I think that there’s some limitations into, you know, how I would seek to influence the board in this decision.
Melodie McCandless: Any other comments?
Melodie McCandless: I think that Hatterly has done a fantastic job.
Melodie McCandless: I also, they did the component unit for the Canyonlands Health Care Special Service District this year, and they were really happy to press with them.
Melodie McCandless: I think that we need to continue the discussion on maybe on next meeting, we could do a vote on what that incentive would be for our component units.
Melodie McCandless: So, once we select the auditor, that we would have a discussion, and whether we’re going to incentivize them with half of their audit paid for, what that would be, I think we should on the next agenda. Go ahead, Brian.
Brian Martinez: Just real quick. So, I believe that the numbers came in at like $7,000 for the audits.
Speaker 19: So, seven to eight, right?
Brian Martinez: Yep, seven to eight.
Brian Martinez: And so, you’re looking at, like, the Canyonlands Care Center, they’re already, just with the bulk of us getting these things right there, we’d probably be saving anywhere between $4,000 and $5,000 right there, off of what they paid last year.
Melodie McCandless: Yeah, and obviously, they wouldn’t be able, they wouldn’t be able to force them to do anything. They all have their own unique options, but this would be something that we could incentivize them and explain to them the reasoning why behind it.
Melodie McCandless: All right, if there’s no more discussion, I’ll call for a vote. So, we had a first by Mike and a second by Brian, recommending Richie May call for a vote. All in favor? Aye. And all those opposed?
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so that vote is 4-2 with Mr.
Melodie McCandless: Hadler and McGann opposed, and Trisha Dean absent.
Melodie McCandless: So, I’m going to go ahead and call, let Tess come up. Do you want to come up?
Melodie McCandless: You don’t have to wait around.
Melodie McCandless: I think we have you a little bit further, you’re the last. We don’t have to wait.
Melodie McCandless: We can go ahead and bring that.
Melodie McCandless: So, we’re going to go ahead and skip to number 15, which is the 2026 Health Insurance Benefit Renewal with our Personal Services Director, Tess Barger.
Tess Barger: All right, thank you, everybody, very much.
Tess Barger: And so, for this, and I’ll go ahead and I apologize, I didn’t log on to the Zoom meeting yet, sorry.
Tess Barger: So, I’ll start talking while I’m simultaneously trying to do this.
Tess Barger: And all right, so we have for the last several years not gone out to bid for our insurance benefits.
Tess Barger: The reason for that is that we have been with Cigna and Cigna for the last several years either gave us a 0% renewal rate or a very minimal renewal rate of about 2%, 3%.
Tess Barger: So, there really hasn’t been a reason.
Tess Barger: We’ve been very happy generally with the coverage that we’ve had through them.
Tess Barger: This year, we initially received approximately 14% renewal rate.
Tess Barger: Cigna then came back with an 8.7% renewal rate.
Tess Barger: And we decided to go out to bid.
Tess Barger: Generally, I think it’s an important practice for us in Personnel Services to go out to bid every several years, both for this as well as for other items that we have held within our office just to ensure that we are making sure that we’re still continuing to make the best choice.
Tess Barger: But that increase also certainly was part of the reason that we went out to bid this year.
Tess Barger: So, and I apologize, I’m not being as good at multitasking as I promised I would be.
Tess Barger: So, yes, we went out to bid our Benefits Administrator, GBS Benefits, assists us in doing that.
Tess Barger: So, they collected bids from a variety of insurance companies.
Tess Barger: We went out to bid both for our medical insurance as well as our dental and vision insurance plans.
Tess Barger: And I’ll be able to go over the details of that.
Tess Barger: So, now I’m moving information on the agenda of all of the bids that we received.
Tess Barger: The one that I’m primarily going to be focusing on talking about is our bid that we received from PEHP. It’s quote three.
Tess Barger: It’s on the first attachment for the agenda item.
Patty Robinson: And again, I apologize.
Melodie McCandless: So, I’m going to continue to explain while I’m going.
Tess Barger: So, the bid that we received from PEHP is for, actually, they gave us a decreased renewal rate that would be in effect for 2026 for our medical insurance at 3.8%.
Tess Barger: And I’m just waiting to be let in on the meeting now. Great. Thank you very much.
Melodie McCandless: Sorry to put you on the hot spot now.
Tess Barger: It’s fine. I apologize that I wasn’t able to just jump into the hot spot. Typically, I can do it. Okay.
Tess Barger: And I’ll pull up what I’m talking about as well so that it’s not totally in the dark.
Stephen Stocks: And this is the last exhibit on item number 15 of the packet. If county employees are looking at it, what created excitement about what insurance changes there are?
Tess Barger: All right. Okay.
Tess Barger: So, again, Cigna is who we’ve currently been with.
Tess Barger: And the initial renewal rate that we received was the 14.9%.
Tess Barger: They came back with 8.77%.
Tess Barger: And then they actually, it’s not provided in this chart, but they came back with one best and final offer of 4.78% after all of the other bids had closed.
Tess Barger: The reason that we’re recommending PEHP is the only other option that we would consider is because the health insurance, the medical insurance coverage is very comparable.
Tess Barger: The plan of the two, there are two quotes.
Tess Barger: There’s quote three and quote four from PEHP.
Tess Barger: Quote three, employees are allowed to choose a plan that’s called the Advantage Plan or a plan that is called the Summit Plan.
Tess Barger: The big difference is that one of the plans lets you use IHC, so Intermountain Healthcare Systems providers.
Tess Barger: The other plan includes non-IHC providers.
Tess Barger: So University of Utah, for instance, is the big one.
Tess Barger: Some providers accept both of those plans.
Tess Barger: So there are only certain providers that employees would really have to sit down and consider, is it better for me to go with Advantage or is it better for me to go with Summit?
Tess Barger: This plan would also cover, we have a lot of staff that access healthcare in Grand Junction.
Tess Barger: So while there may be some providers that have some different acceptance of PEHP, coverage in Grand Junction would be comparable in terms of the providers that accept it.
Tess Barger: There may be some difference in terms of how much claims cost in Grand Junction.
Tess Barger: So employees might have to take on extra cost if they are going to Grand Junction regularly for medical reasons, depending on who their provider is, what services they’re receiving, et cetera.
Tess Barger: The other main difference between PEHP and Cigna is there is a minor increase in pharmaceutical costs on the PEHP plan.
Tess Barger: There are three different levels of how pharmaceuticals are essentially ranked in price.
Tess Barger: And the increase in those plans would be $5, $10, or $15 per prescription based on what that prescription is.
Tess Barger: So again, the context of this is Cigna has worked really well.
Tess Barger: We’ve gotten either neutral to very good feedback from staff on the service, the medical coverage of Cigna.
Tess Barger: The primary reason that we have looked at recommending PEHP is because of the ongoing identified concerns about budget constraints in the county.
Tess Barger: We want to ensure that we are, if there is a possibility for us to provide comparable health support to our staff, while also ensuring that we’re able to provide support with some other ways, such as ensuring that we have a better ability to advocate for a cost of living adjustment, or we have the ability to preserve more positions, then we want to be able to prioritize that.
Tess Barger: Again, the big differences between Cigna and PEHP are there will be some pharmaceutical increases to prescriptions, and there may be some difference in what providers are covered or in place.
Tess Barger: So anytime you switch an insurance plan, there is going to be a learning curve.
Tess Barger: It might benefit some people, it may be neutral for some people, and it may not benefit some people.
Tess Barger: So those are the primary factors that we were looking at as we went through this renewal process.
Tess Barger: In terms of our dental and vision, we recommend that we stay with Cigna for those.
Tess Barger: We got a 0% renewal rate for both this year, and by this year, I mean 2026 as well as 2027, and those have been working well for us.
Tess Barger: And then we’re recommending that we keep all of our voluntary and supplemental insurance options, the same for staff as well.
Tess Barger: One more important note regarding PEHP is that in addition to that decreased rate of 3.8% this year, which would result in a savings of $114,000 roughly, is that they are giving us a locked-in renewal rate of 7.2% for 2027.
Tess Barger: And by that locked-in rate, not a cap, but it would be 7.2%.
Tess Barger: The primary benefit of having that locked-in rate is that we know exactly what to budget for going into 2027.
Tess Barger: It’s not going to be a surprise when we get bids back in September, October of are we going to get a renewal rate of 20% or something like that. And that’s not abnormal.
Tess Barger: There are some employers in the community that got a 30% renewal rate.
Tess Barger: So even the fact that we were able to get Cigna down to that 4.78% is really, really excellent and not very common.
Tess Barger: But again, if we went with PEHP, we’d have the decrease this year and then a guaranteed rate for 2027 so that we know exactly what to budget for.
Tess Barger: Additionally, PEHP, based on the way that they’re structured, they’re able to keep their rates a bit flatter.
Tess Barger: They’re in essentially a government pool.
Tess Barger: And so if we have a year where we have a lot of utilization of our health plan, we’re not necessarily going to feel the pain of that with a really high renewal rate.
Tess Barger: So there’s, again, more consistency.
Tess Barger: There’s not as much volatility of last year we got a 0% renewal rate from Cigna and this year we initially were quoted a 14% renewal rate.
Tess Barger: That’s a lot harder for us to anticipate and budget for a year to year.
Tess Barger: What questions do we have? Yes.
Jacques Hadler: So on the PEHP, it does cover visits to St. Mary’s.
Tess Barger: Yes, it does.
Jacques Hadler: And there’s, so sorry, just to clarify. So the employees get a choice of the two networks. Is that right?
Tess Barger: Yes, that’s correct.
Tess Barger: So the quote three, and that’s the reason it’s not as cost savings, but as quote four is because we would be giving employees the option of Advantage or Summit.
Tess Barger: For both Advantage and Summit, it has the same Grand Junction, Colorado coverage.
Tess Barger: The big difference between Advantage and Summit plans are what network people want to go to within Utah.
Jacques Hadler: Okay, but that whole junction, all the standard medical facilities and junctions that are currently available to people would still be available.
Tess Barger: It’s very commonly utilized. PEHP is very commonly utilized.
Tess Barger: In Grand Junction, you know, the city has PEHP. I spoke with them.
Tess Barger: They said that there was a learning curve when they switched over to it, but generally their staff have been happy with the insurance.
Tess Barger: What I will say is coverage is a very complicated question because even if, say, the providers on the West side of the hospital accept an insurance, a provider on the East side of the hospital may not be in network with that insurance.
Tess Barger: So that’s kind of, that’s a really hard question to give a hard yes or no to.
Tess Barger: It’s unfortunately a little bit more complicated than that.
Tess Barger: There may, our staff may feel some differences, but individuals with PEHP who live in our community do access Grand Junction Healthcare. Okay. Yes. Go ahead. Oh, I’m sorry. It wasn’t true.
Stephen Stocks: I think, thanks, Steve. Just kind of an odd nuance.
Stephen Stocks: I think only one, I know Commissioner is going to let everybody know, and then of course, why it works for the Sheriff’s Department. So it’s an odd note that most of the commissions are covered under the insurance.
Stephen Stocks: I had a question for you regarding HSAs.
Stephen Stocks: So under this plan, I’m assuming you’ll have a high deductible plan and…
Tess Barger: Excellent question. Yes.
Tess Barger: So really what we’re looking at is changing coverage.
Tess Barger: Our plans for employees would be the same where we have a high deductible option and a traditional option.
Tess Barger: The high deductible option means that you have a higher deductible before your insurance starts kicking in and one of the reasons that we went this route is ultimately over time, insurance is going to increase in costs.
Tess Barger: Our options are either we take on that additional cost, we share that cost with employees and start having employees pay higher premiums, which we really don’t want to do, or we have to look at adjusting what plan we’re with.
Tess Barger: Ultimately, we are going to, over time, increase the amount that we’re paying for insurance because that’s ultimately something that’s out of our hands. Yes.
Mike McCurdy: Mine’s twofold here. One, my workforce is the Sheriff’s Department.
Mike McCurdy: I am actually insured underneath our healthcare. Two, is there any direct… Okay.
Mike McCurdy: Our county employees use a varied amount of services from Colorado to Intermountain Health up north.
Mike McCurdy: Do we have a direct, a Cigna hits all these and fills the needs right now, but we have gaps here and here?
Mike McCurdy: And do we have PHP will miss these and will hit these needs right now?
Mike McCurdy: Have we asked the employees this? Have we?
Mike McCurdy: Because this decision, we spoke earlier, this decision goes far past the commission as I’m one of a few that are actually insured by us, but this decision affects employees that are here far past electeds.
Mike McCurdy: So it really matters what we make this one.
Tess Barger: Yeah, it absolutely does.
Tess Barger: No, I greatly appreciate that.
Tess Barger: And that’s one of those things of their charts available and resources available to staff that they’ll be able to do provider lookups, et cetera.
Tess Barger: What I will say is in looking at the various charts, there are a few hospitals that neither the Advantage or Summit Plan covers that Cigna does, but there are some hospitals that Cigna doesn’t cover that Advantage or Summit does.
Tess Barger: And so really what I think we’re looking at is that again, there may be some employees who have absolutely no impact whatsoever.
Tess Barger: There may be some employees who perhaps have better opportunity to select a provider that’s in one of those hospitals that isn’t currently covered by Cigna.
Tess Barger: And there may be some employees who are seeing a specific provider or going to a specific hospital or care center that doesn’t accept one of these plans and they may have to change or make decisions about if they want to stay on and pay out of pocket.
Mike McCurdy: Okay, and this is part of the question too. In that, do we have any hard deadlines that we have to do this today?
Mike McCurdy: Or are we able to put a little bit more work onto it into our next meeting? Or is the hard deadline coming up?
Tess Barger: It’s a fairly hard deadline. And the reason for that is that open enrollment starts in approximately one month and we have to give our benefits administrators time to start getting everything set up in our system for our staff to start enrolling.
Tess Barger: It is technically an option to push back open enrollment by a week or so.
Tess Barger: It’s just going to put a lot of, it’s going to put a lot of crunch on things.
Mike McCurdy: Well, I don’t say this lightly. I very much appreciate your opinion on looking towards PHB.
Mike McCurdy: But I would love to pose that question to Mark Tyner.
Mike McCurdy: I would love to hear from all staff if possible, as quickly as possible on this.
Mike McCurdy: I would have loved to hear him before this conversation today, but I’ve heard from some now and I would love to hear from more before making my decision on switching or staying Cigna.
Mike McCurdy: I mean, if some form could be done there.
Melodie McCandless: Yeah, I think that that’s, I mean, I’ve obviously had insurance outside of the county for 25 years and I’ve never been asked when my company changes their plans, they just do it. And I’m curious, how long have we been with Cigna at the county?
Melodie McCandless: We’ve been with them for at least three years. Three years, yeah. I mean, it does get changed.
Melodie McCandless: Like you talked about the auditors, you know, changing based upon that. And it is some love it, some hate it.
Melodie McCandless: It makes you have to change. But generally you’re like general practition doctors that live in our community, generally fall on both.
Melodie McCandless: But it’s a specialty going out of town and stuff that it affects.
Melodie McCandless: But like I said, I’ve never been asked as an employee just saying, and I think Brian was next.
Brian Martinez: Perfect, yeah. A whole bunch of my questions got answered and it’s right here.
Brian Martinez: But the couple that I still have left. So do you consider the PHP as similar as possible to the Cigna coverage?
Tess Barger: Of the bids that we received, I consider it as comparable.
Tess Barger: I think as we can, I think as comparable while also looking at the fact that it would be beneficial to switch to it additionally because of the identified budget constraints that have been expressed by the commission throughout this year.
Brian Martinez: Quality wise, you think that we’re talking?
Tess Barger: I think that the one area that there, I wouldn’t say it’s 100%.
Tess Barger: And the reason I say that is because prescriptions are going to go up for those that utilize that by $5, $10, $15.
Tess Barger: So we’ll build prescriptions very often.
Tess Barger: The other item is if somebody very heavily uses that Grand Junction area network for, and I apologize, I’m gonna get into the weeds, but it’s simply because that’s the best way that I can describe it.
Tess Barger: So PEHP contracts they use, it’s either called a RAP network or a rental network, but they essentially use a different health network in Colorado.
Tess Barger: It’s called First Health.
Tess Barger: First Health is not as large.
Tess Barger: They don’t have as, essentially in the industry, what they say is they don’t have as much kind of weight to throw around for hospital contracts.
Tess Barger: So they can’t negotiate as good of rates all the time.
Tess Barger: So there may, it may be that because First Health is a little bit smaller, doesn’t have as much weight to throw around the Cigna, that for some hospitals getting services there is going to be more expensive, which means that for those claims, some of that additional expense may get passed off to the employee.
Tess Barger: If they have a 20% copay and the bill, the flat bill is higher, they’re gonna have to pay more in that 20%.
Tess Barger: So again, it’s very difficult to say firmly, this is better or this is worse.
Tess Barger: There are certainly some considerations when it comes to the fact that if we switch, there are some employees that are going to have to make adjustments and that is the reality.
Melodie McCandless: I think Mark had a, do you have more? Sorry.
Brian Martinez: I do, but Mark, if you wanna go ahead and jump in, that’s fine.
Mark Tyner: No, I was just going to ask, did you say earlier that the option that you’re recommending at this point is a little bit more expensive than the most savings they can make?
Tess Barger: Yes, that’s correct.
Tess Barger: Yes, so we either, for PHP, the two options that they quoted us, option three gives staff the ability to choose either that advantage plan or the summit plan.
Tess Barger: For quote four, we as an organization would make that choice for all of the staff and say, we as an agency have decided that the majority of staff would benefit from the summit plan or would benefit from the advantage plan and would not have a choice.
Tess Barger: So that’s why we went with option three.
Brian Martinez: Just real quick then to follow up. So for Cigna, we’re coming off of a 15% increase from last year. Is that correct? 14.9? Yeah, 7.9. 8.77.
Brian Martinez: No, no, I think that we’re coming in from 2025.
Brian Martinez: We’re coming in on a 14.9% increase previously, right?
Tess Barger: No, Cigna quoted us a 0% renewal rate coming into 2025, so nothing changed. Pretty amazing. That doesn’t happen very often.
Tess Barger: I believe that there was 0% or very, very, maybe at most 2% renewal rate the year prior to that. This year, it did go up to their initial quote they gave us for this year was 14.9%.
Tess Barger: That has to do with our utilization.
Tess Barger: We, the last few years have had really good years where people are healthy and there aren’t really big claims.
Tess Barger: This year, our staff utilized our insurance which is what it’s there for, but the insurance companies aren’t going to take all of that hit on their own.
Tess Barger: They pass some of that off to the employers, and so that’s why we saw that bigger renewal rate this year.
Tess Barger: We did get them down from 14.9% to the best and final offer of 7.8%. Got it.
Brian Martinez: So it started out…
Tess Barger: So the first quote they came on… Then it got down to 8.7. And now we have it down to 4.78%.
Tess Barger: And now it’s down to 4.78%. Which is an increase of $140,000, about $143,000.
Speaker 17: Chair, may I? Can I? Go ahead. Yeah. It was on the… Yes, what I was doing. I was just going to say that when we looked at this, Mark and Tessa and Mark, correct me if my memory is different from yours, kind of our number one priority and goal was to save the county money.
Speaker 17: And then our second priority was employee satisfaction with the healthcare system that we’re providing. I tend to agree. I think Tessa has been very, almost too nice.
Speaker 17: But I agree that people are very happy with Cigna.
Speaker 17: And this is going to cause a little bit of unhappiness among some staff, certainly.
Speaker 17: If that expense, if the 4% increase is something that the commission is willing to absorb, I think that we would see, generally speaking, happier staff staying with Cigna.
Speaker 17: But I do think that the savings that it represents to switch to PEHP is… It’s certainly not zero.
Speaker 17: So I mean, if you guys…
Speaker 17: If you guys say, hey, we’re comfortable staying with Cigna, I think all the staff would breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Speaker 17: But I also think that switching to PEHP is a fairly comparable network system with some small challenges and it is cheaper for the county.
Melodie McCandless: And it was $178,000. Is that what it was? $178,000. $178,000 with that 4% increase?
Tess Barger: Well, with the… I’m sorry. With the 4.78% increase, it’ll be $140,000. Okay.
Tess Barger: And then if we went with PEHP, it will be a reduction in $114,000 going into 2026.
Speaker 20: Over a quarter of a million dollar difference. PEHP also has quoted as a firm, what, 7.5% increase? 72% going into 2027.
Speaker 20: So we’re getting exactly what we’re looking at. We’re also providing stability. So anyway.
Melodie McCandless: Thank you. Let’s see. Did you finish your questions, Brian? I’m good.
Mary McGann: Okay. Mary, go ahead.
Mary McGann: You know, one of the most important things for our employees and people who live in Grand County is network.
Mary McGann: You know, how many networks? And it’s hard. I’m not seeing a real…
Mary McGann: It’s hard to find where that is happening.
Mary McGann: I would like to postpone this decision so that we can have something that really gives us a better and clearer idea of what is network and what is not.
Mary McGann: Because in Moab, in Grand County, if something’s not a network and you’re in a hurry and you need to get to Grand Junction and it’s not a network, that’s a big deal.
Mary McGann: Especially if it’s something that has to happen quickly.
Mary McGann: And my experience from my time working and having, you know, insurance through the school district is when we found that when we stayed with more of an insurance that was national, you know, that was more than just Utah, which PHP is pretty much just Utah, that the networking or PHP is a lot less.
Mary McGann: A lot more than I think we’re seeing here.
Mary McGann: And I, you know, I think for almost everybody in Moab would agree that that’s a big deal.
Mary McGann: It’s a really big deal for us to not have networking.
Mary McGann: And in the past years, we’ve had workshops to deal with where we have really had the opportunity to look at both things side by side with the picture, you know.
Mary McGann: And so I would like to recommend that next meeting, before the meeting, we have a workshop to really look at, you know, we want to save the money, but yet the hardship we’re going to put our employees in if they can’t get to an in-network person, it’s a big deal.
Mary McGann: Or if they’ve been going and getting treatment right now with someone that is in-network, and then we switch over and that person isn’t in-network, that person is going to be faced with, do we stay with this person because they know our history and we have this relationship and they’ve been helping us with our health issue and pay the extra money because they’re out of network or do…
Mary McGann: This is a huge decision and probably one of the biggest decisions we make outside of our budget as a whole general.
Mary McGann: And I would prefer a workshop.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, Bill has his hand up.
Bill Winfield: Yeah, I would agree with Mary that we need to do a lot more research or at least inform the commission because if I was to make a vote on this tonight, I would have to vote against because I just don’t have enough information to feel comfortable with it.
Bill Winfield: And so I would agree to pushing this out until we can schedule a workshop, but I also wanna mention that, I think that our employees, it’s important that we keep the coverage or the standard that they have consistently.
Bill Winfield: But I also think that on the other side of this, there’s a need to look at the fact that we represent a constituency in the county of which many or most do not have any insurance.
Bill Winfield: So there’s two sides to this sword for me.
Bill Winfield: One is looking at the money savings that need to be considered.
Bill Winfield: And the other is that what losses or gains that we have for our employees here.
Melodie McCandless: So Mike, I would like to- I said that’s kind of first, sorry.
Mike McCurdy: Two weeks put a big hiccup in deciding?
Tess Barger: It will put a hiccup in it. We will make it work.
Tess Barger: But more than two weeks, we won’t be able to. So we should definitely get that workshop on the books.
Mary McGann: And we can have it still on the agenda to vote that night. Right. But I think we can make a much better and more informed decision.
Stephen Stocks: Can I add one possibility? Is it possible to have a representative?
Stephen Stocks: Would it be possible to have a representative from PEHP be present to be able to show the maps or the networks?
Tess Barger: I’ll speak with our benefits administrator. We have not directly communicated with PEHP.
Tess Barger: Our benefits administrator does all of that coordination for us. But I can certainly speak with them and then see what I can do.
Stephen Stocks: Because I think that’s the underlying goal is to make sure that whatever change happens is ultimately a positive impact for them.
Stephen Stocks: And if we have something in a presentation from the provider themselves, if later it changes or it doesn’t meet what we’re anticipating, then it’s not necessarily the commissioner’s fault that they picked X network instead of Y network.
Stephen Stocks: And I think that’s without having them present, I think it’s going to be really hard to provide what the commissioners are looking for in terms of information. Just noting that.
Melodie McCandless: Yeah. So I don’t think, I think we’re discussing about we can do a workshop and vote on it in the same meeting. Not in the workshop, but in the meeting.
Stephen Stocks: And technically under policy, you guys do have it that if something’s on for a workshop, then you technically are not supposed to vote on it. So you have to suspend policy.
Stephen Stocks: The one note, the one reason why that exists is because often when we’re looking at most of our workshop, it’s not just receiving information, it’s making modifications to an underlying contract, redlining.
Stephen Stocks: And that puts a lot of stress and difficulty on staff.
Melodie McCandless: It’s usually creating a resolution or workshopping in that.
Stephen Stocks: And instead, this is really just providing more information and it doesn’t necessarily change the motion at the end of the day. Instead, it’s just, we want X or Y or whatnot.
Melodie McCandless: I think that Mike, were you in the middle of making a motion? No, do we have, Bill, you still have your hand up?
Bill Winfield: Yeah, I’d like to make one comment and then I’ll make the motion to postpone.
Bill Winfield: But I know that multiple times I’ve made the request that we reach out and consider the insurance that is provided through UAC, the Utah Association of Counties.
Bill Winfield: And I was just wondering if they had been considered or reached out to in regards to this change.
Bill Winfield: And then you can answer afterwards, but I do make the motion to postpone this until we’ve had a chance to workshop it.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, so Bill has a first, Mary has a second. I think, John, did you have another comment?
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, could we just, instead of doing a workshop, we could just call it a presentation because it seems like it would be more of a presentation than a workshop and go about it that way.
Stephen Stocks: And then that wouldn’t violate policy and require a suspension of policy. Okay, fine. Semantics win.
Melodie McCandless: So we’ll do a presentation. Yes, okay, and Commissioner Martinez?
Brian Martinez: Yeah, and I think that this entire body up here should realize that there has been, having been involved in the budget advisory board, there has been a lot of tough decisions that have been made trying to come up with this reduction that we’re going to have. And this is something that we are going to have to be ready to start making some of these decisions.
Brian Martinez: You know, I commend you guys for going out and finding this right here.
Brian Martinez: I mean, it has been tough to try to find, you know, anything to cut out of our budget.
Brian Martinez: I mean, every decision that you make is a tough decision.
Brian Martinez: And I think weighing that of, you know, what we’re basically losing in our benefits to what we might be gaining, I think is something that we definitely want to keep in mind.
Brian Martinez: And I appreciate you bringing that up at the beginning of your speech.
Tess Barger: Yeah, and then to answer Commissioner Winfield’s question, we did reach out to UAC and they utilized PEHP.
Bill Winfield: Awesome. Thank you very much.
Bill Winfield: And then I guess I would need to change my motion if we are going to move to a presentation. Is that correct, County Attorney? Yes.
Bill Winfield: So my motion would then be for a presentation at the next meeting.
Melodie McCandless: I agree with you. OK, so we have a motion from Bill to postpone and have a presentation and a second by Mary. So all in favor?
Melodie McCandless: OK, that passes 6-0 with Commissioner Hedin absent.
Melodie McCandless: And that is perfect timing for us to go into a six o’clock Citizens to be heard. Thank you, Tess. See you next meeting. Yeah, thank you, Paul. So it’s six o’clock.
Melodie McCandless: So we have our citizens to be heard.
Melodie McCandless: So if there’s anybody in the audience that would like to speak, go ahead.
Melodie McCandless: And you can sit at the podium or you can sit at the table.
Jim Barton: And say your name. Name is Jim Barton. I live in the subdivision that will be most correctly impacted by the NOVAC rezoning request.
Jim Barton: A couple weeks ago, I sat here and was extremely opposed to the development. But my major concern being the impact traffic on Zimmerman Lane for our children.
Jim Barton: My opposition was formed by the information that I had available to me. Which was the, I mean, as soon as I bought my house, I was pretty much informed by my neighbors that there was an adjacent 30 acre property that was trying to be rezoned.
Jim Barton: Eight dwellings per acre. Which would allow 240 units to be built there. And with no road out.
Jim Barton: And which would make Zimmerman Lane for all those people. And our kids were out there.
Jim Barton: So that was, I think that’s where most of my neighbors are. That was the information available to us.
Jim Barton: Since then, after that meeting, the NOVAC affiliated civil engineer pulled me aside. He had a plan.
Jim Barton: He showed it to me the first time I’d seen it.
Jim Barton: And it’s not 200 units, it’s 88 units.
Jim Barton: And it’s not eight units per acre.
Jim Barton: You know, one house per acre or half acre on the outer edge.
Jim Barton: A couple of quad pledges in the middle that probably won’t get built.
Jim Barton: But the point is, is it’s not a 240 dwelling impact in our area. It’s 88. We need houses.
Jim Barton: Moab is, we only have so much land that is capable of being developed.
Jim Barton: I’ve looked over the plan.
Jim Barton: I’ve spent a significant amount of time with Ms.
Jim Barton: NOVAC talking about her plan and how her team let her down by not communicating this to the people impacted.
Jim Barton: But I’ve reviewed the plan.
Jim Barton: I think it’s very professional. It’s within reason. It is not outrageous.
Jim Barton: Now, there is still a road that has to be built out of there to connect to Stocks Drive.
Jim Barton: That is going to impact a property owner who my understanding is it’s very much against that road being built through his property.
Jim Barton: However, I think there’s an easement.
Jim Barton: I know the Commissioner Winterfield was speaking to that a few weeks ago.
Jim Barton: Assuming that road can be built to get that traffic out of that development, I’m very much in support of the NOVAC rezoning.
Jim Barton: I think it is a, it’s really a well-designed development. And we need it. And my son’s here. He just moved here.
Jim Barton: He’s trying to find a house.
Jim Barton: We need more houses for people to buy. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. Do we have anyone else in the audience to speak?
Brenda Novac: Come on up. Hello, I’m Brenda NOVAC. It’s really nice to get to meet you all in person.
Brenda Novac: I am the trustee for the LaVar Moffitt Trust, which owns the property on Chapman. I feel like it’s very important when somebody like me comes before you and asks for a development like this, that we get some sort of trust and knowledge of each other.
Brenda Novac: I think trust is an important element in it. And that comes with knowledge.
Brenda Novac: And so a little bit of background on me. I was born in Utah, Vernal.
Brenda Novac: I was raised in Salt Lake Valley, went to BYU. And I’ve lived in California since I married my husband.
Brenda Novac: But Utah is home, will always be home. I hope to move back here on this property.
Brenda Novac: I totally understand the neighbor’s frustration with development and having high density. If I were living next to it, I would probably not want it either.
Brenda Novac: We’ve been fine with leaving the property, just vacant and let people use it. They’ve ridden their motorcycles and quads and done target shooting.
Brenda Novac: But now that it’s been in our family for three generations, and it’s time to do something with it. And we feel like the highest and best use for this property is housing.
Brenda Novac: It’s something that Moab needs. So we wanna do a well-designed, well thought out community where we have space for people to put their toys, possibly a garden that people can do together.
Brenda Novac: So we have some great plans for it. Greg Upwell is the architect who designed it.
Brenda Novac: I have taken a great deal of feedback from the neighbors, which is why we shifted to have the larger lots around the outside, trying to abut what they have. So it’s like by like, and put any density toward the middle. We are asking for this.
Brenda Novac: It’s only 2.8 per acre, which is not a high density development, but there has to be a small level of density to be able to justify the risk that I will be taking on behalf of my family. I can’t let them down. I’m the steward. I need to do this right.
Brenda Novac: And at the same time, I can’t let you down and I can’t let the neighbors down.
Brenda Novac: So I’ve been busy trying to make compromises that are reasonable and wise.
Brenda Novac: And so anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’m here if you have questions.
Brenda Novac: I think I’ve emailed most of you or all of you.
Brenda Novac: And I have met with many of the neighbors.
Brenda Novac: And as a person who counts success, not by what I accomplish or how much money I make, but how many people I love and who love me back, this has been a great exercise because the people even that are on the other side of the fence have become very good friends.
Brenda Novac: And so it’s been fun to get to know everybody.
Brenda Novac: And I hope to get to know everybody a little better.
Melodie McCandless: Thank you. Okay, go ahead. Come on up.
Mike McCurdy: Question for Steven real quick.
Mike McCurdy: With the extension of moving several of these items to next meeting, we still encompass any of these in public comment?
Stephen Stocks: So all of these will be, any of the written comments will be received in the public comment period through Wednesday, the day prior to our close.
Stephen Stocks: But it doesn’t mean that that information isn’t relevant.
Speaker 19: Okay, thank you.
Patty Robinson: Do I introduce myself? Yes, please. I’m Patty Robinson.
Patty Robinson: My 12 1⁄2 acres comprises the eastern edge of the property she’s just referring to.
Patty Robinson: And on the 15-foot setback, on the parcel that applies to my house, there are some trees that have been planted.
Patty Robinson: A core sample would probably show that they were 50 years old.
Patty Robinson: On the other side, from my house parcel to my agricultural parcel, I planted a tree line about 34 years ago.
Patty Robinson: And if stocks drives were realigned to the appropriate orientation, it would take out 56 mature trees.
Patty Robinson: However, stocks drives currently exists is not in line with property boundaries.
Patty Robinson: So you’d be thinking, if it was realigned, you’d be moving a fire hydrant taking 15 feet off the vansal property and then the entire tree line 56 trees worth.
Patty Robinson: At one point, the county thought that putting the road through would just go ahead and take 104 trees out to establish a road.
Patty Robinson: However, it’s never been a road.
Patty Robinson: We’ve done the maintenance on it.
Patty Robinson: And I really don’t want to miss having the end of the road to myself.
Patty Robinson: I understand that we need property.
Patty Robinson: We’re younger people to move in here. I should show them.
Melodie McCandless: Thank you. Okay. Do we have anyone else? And then your son.
Michelle Barton: So we left here. Your name, please. I’m Michelle Barton, Jim’s wife.
Michelle Barton: We came in here a couple of weeks ago for the meeting and I think we were really opposed to it. There was so much miscommunication out there.
Michelle Barton: And then the gentleman talked to us outside at the meeting and we talked to him and he really opened our eyes. And it was myself, my husband, another gentleman from our neighborhood was there.
Michelle Barton: And so we kind of decided to like talk to Brenda ourselves, get to the source itself and find out what’s really going on.
Michelle Barton: And after talking to Brenda, we really are for it because of how it’s being developed.
Michelle Barton: And we have a newer generation coming in.
Michelle Barton: Younger people want to come move here and there’s no actual houses or houses that are affordable for a younger person to buy.
Michelle Barton: So, I mean, it’s almost becoming a rich community.
Michelle Barton: You know, you have to be really wealthy to live here, apparently.
Michelle Barton: And I think this one could open up a lot of doors for a lot.
Michelle Barton: As long as it doesn’t go down my street and turn it into a freeway, I think we would be really, I would be fine with it.
Speaker 19: Okay, and you can go ahead.
James Barton III: James Barton III, Jim’s son. Um, when I first moved here, I was against it because my kid loves playing on the road and all his friends play on the road. We didn’t want traffic. We’ve seen the plans.
James Barton III: As long as there’s an outstreet to stocks, I’m for it. I’m a working participant in the community and try and find a house.
James Barton III: I’m bidding against people that just want to tear the houses I can’t pour down. And put a bigger house. So it’s hard trying to find somewhere reasonable that I can pour as a working part of the community.
James Barton III: It adds places that people that want to build bigger house, they might be able to, you know, then have that more expensive, nicer house. And I can get the house I can’t pour.
James Barton III: Um, it also adds people to the community to help businesses on the off season.
James Barton III: 200 more people that live in Mohawk.
James Barton III: That’s 200 more people that are going to go to the shops during off seasons.
James Barton III: Don’t go to restaurants, help owners. It’s, I’m for it.
James Barton III: As long as it doesn’t turn into a highway.
James Barton III: And I think it’ll be good.
James Barton III: It’s land that’s not being used.
James Barton III: I feel terrible for the land that would lose part of her land.
James Barton III: But we can only build so much in town here.
James Barton III: We got walls on each side.
James Barton III: You can’t build on the wall.
James Barton III: You gotta build, you know, north-south. So that’s my ideas. Appreciate your time. Thank you.
Melodie McCandless: Okay.
Melodie McCandless: Do we have anybody else in the chambers that want to speak? What about online? Quinn, nobody online? Okay. Only once.
Melodie McCandless: We are going to move on to number nine on the agenda packet, which is to allocate $250,000 for special event matching promotional grants for 2026.
Melodie McCandless: And this is by Commissioner Mark Martinez. Give me one second.
Melodie McCandless: Thanks everybody for coming. Have a good evening.
Brian Martinez: So this is very similar to the $77,000, I believe, that we approved for 2025. It was not used.
Brian Martinez: And what these funds are for is this is a matching grant.
Brian Martinez: So if a special event was coming to Moab, they could apply for this grant.
Brian Martinez: And they would say like, hey, we have, we plan on marketing $10,000 for our grant.
Brian Martinez: This grant right here would be used as a matching fund.
Brian Martinez: So then they would have $20,000 available for a matching grant.
Brian Martinez: And then they would, after they completed their event and shown receipts that this went towards advertising, this money would then be reimbursed to them.
Brian Martinez: The reason that we have it on right now is rather than just in the budget, it is what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to cast a wider net with who we offer this grant out to.
Brian Martinez: So we’re trying to utilize Madden and Camp Stories to try to bring in some different events and at different times of the year, some of the grant priorities, and I put this in here on the agenda right here, is year-round events.
Brian Martinez: So trying to prioritize off-peak travel, growing existing events and new events, and then supporting existing events that we already have going, kind of in that order.
Brian Martinez: So what this is, is just basically letting Camp Stories and Madden know that this money will be available for 2026, so that they can go out and start advertising this opportunity right here.
Brian Martinez: Some of the things that they’d come up with might be music events, river events, night sky events, contacting rodeos, craft events, food events, just things that we haven’t seen here previously.
Brian Martinez: One that I really liked was dog skills events because those actually happened in December.
Brian Martinez: And so that might be a nice time to bring something into OSTO or things like that.
Brian Martinez: So just casting a wider net right there.
Mary McGann: I have a question, I’m a bit confused.
Mary McGann: So it’s gonna cost, out of TRT promotional funds, $250,000, but we’re not going to be spending up to $250,000 until 2006, is that right?
Brian Martinez: 2026, correct.
Mary McGann: 226, I mean. 206, that was 2026, correct? Correct, yeah. Okay, but we need to do it with the reason we want it.
Brian Martinez: Now, so that we can advertise the opportunity now, so that we can actually, the special events subcommittee is trying to award those, to award these grants in first quarter, rather than in third or fourth quarter, like they did last year.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, so they’re just trying to improve that process.
Brian Martinez: And so if we are going to advertise it, they’re going to have to advertise that really, you know, this October, November, December, if we’re going to try to get this out to people.
Brian Martinez: And then the reason for the increase right there is we just want to, they want to have a little bit more flexibility.
Brian Martinez: You know, like there could be a concert series that might be exciting and someone might see this as, hey, this is a great opportunity for us to come and try to bring some music down.
Brian Martinez: Or, you know, a rodeo series might see this right here.
Brian Martinez: It’s just trying to step up that game. All right, Doug.
Jacques Hadler: Would this be available to entities that are applying for special events in the city, as well as the county?
Brian Martinez: It’s in the county, yeah.
Jacques Hadler: Cool. So like Car Show, for example, is permitted by the city.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, I mean, if Car Show was to come and basically, you know, if they were to come and say, I would imagine that this money would be available for them. Okay.
Mike McCurdy: Mike? This $250,000 is the total pool that was provided, not the total amount that’s obligated out.
Brian Martinez: It’s not obligated out.
Brian Martinez: And so what’s been in discussion right now is if, you know, there was $100,000 worth of grants that they chose, basically the other $150,000 would just go back into the reserve fund.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. Mike?
Speaker 19: Oh, never mind.
Bill Winfield: Bill, quick. Yeah, and I just want to clarify, Commissioner Martinez, this is promotional money that would be used to bring people into the county, correct?
Bill Winfield: And we would just be given grants out to match what someone else is spending.
Bill Winfield: It would be a dollar for dollar match, basically.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, and we haven’t figured out what that tier would be yet. Or I’m sorry, not we, but the special events subcommittee has not figured out those tiers.
Brian Martinez: But a lot of times when you think of marketing, people like to think of it like a really big funnel. And usually we attack the top of the funnel, which is that more expensive, wider reach when we’re going.
Brian Martinez: This is basically just providing an opportunity to attack more of the center of the funnel.
Brian Martinez: So it is a marketing grant that with that says, you know, we are bringing people in.
Brian Martinez: But rather than trying to say like, here is Grand County, it’s more of somebody saying, we’re going to come to Grand County and this is the number of people that we’re going to come in.
Brian Martinez: So it’s just a little bit further down the funnel, a little closer to actual results in action.
Melodie McCandless: All right, I feel sorry. Did you have more to say?
Bill Winfield: No, I was just thanking him, but I’ll go ahead and make the motion to approve this.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, and second?
Mike McCurdy: I’ll too. Mike. One more point here. Okay, I’ll make sure it’s okay.
Mike McCurdy: With this, I like the clarification that receipts were provided on the tail end. We had some previous grants just kind of slip through the floorboards just on some of the receipts.
Mike McCurdy: I’d love to always keep an eye on that tab too.
Brian Martinez: And so right now, just to kind of give you a little bit more clarity, we’re right now at the end tab board is trying to put together the application. Okay. And inside that application, it should describe the process.
Brian Martinez: A couple of things that they’ve talked about is first, they’d like to make sure that the event happened satisfactory, right?
Brian Martinez: Like I think that part of it should be that they came here and did exactly what they were supposed to do.
Brian Martinez: And then second, to get that, they’ll have to show the receipts that they didn’t spend that actually on promotion. Cool.
Brian Martinez: So that the money stays all up for it.
Brian Martinez: Also, just real quick, also the Moab Office of Tourism, Mick and Allie also provided what other counties are doing as well and how those programs are working.
Mike McCurdy: Okay. Quick question with that, if you know the answer too. I’m already biased to Grand County.
Mike McCurdy: Are we doing better than other counties? Are we on par with other counties with this? I think we’re just getting started. Oh, okay. Thanks.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. So we’ve got a motion by Bill with second by Mike. So we’ll call the vote. All in favor? Okay.
Melodie McCandless: So that passes 6-0 with Commissioner Hedin absent. Number 10, acceptance of the 2024 TRT and TRCCA expenditure report.
Melodie McCandless: And this is presented by Dr. Gaughter. Hey, real quick.
Gabe Woytek: Thank you, Vice Chair.
Gabe Woytek: So per code, this is a report required for access to potential other sources of funding that H-246 opened up related to TRT, if I’m not mistaken.
Gabe Woytek: And I did bet that it’s through the State Authority’s Office for some review before submission.
Gabe Woytek: Shared it with the Tourism Advisory Board and it’s being placed before you.
Gabe Woytek: I think, you know, certainly if there are any big holes or, you know, significant edits that need to be made, I’d be happy to submit it at the end of this report.
Gabe Woytek: It was due on the first of the month.
Gabe Woytek: So I look forward to submitting it with more advanced time so you all can review it prior to submission next year.
Gabe Woytek: And yeah, I think generally, I included a handful of other counties that have kind of similar TRT revenue dynamics.
Gabe Woytek: There are reports that they submitted for the same equivalent year.
Gabe Woytek: And I did that not necessarily to analyze like how we’re spending these revenues, but mainly I just wanted to display that the importance that, and the emphasis that I’m placing on Grand County taking leadership and its transparency and compliance and the seriousness it takes and using TRT and being good partners with the state and reporting and sort of communicating those issues with the public and with the state and take that really seriously.
Gabe Woytek: And I think you’ll see when you compare the report that I submitted with those other counties, evident level of detail and care and attention I placed on it. So that’s all I have.
Melodie McCandless: Absolutely. I looked at all of them and I can definitely see the difference in the reports there. But do you have any questions for Gabe?
Bill Winfield: I do. Yeah, Gabe, you stayed in here that a final draft was shared with the state auditor’s office.
Bill Winfield: Did they return any comment on that?
Gabe Woytek: They said it looked good.
Gabe Woytek: And the degree to which they want, that they’re going to offer, you know, there any more coaching than that, you know, I can’t say, but yeah, I did receive a positive response.
Jacques Hadler: Go ahead, Jacques. I’ll move to accept the 2024 Grand County TRT slash TRCCA expenditure report as presented. I’ll second. Okay, Bill seconds. And Brian has time.
Brian Martinez: I actually have a question. So I believe that also in the HB456, there was supposed to be a person in the state auditor’s office that comes out with these.
Brian Martinez: Is that position been filled yet?
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, her name is Hadley Scott. Hadley Scott. She’s been the person that I’ve been communicating with, along with Seth Obeson regarding this report. Okay, thank you.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, any other comments or questions?
Jacques Hadler: Go ahead, Jacques. No, just great job, Gabe.
Jacques Hadler: I looked through all of them also, and this one is clearly very well detailed and reported, and that probably took a lot of time and energy. So thanks for your effort on that.
Brian Martinez: Go ahead, Brian. Oh yeah, and then just ask, and then you don’t feel that we need to include the addendums that we kind of talked about previously under the TRCCA? Is that something we can include for this item?
Gabe Woytek: Yeah, maybe I can reach out to Hadley and let her know that there’s a sentence or two that I could add, and if it’s, you know, I don’t see why that would be a problem. Thank you.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, there’s no more comments. I will call for a vote. We had a motion by Jacques, with a second by Bill. So all in favor? Aye.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, that passes 6-0, Commissioner Hedin absent. Number 11, appoint representatives to the Bicycle Access Improvement to National Parks Group.
Melodie McCandless: And Commissioner Winfield, did you want to talk about this?
Bill Winfield: Sure, there was an email sent in and by the National Park Service regarding this, and with multiple commissioners requesting to fill that position, why I’m not sure.
Bill Winfield: It might have been myself, I believe, that reached back out to the National Park Service and they were totally comfortable with adding an additional commissioner and just making it two rather than one.
Bill Winfield: And so that’s where we find ourselves now.
Bill Winfield: Both Brian and Jacques will be able to have input and be a part of what they’re doing.
Bill Winfield: I know that there’s multiple suggestions out there right now of bicycle access into Arches, and I couldn’t honestly say where it will end up myself, but I think this will give good representation from the county on that decision.
Melodie McCandless: What about a vote motion, Bill, because you mentioned both their names.
Bill Winfield: Oh, so I’ll make the motion.
Bill Winfield: I move to appoint Commissioner Martinez and Commissioner Hadler to the Bicycle Access Improvement in the National Parks Group.
Melodie McCandless: Do you have a second? Go ahead, Michael.
Melodie McCandless: Second, okay. Then I think I saw your hand up, Jacques. Did you have a question or comment?
Jacques Hadler: No, I was going to make the motion, but I’ll comment that we’ve already had one meeting and I thought it was a great first step and I’m just looking forward to this project and more discussion about bicycle access in the National Parks because I think it’s awesome.
Melodie McCandless: Yeah, and I think all of the commissioners are well aware that that was all happening. We all were talking on those and with the meeting happening before this vote, I thought that was super comfortable for those two to go ahead and go about that.
Melodie McCandless: All right, any other discussion? Okay, let’s take a vote.
Melodie McCandless: We have a motion by Bill, I wish a second by Mike. All in favor?
Melodie McCandless: And that passes 6-0, with Commissioner Hedin absent. Okay, our next one, let’s appoint a liaison to the Thompson Springs Special Service District and this is a reassignment request.
Melodie McCandless: I’ll go ahead and let Commissioner Hadley speak to this.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, I’ve been the liaison to the Thompson Springs Special Service District and a voting member for four years.
Jacques Hadler: I think that community has come quite a ways since I got on and I think that the direction they’re going is going to, I think it’s going to have to involve WSAA and some, just a different paradigm out there for them to get the water that that community needs and deserves.
Jacques Hadler: And in my time there and talking to folks, I think it would be beneficial to them to have a liaison who has just connections to WSAA and Commissioner Winfield also has developed some good relationships upstate that I think could be beneficial to the TSSD.
Jacques Hadler: So I am ready to relinquish my role in that capacity and I think Bill would make a great liaison.
Jacques Hadler: So I would move to appoint Commissioner Winfield to the Thompson Special Service District as commission liaison.
Bill Winfield: I’ll second.
Melodie McCandless: Mary Katja before then. So Jacques has made a motion and Mary seconds. Any more discussion?
Bill Winfield: Yeah, I’d like to comment.
Bill Winfield: Yeah, I would say that Commissioner Hadler has done a great job of bringing that board together out there.
Bill Winfield: I know that it was fairly disruptive and meetings were quite contentious.
Bill Winfield: Just listening to some of the neighbors talk and I would say Jacques done a real good job of bringing that together.
Bill Winfield: And I think both Jacques and I have ties into that community.
Bill Winfield: You know, for the record, I have a sister that owns a piece of land out there, although she hasn’t seen it or been on it in 20 plus years.
Bill Winfield: Why there is that, you know, that I wanna disclose that for sure.
Bill Winfield: But the ties are more than that.
Bill Winfield: They’re a community in need and you know, the JR, John Ripley and I went before the CIB to get a grant for some stuff out there.
Bill Winfield: And we got to escape the system.
Bill Winfield: It’s almost operational now that the state can use.
Bill Winfield: And I just think the community’s been appreciative of Jacques work and sees some value in both of us.
Bill Winfield: I wouldn’t say that there’s any more one over the other, but there is a chance to move this forward and possibly see some participation in the future if things work out with GWSA.
Bill Winfield: And I would say that’s kind of where my interest lies to try and get a bigger community, I guess, overseeing the water board out there and kind of being able to help and move that forward in that community. So that’s all I’ve got.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, I think has a comment.
Stephen Stocks: Yeah, so early on in my tenure, I remember having to go out multiple times.
Stephen Stocks: I am not the biggest of humans, but Jacques took me out a couple of times with him to go chat with that board because they have had quite a bit of growing.
Stephen Stocks: And in the beginning, it started out with myself being there and law enforcement being there and lots of talks of litigation and term oil, but I think they’re at a wonderful place.
Stephen Stocks: I think that’s been something that Commissioner Hadler’s really done a good job to kind of help balance and calm down.
Stephen Stocks: And I think they’ve made a lot of good positive progress that I don’t think would have been possible without strong helping hand.
Stephen Stocks: I appreciate Commissioner Hadler and Commissioner Winfield taking on the meeting.
Stephen Stocks: It’s really probably one of the most inconvenient meetings.
Stephen Stocks: You have to drive all the way out to Thompson and this board meeting is like their, I don’t know what it is.
Stephen Stocks: Their cinema, their life, but it is a really, really interesting site.
Stephen Stocks: I wish all of our boards had this much engagement and this much excitement.
Stephen Stocks: So I just wanted to know Commissioner Hadler’s great efforts out there and I think they’ve been very helpful.
Jacques Hadler: I definitely appreciate both Stephen and Bill’s comments on that. And it’s been really fun and interesting to learn and work with that community. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Jacques Hadler: And I think we’re getting places and I trust that Bill will continue to get them further along and get that community to where it should be. And it is a unique and fascinating community.
Jacques Hadler: So I also, Bill and I worked really well together on the Thompson stuff. We’ve driven out there a number of times together for meetings.
Jacques Hadler: So I definitely appreciate the collaboration too.
Melodie McCandless: Thank you. Okay. So go ahead and call for a vote. We had a motion by Jacques with a second by Mary. So all in favor.
Speaker 19: Aye.
Melodie McCandless: All right. So we’re five inches. Oh yeah. Five, two, oh, let’s see.
Melodie McCandless: Tricia Dean is absent and Mary McGann’s absent. So moving on to number 14, oh well, okay.
Melodie McCandless: So 13 is being skipped due to legal review. And that’s the contract approval for the public defender 2025 to 2027.
Melodie McCandless: So number 14 is facilitating the trail ambassador exit from the County. And I will start with this and let Jacques talk after I do.
Melodie McCandless: We’ve had multiple meetings, probably six since the last meeting that we had that we discussed that we had a workshop discussing the future of the trail ambassador. And we’ve had a lot of different nonprofits join us and community members.
Melodie McCandless: And they’ve come to the decision that a nonprofit is going to be best course of action for them. Thinking about moving into the health department or another group was considered.
Melodie McCandless: They’ve been able to lock in a place to be housed for the next year, which is fantastic. And they’ve come to the County now asking for a few things since that group doesn’t have any money at the moment.
Melodie McCandless: They have some funding for future positions for next year but not any funding for spending. So I think what they’re requesting is some money for a web design.
Melodie McCandless: And that web design will be a portal to channel donations through as well as getting the word out. They want a Google workspace so that they can start mitigating, creating their emails and moving some of their contacts over before the exit from the County.
Melodie McCandless: They also want to do some legal fees. And I have a question for our attorney on legal fees.
Melodie McCandless: But so legal fees is the other one. And that would be to help them move the items that the County will move out of the County which we haven’t voted on.
Melodie McCandless: But those items that we do choose to send with them to get them transferred into their names.
Melodie McCandless: So there’s some legal items.
Melodie McCandless: I think that’s everything.
Melodie McCandless: Google workspace, website.
Melodie McCandless: Oh, and then also just the nonprofit set up either.
Melodie McCandless: And so those are what they’re asking the County to start with right now so that they can get moved forward.
Melodie McCandless: There’ll be a future resolution that will come with more ideas once we continue to work on but this gets them moving in the right direction.
Melodie McCandless: And so the legal fees that were quoted on that vote was $10,000.
Melodie McCandless: And I just wanted to hear your opinion on that amount.
Melodie McCandless: And she did mention, Anna mentioned that it was for a retainer and that all of that money would probably not be used.
Melodie McCandless: But that was like, you start with that and then it probably won’t be the whole thing.
Stephen Stocks: Yeah. So normally when anybody thinks about nonprofits everybody’s excited but it’s actually just, it’s tax law.
Stephen Stocks: I mean, that’s really what the formation is going to be.
Stephen Stocks: It’s everything from a combination of tax law and then the bylaws, the formation documents and everything else that they need.
Stephen Stocks: They’ll have the founding individuals.
Stephen Stocks: And I would estimate probably between 10 to 20,000 will be the range of fees that it’ll take.
Stephen Stocks: The other thing that the County needs to do is create an asset list.
Stephen Stocks: I know they’re working on that because we need to identify either the intellectual property, the physical assets, the title assets and all of those things to be packaged up and sent across.
Stephen Stocks: And so the question becomes what does the County want to have us take care of?
Stephen Stocks: And what do they want outside help on?
Stephen Stocks: And I think for the most part if our staff does your asset list and your basic information we can kind of keep the costs down quite a bit.
Stephen Stocks: So I think that’s that range.
Stephen Stocks: I think if you did a regulator the tricky thing is going to be that they won’t be able to engage an attorney unless they bring that contract back to you guys anyways because you guys have the signatory authority.
Stephen Stocks: So I think the next step would likely be finding an attorney and that’s whether we’re going to put out an RFP or RFQ or determine that they’re sole source and then obtaining that information, that contract look at what the request is but move pretty quick on that so that we can get this done by the end of the year if that’s what the commission wants to do and move forward.
Stephen Stocks: But timing is of the essence.
Melodie McCandless: Well, I see your hand up but I’m going to let Jacques speak first just because he’s been, him and I have been on that committee and so if there’s anything that I missed.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, no, I think you did a great job of explaining it, Melody. And we have been, that working group has been working frantically to get this completed by the end of the year.
Jacques Hadler: Melody and I have been doing weekly meetings with a very good group of folks from local nonprofits as well as the health center. And from Maddie and Anna from GCAT, we have another meeting at one tomorrow.
Jacques Hadler: Stephen and I would absolutely invite you to that.
Jacques Hadler: I know you came to the first couple of those and I think it’s definitely beneficial to have you in the room for those if at all possible. 1 p.m. tomorrow? It’s 1 p.m. tomorrow here.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, I’ll be, it should be right after court so I should be able to attend. Awesome.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, and again, this is, it’s kind of a race against time to get this spun off.
Jacques Hadler: I’ve learned a ton about just creating a nonprofit from some of the folks in the room there that have been running them.
Jacques Hadler: And I think we’re lucky to have some of those people in that room to help guide Anna as she works on this.
Jacques Hadler: But yeah, I’m definitely in favor of this.
Jacques Hadler: I mean, I think everyone here is espoused a appreciation for the trail ambassadors, if not in Greene County, then as their own entity and the value that they bring to us.
Jacques Hadler: And just so it doesn’t die on by, I think this is a great.
Bill Winfield: Okay, go ahead. I’ll make the motion to approve this and then have comments after it’s been seconded.
Melodie McCandless: Do we have a second?
Melodie McCandless: Okay, John, second. And then they’ll go ahead and comment.
Bill Winfield: I would just like to comment. Oops, am I talking over somebody?
Melodie McCandless: No, you’re good. Mary’s gonna go next.
Bill Winfield: Okay, yeah, I would just like to comment.
Bill Winfield: Having been involved in setting up a couple of nonprofits, why it’s the lawyer fees to me seem a little bit high.
Bill Winfield: I realize it’s been a few years, but I guess as long as we keep an eye on that, if we have to prove it in the future, I do know that at some point we will be looking at likely funding some sort of a startup for this group when they move into a nonprofit.
Bill Winfield: And I just think keeping a close tab on that and an eye on these fees would be advisable.
Bill Winfield: So I agree with Jacques’ comments.
Bill Winfield: I think we all agree and see the value to it.
Bill Winfield: I just was surprised by the legal services fee there and then even more surprised by our county attorney.
Bill Winfield: So it might’ve been a minute since I was part of this, but nonprofits are not extremely technical to set up.
Melodie McCandless: Okay, thank you. And Mary, go ahead.
Mary McGann: So the motion is to use a $16,076 for trail ambassadors.
Mary McGann: Is that what the motion is for? That I’m out.
Mary McGann: I want to just make sure.
Melodie McCandless: Ultimately, the county would be paying those bills. So it won’t be like we’re giving the non to clarify.
Melodie McCandless: We’re not giving the nonprofit the money. I mean, at the moment, we would be paying the bill.
Melodie McCandless: So I mean, so maybe you would want to say not over $16,500 maybe, but because that will be the purchase. We’ll be paying the bill.
Melodie McCandless: It won’t just be like, oh, here you go, go spend this. So right now I would imagine it’s going to be fine for the county still.
Melodie McCandless: Just like he talked about, we’re going to have to get possibly get RFP or decide single source. So it’s still a cut county funds at the moment, but we’re helping them along and find understanding it.
Mary McGann: All right, there with the remote, it just wasn’t clear how much money we were thinking of using to help in the process.
Melodie McCandless: And it’s spelled out in the, I know I looked at that. I looked at what Anna gave us for her recommendations. Brian, did you have a comment? Go ahead.
Stephen Stocks: Again, confirming what will happen. I mean, this is the commission earmarking these funds that this is what you guys would like those funds to be utilized for.
Stephen Stocks: I’m certain that Com Advan, Quinn Hall and Mark Tyner will be able to help shepherd and guide this process through contacting an attorney. They’ll get a contract. It’ll come back before you guys.
Stephen Stocks: If you guys are comfortable with this, likely what we can do is we can put it on the consent agenda as a ratification and have the signature executed. And then from there, it’ll just be processed and they’ll start doing your work.
Stephen Stocks: If we can find a source that does a flat fee, that’ll be easier.
Stephen Stocks: Attorneys are starting to move forward and abandoning the billable hour.
Stephen Stocks: That’s kind of the bane of most attorneys’ existence.
Stephen Stocks: So let’s get that information for you guys.
Brian Martinez: So then the reason that we would have to hire somebody else out is because you would be at conflict or at odds, with the person on the other side creating this?
Stephen Stocks: So there’s a couple different reasons. My office could do it. We would end up contracting out.
Stephen Stocks: But if you’re going to help a nonprofit, if you’re going to help them go out on their own, it’s not a bad idea that they have a start talking to a different attorney. And then that way in the future, if they run into issues, because regardless of where the program goes, the county is probably going to have to deposit seed money for them to be successful.
Stephen Stocks: And an attorney is a good thing to have for a budding new entity in a relationship as well. Once they shift onto their own, they’re not going to have access to our office because we don’t provide general legal advice.
Stephen Stocks: We provide information in conjunction with the county. And so I think it’s a good supportive thing for them to have that relationship.
Stephen Stocks: I think it’s a good supportive thing for them to be able to build off of that relationship going forward into their own. And so I think it serves many roles.
Stephen Stocks: I think, again, my office could theoretically do it, but you’re creating a new and better relationship for that nonprofit by going outside and having and hiring that attorney. Because then once they’re formed, then they can say, hey, I had a question about agency liability.
Stephen Stocks: And fun things like that, that you guys don’t get really excited about and you get to talk to the attorney and they can kind of provide information about how notification works and contracts, because they’re going to have a slew of information. They’re going to have a slew of different projects that they’re going to need.
Stephen Stocks: They’re going to need leases.
Stephen Stocks: They’re going to need asset acquisition.
Stephen Stocks: There’s just going to be so many different things that they will need legal assistance on.
Stephen Stocks: And whether they utilize, whether they obtain an attorney, you’d hope they’d obtain an attorney to kind of guide them through that process.
Stephen Stocks: So all in all, it serves multiple purposes.
Stephen Stocks: Could the county do it through my office?
Stephen Stocks: And could it be a little bit cheaper?
Stephen Stocks: Yeah, but I think you’d also miss out on kind of fundamental building blocks of creating a new nonprofit.
Melodie McCandless: And I think Anna actually spoke to all those things when we were mentioning Stephen. She was like, I really think we need to have our own outside so we have that relationship.
Brian Martinez: And then where’s the proposal for this money to come from?
Speaker 19: General fund. It wouldn’t yet. The general fund.
Melodie McCandless: I’ve already searched that.
Melodie McCandless: Okay. So do we want to keep it at, did you give an amount, Bill, with your, I didn’t catch that. Did you amount to make a motion just to support it?
Bill Winfield: We can amend the motion not to exceed the $16,076. I thought you’re good with that. I am good with that. Okay.
Melodie McCandless: So we have a motion by Bill and a second by Jacques. And we’ll call for a vote. All those in favor? Aye. Okay.
Melodie McCandless: So a 6-0 vote with Commissioner Hedin absent. And that, let’s see. So we already did number 15.
Melodie McCandless: And just for the, those listening, that our general reports are now provided in written form. We could discuss them at the meeting if we had time for it.
Melodie McCandless: Today, we actually ended the meeting early, but I think we’ll continue on. And so there are written reports on the agenda of our Grand County Commission website.
Melodie McCandless: And there’ll be no presentation for the year-to-date self-tax reporting that is also written. The Spanish Valley Dry Multi-use Path Update is also written.
Melodie McCandless: And the Thompson Springs Reply Update is also written.
Melodie McCandless: So if you are interested in those items, you go ahead and hop on and read those.
Melodie McCandless: We’ll move on to our discussion items.
Melodie McCandless: Number 16, the Conditional Use Permit Policy and Enforcement Discussion by our County Attorney.
Stephen Stocks: Okay.
Stephen Stocks: So we’ve had a couple different conditional use permits, called CUPs, come before the commission over the years.
Stephen Stocks: And I’m joining on it, hopefully.
Stephen Stocks: So again, the goal of a CUP is to make sure that we have, make sure we have obligations that are met within the conditional use permit.
Stephen Stocks: You guys set out requirements that have to be met on an annual basis.
Stephen Stocks: And so this is something that Commissioner Hedin and I are passionate about, which is enforcement.
Stephen Stocks: And I know I’ve brought this topic up to you guys a number of times.
Stephen Stocks: And so what we’re doing is we’re going to start doing a CUP tracking and business license renewal.
Stephen Stocks: And what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be listing each of the conditional use permits, their original scope, their terms that they are subject to, and monitor that on an annual basis.
Stephen Stocks: And to do that, we’re proposing a policy and I’m going to forward this out to everyone.
Stephen Stocks: We’re going to propose a policy that helps kind of shape and guide what the code enforcing officer does.
Stephen Stocks: And so what that will require is that once the CUP is approved, we will always have those written conditions.
Stephen Stocks: And that’s always been the case.
Stephen Stocks: And then within five business days, all of those terms will be entered into the CUP system.
Stephen Stocks: After that, we’re going to have a site inspection and make sure that they comply.
Stephen Stocks: I’m not using specific examples intentionally, but let’s imagine a new KFC comes into town.
Stephen Stocks: One of the things that we may want is we may want that they do dust mitigation and they put down a certain type of material to mitigate that or that they’ll have limited trucks going through.
Stephen Stocks: So what we’ll do is we’ll go out and make an initial check of all the obligations that they have to meet.
Stephen Stocks: And once they meet those obligations, then we will shift into their obligation to have a business license.
Stephen Stocks: So right now, everybody that operates a business within the county, they must have a business license.
Stephen Stocks: Ensuring that they’re complying with the requirements of the CUP and combining that with business license makes it so that they can’t just ignore the obligations that you guys have.
Stephen Stocks: And so what we’ve done is we’ve contacted the clerk auditor’s office and we’re making sure that they have to complete those elements and have to have a sign off from Mr.
Stephen Stocks: Black, our compliance officer, make sure that they do meet those things before they’re going to issue a licensing number and that business license.
Stephen Stocks: If they fail to obtain that, they will not be able to obtain a business license.
Stephen Stocks: So it makes it so there’s an absolute mandatory requirement that they get to a good starting point before they start operating.
Stephen Stocks: Because a lot of times what people will do is they’ll come in, they’ll apply for the CUP, get approved for the CUP and they go, okay, that’s done, good luck catching me.
Stephen Stocks: And we don’t want that to be the case.
Stephen Stocks: So how we do that is we set it up, get them compliance before they even start.
Stephen Stocks: Once they have the license, we’re going to make sure that we have an annual check-in.
Stephen Stocks: And so all of our CUPs will have that requirement on an annual basis to make sure that they’re compliant with all of the obligations.
Stephen Stocks: So that would include inspections, documenting that they’re meeting each of their individual listed out conditions.
Stephen Stocks: So for the co-compliance officer, they will make a list of each of the unique elements that you guys read out.
Stephen Stocks: When you guys read your CUPs that have, hey, you can only have X number of trucks, as all the conditions that you list out, the conditional use permit.
Stephen Stocks: And so we will make sure that they are reviewed line by line, that those documents will be maintained by the planning and zoning staff and it’ll serve as a compliance record.
Stephen Stocks: All of the CUP files that they originally submit will be documented and maintained.
Stephen Stocks: And the reason why is when an entity comes out and they request a CUP for a particular use, over time, their business may be successful and they might want to expand beyond their original scope of their CUP.
Stephen Stocks: So because of that, we wanna make sure that we have all of their original documents and that’s going to require good record keeping with everything from the date it’s filed to the day that it’s approved.
Stephen Stocks: Now, if there are issues that we have, those will be captured and we will try to gain compliance through our standard process of seeking compliance.
Stephen Stocks: That’s normally a letter informing them that they’re out of compliance.
Stephen Stocks: It’s putting them on notice that they need to fix things.
Stephen Stocks: And generally, how compliance works in the county is we give them an opportunity to come into compliance voluntarily.
Stephen Stocks: It is not our goal to clap them in irons and really have jumped to that immediate step.
Stephen Stocks: Instead, we wanna transition upward and say, here’s our issue, here’s what you’re violating.
Stephen Stocks: And so have that open and continual conversation.
Stephen Stocks: Additionally, we’re just kind of, for you guys as background information, the zoning administrator is the person that’s responsible for maintaining the integrity of the tracking system.
Stephen Stocks: So it’s really something that the planning department will be in charge of.
Stephen Stocks: We’re just facilitating this conversation starting off because this hasn’t been done yet.
Stephen Stocks: And when we had our last CUP, Commissioner Hedin had brought up this importance and I started an email chat and kind of inquired about what we’ve done.
Stephen Stocks: So that’s the idea behind the policy, putting it all together, having the tracking sheet, combining it with business licenses, where we will probably have friction points for the commission.
Stephen Stocks: I think there are naturally friction points with CUPs when people get granted them and then the neighbors don’t know what conditions apply or whether they’re compliant with those or they kind of get lost in the wind.
Stephen Stocks: I wanna make sure that the records are there, they’re accessible so that people don’t forget because if you don’t have somebody that’s been here a long time, that’s looking at these things, they may forget about the CUP and which CUP and which process. Commissioner Martinez.
Brian Martinez: Yeah, so I haven’t looked at the county’s business licenses. Yeah. So on our business licenses, we list out specifics, right?
Brian Martinez: So in the city on the business license that we have, like I had an outfitting business, right?
Brian Martinez: I have a rental business and then I have a retail business that could all be on the same business license. Is the county similar?
Stephen Stocks: For the type of, yes and no. In the CUPs, these are unique.
Stephen Stocks: The CUPs are provided for a specific use that’s a conditional use, not as just a straight up permitted use.
Brian Martinez: Correct. So what my question is, is so on the business license, right?
Brian Martinez: Is it going to be, let’s say that I have a piece of property and I do horse training on that property and that’s just a regular permitted use that I could just get a business license. Then also in my shop, I have a metal fabrication that we’ve just seen, right?
Brian Martinez: Now let’s say that I don’t meet the requirements for the conditional use that was placed on the metal shop. Metal shop. Correct.
Brian Martinez: Does that withhold my business license then for my horse training?
Stephen Stocks: No, no.
Brian Martinez: That’s my one concern with what we built.
Stephen Stocks: No, they should be treated differently. It’s not going to violate your regular permitted use. That is something that’s separate from your conditional use.
Brian Martinez: Got it. But the way that our business licenses are set up, that would have to be something that would have to be changed then, correct?
Stephen Stocks: I don’t know.
Stephen Stocks: I don’t believe that that’s how they currently operate.
Brian Martinez: Okay. I don’t know that. So that’s what I was just wondering.
Mike McCurdy: Our business licenses are renewed annually on a set timeline. Yes.
Mike McCurdy: Are we going to compliance review on the CEP annually on the date of activation of the CEP?
Stephen Stocks: Or are we going to do that during the set timeline? I would say that it’s probably going to be cleanest.
Stephen Stocks: And this is, again, this is the P&Z’s choice of when they do this. I think it makes the most natural sense to do it in January, some annual review period.
Stephen Stocks: If we’re doing it based on their licenses, their renewal dates are going to be different based on when they started engaging in business. And I think it’d be a nightmare.
Stephen Stocks: I want one day where we can walk in and just do a CEP annual review on that day in January.
Stephen Stocks: So all the commissioners can feel good and say, hey, look, we did a look back for 2025.
Stephen Stocks: Everybody was in compliance that had a CEP or we’ve actually inspected and these individuals are not compliant with CEPs, et cetera.
Mike McCurdy: Okay. That sounds the better path for my mind too there.
Jacques Hadler: Steven, do we have any idea how many active CEPs we have going on in the county right now?
Stephen Stocks: I don’t have a specific number. I think we have a lot. We have quite a few. And the other difficulty that we historically had is that we used to not require that they started use of the CEPs. Uh-huh.
Stephen Stocks: Which was they could get it without basically. Yeah, correct. And that’s why we have those.
Stephen Stocks: We’ve updated the conditions and terms.
Mary McGann: So I am excited about this because it’s one of my biggest concerns about CEPs.
Jacques Hadler: Yeah, thanks for taking it on.
Mary McGann: Taking this on and getting it going.
Stephen Stocks: Excellent. And we will circulate a number for you.
Stephen Stocks: I’ve got the information that they can give us a specific number. But again, one of the other things and this always dovetails with the conversation.
Stephen Stocks: Um, where are the commissioners can be most helpful? When we have issues with the CEPs, be it issuing the license or not issuing the license, it’s really best to either contact my office, contact Gabe, or contact.
Stephen Stocks: Yeah, contact Gabe or my office is a good starting point. Because a lot of times when we have these compliance issues, a commissioner is going to get a phone call from somebody that’s going to be upset and say, hey, they think I’m doing X, Y, and Z, which is inappropriate.
Stephen Stocks: And they get really upset. Come into it through the perspective of, of being educated about what’s what’s going on or not.
Stephen Stocks: And that that way, it really helps staff the attorney’s office for everything to be flown through.
Stephen Stocks: And the information on the CEPs, 50, roughly 50 CEPs. Is it? Wow. Okay. Wow.
Stephen Stocks: And they haven’t been, they haven’t been historically.
Stephen Stocks: I think they get them in.
Stephen Stocks: So, and we can, we can do better, which is always the fun thing about improvements, is we all always can do better. So that’s, that’s what it is.
Stephen Stocks: I, this is something that, you know, I just jumped on since last meeting. I’m going to put it in a final finalized form on the next agenda.
Stephen Stocks: I didn’t want this to be a surprise to anybody. This isn’t, this isn’t punishing any particular person.
Stephen Stocks: This isn’t with an eye towards project X. Instead, it’s just, hey, look, we haven’t been wonderful at tracking this and we want to get better.
Stephen Stocks: And so hopefully come January, we can do an omnibus review of all the CEPs. And again, the goal is to have that grace period to work with them, just like the commission’s indicated for the last couple of years on anything involving enforcement.
Stephen Stocks: We’ve kind of been softer to start with. And so we’ll make sure that everybody’s on track.
Stephen Stocks: And so we’re not going to look to just shut people down. We’re going to work with them to make sure that they’re in compliance.
Stephen Stocks: And then the other thing to note is sometimes we have individuals that show up that want the CEPs enforced and they don’t know how to go about it and they don’t know how to track it and they don’t have that information. So another part that we might think about is doing an annual report and have a co-compliance officer come in January or February and say, hey, look, we’ve reviewed all the CEPs, they’re all compliant.
Stephen Stocks: Or if they’re not, say, hey, there’s some that we’re going to work with. And that way we can feel better when CEPs are being approved or not.
Stephen Stocks: Because I know I’ve mentioned it to Commissioner Hedin a lot, that we continue to have CEPs in the policy and you guys haven’t said that you don’t want them in the policy. And so it’s here for the anticipated future.
Stephen Stocks: So we want to make sure that we’re making sure that they’re compliant.
Stephen Stocks: So that was everything I had.
Stephen Stocks: If there’s anything that spooks you guys or want to look at the draft policy, I’m happy to talk to you guys about it.
Stephen Stocks: But it’s essentially what I’ve just walked through. And so that’s it.
Stephen Stocks: I’ll have it on the agenda next time.
Stephen Stocks: If you guys do have questions about it in between now and the next agenda review, let me know and we can enthrall you with the exciting details next year.
Melodie McCandless: All right. Okay. With that, we’re going to adjourn our meeting at seven o’clock. Well, seven o’clock.
Speaker 17: Thank you, Commissioner Winfield. Thank you. Goodbye.

See full agenda

Presentations 

Recognizing Bill Jackson

Commissioners recognized longtime Road Supervisor Bill Jackson for his retirement after 36 years with Grand County. He began work in 1989 and chose October 1, 2025, as his final day—timed neatly with elk hunting season. 

Cloud Seeding Presentation

Jared Smith of Rainmaker Technology presented a proposal to bring drone-based cloud seeding to the La Sal Mountains, aiming to boost winter snowpack and regional water supply. The company plans to start operations November 1 through April 30, pending funding coordination with Grand County Water and Sewer. The state has offered to cover $350,000 of the $400,000 total cost, with Grand County and possible regional partners contributing the remaining $50,000. Payment could be deferred until early 2026. Commissioners discussed funding partnerships with nearby jurisdictions.

Grand County Clerk/Auditor Proposed Restructuring

Grand County Clerk-Auditor Gabe Woytek asked the commission to split the combined Clerk-Auditor office, citing growth in county complexity and the need for focus, compliance, and performance—especially during overlapping election and budget seasons. He said the Lieutenant Governor’s elections team supports separating clerk duties from auditor duties statewide. To ease costs, he plans a voluntary staff reduction from six to five next year by moving the Finance Director into his office to share day-to-day tasks without derailing finance work. A motion will likely be on a future agenda.

General Business &  Action Items

Approval Of Consent Agenda

• Approval Of Meeting Minutes For September 16, 
• Ratification Of Payment Of Bills
• Ratification Of First Amendment To Parking Contract At The Airport
• Ratification Of Emergency Purchase Of Backflow Assembly For OSTA Fire Suppression System
• Ratification Of National Opioid Settlement Participation Contracts
• Ratification Of Local Consent Liquor License For The Utah Avalanche Center
• Ratification Of Local Consent Liquor License Grenadier Oktoberfest
• Letter To Legislators Opposing Any Legislation That Would Allow Bigger, Heavier Trucks
• Board Member Applicant Consideration For The Old Spanish Trail Arena Advisory Committee
• Board Member Applicant Considerations For The Grand County Fair Board
• Recommendation To The State Of Utah For Two Appointments To The Grand County Water Conservancy District Board
• Ratification Of All American Wash Emergency Watershed Protection Construction  Contract
• Contract Approval Parental Defender 2025-2027
• Contract Approval Conflict Parental Defender 2025-2027
• Contract Approval Conflict Public Defender 2025-2027 Commission Administration, Commission Administrators Office 
• Separation Agreement, General Release, And Waiver for Amanda Edwards.

Streetlight LED Conversion Project Agreement With Rocky Mountain Power
Approved 6-0 with Hedin absent.

Ordinance Major Utility Overlay Of Parcel 02-0021-0113
Postponed until Oct. 21 meeting

02-035-0007 From Rural Residential To Small Lot Residential (Novak)
Postponed until Oct. 21 meeting

Grandview Business Park Subdivision Final Plat Approval
Postponed until Oct. 21 meeting

Acceptance Of FAA Airport Improvement Program Project Grant 3-49-0020-049-2025
This grant awards up to $9,075,000 in grant with a 5% county match up to $453,750. Passed 5-0 with Commissioner Hadler abstaining and Commissioner Hedin absent. 

Award The Contract For Grand County External Audit Services For The 2025 Audit
Approved 4-2 with commissioners Hadler and McGann in opposition and Hedin absent.

Allocate $250,000 For Special Event Matching Promotional Grants 2026
Approved 6-0 with Hedin absent.

Acceptance Of 2024 TRT/TRCCA Expenditure Report
Approved 6-0 with Hedin absent.

Appoint Representatives To The Bicycle Access Improvement In National Parks Group
Commissioners Brian Martinez and Jacques Hadler appointed. Approved 6-0 with Hedin absent.

Appoint A Liaison To The Thompson Springs SSD – Reassignment Request
Commissioner Hadler replaced on board by Commissioner Winfield. Approved 5-0 with Hedin  and McGann absent.

Contract Approval Public Defender 2025-2027
Postponed until Oct. 21 meeting

Facilitating Trail Ambassador Exit From Grand County
The Moab Trail Ambassador Program is transitioning to a non-profit structure and requires expenditures to make that happen. Motion amended to not exceed $16,500. Approved 6-0 with Hedin absent.

2026 Insurance Benefits Renewal – Documents Will Be Added When Available
Postponed until Oct. 21 meeting

Discussion Items

Conditional Use Permit Policy And Enforcement Discussion
County Attorney Stephen Stocks presented a new policy to track Conditional Use Permits (CUPs) in Grand County in an attempt to ensure that businesses meet required conditions and tying ongoing compliance directly to business license renewals. A motion will likely be on the agenda at the next meeting. 

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