Greater Avenues Community Council -- GACC General Meeting, Feb. 2, 2004

UTA is considering changing bus routes. Only one to affect Aves at all is Route 22, which stops at North Temple and State Street. If anyone has questions/concerns let Peter know. If you take Aves route and connect to another route, please make sure to check other route changes.

Planning commission re proposal to allow making beer at pubs –has flier here for anyone with concern.

Utah power has potential reimbursement for people affected by outages. Phone 1888 221 7070. Could get as much as $200 if you qualify.

On Feb 7 mayor will be at Beans and Brews at 906 So. 5th E. from 10-11 a.m. Go meet the mayor and talk to him

Peter shared a card in the mail to everyone. This card is titled how to build community. Turn off TV leave your house know your neighbors, look up while you’re walking, take children to park, honor elders, fix it even if you didn’t break it, pick up litter etc…..

School Board: Doug Nelson said he will fill us in on things happening now. West high --Utah high school activities assoc has realigned district that governs which schools compete against each other. East, West and Highland are now in separate divisions. We are not happy with this. It is not the school boards doing. Are working to try to correct this problem. Not good to disrupt rivalries. Should not have to travel many hours/miles to conduct sports. Reacting to legislature is what board does during this season. A bill is being considered that would opt Utah out of “no child left behind.” Would no longer have to comply to those expectations. We get over a hundred million now from the feds–if we don’t’ follow their rules we don’t get the money. Jordan has 3 times as many kids and only gets $5 million. We get $8 million. This would be a bad thing for Utah’s Salt Lake School district. Web site will explain this in detail. Sending the message in a way that would hurt all the school children of the state is a bad way to send a message. If we had lots of money to start with, it would be a different thing. Zillions of bills we are talking about otherwise. If we do keep our hundred million it would cost $300-500 million to comply. No one knows how much it would cost to fully comply. Summary of the law is 200 pages. No one is expecting perfection. You make the calculation in your district to make good faith effort, you have a right to say no. This law would force all 40 school districts to do all the same thing. Just today tuition tax credit was released. No one has really read it yet. Question: Will teachers lose their jobs if no child left behind goes through? Unless highly qualified teachers, yes, they may need to be let go. Teachers are required to be qualified. Is one of many things about that law that is not optimal. Less of problem here in SLC who have more qualified teachers. Rural areas are ones who will suffer the most.

Police report: Stats had increase in burglaries from 11 to 18. Car prowls went down by 7. Gang related has been 0 for more than a year. Aggravated assaults 2, sex 2, robberies up to 1. Drive-bys 0. Car thefts went up 7 to 14. 9 burglaries were forced entries. Car strips 5-- 3 were forced entries, 2 were non-forced entries. Car prowls 24 --9 forced entries, 9 not. 14 auto thefts-- 5 stolen and recovered in area. 3 were unfounded. Question: funeral, husband died and people were robbed. Someone should stay at home when someone dies. Police person can be hired to house sit while you are gone.

City Council: Eric Jergensen –obituaries are nice little referral system. Always try to have somebody at your home. Come to LDS Hosp meeting if you are interested in parking situation. Please come and participate. Titled what will happen to hospital but purpose is what will happen to parking. Have ideas that might work but want input from residents before doing anything. Public facts finding hearing on channel 17, tomorrow on Mar 2 at city council whether we will support Utopia project or not. Have received all kinds of responses. Feel free to call me. Should be very interesting. Very important issue for our city and one you should be well educated about. Please get at least educated on this before you come down on an opinion. Had a chance on Monday to meet with Utah Power not calling it a refund—but a good will gesture. Concerned about tree trimming. Planning for midsummer/late summer tree trimming. What to do when line crosses another person’s private property and tree is going up in between. Know that is a major concern. Hope to have meeting this summer. Hope to have some good dialog. Line crossings are very old in terms of placement. Question: What are the economics for long term underground plan. It’s a recurring problem, maintenance problem, aesthetic problem. Hit nail on head. What would be economic requirement to underground lines. Not financially possible? What are requirements? Very expensive and would be very difficult. Still a lot of aerial form-- substation to transformer to sub-transformer to house. Places they can do it while doing substructure to streets. Logic is escaping Utah power. Could very easily put in tubes to do lines as they work on streets. It is not a cure-all. Still have a number of power outages and is more aesthetic. Used to have a plan that on rotating basis would trim trees and every so many years would be back. Then to increase profits they cut back on maintenance (tree trimming) --for every year you cut back you are looking at several years to make up for it. When Scottish power bought out Utah Power they have not maintained in spite of what they promised. Director said they had a cancer patient where power went down, pinpointed the problem as a tree limb that came down and pulled fuse. Cut limb that fell and replaced fuse. Individual was on life support. Crane comes in. Tree owner comes out and says if you cut that tree I’ll sue. Patient down the street will die if you don’t cut tree limb. Told guy to call his attorney and they cut the limb and fixed line. Don’t have all the answers. Do we have to apply for rebate? Yes. Don’t know who was out of power. Phone number will be in newspaper. State of Florida charged companies with upkeep with tree trimming and made them pay Red Cross and other agencies. Mentioned possibility of legislature mandating issue. Phone 532 4844 for Eric with questions and comments.

If you have tree limbs that have fallen, city is coming around to pick them up, but be patient.

Treasurer’s report: state of Avenues address. For those of you who have been coming for last several years, we have been going on a roll. With street fair and newsletter, we are okay with LDS hosp covering all the printing cost. Street fair and newsletter are principle sources of revenue. Would be underwater were it not for generosity of hosp. If we sell every ad in the newsletter income is $16 thousand+. Street fair had additional expenses and income. Came out better--$18,000 with expenses of 13,000. Up about $1000 or so. If income is turned in lumped together it gets posted as miscellaneous income. Could be t-shirts or whatever. Most of our money is in a CD. $55,000 of assets. Roughly $5,000 in interest earning checking. IRS owes us almost $5000. Until we have a non-profit approved they won’t let us have it. That is in the works and eventually will come. $3600 in accounts receivable. Only liabilities are street lighting program. Asked to hold maintenance money and any neighbor can notify John and get it fixed and John can pay for it. Net equity of $53,000 of value. $50,000 of that is in cash or CD’s. What are we going to do with it? That remains a question. Check lights on South Temple and see that they work. Seems that for every one on, there are 2 off.

UDOT is here. Issue on Columbus street & what happens with that. 4 options. UDOT is neutral party. Really a decision we need input from community for. 1st option, do nothing: 2nd option, Build signals at both 3rd and 5th. 3rd option study possible closure of Columbus. This is part of master plan of capitol preservation board, 4th option combination of 2. –signals in summer and study possible closure later. Is to push most of traffic to east side of the Capitol. Why signals? Simply a lot of traffic going up and down Victory and Main street going South and to the east. Try to walk across there during rush hour and it s problematic. Discussion it will back up & down hill and as they stop. But it won’t really. At this point that travel is uninterrupted traffic for about 2 miles. Anywhere else you go you have lots of interruptions. North Main would become 1-way with this. 5th North proposing raised median along Victory road down hill a few yards. Have been kicking ideas around for quite a while. 3rd option Columbus would be connected to open space on west side. Traffic coming south would have to go around capitol and down on east side. Would shuffle cars to state instead of main but he says there will be fewer total. Capital preservation board has come up with this plan. David Hart came up with this to create the Ohmstead park. Like Landscape architect of Central Park. Hope to create a park-like structure in front and use it as a park like atmosphere. Includes a walking oval. Parking is moving back into northeast quadrant. As we work with CC councils we are not proposing stacked parking structures. Will be one level above for public and 180 below. DUP comment they are nearly getting hit. This will take discussion and if UDOT is involved this could go a couple of years. These are state roads around here and will fall under environmental guidelines. This would cause more traffic to 3rd west and be a problem for West high. If speed limit were raise on 4th West it could help. What is happening to HOV exit southbound on 1st south? No one knows what is happening with that. How does this tie into other traffic issues? Since closure is part of capital preservation plan it may happen anyway. What kind of feedback is Capitol Hill CC giving you? Favorably looking at closure option now. This affects Aves as well. Question about security issue with closure? Highway patrol is in favor of closure. Looking for recommendations SOON. Would cost $80-120 thousand to put in signals now. Trying to synchronize government decision-making. Will bring this up again next month and probably vote on an option that Aves likes.

Utopia – what is it? This is a big deal telecommunications state of the art in US. Matches others in world-- we (U. S.) are #4 now. Not without risks and issues for communities. Debate tomorrow night with city council with Comcast and Qwest. SLC is largest of cities. Down to smallest town (Perry). End result conclusions were: it is feasible if we do it all together. Would use national and local service providers after finished. Has effect on each of different cities. Big deal in US, largest in US. Europe and Asian ahead of us in broadband. Want to build infrastructure but let private service providers use the network. Why do we care? Isn’t just about being able to communicate, offers physically impaired ablility to communicate. Advancing high tech businesses that don’t mess up environment. Survey lent overwhelming support. A parallel business is an airport –Provide infrastructure and let other businesses use it. 2 biggest issues #1 is this the proper role of govt. we do see government in infrastructure. Others think we leave it to monopolies. 2nd issue is what is cost and what are risks? Approx a 4 year bill to every home and business. No cherry picking --no haves and have nots. Everybody has it. Take 4 years if we start this year. Approx $540- million. SLC has ? percent. Would issue 20 year bonds that would repay from network revenues. Would maintain it as well. Can’t predict talking about 100 mg in each home. 1 gigabyte for business. Ultimately expand. Network can expand to that. To issue these bonds, has to be financially sustaining. Are Project financing to get interest rate we want, needs sponsor to backstop some level of debt risk. Cities estimate 39% about 4.1 million for SLC. Cedar Falls and Waterloo Iowa examples of how value increases with this product. One city put in fiber optic network. In 1996 they were ahead with 58 million. In waterloo concluded they were behind because had not done fiber optic system for community. Downside exposure base case is no risk. $24 million/year on upside if make it go. If meet base case, money wouldn’t be needed. If 3 out of every 10 addresses use it, it is at a break even. That is 30% below what base case is. $2.28 per household. Or 5.60 cents per household if nobody uses it. Backstop of cities only covers about 40%. Would have opportunities to provide bandwidths to anybody who would want it. Who would control costs at our end, private service provider. Can have 20 different service providers. What is per household coast to use this service? Compared to $45-55 month for broadband now, it would be $20 less. Would have 6 t-1 lines for about $45/month.

Intermodal hub: Mary Guy-sell said some construction is out there right now. By about Oct this year it will be operational. Amtrak will be demolished. Extend TRAX line to hub. Only thing to discuss at this point is line in road and where to locate stations. Large movement downtown is spreading West just like it has East. 16 guidelines used to develop study. We are currently engaged in looking at 400 So to North Temple and from 400 West to I-15. That is study area. People don’t like to walk more than 5-10 minutes to a station. Generally put within a quarter of a mile of each other. Create walk-able communities that feel safe. How to implement policies with city to encourage this to happen. Environmental studies going on with this project. One covers 4th west from airport to university. 4th west part of that is what we are covering in environmental statement. Center of road equalizes it. Will move TRAX to side of street so pedestrian traffic does not have to cross any street to get onto train. Too many stations mean nobody rides it. If not enough stations, nobody can get on. 5th south is a problem due to width of street. Have 2 stations-- 1 just west of 5th west and other at 125 south. Downside is more stations. Could put in one now and the other later when more funds are available. Call SLC to ask questions.

Legislature: Scott Daniels and Ralph Becker will present together. Senator Julander had another commitment she could not get out of. Daniels reps from Virginia Street East and area around university and East high area. Becker reps rest of Aves cap hill and downtown. So far spent most of our time on issues with very little substance and symbolic. Should congress withdraw from UN, or withdraw from Iraq, tax cut be made permanent—it’s not time well spent in Daniels opinion. Judiciary committee will be considering marriage bill. Symbolic gesture on part of legislature but is same sex marriage is already against the law in Utah. Becker sent out questionnaire. Please get them back to Becker. Question – is there any discussion on same sex marriage? Considerable opposition to it. Daniels will be voting against it. Definitely minority in legislature. This area is different and 70% are supporting same sex marriage in this area. Is there discussion on part of leadership related to health insurance costs for public education and state employees? Have been looking at compensation package for health care costs but those costs have been rising so much faster than regular inflation. Guess is that while it’s being discussed, it will probably get folded. It’s about 2% now. What about rebuilding of Marriott library at U of U? Seismic problems there. Typically has 4000 people in it at any given time. Marriott is not on preliminary list because there is no list yet. Bonding on restoration of capitol is item closest to home.

Meeting adjourned at 9:00 pm.