Moab City Council Meeting Report 2021-04-20

The short Agenda for the Special Meeting can be found here: https://moabcity.org/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_04202021-1035

Ranked Choice Voting

The state legislature has allowed RCV on a trial basis for municipal elections starting in 2019. Utah County was the first to support such. Election staff and folks from Utah Ranked Choice and Utah County presented and answered questions. Utah County can provide election services to other local governments who want to use RCV, but whose local election staff don’t have the capacity to conduct a RCV election.

RCV is in effect a runoff election; there is no primary, and a general election may have a large number of candidates relative to the number of open seats. Voters assign a rank to each candidate. After all ballots are collected and the votes/ranks read, if one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote they win. Otherwise the lowest first choice candidate is eliminated, their votes are reallocated based on each of those voters’ rankings, and the process is repeated until a candidate passes the 50% threshold. More info/boosting/graphics at https://utahrcv.com/ and https://rcvis.com/index.html#intro.

RCV as allowed in Utah is not proportional representation. The council members expressed interest, but need to understand cost differential (possibly less but haven’t seen a full cost accounting yet), whether it has much likelihood of resulting in ‘better’ or different outcomes than existing system, and voter trust. If you are interested please check out the links, and give feedback to city-council@moabcity.org.

FYE 2022 Budget

Department budgets were reviewed. Next fiscal year budget assumes 0% revenue growth, given uncertainty of pandemic, and outstanding capital project needs. Biggest concern is with the sewer fund. Impact fees were projected to be a signficantly greater, but with no new lodging in the pipeline (that wasn’t already vested when new lodging was stopped) that fund is forecast to be in the red. The city will be revisiting sewer rates shortly to address this. All departments will continue their lean, pandemic, operations. Some time was spent discussing whether Planning could have a little more funding and capacity, since Moab needs long term planning to address housing, growth, and limits there to.