When it snows, a small group of individuals need to make their way from communities across the Wasatch Back to Heber City before anyone has had the opportunity to plow the city’s roads.
They could wait for clearer roads, but they wouldn’t get plowed. That’s because they are employees in Heber City’s Public Works Department.
It is up to them to plow the roads they have to drive on in order to plow the roads.
This is just one example of an issue Public Works Director Matt Kennard shared with Heber City Council Tuesday night while he gave a presentation identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to his department.
Having city employees who can’t live in the city was a relatively common concern shared by the city departments that presented.
Heber City Police Chief Parker Server recalled asking each of his officers if they lived in Heber City when he took the position a few months ago.
He found that few of them did, though many of them wanted to. The housing market in the area made finding a place to stay difficult enough that many opted to commute to Heber City from other municipalities.
This, he said, could be a potential weakness to the department as it could pose risks to retaining officers. If the city wants to keep people working in Heber City, it needs to create a way for people to live here. Otherwise, he anticipated police officers could easily decide to save themselves the commute by finding jobs closer to home.
Kennard shared the same concerns about his department’s employees.
The growth of Heber City was also a major focus of both Server and Kennards’ reports.
Kennard explained that as the city grows and his department stays the same size, employees have less and less time to complete regular maintenance buildings.
“Enormous growth of the city population and building developments has dramatically increased the need for more employees to maintain levels of service,” the department’s written report states.
Server noted that even with the increasing traffic on Heber City’s roads, he wants to expand the department’s small traffic unit.
“Right now, we have one person,” he said.
As Main Street becomes crowded due to accidents or construction or periods of congestion, he said people divert onto the city’s back roads that were not meant to host heavy traffic.
Finance Manager Sara Nagel was also concerned with the number of staff in her department, as she explained a situation that by then fit a pattern within the reports — the department’s workload grew, its staffing did not. As a result, she said workers are facing burnout.
The conversation regarding Heber City workers, what’s necessary to retain them and where they can live is not new, and while the community and its leaders are made more and more aware of the problem as prices continue to rise, none of the several solutions have worked for many individuals who continue working in Heber City only before and after a daily commute from surrounding towns.
Later in the meeting, when Mountainlands Association of Governments’ lobbyist Dave Stewart talked to the council about Utah’s upcoming legislative session and how the state’s governing decisions might affect Heber City and its ambitions. He mentioned Gov. Cox and Lt. Gov. Hendersons’ plan to pour $150 million dollars into the state’s housing market to create 35,000 starter homes by 2028. Heber City Mayor Heidi Franco said she felt that would only be drop in the bucket.