The City Council already has set the budget to examine engineering, architecture and fiscal feasibility of the project, which is estimated to cost $30 million.

The decision to vote on the resolution was brought forth by council member Jacob Holdaway, who is skeptical of the project. If passed, it gives the city direction to move forward and issue a request for proposal to interested architecture firms.

Holdaway does not believe the city has the necessary tax base to fund a new City Hall.

“I’ve called five or six cities, and they’re like, ‘This is very scary that you’re even thinking and considering this,'” he told the Daily Herald in a phone interview.

Many Vineyard officials are in support of the project, though, including Mayor Julie Fullmer, who told the Daily Herald in an email that the city’s rapid growth makes a new City Hall necessary to “support essential services and community engagement.”

The plan is to build on a property donated to Vineyard by “Utah City,” a 700-acre master-planned development by the Flagship Cos. and Woodbury Corp. that is in the works.

According to City Manager Eric Ellis, funding for the project will be split three ways between Vineyard, the Mountainland Association of Governments — which will own a portion of the building — and potential lessees in the building.

Ellis is confident in the fiscal feasibility of the project and said preliminary evaluations have confirmed it could work with the type of growth and the revenue streams the city currently has. Going forward, the city will meet with a financial consultant to build a bond package.

“They help us design, put together the best bond package that would function with our existing revenue streams,” Ellis said. “And they do a careful evaluation, and they look for one that works. And if for some reason it were to not work, it would just be something we didn’t pursue.”

However; Holdaway said he believes the figures for the bond should be set before the city continues making major steps toward construction, such as issuing a request for proposal.

“You’re going out and saying, ‘Hey, let me go get a construction company. Let’s go build this house.’ And you haven’t been given a budget yet,” he said. “You haven’t even told the person who’s making the payment, the citizens, like, ‘Hey, do you want a new City Hall?’ We haven’t asked the citizens at all.”

Holdaway, who said the Mountainland Association of Governments will fund $8 million of the project, further expressed his doubts that the city could get a bond to fund the rest of it.

He referenced the fire station the city recently broke ground on and said it took a decade to raise the funds for a project that will cost approximately $1.4 million. He added that he reached out to bond professionals, who he said estimated a 20-year bond for a City Hall would cost around $1.4 million per year with interest.

“Has Vineyard been able to build the infrastructure of a fire department every year for the last 20 years? No, it hasn’t. Why would we have the ability, with our tax base, to be able to do that in perpetuity for 20 years? This is so financially off,” Holdaway said.

The countering opinions on the city’s fiscal viability appear to boil down to differing beliefs on the city’s ability to raise the money through taxing commercial entities.

Holdaway said Vineyard is heavily reliant on a residential property tax that’s double the rate of Lindon’s and Orem’s, adding that there is little income coming from businesses in the town.

“Vineyard’s poor,” he said. “The entire tax base of Vineyard goes to shops in Lindon and Orem. The Costco’s up there, the Target’s up there. Walmart is up there, all of our dealerships, the vast majority of our restaurants. We are (doing commerce) outside of our city. We’re just a bedroom community.”

Ellis disagrees with that notion.

“Right now, there’s sort of a rhetoric out there that the city hasn’t grown its commercial base, that there’s no way we would be able to support a bond with our sales tax, for example, and that we have a single business, and we’re going to put all of our eggs in the sales tax revenue of a single gas station,” he said. “In reality, we have 164 businesses in Vineyard, and that number is growing every day.”

Ellis, who said there will be public transparency throughout the process, thinks the ability to finance the City Hall will only increase as new development comes, including a hotel and grocery store that are under construction.

“If (setting up a bond) was feasible today, it is most certainly feasible in 10 months to expect our financial consultant to come back with some options that fit nicely within our existing budget and revenue streams,” he said.

Holdaway, though, doubts that enough new business are coming to Vineyard in the future due to the proximity of stores in neighboring cities.

“I called Target, I called Costco, I called all the places after being elected for the first year (in 2023),” he said. “I asked, ‘Why aren’t you building in Vineyard?’ And they said, ‘It’s not that hard of a drive. We’re not busy at these other ones, so we don’t see ourselves ever coming here.'”