Apr 22, 2021 Community Partnership Committee on 2021-04-22 9:00 AM

Good morning, and we apologize for the delay, but this is the meeting, the Thursday, April 22nd meeting, the 2021 of the Denton City Council Community Partnership Committee. We'll move right into our agenda, seeing that we have a quorum myself and Councilmember Baker. First item for consideration, 1A, is considering approval of the minutes of our March 18th meeting. Councilmember Baker, do we have a motion for approval or any changes or deletions? I'll make a motion to approve the minutes. Thank you, sir, and I will second. There's a motion to second. Any discussion? Councilmember Baker, how do you say? Yes. And the chair is an aye. The minutes are adopted and approved. Item 1B, our next item, receive a report, hold a discussion and provide direction regarding the Hotel Occupancy Tax Program year 2022. Good morning. We are at the kickoff for the program year 2022 for the HOT program, and so every April we bring to the committee the application and the guidelines for you to review and see any staff changes that have been made to the current program. So in your backup, you have the guidelines and the application that have been redlined for you, and the few changes that we made this year, just for administrative purposes, are updating the committee's name change from September when that resolution passed, and then also just some minor grammatical and spacing cleanup, as well as removing any language about late applications being accepted and presented to the committee, because this committee gave us direction last year that no applications would be accepted after the due date or throughout the entire next program year. So once these are decided on and presented in the August council work session, that would be the end of the process, and there wouldn't be any other applications throughout the year. So unless any of the committee members want to add anything or take away or make any changes to the guidelines, we're looking for approval as written or with any additional changes that you guys may have. Mr. Baker, do you have any questions for staff or changes, suggested changes to the guidelines or application? No, I don't have anything. Okay. Thank you. Before the meeting got started, I asked Randy just a little bit about the deadline and if we were given organizations time enough to fill out the application. My thinking is the organizations that have done this before that are working from last year's application and can kind of copy and paste some historical information at least, probably are well set up. But if we were going to have anybody new to apply or if we're going to have anybody with significant changes to their program, it might be helpful for them to have just a little bit more time than the middle of May. And Randy, you told me a little bit about the end of May, maybe pushing it a little bit for staff, is that just really out of the question or really pushing it or would the end of May be feasible to do? I think it's, you know, anything's feasible, we can make it happen for the program to succeed and meet the deadlines for meeting the budget deadlines and then getting to council appropriately. I would hope and I think most of the recipients that are past recipients are already organizing and planning, they know it comes every April, so hopefully those will come in sooner than the deadline and we can start, you know, ramping up our reviews and the processes that we have in place and so maybe any of the new applicants are the ones that run a little bit later, have to get, you know, commissioner court's approval or whatever, those will be the ones that are just, you know, right on the deadline. So I think there's some opportunity to have, you know, a lot of them probably be provided before the deadline, so we'd be able to get a jump on it. Good deal. My thinking too is, we're still only a year into the change of no late applications, and if, you know, coming out of kind of a weird year anyway, I'd much rather have a conversation about moving the deadline than a conversation about one of our marquee events didn't get their application in and now we've got to talk about exceptions to rules and that always gets dangerous. So I'm kind of thinking about the 28th of May, not the 30th, the 31st is on Monday, so maybe making it a Friday and yeah, and that's a pretty natural deadline before the holiday weekend, getting something in. Councilmember Baker, do you have any thoughts? Well, not at this time, but it looks like reading over the reports and everything that everybody's doing a good job here and I'm like you, we need to keep going forward. Good deal. I will then move approval of the Redline application and guidelines with the change of the deadline to the 28th of May. Councilmember Baker, do you second? Yes I do. Okay, any further discussion? Okay, Councilmember Baker, how say you? Yes. And the Chair is an aye, so those will be our guideline and applications. Thank you staff for the time spent on those. It's always fun doing a Redline because you always go back and do something else and then you find something else. And that moves us on to our third item for consideration, the same conversation but around the sponsorship program for FY 2021-22. The sponsorship program is another one that the committee oversees. It is a program that runs the fiscal year and that's why you see the fiscal year here. But we have the same process, we have application and guidelines that the staff has redlined and is open to any changes that the committee would like to make, so we did some administrative cleanup. I also add an exhibit for proof of active status from the state comptroller that hadn't been in there in the past. Of course, we've only had the program for about three years, but we require it from the hot funds too, and it just shows that they're active and that we can actively contract with them. And so it's something we usually go through in the process when the contracts go to legal. We check that standalone because the contracts usually go to legal maybe in September, so it's several months past the application process, but I thought we'd go ahead and put it in place here so that we know they were active at the time they applied and then we'll double check it again before the contracts get completed. And then obviously we added the language to support the deadline date as a fixed date. Good deal. No, that's smart and kind of put the onus on the organization to provide that rather than using staff time to do it. And we did add the links to the exhibits where they could directly go in there and just put in either their tax ID number or their actual name of their organization and it'll take them right to it. Perfect. Perfect. Council Member Baker, these are in our backup as well. Did you have any thoughts on the guideline or applications for the sponsorship program? No, it looks good. Staff did a good job on that. Thank you. And so I will move approval of the guidelines and application for the sponsorship program with the same date change, but I see to the 28th of May. Perfect. And is there a second? I'll second it. There's a motion and second. Any further discussion? Seeing none. Council Member Baker, House AU? Yes. The Chair's an aye and those are approved and adopted for the sponsorship program. And our final item this morning is management reports. We have the Parks and Rec co-sponsorship program and the Public Art Committee 2.4% art allocation. Are these reports in discussion or just reports on status? I guess we'll find out. Let's just dive into the reports and see what we're doing. Right. And the management reports we had last month was the first time we've actually presented them in that fashion. And so it can be a discussion, it can be an FYI. I'll just say that the Parks co-sponsorship is just an update on what the status is on how they're going to bring the program back to this committee since there's been such a long time in between your first review of it and accepting the oversight of the program. They've had a lot of staff changes and evaluations of their processes. So they want to tweak that a little bit and then come bring you a final product before it goes to council. So there'll probably be a special call meeting because it won't be able to have that happen in your next June meeting and June is your last scheduled meeting. So we'll try to get something by the end of the calendar year on that one. Good deal. So we're working closely with them to iron out all those details. And the second management report for the 2.4% art allocation, council member Johnson had asked staff during the last meeting where that 2.4% came from and we've checked records, we've checked with public art committee, the Parks Department, Economic Development, everybody that had their hands on it, we've looked, even went to the service center and looked through some boxes for the park beautification board and we just can't find anything in writing with anything that says why the 2.4 actually came about, but I did provide a little bit of history of how the public art came about and the transparency and all the information on how it got to the place where it is today. I did find enough information to provide that, but we do not have a solid answer on where the 2.4% came from. Interesting. Probably like everything council does, little horse trading, a little bit of personalities and maybe even like we talked about with fund balances last Tuesday, targeting a number, a particular dollar amount and building a percentage around it. I did have a question since we're noticed for that public art update. Last year, they did not accept their full allocation. They didn't request their full allocation and that made sense, they didn't have projects necessary for it, but I also wonder, is it possible, most of our allocations are for a budgeted event or a budgeted program, they intend to spend every dollar or they wouldn't be asking for it. Is there anything that prohibits somebody from carrying a hot funds balance or from a fund if an allocation is made to the public art fund and the committee doesn't spend it that year? Is there anything that prohibits them from just keeping that in the public art fund and rolling it over to the next year or the next project? We have a process in place for the public art group to do that because they're an in house recipient, so they move it to project money and the reason they didn't take so much last year is they had so many and they went back to like 2018 and so that hot money had been rolled over for them in the project. So they had their own money, bond money and hot money to get the VELA programs and all that handled. So they're supposed to spend all their hot money by the end of this fiscal year that they've had rolled over for the last two or three years. And so I see a solid application coming forward for this year. Good deal. Good deal. Councilmember Baker, do you have any questions on either of the staff reports? No, it looks like the staff's doing a good job. I appreciate everything y'all are doing. Keep up the good work. I'll second that. Y'all are doing a great job. I believe then and that is it. That's all my questions. I'll have Councilmember Baker's questions. It takes us to concluding items. We've got a full enough schedule on this committee. I think. I don't think I have any concluding items or future requests. Councilmember Baker, do you have any concluding items? No, no. Okay. Very good. I will say, I don't know if any of our organizations are watching this morning or not, but I will say that I don't remember the particulars, but there's an arts and jazz event coming up. It's a Sunday afternoon, enjoy some music, limited seating event, because of course they've moved their, their event to October. So anybody who normally enjoys arts and jazz, if you'll go to Facebook and check out their page, you'll find the event. I think it might be this upcoming Sunday or the next, I can't remember, but. And with that, that exhausts our agenda. Thank y'all very much and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thanks everybody.