May 03, 2021 City Council on 2021-05-03 12:00 PM

and good afternoon welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. It is Monday May 3rd, 2021. It is 12 or 2pm and we do have a quorum so I will call this lunch meeting to order to work session. We also have one closed session item. So the first item on our agenda is to work session 1A ID 21080, receive report, hold discussion, and give staff direction regarding an update on the 87th session of the Texas Legislature. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. This is Rachel Bothrot Mendoza, Assistant to the City Manager. And first here off the bat, I just wanted to introduce our first set of consultants. There are Kate Goodrich and Denise Rose with Jackson Walker. There are general legislative consultants and their presentation to y'all will be first this afternoon. We'll ask if y'all wouldn't mind holding your questions until they get done with their brief presentation and then we'll go through those before we introduce our second set. Ladies, the screen is yours. Hello. Thank you. Thank you. Got it pulled up here. Thank you. Does this work? Not seeing it yet. How's that? That's better. Awesome. Thank you all for having us today. We are just going to give you a brief overview of where we are in the 87th session with 28 days left. I'm Denise Rose. Happy to be here with you all this afternoon. We are both Jackson Walker. We're both attorneys. And although we do not practice in the normal way of an attorney, but it's been an interesting session. And before we jump into talking about the bills that we're tracking for y'all, I will say that I think every month of this session, we've had something happen that has really changed the trajectory of the conversations and the priorities up here at the Capitol. And so we have been dealing with that in the way that we always do, which is nimbly and reacting to what happens, but it's been easily one of the stranger sessions that I've worked in my 16 years at the Capitol. So I'll just kick us off with that kind of overarching theme about this session. And I'm Kate Goodrich. I also am very happy to be here. And I'm going to start us off with talking about some of the slides that we're tracking for you guys. And starting out is an issue that Denise and I have been paying very close attention to. Partially because it affects y'all and partially because it affects us. This was a Texas Public Policy Foundation priority last session that ended up failing after an amendment was tacked on at the very end in the House. But it's back again this session, this would be a ban on taxpayer funded lobbying, which for all intents and purposes, this bill only relates to counties and cities like Denton. And it says that it does not eliminate you all lobbying on behalf of yourselves, or you all hiring internal staff or sending internal staff down to Austin to lobby, but it would eliminate the ability to hire outside consultants or people who have to register as lobbyists. So this bill has passed the Senate and it's made its way into the House, even despite a significant amount of opposition from local governments from all around the state who came to testify. So we're keeping our eye on that for you guys. And we're happy to talk more about that later. And then another issue that's been hot on in the press, especially here in Austin this week, is a statewide public camping ban. So this bill would eliminate any sort of public camping, public camping being defined as a person individual who appears to be living on the street. It's limited to people who are evidence that they're living, such as cooking or clothes. It wouldn't apply if you were just like waiting for an iPhone overnight on the street, that would be treated totally differently. But obviously, there's a big election here in Austin this weekend. So this is hot on everybody's mind. And we're keeping our eye on it for you. The Senate bill has kind of stalled, but the House bill appears to be moving even despite a little bit of a snafu. So we understand that would affect some of the homeless outreach team and some of the policy that y'all have there in Denton. So we're definitely keeping up to date on that for you guys. And I'm going to turn it back over to Denise to tell us a few more. One thing I would mention is that things are moving so quickly down here right now that some of the slides that we're sharing with you all today are out of date. And so we'll just try to keep you updated as to where things are as of this particular moment. The local police defunding bills are different in both chambers. The Senate bill goes, takes a direction where local voters would get to approve police budgets. And on the House side, it's a little bit more punitive and it would say a municipality that is considered a defunding entity would go before the governor's criminal justice division and then face repercussions related to your tax rate and your municipal utility rate. Last week, this bill was on the House floor. It had a point of order and has gone back to committee for that point of order to be fixed. The same is true for House Bill 1925, although I would note that the camping ban ordinance did pass in Austin over the weekend by almost a 60 to 40 margin. That's worth noting. I don't know if that'll impact what happens with the bills, but that did just happen on Saturday here. Go to the next slide. Limiting city debt. This is a bill that's actually on the House calendar today. There are a number of cities that still have concerns with it in the way that it defines debt. A lot of opposition to this in committee. It's still moving forward. I believe that we have suggested some potential amendment language to sort of tighten this up, but it's going to go forward for a vote probably really soon actually. And then the last bill we wanted to call out specifically to you all was this House Bill 610, which is around state license holders. And this bill also has seen a lot of opposition. It just got voted out of committee last week. So it's a little bit behind these other bills, but essentially would allow anyone who's a license holder to bring a cause of action against the city. And there are a number of ways that that could impact you all. And we sent a letter in when this was up in committee. And so it's just a really broad bill that's not been well received, I would say, but we're hopeful that with time running out, we're essentially at a point where we have about five House calendars still left to get set that this one is maybe going to get bogged down in the calendar's process. It does not have a Senate companion that's moving. And then we have Senate or House Bill 749 here as well. This was the other taxpayer funded lobbying ban that was moving. It seems as if this bill had enough concern to not go forward. It was heard in March and has not made any additional progress. Senate Bill 10 really seems to be the bill that if there's anything that goes forward, it could be that one. There's another bill that I would just mention in passing is Senate Bill 1879. It's another sort of bite at the apple, but really just increases transparency. It's not an outright ban on taxpayer funded lobbying. And a number of cities actually supported that bill. So these are over in the House State Affairs Committee right now, and we will see what they decide to do with them. If there's an appetite to move them, at least at this point, we have heard there still were not the votes in that committee to get these bills out, even in their amended form. Go ahead. Oh, and then this is just kind of closing us out. We've got a couple slides here that just, we want to call to y'all's attention the sheer quantity of bills that we're tracking for you guys. Denise and I had not really shared a city client before. And so now that we're here, we're seeing, wow, everything really does touch a city in some way. So here are some of the other issues that we're monitoring and tracking actively for you guys. Anything related to revenue and taxation, especially property tax or ad valorem tax issues we're always aware of and how they could affect the city of Denton. Public city policy and budgeting. You can imagine that that has been huge a session. Infrastructure issues, public information. I know you guys can read, but just want to kind of circle the wagon here on talking about some of the other issues. And then these are, Denise is going to close this out by talking about some of the big issues that just are kind of overarching themes of the session that Ashley mentioned has been kind of a wild ride. These were the issues that we started out thinking would take up a lot of the space this session, and some of them have, and some of them haven't. And you'll see that I've got an asterisk there by the winter storm, Yuri, that is considered an emergency item. There's a list of the other emergency items the governor declared back in February. At least as of today, none of his emergency items have passed. He has said that he will call a special session if there's no action taken on the utility reform will, you know, remains to be seen what will happen in these last 28 days of session. But just some really huge issues that have come up this session, and there's not to this point been completion on on those issues, they're still moving forward through the process. So we've still got budget conference committee going where they're going to decide how they handle these federal funds. You all may or may not be aware of the impact on your local hospitals and healthcare providers with the withdrawal of the 1115 waiver. And then these various scope of authority issues between our different levels of government in the state have gotten a lot of attention this session. And then last but not least, we're still in a pandemic. And we are not talking about that a whole lot anymore, just because so many other things have popped up. So just to give you a sense of all of the dynamics that have impacted and changed this session, and big, big issues that need solutions and still a lot of we were both we're at the point of session where there's a lot of time left and not a lot of time left. And so, you know, our job is to keep you all apprised in the moment to moment changes that that happened up here. So our last slide is just really pointing out the deadlines that are approaching as we come through this month. The last day for house bills is next week. And the last day for Senate bills is in 22 days, but who's counting. So we will have a signing die on May 31. And then we'll figure out where we are from there. And I think we're open to any questions if if Rachel Ryan direct us to Yeah, thank you, ladies. Would you mind stop sharing? There we go. Great. Thank you. All right. So question for the consultants, we'll just kind of tailor that. Councilmember Meltzer and then Councilmember Armitage. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I've got questions on a number of the items that you covered on SB 10. I understand that we pay for about, you know, one in a fraction person of a five person team. Now, I mean, your whole occupation obviously is kind of in the balance, but doesn't it sort of point toward municipalities just having people on full time who do what you do might be the same people even. And before you respond to that one, if you know, there's a difference between one person's worth of a five member team versus having one person because it's different functions, but could neighboring municipalities conceivably each have a person? And could those people be part of an interlocal body that talks to each other? I'm happy to speak to this, Ryan. I think you had mentioned that you had an answer that you might share for this. Well, and then sure. And if I miss anything, Councilmember, you are correct that this bill SB 10 would not prohibit cities from pooling resources for any type of advocacy activities. What it would prevent would be any hiring of anyone who would have to register as a lobbyist. So if say a number of cities had legislative officers and they wanted to come together to share resources, they could. The bill would not prohibit that at all. If you do as a full time employee, exactly what these folks do is to register as a lobbyist. As a full time employee, you would not, as long as you're an employee of the city of Denton. Yeah. Thank you. On the state license holders, I tried to find out before, maybe we've had a little more time. Staff might have had a little more time to look into it. Are there any specific regulations standing now that might be particularly vulnerable if that law were to pass? I think for purposes of that bill, it's so broad and that has been what's caused the concern. And so some examples that we are using for that about a restaurant with a license from TABC could attempt to enjoin the enforcement of city's health code regulations. State license daycare could seek to enjoin city building codes. Cosmetologists could seek to enjoin city parking regulations. And it's just incredibly ambiguous and would also preempt the ability of cities to charge a fee related to permitting. So, you know, they're just as, it could go any direction as the way that we've interpreted it. And what do you think the prospects are for action on that, on that bill? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, sorry. I thought I heard someone ask something. Given where we are in the process and the fact that it has just gotten into the calendars committee as a Friday, it, well, I w I want to never say never until, you know, we're at the very end of session, but it certainly is behind probably close to a thousand bills. And unless someone on the calendars committee is really championing that bill to move forward, it's going to have a tough road ahead. What we do have to be really vigilant on at this point in session, which is something that we've been talking about with the team is watching out for potential germane bills where an amendment could go on. And if there's something that has a wide open caption or the subject matter of the bill is broad enough that it could incorporate this bill, we have to be mindful of that. That's happening a lot right now because so many bills are backed up. So they hitchhike. Mayor, do you mind if I keep going a little bit just because we covered so many topics? Sure. No problem. Thanks. So, you know, I'll try to be focused on the whole public camping area. If I understand the kind of pre-session feedback, even if the city wanted to designate an area for that use, it would have to be approved by the state. Do I understand that correctly under what's proposed? So my question is where is the distinction drawn between camping and tiny house? What has to be there for it to not be camping? That was really, really hotly contested in the committee hearing, actually. But I think that there are definitions. And like I said, that's why they went pretty into detail in the bill about saying this is what would qualify as statewide camping. And I think tents, shanties is visually very temporary, something that would include maybe having to build a fire, not having access to a restroom. It's all very specifically elucidated. And I think that that would be where the distinction would lie. Yeah. Well, we'll certainly want to know about all the specifics that comes to bed. And they also took caution in the bill to make sure that it's not anything that could be confused with, like I said, camping out for the iPhone or concert tickets or anything in a state park. You know, I mean, they really, it's pretty limited to street camping, right? Last item, I'll touch on the limiting of city debt and what exercise of borrowing powers can kind of go in what part of the tax rate. I just wasn't sure I understood the response. Would that inhibit city's ability to use debt for things like ambulances and fire trucks? That has been the concern there. There's a list in a substitute version of the bill that spells out some things, but that's definitely been not well elucidated by the author throughout the process. So it's just going on the assumption that use of debt is bad, not saving lives. Okay, I understand. I'll yield the floor. I believe that he thinks his changes incorporate that, but we're not so sure in the way that we're reading the bill. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Armitage. Yeah, so two questions. One is about, well, first of all, thanks for what you do. It is quite something out there. So thank you for being there in the front lines for us. A question about the slide about emergency items. Did I hear correctly, and don't hesitate to correct me because this was new to me and interesting, that did you say that Governor Abbott is in favor of all of those items listed on that one slide? If you could just elaborate so I make sure that I understand. I can reshare the slide or Denise can just read them. The emergency items that he listed back in February are bail reform, urban integrity, rural broadband, punishing cities that defund the police and civil liability for businesses open during the pandemic. And then he added ERCOT and PUC reform to the emergency list after the storm. So those are his declared emergency items at this point. And today, I believe that the broadband bill is actually about to go to his desk. I think the Senate is close to passing that or has passed it. Everything else is still pending. Okay, thank you so much. And my second question was, you know, can you speak to you of the major, you know, bills going forward that you've shared with us today? Can you can you speak to where our state reps who represent the city of Denton, you know, stand on these and specifically, you know, where there are state reps who might be in support of something that we're opposed or vice versa, you know, so that, you know, council and the public can know, you know, who to who to write to with their their limited time. So on the House side, we've been working a lot with Representative Lynn Stuckey and his colleagues. They are wonderful to work with. They are accessible. And I know that he and the mayor have have talked on a number of issues this session. And he has tried to assist in any way that he can. When we brought a concern to him about a bill, he's talked to different authors. We've been able to get feedback from him on, you know, where do you think this is headed? They've reviewed some letters. So he's just been great to work with on the Senate side, you have Senator Jane Nelson and Senator Drew Springer. And they too have been very open to communication from the team. Now, I will say that Senator Springer's been a little bit more of kind of a hard line on talking to Kate and I directly. I think it's just kind of, you know, trying to toe the line on the taxpayer funded lobbying issue. But we have been able to talk to his staff. And I know that you all been able to communicate with him. And Jane Nelson, the same, you know, her staff has been very open to us reaching out and providing input on particular bills that are moving. She's got, you know, she chairs the Senate Finance Committee. So she's got a lot that she's, she's got a, you know, she's very busy with that right now. And so she hasn't, she's not been as engaged on some of these issues, but that's not a function of her not being interested. I think, you know, she's just got working on the budget is a huge, huge task, especially this session. Thank you. So would it be fair to say that, you know, whether or not, whether, you know, these individual legislators agree with the bills that the city, that the city opposes or supports some of them are more communicative than others and that it's, it's worthwhile for people to get in touch with their, with their representatives and be aware of who's especially communicative. I still think they respond to constituents. Okay. Thanks. And council member, if I can add as well, I would like to say that to echo Kate and Denise, that every single one of our representatives and, and senators that represent city of didn't have communicated very well with staff have been very responsive. And I know that with each one, I can pick up the phone and they'll answer and they may not agree with the council's policy. However, they will always be willing to hear the city's concerns. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for our representatives there in Austin? Okay. So I, well, before you take round two, I'm going to go, thank you. So I would ask, have we heard anything about the rainy day fund? That, that is the biggest billion dollar mystery that I've ever heard of. I mean, you know, so if it's not now, right, if it's not the middle of a pandemic, the middle of a winter storm that's unparalleled then when, I mean, at some point it becomes just a savings account and that's okay. It's out of our jurisdiction. I just kind of want to understand what you're hearing and what, what people are saying. So that is a really great question. And I will tell you that it's been talked about less this session than in others. And I think part of that is a function of the state being, depending on how we approach it, having almost $38 billion coming down from the federal government and them thinking about, well, we can maybe use that instead of tapping our own rainy day fund for these issues. So, and we just, you know, I will tell you that even as late as last week, they made a decision to release $11 billion from that $38 billion to go towards public education. And that's been the only decision that's been made thus far. Now, some of that money will flow directly to cities and counties, but the remainder of it, I think it's about $17 billion that's coming directly to the state treasury. And that can be used for a number of things. And then there still will be, I believe, about $6 billion left over that they could decide to use for public education that they have not yet. So, I think that's driving the conversation or the lack of conversation around the rainy day fund because they've got access to other money right now. If that wasn't being, if that wasn't out there, then maybe we'd be having more of a conversation. But it's just not been, it's fascinating. True. Well said. And so, and I'll conclude with this thought that I want to echo what you have said with what Ryan has said on our team, that I've been really proud of the response from our representatives from Senator Springer, Senator Jane Nelson, even beyond that to say Tan Parker has been a great resource. And obviously Dr. Stuckey is fantastic. And really, that kind of connectivity was featured during the winter storm when County Judge Andy Eates was hosting daily conference calls and all our representatives were on those calls responding, researching, reaching out individually. So really, really proud of our representation at this point and they've been great to work with. Councilmember Meltzer? Oh, you're muted. Yep. Thanks. Speaking of the storm, the biggest lasting impact is the result of the basic heist that took place in broad daylight during that, during the declared disaster. And I'm just, you know, make a little statement to kind of set up the question where, you know, essentially, even during the declared disaster, the price gouging on fuel and power resulted in all of our reserves for a year being sucked out in a matter of days and then kind of Tony Soprano style, we were forced to then use our credit to go borrow more and pour that into it. And as I said, our ratepayers are going to be paying for it for 30 years. So my question is, is there even any interest on the part of our delegation or anybody down there in not just addressing, you know, making sure it doesn't happen again, but in redressing what already occurred that we will be paying for it for 30 years? Well, I might defer to Kurt on that. I, you know, I think there's still a lot of discussions taking place around all those issues and not definitive plan on what's going to move forward and how to address it. But we are kind of removed from that, the weeds of that discussion. So okay. All right. Thank you. I don't know. Did Kurt have anything if that answer stands and that's fine. Just don't want to pass that by if there's something he wanted to add. Mr. Mayor, this Kurt sidelets. I'll mention that here in just a minute during the presentation. We'll talk about gas. Perfect. Thank you, sir. Okay. Very good. Any other questions? Seeing none. Rachel. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, ladies. Appreciate y'all taking the time to be here with us today. I will get us move into the next part of our presentation. Kurt and Christina are here from focused advocacy. Before I let them get going, I just wanted by way of reminder, mayor and council members, we have put for y'all all of the action that the city has taken on each of our bills thus far in each Friday report that started back in March. Those were included in your backup today, but they're also of course on the city's website in the staff report section. So those are accessible to anybody should you want to look at them anytime. But I am going to turn it over to Kurt and Christina now from focus advocacy. They are our energy representatives. And as soon as they would like to get going sharing, I will defer. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, council members. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today through a zoom. I wish we could all be there in person that they will come soon, I believe my colleague Christina cany joins me today. And she will be handling the slides and we'll have a discussion about energy legislation electric legislation during this legislative session. So Christina, you want to put it up? Yes, we can start sharing. I would be remiss to have I didn't mention that we work very, very closely with Tony point a of course, Terry Nolte Smith day, Bill and the rest of the DME group as we try to assess this legislation and how it has an effect on DM DME as well as the entire market as we go forward. So hopefully today we'll talk a little bit about the legislation and a big picture, but try to narrow it down as much as we can to DME and the impacts that it has on you and your customers. Go ahead, Christina. Before we started this legislative session, we thought it would be fairly easy on electric legislation. The mainly the talk before we started was about having mo use go into competition. But with the advent of the winter storm, Yuri, for that week in February, it changed everything. We alluded to it just a minute ago, but there was a very increase in staggering increases in the cost of power across the Urquhart market. I'm not sure anyone knew what Urquhart was before the storm, but the acronym now everybody seems to know about Urquhart, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is about 85% of the power market in Texas. You know, normally you might run five billion through their money to set exchange hands for payment of gas, hedging, trading, you name it, and the cost of the customer. The week of Yuri that shot up to 45.6 billion or thereabouts. And much of it, Councilman, as you mentioned, was because of gas prices. Gas prices went from the high twos all the way up to I heard a quote of $1100. And I believe even DME paid in some $700 gas range. So very, very, very cost so high that nobody really for saw. I might just mention most people if you hedged you hedged to the 2011 levels, maybe of gas, which was $40. So we had instances where the 40 turned into 1100. It was almost impossible to hedge for the sustained amount of time that the prices were kept at $9000. During this period, you know, we had outages, we were supposed to have rolling outages. But because of the severity of the load shed, we didn't have a lot of rolling. I think the average Urquhart was out about 42 hours. We lost 52,000 megawatts of power. That's staggering. Over this time, because normally, I think we have about 78,000 in capacity. Peaks have been over set over the years at 74,000. You know, frankly, the demand for power during this period, exceeded the capacity, even if we had had all the capacity that we had online, we still wouldn't have made it. What was the financial impacts a lot just to Urquhart itself? Urquhart, which is a quasi state agency under the tutelage of the PUC. They came up $3 billion short. In other words, market participants couldn't pay their bill to Urquhart. So they couldn't pay rest of the market participants that they owed. So right around that $3 billion is still owed to market participants. And there's no money in the bank to pay it. So that has to be addressed as we go forward. We had three PUC board members resign. One of them at the request of the governor. We had six or I think it's actually more now Urquhart board members that resigned. The governor, in fact, called upon all the leadership at Urquhart, they should, they should resign. And the Urquhart executive director and CEO, Bill Magnus, did resign as of today's date of May the third, I think, or fourth. Brad Jones is the new interim Urquhart. So you see, there's been a lot of turmoil. And at the same time, they want to address these questions amidst all this turmoil. The impact to DME, I would say was staggering with the capital S. As was alluded to a moment ago, people had to go into the, the reserves, not only at the utility, the city, and determine how you're going to pay for that going forward. This $141 million after the offsets of the 207 million in energy purchases. So we'll talk a little bit about that. Christina, go ahead. Mainly, the legislature has approached this issue much the same as, you know, we as customers and citizens of the state, and, you know, how do you stop this from happening again? So four little areas that they're looking at. One is customer interface. I'd mentioned that first. That's on improving communications, improving how we notify people of outages. How do we have realistic communications with the customers themselves? So you, I think in DME, it worked pretty well. But a lot of times ERCOT wasn't getting sufficient information to the utility, where the utility could actually give the information to the customers. And it kind of all started when we all thought there was 30 minute outages. And because of the way ERCOT is, we're all interconnected. We have one control center, which means what happens in Denton affects what happens in Austin affects what happens in South Texas, all throughout the ERCOT system. So a lot of people couldn't enroll customers because it affected it affected the whole system and the way the voltage works from one feeder to the next. So a lot of people, once they were outed, say here in Austin, they were on there for a long period of time before we could actually bring customers back on. So you'll see a lot of bills this time, and the legislature is looking about the communications and also what you determine to be critical load. You notice if you live most of the time by a hospital or a police station, you got to keep power because that's a critical load. So going forward, there's going to be a parameter set to how you determine what that customer critical load is, and how it applies to all the folks. I'm going to go over to ERCOT PUC reform over there is right. Everybody wants to come in and fire everybody in time of crisis. And that's definitely what has happened here. Several of our board members were deemed independent. Most of those independent board members from were from out of state, ironically enough, because that's what the legislature wanted over the years. But now it's in vogue to be Texas centric. So of the new ERCOT members to be appointed, they have to be from Texas. The PUC also is probably going to be from Texas. And also the governor and the lieutenant governor and the speaker might get some might get some appointment powers on ERCOT. So you'll see a revamping of ERCOT. As I mentioned, Brad Jones is the new CEO, best experience in Texas and in New York, and he'll do a good job over there. I'll go to the reliability one here next, because we'll go to reliability. There were a lot of reasons for this epic proportions of failure on the gas side, on the power side, you name it. It was an epic proportion. You know, DME actually did what people are supposed to do, what a company is supposed to do. They're supposed to have backup generation, but because of curtailments in the natural gas, the gas to be determined mainly by the gas supplier, they got cut off. And then some certain freezes happened in the radiators, the backup generation. And so you see some staggering losses of the having to purchase power at $9,000. The wind in the solar initially wasn't able to produce a lot of people blame the wind and solar. That's not necessarily the case. A lot of people blame frozen gas lines. That is part of the case. The wind didn't blow the sun didn't shine and it was all of it came together in a disaster basically. So what people are looking at is how do we have backup generation to wind and solar when it doesn't work? Do we build more plants? The market's not giving the price incentives for new generation to be built. So do you have some type of state regulated generation or do you have what type called a capacity market? One of the quickest ways is you have a demand market. If I simply don't run, give me some type of credit or payment for that and I'll shed the load for you. So that's things that they'll be looking at and it's not something you solve in the next 28 days. I assume there's going to be a lot of studies, a lot of stakeholder meetings and a lot of PUC and ERCOT direction on how to come up with reliability. As I mentioned, these losses continue to mount amid reports that some of our gas companies made billions and billions of dollars. The impact of those high gas bills is rippled throughout the country to where other parts of the country on their utilities are paying big prices too. The thing that folks are looking at down here is one, how does ERCOT pay the $3 billion I mentioned earlier? The protocols set it up at 2.5 million over 96 years. We got to do better than that. So I expect there will be a securitization process of a longer period of time at a low interest rate for all market participants to pay that $3 billion. There's also charges of ancillary services. You may have talked to some industry or some customers there in Denton and around the state that because of the nature of their contracts pay high ancillary services and the legislature is looking to try to go back and cap those and give some type of credit through securitization to those customers and those utilities. The other one that for 32 hours when load wasn't being shed, we were still getting charged $9,000 on purchase power. So there's an effort to go back and adjust those prices and not repricing but adjusting those prices. I think it's relevant to say here the state has little or no control over natural gas prices. Little or no control. Probably no control. It's an interstate commodity regulated mainly what little it is on the federal level. The state looks at it on safety but doesn't have anything to do with the pricing. So those gas bills are going to have to be paid by someone and that's why this securitization is very important and I think important to a lot of communities around the state to be able to get some kind of relief lessen the impact on customers. On the legislative priorities, I think somebody mentioned the emergency items ERCOT reform. The reason we put this up here is because these are kind of the movers and shakers on these issues over there. You'll see the names of Kelly Hancock, Richland Hills up there, Charles Schwartner is Georgetown. A lot of other folks, Huffman and Hughes. And then Speaker Phelan has the priorities as he's going forward. So what we'll be looking at is, can you go to the next one, Christina? Is how does this impact DME? We review the legislative proposals. We try to participate in the debates. Terry came down and testified, did an excellent job in the two weeks that was following the ice storm. We work with stakeholder discussions. Texas Public Power Association is our statewide association. And we're looking at legislation that lessens the financial impact on customers as well as the utility because the utility owns the customers. That's where we're so different from DME and other munis. I mean, our customers are the owners as taxpayers and residents of the city. The second one is kind of important. I think we were looking at legislation that allows cities to make their preference on how they may want to go into future on generation choices. A big impact this time on folks that have gone quasi 100% renewable because you've heard me mention about the requirement for backup generation affects the pricing tremendously going forward. And then lastly, as the main thing that we look at, and that is to preserve DME as an ongoing entity within ERCOT, when we started out the session, it was all about are we going to make munis go into competition? That moved to the wayside with the storm, but we still had significant issues going forward and that's going to be discussed. I think Christina next, there were a couple of I think they alluded to the last days of the session. I wouldn't mention special sessions. There's rumors of one in July Medicaid funding and federal funds. And I mentioned the federal funds because it was talked about. There is a lot of money coming our way. That money could go into power cost. It could go into reliability going forward. And I think the legislature is looking at those as we go forward. Someone mentioned the rainy day fund. The rainy day fund is funded by the oil and gas severance tax. It would make a whole lot of sense to use some of that rainy day fund for reliability purposes that we have here. But I think they're probably the electric. I don't know whether they want to put that in a special session with all the highlights, because if they put it, then they're expected to do something. So I think they're going to try to move with a lot of bills this time and then do a lot of a study over at the PUC and at ERCOT during the interim. I'd be happy to answer any questions, Mayor. All right. Thank you very much. Questions? Any questions? Okay. Seeing none, I guess you did a great job. Well, thank you. Yes. Thanks, Mayor. And if you could, I wanted to make a note. Which fund does the -- which fund pays into the rainy day fund? It's the oil and gas severance tax. There's a tax put on everything that's taken out for the oil and gas and assessed and it goes into the fund. Now, that fund also pays a portion of education cost and also some of the transportation costs. It's set up constitutionally that way. Great. Great. Okay. Any other -- any other questions? Seeing none. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Mayor. Thanks, Council. Appreciate it. That's all we have for y'all today, Mayor and Council. If you need anything else, obviously we're just an email or a phone call away, Ryan and I, should you have anything as we get forward over the next month. Okay. Thank you very much. So that concludes Item A. That will take us to Item B, Receive Report, Hold Discussion, Give Staff Direction regarding the 2021 Winter Weather Actor Activity -- Actor Action Report and Plan. And that's -- I didn't say so. It's Item B, 21785. All right. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Stuart Berksay, Assistant to the City Manager. Going to share my screen. Today, I'm going to talk to you about our Winter Weather Action Plan. Just by way of reminder, as you know, there was a week-long severe winter weather event that began on Valentine's Day. During March and April, individual departments presented information about their response, including what went well and what could have been improved. So today, we have combined all of those recommendations into an overview of the action items, including anticipated timeline and budget considerations. What you'll see is that some of the items are updates to policy and procedures that do not carry a cost. Others are included in the normal departmental operating budgets. And then there are some that will need to be developed and will be brought to Council for consideration during the budget process. These have been organized into six categories -- facilities, vehicles, emergency services/business services, public communications, DME, and department-specific items. So we will review kind of what went -- what issues we had and then the recommended action plans. And then at the end of the presentation, Madison, our city auditor, will talk about how the progress of these items will be tracked and reported to you. So the first area is our facilities. These are some of the issues that we ran into that electronic building locks disengaged because of power outages, that some generators were not installed with the intent of supporting HVAC systems, and then that buildings could be better winterized and critical infrastructure experience rolling outages. So coming out of that, these are a list of the action items that we have. The plan today is not necessarily to go line by line through them but just kind of hit the highlights. So facilities is going to determine the backup generator needs, develop a plan and a budget, and that would -- that cost and everything would be brought forward during the contingency funds -- or as a contingency item, supplemental item rather, during the budget cycle. Developing a plan to winterize buildings and fire suppression systems. And then review a list of critical infrastructure and hospitals for rolling power outages. Next up are our vehicles. The issues that we ran into here is that our diesel fuel experience gelling, the stocks of sand were depleted because of the length of the winter weather events, and we actually moved that action item to the department specific. So I'll touch on that here in a little bit. And then our vehicles could have been better winterized for the extreme temperatures and again the length of the events. Here are some of the action items out of that. It's developing a plan and procedures to winterize those vehicles including a plan to prevent the fuel gelling, create a plan to utilize fleet vehicles and parts maintenance and things like that, some departmental vehicles for plowing and road maintenance, determine the best practices for winterizing fire emergency vehicles, and then develop SOPs and train staff for sanding and plowing activities for the major arterials in the city. And that extends beyond just having to rely on streets or public works or parks, but kind of cross-train some of the other departments that might be out there so that we can fully utilize the staff for that. And then determine fuel stock and delivery methods for emergency generators. The estimated cost for that would be about $11,000 for a fuel trailer. And then again about that collaboration just creating a shared resources and vehicles list so that everybody can utilize those resources. Our emergency services and business services, a lot of this is updating action plans and implementing those. It's not that they were necessarily out of date, but we just need to review those. Staff lost internet service at home during outages when we could not make it into the office. There's room for improvement for the internal emergency communications coordination. And then this was mentioned in the presentations whenever we did the departmental presentations, but connecting with those local departments to form a holistic view of emergency management. I'll leave this up here for a little bit just so that you can look through those. But I'll note that many of these are going to kind of be completed or worked on by the EMO, that's the Emergency Management Office. And so once that person is on board, a lot of these will be updated through that. But it's establishing business continuity and contingency plans, amending procedures to include holding daily calls with leadership to discuss major issues within the city. That was an issue because of the virtual environment. And so it was just noted that the frequent consistent calls would help with that coordination. Fire, securing a minimum of two traction control devices for all vehicles. And then finally developing specific stages of winter weather, protocol with specific trigger points so that departments are aware of pending operational changes. There is also a consultant that is and has performed an assessment on our response. They provided the recommendations listed there. They also recommended a clear delineation between the EOC roles and incident command. And then they talk something or they mentioned something in their review that we also agree with outside partner agencies, such as the cities, county, school district, things like that, they should be included in the disaster preparedness and response. And we internally researched and conducted those research, that research provided a review of 13 comparable municipalities to look at where their emergency management is placed within their organization. The majority of those are within the fire department or reporting to a public safety director. Public communications was also highlighted. Some difficulties we ran into there is that there were limited avenues to deliver the emergency messaging to the community. Whenever we put out communication, we could better anticipate the follow-up questions from the communication to ensure that the public fully understands the situation, think drip, no drip on that. And then there was limited Spanish language translation available. And then just updating those community, those communication protocols. Here are some items that came out of that. It includes updating the protocols for outages and boil water notices, some items that we want to incorporate into the overall protocols for emergencies. And then something that we're working on now actively is creating that crisis preparation web page that can be easily converted to a response web page. And then as we're going through the purchasing process and discovery for the 311 CRM procurement, something that we're looking into is the reverse notification tools there. DME and the Denton Energy Center, they went into a lot of depth wherever they spoke to you. A couple of the items that they ran into was a limited fuel supply. Kurt just touched on that. Available for the deck. And then some industrial and commercial properties continued to use energy with limited to no operations at their facilities. And so some things that we plan to work on are increasing the natural gas fuel reliability, developing a plan for how to communicate and work with major industrial users and commercial properties to reduce the power loads so that we aren't, you know, holding back power from residents or people who may need it for those empty buildings. And then our department-specific items, some things that we found are that the long-term signal failures, the traffic signals, they cause a little bit of traffic congestion and confusion. You'll see a couple of items on the list that address that. There's a need to review the policies for emergency food purchases and lodging for critical staff. And then water/wastewater mentioned that underneath all the snow sometimes are water shutoffs or meters were difficult to locate. And so it's just geolocating those so that they're easier for staff to be able to find whenever they're out there in those situations. But here the department-specific items, I'll touch on this, procuring temporary street signage in case of traffic signal failure. And again, those would be deployed in the critical areas where it may not be obvious that if the signals are down, that intersection becomes a four-way stop. The third item there, test and replace battery backup systems, those actually froze, so you see the estimated cost there. Those systems actually froze during this event, and so those need to be tested and replaced as necessary. And these are just estimated costs, so it may not come to that, but there are 130 that they've identified that need to be assessed. Purchasing generators for those long-term signal power outages. And then moving to the next slide. Just touching on the geocoding for water and wastewater infrastructure and updating that GIS database. And then setting new winter inventory levels for the water and wastewater treatment plants. So that includes emergency generators, the fuel that they might need, and so that's included. Some of that is included in the other items, but we definitely wanted to point out that we're aware of the concern for the water and wastewater treatment plants, and so we'll be tracking that. And then to determine and secure proper levels of sand storage for an extended event like this. You'll notice that they say that we dispersed 500 tons compared to what we usually disperse of 10 to 30 tons, and so we just want to make sure that if an event like this is coming up, that we have it stored, we have it dry, so that we can distribute that onto the roads if necessary. So moving forward, as I mentioned, some of these items will be brought forward to council as supplemental budget requests for your consideration during this budget cycle. Other departments are going to be working on their updated policy and procedures. Those are listed here. And then the city manager's office and internal audit are going to work together to review progress toward the action plan, and we're going to track the progress. And that's where I'm going to stop sharing and let Madison, our city auditor, update you on how we plan to do that. All right. Hello, I'm Madison Rocha, the Denton City Auditor. And as Stuart mentioned, we're working, internal audit is working with the city manager's office to track the progress on these items. And to do that, we've actually created a dashboard. So I'm going to show it to you by sharing my screen. Okay. All right. So if you go to the city's website, they have an inclement weather page. If you scroll down on this page, we have winter weather after action blurb right here. And this dashboard, once you click on the button, should open up the smart sheet page, which shows us basically these are all of the action items kind of split up by the categories that Stuart just showed you. This shows the progress that we've made. This is self-reported by the departments. And this just breaks it up kind of similarly by the category. So this is publicly available for anybody to go and look at. And then we plan to each quarter kind of dig into what the departments have reported as part of this dashboard. On the backside, there's a place for them that they can add comments. And so we can go and look at what the progress that they've made, what that actually is. And then we're going to report that quarterly as part of the Friday report. And I believe the first one will be in August. So that's kind of the plan going forward to keep reporting on these action items. So I'll answer any questions about that if you all have any. Got it. Okay. So that's our presentation. We do have a department, a lot of the department directors on the call if you have department-specific questions. Great. So questions for staff. Councilmember Meltzer. First, I just want to say I'm so pleased at the sort of seriousness and professionalism with which staff has just taken this whole event as a learning opportunity, very analytical and kind of no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled approach and tracking it to follow through. I just think it makes my inner manager very happy. There's one specific area of criticism that keeps coming back to me, which is criticism from the point of view of in the same spirit of how could we do this better if something similar happened again? It has to do with the communications during the adage itself. Now, this is a very tall order with the pace at which the rollouts were happening and the sort of energy and attention to just actually execute what was required. But the thing that I hear is we didn't know what was going on and that means at a granular level. First of all, I don't know if that's actually true. So I'd be interested to know if I'm just wrong about that. Were there in fact notices going out with each wave like here it comes, here's exactly where it's going to hit, this is the best we know so far about how long it's going to last. I don't know if we were doing that or not. I didn't see it if we were. But that's the kind of thing that is implicit in the questions coming to me is how much more frequent and granular could the communication have been? So again, not from the point of view of looking back and doing this, but just saying, could we be prepared to, if you agree with this criticism, to staff in a moment like that specifically to do that level of communication? Mayor, this is Sarah Hensley, interim city manager and the answer to that, the question is yes. I think all of us would say we could probably do a better job. I think one of the things we could have done, and I think Ryan can jump in here as well, is we were going, it was almost like trying to change the tires on your car while it's still going. So we were trying to keep up. But I think the one thing we all recognize that would probably be the most important thing for us in the future is to try to activate an EOC where we have those public information staff available to us. And that may mean in this case we had to go out and get them to bring them into work but be able to do real-time information. Ryan was pretty much the person that was communicating and it was pretty real-time, but there were some laps because we were trying to make sure the information that we sent was accurate. That was another problem, the accuracy. And just to interject, you know, I'm not trying to put a point of view of criticism like how could this have happened? You know, it's just what would we do differently? Yep. And so I think one is, yes, no, absolutely. I think we take this as a constructive criticism and I think you can see through our report and by engaging Madison, we take this very seriously and we'll be keeping up with how we can move along, but I think having an EOC open and having people on staff and being able to really be there real-time to talk back and forth, you know, my vision, quite frankly, in the future is that we're actually working hand in hand with FEMA and with the county in a situation where we're actually doing that real-time so that we're there making those decisions with all those representatives in that area that that this time it just was one of those things where it did not occur. But I think for the future, that is something we would definitely want to be planning for so that we're ready to have that and have all those people there to make those decisions and get the information out. Ryan, you want to add? I think the only thing I'll add is that Councilmember Meltzer, for any Councilmember resident, as you received feedback related to communications, we're actively building, or I should say building, we're renewing and reviewing and creating better processes of protocol. So anything you'd like to share with us so that we can make sure we factor in every perspective, that'd be very helpful. I was a little surprised that, look, you would think in a situation like that, that there'd be like an incident commander. It's a community-wide thing. Like the things that had to be invented, you know, real time. You are like, "Oh, people don't have water. I've got to figure out how to get water to them." All that stuff. You know, you would kind of think, as a lay person, that Red Cross and FEMA or somebody would know how to do that and would be doing that. That's the beauty of activating an EOC, is that you have all those players at the table with you, and that you can do it virtually, and we did. And our Fire Chief, our Assistant Fire Chief who stood up and helped get this going from a virtual viewpoint did an outstanding job. I think there's, from a lack of, there's no criticism about him. I think all of us would admit that probably the best situation for us to be in in the future is to activate that EOC, get people in, and not just city employees, but get in with your county, your FEMA, your Red Cross, where you're all there and you can make real time decisions. Are those key nonprofits? And nonprofits, yes. I mean, I know our Police Chief has been there. I've actively been involved with this in another city where, you know, we all show up at the EOC and we work 8 to 10 hour shifts. And all of our nonprofit partners, the county, the state, are all there in the same room so that we can make those decisions. Should be like this. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Seeing none. One more time. Any other questions for staff? Great. Okay. Thank you, Stuart, Madison, Brian, and Ms. City Manager. Thank you very much. Thank you. Uh-huh. Okay. That concludes Item B. Our last thing on our agenda for today is a closed session. So I'll call, I'll call the closed session, take us in the closed session, and then we'll take just a short five minute break, come right back, just give them time to clear the room. So it's our convened closed session at 1.15 p.m. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under Texas Government Code Section 551.071. We will adjourn for five minutes, be back at 1.20 in closed session. Thank you.