May 25, 2021 City Council on 2021-05-25 2:00 PM

Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council. It is now two o'clock in the afternoon on May the 25th, 2021, and we do have a quorum, so I will call this meeting to order. We did not have any citizens comments on the consent agenda item that takes us to the request for clarification on the agenda item by our council. So questions for staff with respect to the consent agenda. Seeing none. One more time. Seeing none. Okay. Thank you. That takes us to our first work session, which is item 3A. I'll call that ID 21926, receive report, hold discussion, give staff direction regarding a summary of prior and current federal funding related to COVID-19 and overview of the Federal American Rescue Plan ARP Act of 2021. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council. My name is Cassie Ogden, Director of Finance, and I will share my screen and we'll get started with the presentation. Thank you. So just a brief overview, we're going to talk about the American Rescue Plan Act and what it means for the available funding for the city of Denton, the guidelines for the funding, and then some of the goals and proposed use of funds. So just a background about the federal response when the pandemic started last year, the federal government enacted the CARES Act, which the city did receive money from the CARES Act funding. $2 trillion was part of the rescue package for relief for states and local governments. In December 2020, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act provided $907 billion for pandemic relief, but there was no direct local government assistance. And today we're here to talk about the American Rescue Plan Act that was signed into law in March. It's a $1.9 trillion relief package and $350 billion is dedicated specifically to state and local government assistance. So the city of Denton, we actually updated this this morning with our new allocation is $23.29 million. We previously, the methodology had changed, and so we were previously thinking we were going to get $26 million, but they've reduced that to $23.29 million. We are expecting to receive this money in two tranches, that's the phase that's used in the guidelines, 50% will be given to us this year, and then the next 50% next year. So $11.6 million we should receive this year. In addition to the $23.29, we are receiving home funding of $1.7 million for tenant based rental assistance, housing support, and then for other shelter activities. Denton County has also been allocated or is allocated funding of $172 million, along with emergency rental assistance of $18.25 million. There has been other assistance given that it's been administered by federal agencies throughout the pandemic, specific for small business assistance, you can see the list on the left. There's been substantial money given to help revitalize those businesses that were impacted directly by COVID, as well as there's been aid to households through some tax credits and other assistance. All of these programs are administered by federal agencies, not by the city. So I mentioned the CARES Act earlier, just a quick overview of the difference between the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan. So the CARES Act had a shorter timeframe to spend the money, it was nine months to spend the money, which we have spent all of our CARES Act funding. We received all of the money at one time. There was no revenue replacement allowed, which is different than the American Rescue Plan. Obviously, I just talked about the two tranches that will receive part of the funding this year and part next year, and there is revenue replacement allowed. So the CARES Act funding, just for a reminder, we did receive $7.6 million in CARES Act funding. As of December 31st, we expended all of our funds. You can see the categories that the funding was used for, housing support, COVID mitigation, and then capital expenses. In addition to the $7.6 million, we have received some additional funding from state agencies for fire, library, airport, and police for $412,000. The funds are still being administered. And so just again, to go over some additional aid to households through all of these acts. So the CARES Act and the previous act, $31.5 million has been dedicated for programs specific to help households. And you can see the status of those programs. Some are already closed. Some are still open and being administered through our nonprofits and through the United Way. And then with the American Rescue Plan, there were additional assistance given, $18.25 million for the rental assistance, the Round 2 that's being administered through the county and nonprofits, as well as additional emergency housing vouchers. I just wanted to make council and citizens aware of how to apply for rent and utility assistance. These are the programs that we just spoke about previously. You can scan the QR code and receive the application. So the Treasury provided some interim guidance for how cities and governments can use the American Rescue Plan funding. So it's really intended to respond to COVID and its economic impacts. So all the programs and projects must tie back to the negative impact that COVID has created. There's also replace revenue loss due to COVID. So if a government entity had a revenue shortfall, however, this does exclude revenues for particular activities. And it has to be caused, the revenue shortfall has to be caused by COVID, not as a result of rate reduction or council actions. And so a good example may be the lost hot funding revenue. This may be an eligible use for funding. Additionally, the ARP guidelines outline to provide premium pay to eligible essential workers. There are some limitations on industry and overall pay, but that is an eligible use. As well as investing in water, sewer, stormwater, and broadband infrastructure. The guidelines do say that Treasury will issue additional guidelines since they're not very comprehensive right now. But in general, projects should be eligible for or fall in line with the eligibility requirements for the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water State Revolving Fund or Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. And so for the goals for the use of the ARP funding is really to create sustainable solutions. So avoid ongoing financial commitment since this is kind of one time funding, we will be receiving it over just two years, so it's not going to be an ongoing funding. And then just to address the immediate need, specifically from COVID and then the economic impact to achieve long term benefits, we really want to partner with our organizations to help leverage this funding to meet the needs of our community. We wanted to get council feedback on some potential projects and how to appropriate the funding. So staff has identified some potential projects. All of these are tentative and still subject to the eligibility requirements. As well as we've just provided estimated cost funding, staff will bring back, once we get guidance from council on how you would like to allocate the ARP funding, we will refine the scopes and bring back a final project list in June for you. But just wanted to briefly mention our staff's top priority for the ARP funding would be the Loop 288 building, since we feel like it may be eligible under the ARP to support public health resources. Another potential project is the vaccine clinic support. I know the fire department has talked about increasing their support for the vaccine clinics and that could be an eligible use of the funding. As well as the temporary alternative shelter for those experiencing homelessness. That would be one time use just for the next fiscal year. And then we've outlined some other programs that could be potentially made into grant programs where the city would administer a grant for our, I'm sorry, rent relief, behavioral health care services. There's a business building health improvement, potential project that economic development is looking at, as well as the arts, music, cultural business grant program for those artists and musicians affected by COVID. I've already mentioned the hot fund revenue replacement. And then for the water and sewer infrastructure, we've identified some projects that you may have previously heard about the Elm Street, Elm and Locust Street projects just for the water wastewater and drainage infrastructure replacement, the stormwater master plan, funding for that since it's not currently budgeted. And then the Pecan Creek phase three and four, just the water and sewer infrastructure would be eligible. And then the water treatment and wastewater treatment plants have identified a couple other projects that could be potentially eligible for the ARP funding. So wanted to get council's direction on how you would like us to appropriate the money and what potential projects you'd like us to bring back for more detailed scope and analysis. Okay. Just as you're discussing the potential projects and things to consider, we are still waiting on Denton County's plan for how they are going to spend their ARP funding. We would really like to avoid duplicating programs and want to work to partner with them in being able to provide projects, but we're still waiting. We've heard where they're about two to three weeks out from making that decision. We will, once we've have final projects listed, we'll bring back a budget amendment so we can actually spend the money. And then just as we're talking about potentially administering grant programs, just keep in mind, we'll have to fold in the program administration expenses associated with administering those grants. Staff does plan on gathering public input on community priorities and needs after this, after we get council direction on your funding plan. And then we'll, like I said earlier, we'll bring back that final recommendation for your adoption in June. And with that, I will take questions. Great. Okay. Thank you. And so I think the direction, Cassie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if we give you direction around the category that helps and then you can compare and contrast that those categories, those projects across the county's priorities and then are with where the county's going to decisions they make and then with the city perspective, you can staff can come back bring those and kind of priority order by category. Does that, is that, is that helpful? Yes, that's very helpful. Great. So as we kind of formulate questions again, any insight staff will note, but I think if we can kind of end with a preferred category and there's only three or four of those, so that's good. So it's health resources, economics, sewer, waste and infrastructure. And there may be one missing there, but so yeah, so that kind of, if you can give that category direction as well. So there's waste, yeah, infrastructure, yeah. So that would be good to then give an overview and give staff flexibility based on what they hear back. Councilmember Beck, I thought I saw your hand, Councilmember Davis. Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Is there, is there any categories that whose funds we don't have an avenue for another fund to address them? Is there anything we'll, if we don't take something now, we'll lose out on? The allocation has already been made as far as we are, we've already requested the funding. We should be getting it. So it's not a use all of it or you lose it. We do have restrictions on how quickly we have to use it. So for instance, on the infrastructure projects, we have to spend it by, or we have to encumber the funds by the end of 2024, but actually expense all of the funds by 2026. So that should be a consideration when we're thinking about large infrastructure projects having to design and then go out to bid for construction. I hope that answers your question. I think it mostly does. I might have some more, but I'll pass the baton at this time. Okay. Councilmember Davis. Thank you, Mayor. I'll ask my question and then I think my direction could be pretty brief too. My question is, you mentioned community input and soliciting community input. How are we planning to do that? Can you kind of describe some of the channels we're going to use to reach out to the community and I'm thinking specifically about some of our nonprofit partners, making sure that all of our nonprofit partners know that we're working in this space and we have some substantial funding and we might not even be aware of some of the projects they've got in the works that may qualify. Sure. So we were planning on putting out some potential projects for the citizens to look at and give us feedback on the city's website. We've talked about possibly doing a survey and I've been working with Danny Shaw and her team on the nonprofit side and we've asked to meet with Denton County to work with them and partner with them on their plan as well for using the funding. Mayor, would you like me to go ahead and give direction or wait for other folks to come around with questions? No, no. Yeah. If you can get a start, that'd be great. So it's going to take us a while to kind of winnow everything down to the choices and staff's going to come back. So I'm going to just kind of express what I think are some important principles. One I think is bricks and mortar and things like that are going to have a longer lasting impact than say operational costs or for instance, hot fund replacement revenue. That's great. I'm sure those organizations would appreciate that. I know our committee, our hot funds committee would have an easier time budgeting if we had some revenue replacement, but at the same time, a lot of those organizations have already pivoted, they made changes to last year's events and those sorts of things. I think if we're going to get a big one-time injection of a lot of federal funding, then putting it into things that have a lasting impact. The first one I can think of, of course, our Luke 288 building that also had a direct public health benefit if we'd had that available to operate in the way that with a little more space during COVID, we might have been in a better situation for some of our vulnerable populations. I think if we look outside our own walls, there might be some nonprofits that have brick and mortar long-term needs as well. I don't have any off the top of my head, but if we adopt that principle, things that are going to last longer than just this year's budget or next year's budget, I think that would be the best stewardship of these dollars. To be frank, I'm not especially interested in spending this money on our sewer and water projects. It'd be really nice. It would make it a lot easier to do the PEC three and four projects with a little extra money from the feds. Drawing that COVID connection with those projects and funding those things that way, I don't think would be the best stewardship of these dollars. I think big impact bricks and mortar kind of stuff is the best way to spend them. Okay. Thank you. Council Member McGuire and Mayor Pro Tem Melter. Yeah, thank you, Mayor, I agree with a lot of what's already been said. I personally, my top priority for this funding would be a direct delivery of health services, including administration of vaccines and outreach and communications related to getting as many of our residents vaccinated as possible. I think that getting as many folks vaccinated as quickly as possible needs to be our number one priority. I agree with Council Member Davis that I do think the facility on loop 288, the junction, the new facility for that would be a great use of these funds. Another project that comes to mind that serves a similar function would be the Denton Basic Services Center, which I know is very, very early in its, you know, planning and proposals. It hasn't even come before this council yet, but that is something that we could possibly use some of these funds for. I also, I agree with Council Member Davis that probably for our city, our big infrastructure projects are probably not the best use of this money. You know, I wouldn't be opposed to maybe setting aside some of it for our big sewer and waste water projects, but those projects could really quickly eat up this funding and we want to make sure that we're prioritizing public health related projects first before we go in that direction. Okay, Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer. I think eventually somebody will have advocated for every position here. I, well first the easy one to agree with, I absolutely think it's a great opportunity to fund the loop 288 building and we're kind of anticipating that something like this might be in the offing, so that's great. I absolutely share the, generally the priority on getting people vaccinated and everything related to that. But what I, but it's very important to know, ultimately, what the county is going to do, and that pot of money is bigger so you know if in fact, all the items that relate to that will be covered by them, big if, but it could be, then we could do different things. As far as brick and mortar type stuff. I do have the question that Councilor Davis raised in mind, but how would you draw the connection to COVID to something like the Pecan Creek phases. So I assume there's staff that had some thinking and I'd be very interested to hear how you would make the connection. If in fact that's supportable and would happen. My reason for, if the public health needs are already funded out of the total portfolio of county and city, my reason for supporting that is, it would just be the biggest economic development slingshot for recovery for Denton. So that's why I would do it. Okay, thank you. Staff, do you want to speak to the sewer authorization component first, and then we'll go back to Council Member Byrd. Sure, so the Treasury guidelines do discuss the water sewer broadband infrastructure kind of tie to COVID, and it's really related to sustainable clean drinking water and ensuring that our plants and our treatment methods are updated and as sustainable as possible. Given people are staying at home more, they need access to clean drinking water. That's outlined in the Treasury guidance. Okay, Council Member Byrd. My first question, I have a question and then I'll give my point of view here. The first thing I would like to know is, how does this connect to the open status of some of the things of the CARES Act? I was noticing here that we have open status or emergency solutions, grant round one, round two, and then emergency real assistance that's showing still open. And then, how is that going to affect what decisions or what opinions we have today in those terms? And with that being said, I would definitely think that I would want to do the reoccurring, taking a look at the reoccurring things, the emergency management program and also the public communication. I think that one of the things that we probably do, if we have an issue, it'd be more likely that the community does, I think, that we're communicating effectively with them. And so, I think I would like to have us to take a look at that and the emergency management part. And, of course, then we can go through the other public health resources and the temporary alternative shelter. I don't know what that looks like, but it sounds like it's something that we would need in it. And then again, the day center and overnight shelter. So, my top two is the emergency management and communications, and then I would go just going upwards, behavioral and then the day center. Okay. And to address your question- To answer that question, yes, ma'am. Danny Shaw is here to discuss the ARP is separate than those other rent and utility assistance that was administered through the CARES Act. And so, Danny can answer your questions about what's open and closed. Thanks. Thank you. Danny Shaw, Community Services. The ESG grant funding that came through the CARES Act is still open with the city. We're still administering that program and it's providing resource assistance for eviction prevention and to rapidly rehouse people experiencing homelessness, as well as a few additional funds for emergency shelter. Those funds are set to expire in July based on the deadline. We have requested an extension, but it would give us a few months additional to expend any remaining funds there. The United Way is also a recipient of ESG-CV funds through its round two allocation, and that is limited just to eviction prevention and rapid rehousing. So they'll be deploying those funds through March of 2022. So that's additional funding that's still available in the eviction prevention realm, as well as to house people who are experiencing homelessness through rental assistance. So those funds are out there. And those are what we would be considering when we're looking at how we might use the ARP funds or the home funds, and specifically in those particular areas, because there is funding available, as well as the county's allocation within that ARP, there's additional emergency rental assistance funds. So in the eviction prevention realm, there's a lot of funding. So that would impact how we might look at how we use our allocations of ARP funds in the future as it relates to eviction prevention or rental assistance options. - Okay, Council Member Bumter. - Yes, so before giving my direction, I just wanna state my overall approach to this opportunity. I take a triage approach instead of thinking of what will have the longest lasting effect, I think, for something like this that is emergency funding, what are the biggest needs right now? And some of these things will end up having a long lasting effect, I believe and I hope, but others might not, except in the sense of helping keep people housed and alive, who would fall through the cracks otherwise, that can be seen as having, absolutely having a long lasting effect, just depends on how you define it. I wanna mention a couple of things that haven't been mentioned yet. One, the non-profit capacity support grant program idea, I believe that's really important. As Danny just mentioned, there's a lot of money available right now for eviction prevention and rapid rehousing, but I hear from our non-profits and also from constituents who are waiting on funding that there is often a wait and during those wait times, and the wait is largely, as I understand it, because there are not enough people, enough boots on the ground to do this work, it takes a lot of people to fill out all these forms, make all this face-to-face contact, get all this work done, and if you don't have a lot of people during this limited time with the clock running out to connect applicants to funds, people end up falling through the cracks. So that's why I think that should be one of our big priorities. I know folks haven't mentioned it, but I'm wondering if anyone would reconsider looking at it from that perspective as this would be an investment in making sure that this money we already have actually gets to people in time and does its job before it runs out. Certainly, the emergency management program manager idea I like, but I would like to tweak that to be a public health coordinator position, which would do overlapping work, do very similar kind of work, but with an eye to public health. That is a position that could really have long-lasting effects, and I think we see the need for it. Anyway, the other ones that I support are the building on the loop, vaccine clinic support, and these are in no particular order. I'm just kind of reading down the list, although vaccine, I would put at the very top, just as it's at the top of the list, because this is an emergency triage need. I want to speak to what Mayor Pro Tem Melter said about making sure not to be redundant with the counties offering. Staff mentioned that with what the county is doing for vaccines, staff mentioned that too. I believe that whatever the county is doing for vaccines, as we've already seen, there will be needs in the city of Denton where we can work not in a redundant way, but in a collaborative way with the county, with whatever they're doing, and we can actually set a goal of getting everybody who wants to be vaccinated, vaccinated by a certain period of time. We could focus on mobile vaccinations, getting vaccinations to people where they are in underrepresented communities, et cetera, in ways that the county just can't do in the city of Denton because they're focusing on that broad county perspective. The lease and rent relief for small businesses, I do think that's important because I know that there are these federal programs, but a number of programs, local businesses have applied for them and not received funding, and they're applying to the feds who don't come here, and they don't know what these businesses are and what they mean to our community, so having some of that local would be really good. Anyway, I also like the idea of Arts, Music, Cultural Business Grant Program because this is not something that is extra, that is not necessary. This is about keeping our artists, musicians, and the establishments that keep them doing what they do up and running. So anyway, those are my priorities. Okay. Let's see. Okay. So going back around, Mayor Pro Tem Melter, then Councilman Bet. Yeah. I just want to clarify the comments. I didn't express any preferences at all about how these programs are implemented. I was just talking about the funding. The county's got a bigger bucket of money than we have. So if they're going to do exactly as we would want these funded, if they're going to cover them, then the question is, where else do you go on the list? That was my reference to the county. Councilman Bet. Thank you. I just wanted to concur with some of the direction that I heard that I think that my priorities would be the public health sector, and I was actually going to propose the emergency management be more health focused as well, and so it's not something I spoke with Councilor Armitage about, but I'm glad we're on the same page. And so these things that are COVID related or health related that we are being funded for would be my direction. So the kind of vaccine clinics that the county isn't matching, the kind of services that we keep saying I wish the county would do, well, now we can do those punctate little programs that the county is unable to do. And as well as the recurring health management. And then on top of that, I really like the concept of the grants program, because it allows us to be a little flexible as we try to recover from some of these impacts. Okay. And so if I were to, Councilmember Davis. Yeah, I just wanted to weigh in against funding salaries with this money. I think it's like any grant funded position. You've got the money provided this year, or for this period of time, and then it's not there and you've got to carve it out of another budget. I understand there are some council members who would like to see a permanent public health officer for the city. I see that as duplicative of the county. Someone who certainly that office has been severely taxed during this current crisis, but this has been the hundred year flood, so to speak, for that office. I also want to push back on the idea that there's anybody out there who has not been able to receive the vaccine, who wants it. They will pick you up at your house, they will take you. You can get an appointment there. The waiting list has been down to zero multiple times. I understand people have work conflicts and that kind of thing. Barring some pretty extreme circumstances, vaccine is available. I'm not saying the city of Denton doesn't play a role in that because we already do. We already have our paramedics and our firefighters out there putting shots into folks arms. We already have our folks and our resources going to those things. I would like to see this money spent on public health initiatives as well, but I want us to remember the public health initiatives that persist, that were here before COVID, that were exacerbated by COVID, and will continue. Mental health, there are nonprofits who serve the mental health needs that have bricks and mortar requirements. Serve Denton has a program coming up this summer, groundbreaking this summer for a construction project for all of the nonprofits that they support that are active in the public health sphere, victims of domestic violence, mental health, all of those kinds of things. I think those are better, bigger impact, long term ways to spend this money that don't drain it down to nothing on salaries. Okay. Council Member Beck. I'd like to push back just a little bit on that. I mean, there's a lot of health impacts that we were not addressing. That's completely true, and those can be addressed if we have that public health focus with someone whose focus is public health. I understand that that may not be your preference, but we are having unaddressed needs that you just alluded to that a public health person would be able to address. And regarding the vaccines, yeah, if this county is covering that, if we end up not needing that, then those can be repurposed to the kinds of activities that are more broad based. Okay. So here's what I hear, Cassie. So there seems to be a consensus heavy on the category wise with the health resources, primarily of that being the junction, I counted four plus on that kind of focus. There's also at least two that were kind of put the sewer projects on the lower end of spectrum, one that said potentially interested in that. Then there were three that were kind of gathered around the recurring costs, but the majority not around that recurring costs taking staff's direction that that is not something that's sustainable. And that was all the way around the emergency management category. And let's see community and engagement category there, pardon me, communication and the emergency aspect of that. So that's the public communication and emergency management kind of there is a few around that. And then also what else jumped out at me, vaccination, I have a note here, there's three or so that were interested in that, but not a majority, and that would fall under the public health, which will be top of mind anyway. And then from, I have my perspective. So I fall, I prioritize the health resources component, but then I also know when I stand alone in this, but I think this is important. So I'll say it by myself, but the broadband component is important. We're going to have more people at home, more people, you have the Denton ISD that's now stood up a online school, if you will. And so I think it's a great opportunity to use those resources at a very cost. It's a heavy cost to get that infrastructure in place to tie in with one of our rec centers and kind of use that as a broadband broadcast, if you will, next to a school and kind of test that and start to try to cover some neighborhoods. So I think there's an opportunity to spend the money on the broadband needs of our community and our citizens. And then obviously I fall in line with the arts component of things. So that would be where, you know, economic impacts, you know, I think that arts community, it's a known commodity. We've had no concerts or gatherings for over a year. And so I think that kind of one-time approach, but so that's kind of the look at it that you can, and you can listen to it back and gleam whatever else, that's just my summary of my notes that jumped out at me. Councilmember Armitage. Yeah. So first of all, I'll mention, I too support using some of these funds for broadband. For me, getting municipal broadband is a really big priority in general. And I don't know if, you know, these funds would help us to do that or just fill in some of the gaps. But I absolutely agree that is an immediate need. Regarding vaccines. I just want to say that I thought I counted a majority in favor of vaccines. I thought that of applying some of this money to vaccines or at least exploring the issues, I understood it. Councilmember Beck. They can go back and they'll go back and look at it. I promise. McGuire. Well, I was just wondering, I mean, we could, we could resolve that issue right now. Just to be sure. McGuire. So I don't, I don't know if you want, if others want to speak up. I know that council member Byrd, you know, is prioritizing health. I don't know if that is vaccines are, I would imagine that they are. But I really felt like there was a majority for. Well, the primary focus was on the broader categories. And so people may though went down to a more micro level, but that wasn't staff is going to bring back that prioritization in conjunction with the county. So really health and resources had the, it was the priority and that then encompasses that. So it's duplicative. But the fact of the matter is we started from the outset that staff would needed just the broader categories. But I wanted to also have that insight so that they could factor that in when they come back to us. But it was not to go down to the actual individual use level. It's to stay at the category level so that they know what to come back with us with. It was to give general direction, but so that is captured in there. But whatever else you have for staff would be great. Okay, Mayor Pritz and Meltzer. Yeah, to clarify again, I said I agreed with council member McGuire that the focus on vaccination was the high priority. But if the county is already going to pay for it, then we could go to other items on the list. That's it. Again, and we're talking to each other, which is not necessary. The fact of the matter is, it was to start at the broader categories, which has been done. I didn't hear that. Okay. Well, that's where we started when I gave the before I opened the conversation, we started with that understanding my I thought, well, I said that I don't know if it resonated. Well, whatever, I got it. Thank you. Anything else for staff? Great. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so that'll take us to item B, which is ID 21866 receive report, hold discussion and give staff direction regarding the role of the city council committees, memberships to subcommittees and other internal internal external groups and their associated nomination appointment processes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. My name is Rosa Rios and I am your city secretary, and let me bring my presentation up. So I'm here to present the city council committee appointment process and understanding that when we call council committees are both internal external as well as some community groups. So the objective of the presentation is to review the city council committee responsibilities and provide a general purview discuss the relationship of the individuals committees to the full city council review the list of the current city council committees and then discuss the city council committee appointment process for what we call the 2021 2022 term although understanding some of the terms are a little bit longer than that. So for the committee appointment process committee appointments are reviewed annually, typically after every city council election. Committee members will serve at the pleasure of the city council until successors are appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council. Individual city council member are asked to identify which specific committees they wish to join, and that request was part of the ISR that's noted here to provide some information on the oversight and responsibility so section to dash to nine of the city of Denton code of ordinances addresses the city council rules of procedure, and there is a provision that city council may by resolution of the need arises appoint council committees. And of course they shall cease to exist when abolished by the same resolution, similar resolution, and of course committees are required to comply with the Texas Open Meetings Act. The city council committees typically consists of three council members, and the committee membership is determined by the mayor, but they do have to be approved by the city council. And of course historically the mayor has allowed each council member to request those committees that they wish to serve on, and we call those the committees of interest. The presiding officer and chair of the committee is then chosen annually by the committee. So the relationship of individual committees to the full city council. Council committees will vet projects and potential policy and make potential policy recommendations prior to information being brought before the full city council, but the council policy remains that any policy item or initiative that would require over two hours of staff time must proceed through the council request process. Committees do not speak on behalf of the entire city council or the community. And of course the endorsement of an issue or policy matter from an individual committee does not result in an automatic endorsement from the full city council. So listed here you'll see the current city council committees. These are classified under several categories of course the standing committees here I won't read each one, but you'll notice for committee number seven, the community partnership committee. Those members must also serve on the Denton on the Discover Denton advisory board. And currently there is no quorum that exists so they're not able to meet. For the external committee appointments, we do have of course here you can see several and we outline you know what the preferred membership or the required membership is. And again similar to the previous screen, you'll notice committee two is the Discover Denton advisory board. And of course they must also serve on the community partnership committee and I'll detail that a little bit, a little bit more you'll notice that they are kind of set aside one by color coding, and then the superscript number one. So for other appointments, we do have a boarding commission, which is a development code review committee. And that does consist of three members of the city council and three planning and zoning commission members. It was previously an ad hoc committee until April of 2020 this year, when it was made a full boarding commission. So for community boards, there is a separate appointment process presented to city council for formal appointment to the economic development department. But we go ahead and list this here just to kind of give you an advanced glance of you know what seats are up for expiration. And you can see here for the economic development partnership board that two of them, there are two members and they must also serve on the tax increment reinvestment zone number two board. Likewise, committee number three here you'll see that the tax increments or investments or number two board that two members have to serve on the economic development partnership. And we'll detail a little bit more about the appointment process there. Again, these these particular boards here are just more for informational purposes at this time, they do have a specific nomination process, although it does help to get an advanced idea of those members that are interested in serving. So for special appointment considerations, kind of just to recap the combined service, development code review committee and then the community partnership committee. These two members who serve on the community partnership committee must also serve on the discovered debt and advisory board. If you're serving on the ADP board, then you also need to serve on the terse number two board. So the next steps are to discuss the mayor's proposed assignments and I'll do several screenshots here a little bit later and cover those in detail. And of course, it can be considered as presented or make any changes or adjustments as determined during discussion. There is an item for formal adoption later at the special call meeting that follows and any changes identified during this work session will be incorporated into that information. So you can see here that what we call the internal committees. So for the agenda committee, the first category here, you can see where it's the current members and of course, any existing vacancies, it shows the member selections or the committees of interest that were identified by each member following the request on the informal staff report that was provided. And of course, the mayor's proposed appointments. So for the agenda committee, the mayor is proposing that is actually part of the resolution, which is the legislation that establishes the agenda committee. So there really can't be any changes here without changing that resolution itself. And of course, it has to be the mayor and the mayor pro tem and then the city manager also comprises that membership. For the audit finance committee, mayor Hussbett is proposing to appoint mayor pro tem Melzer and council members Armentor and Byrd. For the committee on community engagement, mayor is proposing to appoint mayor pro tem Melzer, council members Armentor and Byrd. For the committee on the environment, proposed appointments are mayor pro tem Melzer, council members Davis and Beck. For the council airport committee, proposed appointments are mayor pro tem Melzer, council members Davis and Beck. Now for the council appointee performance review committee, as you can see, even last year, that was it's been inactive for several years because of the way that, you know, city council has been handling council appointee, either reviews or hiring processes. So mayor's proposing to kind of just leave that dormant and of course, you know, address any appointments if the committee were to be reactivated. For the community partnership committee, again, keeping in mind that at least two of those members have to serve on the discovered Denton advisory board, the member, the mayor is proposing that those two representatives that will serve on the two would be council members McGuire and Byrd and then council member Davis would retain a seat as the basically at large member. For the mobility committee, the proposed appointments are mayor pro tem Melzer and council members McGuire and Byrd. So for the boarding commission, which is the development code review committee, again, previously, it was an ad hoc committee, mayor's proposing to have council member Davis retain that seat, but go ahead and appoint newly elected council members McGuire and Byrd to that during the action item later in the day of the appointment would be for the unexpired term ending August 31 2021 and the appointments for all of three three members for the planning zoning committee plan zoning commission members and then of course the city council seats would be handled during the appointment process that were to bring you around June 15 for all of the boards of commissions whose terms expire in 2021. For the community board you can see here again the kind of the cross reference where ADPB and the tax increment reinvestment so number two board where you have to have the two members represent be the same representatives on both boards. Again these the ADPB and the downtown Denton TIF reinvestment zone number one board and of course the what we call the West Park church board. Those do have their own separate appointment process at this point it's basically just kind of an interest indication for staff and the economic development department would bring you bring forward additional information as to the nominating committee and the nomination process and everything a little bit later into the process and you would address any terms that expire there are coming up for expiration here in 2021 and you can see those detailed there so of course again it's not a it's not a definitive of what the appointments will be since that'll be discussed a little bit later. For the external committees to the Dallas regional mobility coalition Mayor Hudspeth is proposed to continue for the discovered Denton advisory board and as you saw also has to be the same representative for the community partnership committee that was detailed a little bit earlier it would be council members McGuire and Byrd serving on the dual boards and then of course council member Beck basically serving the at-large seat. For the Denton county transportation authority DCTA we do have the terms they're actually going to expire November 12 2021 this board does have its own separate appointment process so that will be brought to you by staff a little bit later and we do know that Chris Watts is indicated an interest to continue should the city council desire to to reappoint him and of course the city manager even now serves as the alternate. For the Lake Ray Roberts PNZ commission Mayor Hudspeth is proposing to continue his service of course it does have to be the mayor and you can see here with the new term actually would expire January 31 2023 for the North Texas Commission Mayor Hudspeth would continue to serve and the city manager would serve as the proxy again that is a separate appointment process that will be brought to you a little bit later similar with the regional transportation council here there was a recent change here where they do these two seats do have to be an elected officer and the mayor is recommending council members from Guire and then himself as the alternate and of course when the time comes those appointments would be for the unexpired term ending June 30 2022. Then we have the Texas municipal power TNPA agency and again you can see where Chris Watts has indicated an interest to continue serving and then Bill Cheek the mayor's proposing to you know for you to consider reappointing him. You did receive information from Antonio Puentes on the Friday report there is a an action item coming up on a future agenda where city council will actually make the final determination on that membership. And I will take any questions you might have. And actually let me see I think I did leave off one slide here but let me just kind of go over it really quick and these are and I do apologize for that. So we do have the three leadership teams that were listed earlier we have the Denton County behavioral leadership team and Mayor Hudspeth is proposing to continue on that members indicating an interest for that were council members Armentor and Byrd and that term would expire June 30 2022 for the Denton County homelessness leadership team Mayor Hudspeth is proposing to continue on that and then of course the city manager as the staff representative. And then for the Denton County workforce success leadership Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer had indicated was the only member that indicated an interest and the mayor is proposing to appoint him to that. There was one external community justice council that has been inactive since 2019 and while council member Byrd did indicate an interest on that because the committee the community justice council is inactive it's made it very hard for us to kind of pull information as to really what the requirements are so the mayor is proposing to kind of leave that inactive without any actual member appointed but would address it if the community justice council would ever to be reappointed and that is the information that I have here to present and let me get off the screen and I'll answer any questions you may have thank you. Great questions for staff Mayor Pro Tem Meltzer then council member Armentor. I have a sort of input and suggestions so if there are actual you know questions for staff I'm happy to wait no go right here thank you well first of all you know mayor there's only about like 140 moving parts there so I really appreciate you're trying to solve the puzzle but I think we can I think we can build on what you've done here that first of all I think I can pull out of some things and make some room for other people you know if they want to explore their interests for instance especially with council member back on environment which I think is a great you know win for us I've done it for three years if council member Armentor would like I'm happy to make room for her on that and withdraw on and on downtown tip I know we're not discussing tonight but just so everyone can kind of contemplate their whole workload I've done that for three years actually more and I think it's great to have somebody from district one on there because the tip is bigger than just downtown I think it's really helpful to have an advocate you know for for that whole area and I hope council member bird would consider standing for that and as long as I'm making recommendations for what other people ought to do on audit audit and finance we were lucky to have had a council member who was an attorney on there so much of what that committee does is about conformance with legal requirements I think if we're going to play our best players in the best positions I would encourage council member Davis to stand for that I think that would be a service to the city if you would help us on that and in a similar vein on DCRC you know the I wasn't for creating that as a standing committee but its purpose of being there just have people who have expertise and kind of know the history and can guide it so I think we're totally missing a trick if we don't put council member back on that and lastly I would say when we get to it I think we have someone on council who is on pub who would be who would have have some relevant background on tmpa you know who you are and lastly I would say if you haven't considered airport and you're new on council it's a kind of a cool learning opportunity when else in your life are you going to learn how an airport operates so you know I think that's an opportunity for for somebody particularly if council member Davis would accept my suggestion to shift to audit okay and then councilor Armitage oh it's probably one last thing and I tend to seek a nomination or nominate myself if necessary for edlp when that when that comes up so just in terms of what the constellation might look like councilor Armitage okay so I'm going to follow mayor protem melzer's model and just kind of go down this list and kind of focus on some suggestions to to build on what the mayor mayor hudspeth has already suggested so starting with committee on the environment thank you mayor protem melzer I would absolutely love to to serve on that you you've done a magnificent job on that I'd be honored to to serve and I also think you know now that we have several women on council be good to you know see see what kind of you know gender diversity we can get on on on committees knowing that that might not always be possible so anyway I would be thrilled to serve on that the community partnership oh no that's not that um uh next one um development code review committee I too thought that council member beck should be on that um his his experience on on p and z um will will be such a benefit uh to that committee you know he he's been on the end of implementing uh these uh existing rules and seeing the pros and cons of you know various aspects of of planning and development and the way we do things so I agree with mayor protem that it would be really good to have him on there I I had had written that down too um let's see moving on to the next page um on uh DCTA um council member mcguire has said she would like to serve on there uh the uh former mayor chris watts has served for quite some time uh I would like to see somebody somebody new on there uh so I would be really thrilled uh to have uh council member mcguire on there in that position um as far as an alternate um is I I had originally uh nominated either for the uh main DCTA position or the alternate uh lauren fisher uh who is a researcher on uh public transportation but she uh recently actually over the weekend just on on sunday uh decided that she she she didn't want to to do this uh anymore so I reached out to uh former council member briggs uh and asked if she would be interested in you know serving on that on DCTA in some capacity uh she said yes and as I understand it staff is looking into whether or not she would have to you know remove herself from sustainability uh to do that or not uh so I'm not I'm sure if those questions have been answered yet but either way I would like um you know myself or uh council member briggs I'll put forward those names as as alternates uh I think it's important uh that we have you know either members of the public or uh elected officials in these kinds of positions and of course you know staff is welcome to attend and and participate and I know we have staff participation on a lot of committees but as far as you know voting power I think it's important that it be a member of the public you know or an elected official either one um so on tmpa uh I would like to uh serve in that uh capacity uh and uh instead of uh chris watts uh then on the final page um for the um denton county behavioral health leadership team in the denton county homelessness leadership team uh council member bird uh put her name in uh for for both um and it's my understanding and and staff can maybe uh correct me or kind of filling some um missing pieces on this that uh it that the denton homeless county homeless leadership team had required uh to or had in their bylaws that that we could bring forward to people uh from our city council um to to represent denton on that board and that we have always had someone from staff more than one person from staff I believe who has already served on that committee so I'm not saying that I don't think staff should be on that committee but just that it would be redundant um to uh put a staff member there if they're already there so I would suggest um that uh council member bird uh be on the denton county homeless leadership team uh instead of uh city manager and city manager being welcome to come and you know participate but not in a voting capacity and then on the behavioral health team either council member bird or myself you know I appreciate mayor hudspeth for serving in that role but I know that council member bird has you know made a mental health and health in general a big part of uh her campaign um I have you know been really invested in uh mental health too and so I think it would be nice to see uh some some change on that board and that is the final page that is all Katherine I just wanted to clarify that bill cheek's appointment to the team pa board was just made last may and it goes through 22 just I apologize for interrupting but I wanted y'all to be aware as you go through that and are commenting that you're aware of the date of the expiration okay thank you councilor bet thank you mayor um sorry was getting my unmute there um yeah I I appreciate the the vote of confidence uh of councillor melzer's and and our mentor I I do think uh it would behoove the the city if if my experience on p and z were were part of the dcrc um and I I think that I agree I concur with the councillor melzer that uh that considering how much of district one is um in the deep in the downtown tours uh it might be a good idea for councillor bird to play an active role in that um I I'm going to second the the recommendation that maguire get on dcta uh and then uh I'm going to second the uh councillor melzer oh there was councilor armatores recommendation of herself and councillor melzer's uh initial nomination for uh councillor armator I guess that was the third I'll be third on recommending uh uh for tmpa councillor armator because her pup experience and her her her experience with uh the gibbons uh coal plant that in the past okay um any other councillor maguire um I'd just like to second a few things that have been said um I would also love to see council member armator on uh the committee on the environment um I would also uh very much like to see council member beck's expertise with with planning and zoning uh be utilized on the development code review committee um I would love to serve on on on dcta I had actually planned on um uh withdrawing myself nomination and supporting dr fisher as well but um if she's uh uh not amenable to that then I would be willing to serve in that capacity um and I would I would like to forth uh the suggestion that um council member armator serve on the tmpa board um in place of chris watz okay councillor berg um I am looking forward to working as hard as I can but I am going to suggest that um to go along with metzler that davis uh would be more proficient on the audit uh committee um and I have worked in risk management for a long time and I can understand you know why the suggestion would be there and I would certainly be interested but there's some other things that I would prefer to do and uh the other thing is the dcrc I'd like to remove myself from there and um suggest that beck is placed there I I don't know how much help I would be there I'm a quick learner um but I think that that's something that he would appreciate more my areas are more um leaning towards um public assistance direct so I appreciate the um community engagement I appreciate the community partnership discovered didn't goes along with that I did study and look at the mobility committee which I can take or leave uh but I I uh would board also lean towards the leadership because of those other two things the behavioral health and the homeless I think goes along with the community engagement the community partnership and to discover get didn't I think it will be I would be very very solid and um very helpful on those committees thank you okay any other questions for staff mayor this is sarah sorry oh my lord you can hear me from I've had some really bad technological problems and had to move to another computer um I just want to mention on council uh member armature's comment about the homeless uh committee the task force it is imperative that we have a staff member either danny or sarah that's involved because they work so closely with the representatives from hospitals other non-profits and and the business community as well that certainly does we don't have a sort of a dog in the fight when it comes to who you put on there but I do want to impress upon council the importance of a staff member who has that continual knowledge of working together making sure that we're doing the right thing not duplicating services bringing everybody together to to really take that holistic approach to how we deal with our our individuals experiencing homelessness okay um and so for for me um I'm gonna I'm gonna just speak in general general terms uh Rosa I'll defer to you on what needs to come back and and all that so that I don't poison the pool uh just kind of you'll look at the notes and see what needs to come back uh but for the record I'm not going to change any of the appointments uh just to be uh succinct and and uh then then I'll I'll stipulate these things for those watching uh that the staff being placed is there for consistencies because we compete against cities uh that do not have term limits and so I strategically pay staff in areas where that hurts the city of Denton and puts us at a disadvantage because I've heard from other mayors that they just frankly say we just ignore Denton because that person's going to be gone in a number of years and we're going to serve in perpetuity or for longer periods of time there's no hard out date for them and they gain more uh so I'm I'm working hard for the citizens of Denton all 140 000 of them and that's my primary focus at every turn then I'll say this there's no controversial votes on the uh on some of these boards where you would say uh oh we whether the person has a voting interest or not all these things and this dovetails right into my last point if you're not willing to serve on these capacities that is concerning because uh or if you're concerned about the capacity to get up to speed on any of these things because all of them come to city council so there's if you can't handle if you can't get up to speed at that level then which I believe we all can because that's what we signed up to do and every one of these boards does not have a final decision making capacity it all comes to here so you're going to experience it either uh at that committee level you'll experience it twice at the committee level in here or only here but other we make those decisions and that's that's what we're tasked to do again for the 140 000 citizens plus that live here in the city of Denton and I'm absolutely committed to serving them uh in the best way I know how I did my absolute best to diversify and apply the gifts and talents that we have on this on this in this body and and I'm honored to serve with you and appreciate everyone's service and feedback and it's been noted and concerns have been noted preferences have been noted uh but I'm not going to at this point uh make any changes in in the direction I provided so I'll say nothing else uh if you want to banter about uh and and but at some point we'll wrap up give staff direction Mayor Armitage and Mayor Pro Temelter uh yeah I just wanted to respond um to uh Interim City Manager Hensley I completely agree uh with what you say about the importance of staff being on there uh for all the reasons you you said that is on the uh Denton County Homeless Leadership Team uh and so just to reiterate you know I would not uh in fact I would fight you know anyone trying to get our you know hard-working staff um you know people like Danny uh who are really boots on the ground in this area off that committee my point was simply I might not have made it very well uh but that they are there anyway uh for instance when I remember back in the day uh the two members from the City Council on that committee were uh then Mayor Chris Watts and then Council Member uh Keely Briggs and Danny was still on there uh as well so it so Council Members being on there a second Council Member being on there does not preclude staff being on there and actively participating that was just the point that I wanted to make um and I wanted to ask um uh you know if staff could kind of explain if the uh if uh a Mayor's you know recommendation is uh you know weighed the same as any other Council Members um it's you know my understanding that that that's the case uh or is there some special status that the Mayor's uh recommendation has for any of these committees and if so you know where does that uh is that in the charter you know where is that written if so I will refer to the City Attorney's Office but I think um and I think Katherine has an answer for that the the recommendation that's made that will be voted on in the action items you want to pull one of those to take it separately and make a different recommendation that can be voted on separately at that time does that answer your question I think so but let if you don't mind let me just repeat it to make sure I understand so are you saying that um uh for for every item uh where or sorry let me let me begin again are you saying that uh if on a particular item uh I uh had a different I wanted to vote differently than the Mayor was recommending I should pull that that item request that that nomination be separated out from the rest of the nominations that are kind of voted on in a block typically okay and so what would be thank you and so what would be uh the appropriate time to make that request would that be now would that be item is after the motion and the second after the motion and second when the discussion on the action item okay okay so that is when a request would be made to pull this this that and the other to to take any given nomination and ask for that to be addressed separately okay okay thank you so much for explaining thanks okay uh Mayor Provincial Melton were you want wishes week I think yeah my my questions are along the same lines uh first as a general comment uh you know if you learn about group decision making processes uh you generally get the best results like when they do survival studies when you have between four and ten people it's not like random that we have seven here you have between four and ten people contributing to the solution you tend to get better outcomes like like in a survival study you more people will survive uh so uh uh mayor I just hope you don't take it as criticism when people want to build on the uh the hard work and the great foundation you laid and I would hope that you would sort of voluntarily take the uh input of your colleagues and reflect on it but uh it's you know obviously you're you're uh prerogative to do as you wish but I do see that the positions are appointed by the mayor and approved by the council so there's a process so I want to understand that a little better is is uh City Interim City Attorney is the process that we would merely be able to have a no vote on somebody or would we also be able to say this member instead of that member along the lines of the conversation that we've just had it it depends on the specific provision so the every every board every committee they all have slightly different provisions for the method of appointing and so the answer is different in different cases and I hate to say it depends on what you're what you're trying to address but it does um some of the things I think the mayor does have authority it just says the mayor appoints according to 229 I can certainly reference that and we can revisit this and when we come to the individual consideration items if necessary and what I was suggesting is that when everything's grouped together in a block like this and you end up with what's in front of you to vote on maybe like six different things you could pull one of those individually or you could suggest pulling one of those individually depending on what it is to say we want to do something differently here but I do believe that the mayor's the mayor's appointments are subject to council approval in most cases thank you I would just suggest then that when this is teed up for the agenda knowing the input in the work session you know that we chunk it up to begin with not just make it one big item yes it's you know the inputs coming so might as well make it so that you know we can you know deal with the the input as each relevant committee is brought up thank you uh council member daves council member vett yeah it's related to that I think the relevant question earlier wasn't really you know can we can we vote on these individually you know any question could be divided it's which of these does the council have the ability to do something different from what the mayor says and my understanding on the council committees and I certainly could be wrong but on previous experience in my reading of the the rules the mayor nominates to these committees and we approve the slate there are others that have a different process just like catherine said so I mean I know others disagree with the the way the mayor has drawn the slate there's certainly room for people to have plenty of different opinions we could divide that question all we'd like but the the option for the council later on would be either to put people on that committee or not not to rearrange the slate and maybe there's opportunity to talk to the mayor offline or maybe there's opportunity to to make our good suggestions but I think that's the procedure for those committees the other ones half the ones we talked about today if look it says in red separate nomination process separate employment process we're not doing dcta today we're not doing tmpa today those are all a different process the ones we're really talking about are the ones that don't have that red that red note okay counselor bet yeah I have two questions for staff one is a lot of ideas I guess this is for rosa the first one is a lot of ideas were floated and there was I think whether or not the counselor or davis's supposition is correct or not I think there was there was a clear majority for certain positions and so I would appreciate it if maybe a summary could be provided to council of what sort of the overall discussion summaries fell out as if they could review the the various dialogue and and then the second thing I will ask legal is what what is the ramification of us um if if presented with a nomination what's the ramification of us simply voting no that the appointment no appointment would be made at this time and so if a majority of council voted no then they would go follow they would continue in the state they are correct they would be unfilled that that's also again there are it depends on which one you're talking about if it's a vacant position versus whether somebody's in that position and you may have holdover issues and that sort of thing so it's a general answer and and so those meetings would be unable to to meet that for because they would they would lack body or they would continue on with their well they don't have many many positions were vacant so like the discovered dentin is completely empty at this point correct if there's no quorum they would not be able to meet okay thank you so much all right any other questions for staff okay we're gonna move on councilmember melter mayor protein melts thank you uh councilmember armature asked this question you may have answered uh uh the city attorney but i didn't catch it if you did is this in the talking about council committees is this in the charter or is this council rules the way the way that it operates that as we've just been discussing i think that it's all contained into 29 you got it which is your rules of procedure the council rules of procedure so council is empowered to change those rules correct uh and council's empowered to suspend the rules and propose alternative rules correct okay thank you very much all right any other questions for staff okay seeing none uh that concludes that item uh that'll take us to item c which is id 21442 receive report hold discussion give staff direction on policy regarding qualifying expenses for tax exemption of historic sites mayor this is cameron robertson i don't know if you've had a chance to meet her she's our new historic preservation officer and she is a rock star so i just wanted to introduce her and let her do her presentation hello cameron welcome good afternoon mayor and city council members and thank you sarah for that introduction um let me get my presentation up and going for you all okay so okay good afternoon everyone so um i am so staff is looking for a policy direction on three different items today the first is regarding what constitutes as a permanent improvement and or restoration to historic properties the next is um regarding changes to our current ordinances in the addition of a submittal deadline and the third policy item is regarding policy direction um with the potential expansion of our historic tax exemption program and i'll be sharing three preliminary ideas with the city council please note that these are just preliminary ideas that are being shared and that can be input if city council gives direction to move forward with this research would be included so currently we have 30 local landmark properties that have qualified and received the historic tax exemptions 12 of those are set to expire this year as you can see on the map majority of these are located in the oak hickory historic district which is located um in the green so here are some examples of those current tax exemption properties as you can see they are located both in downtown near downtown and near the twu campus so in our current code of ordinances the standards for improvements and or restoration to historic properties is not limited and therefore open to interpretation the way a property receives the partial tax exemption is that it first goes in front of the historic landmark commission who either approves or denies the improvements or restoration done to the property if approved it then goes in front of city council who either authorizes the partial tax exemption to move forward or can deny or postpone the item if it is authorized by city council it then goes to the denton central appraisal district by the applicant so in texas tax code uh section 11.24 a designated historic site is defined as a historically or archaeologically significant site in need of tax relief to encourage its preservation so staff is looking for a discussion on should there be a defined standard for improvements and or restoration to historic properties so these are some of our current historic landmark tax exemption standards which include exterior interior and general repairs such as plumbing and electrical but as you can see on the sentence at the top as well as exhibit four that was provided um this list includes but is not limited to what is shown therefore examples such as new kitchen cabinetry or garage conversion could apply um so to come up with staff's recommendations which i will be showing with you on the next slide a number of texas city's historic tax exemption standards and guidelines were reviewed and these range from standards or no standards at all to specific listings of eligible and ineligible properties so staff is recommending that a deadline be established for the tax exempt exemption applications the denton central appraisal district has a general deadline of before may 1st for filing an exemption application the second recommendation is to define what is an improvement and or restoration to a historic property staff believes that we need to establish defined standards that serve to solely extend the life of the building of the original buildings or buildings and on the right hand side of the screen you will see a preliminary list that is shown the third policy item that staff would like to traction on is the potential expansion of our present historic tax exemptions the first of three preliminary ideas i will share with you all today is the owner occupied residences and new historic districts this idea comes from san antonio texas this enables all residential properties occupied by the property owner and newly designated local historic districts to receive a 20 exemption on their city property taxes for 10 years that can be extended for an additional five years for a total of 15 years if the owner remains in the same house for that entire period some areas where this could be utilized in denton are idiots hill parts of southeast denton and north of mckinney street as well as southridge neighborhood the reason these specific areas are mentioned in this presentation is because they were mentioned in denton's 2019 historic preservation plan as potential local and or national registered districts they retain architectural styles ranging from the early 20th century to the 1960s the second idea comes from mcallan texas and is referred to as heritage properties these properties may apply for tax exemption for 10 years equal to 100 of any increase in the assessed value they are described as at least 50 years old or they can be less than 50 years old but they have to be substantially restored rehabilitated or preserved den has many historic properties that could benefit from heritage properties or something similar these properties may not meet our more stringent current local landmark standards or property owners may not want to be designated local landmarks however they have a story and history to share with denton the property at 1007 oakland street which is right as just west of the tvu campus is one example this building was built circa 1921 to 1942 and the property itself is laid out in a very unique style with a single family dwelling craftsman style home at the front and four cottages in the rear this just tells a really unique story of the area's development during the first half of the 20th century and with the growth of tvu campus the next example is the people's funeral home at 1122 east mulberry street located in solomon hill the building was constructed in 1954 and then by 1974 the property was the home of the citizens undertaking and funeral parlor which later became people's funeral home the funeral home has been in continuous operation for almost 50 years and is an integral part of the character of the solomon hill area the third and final preliminary idea are neighborhood stabilization areas or otherwise known as revitalization areas austin has three historic area tax abatement programs one of which is the revitalization area program this area which is shown on the map provides 10 year tax abatement periods for both homestead and income producing properties at minimum expenditures of 10 and 30 percent of pre-rehabilitation value of structure any improvements must comply with austin's historic area combining district preservation plan which is essentially local historic district zoning overlays that contain design standards specific to that area as well as 51 percent of contributing properties contributing properties are at least 50 years old and retain sufficient integrity of materials and design to convey their historic appearance additionally the design standards are to minimize the impact of new construction remodeling and additions to existing buildings to protect the character of other neighborhoods of older neighborhoods so this potential incentive could serve to promote restoration rehabilitation and revitalization in areas that retain historic character of denton this incentive does not highlight any specific areas like in our previous slides as staff believes this would be a wonderful opportunity to work alongside other departments such as community development and economic development to determine where this incentive could best serve the denton community so just to jump back into the beginning staff is recommending some updates to the ordinance to provide clarity and ease to the historic tax exemption process this would be the addition of an april 30th deadline to submit tax exemption applications to the denton central appraisal district also staff is hoping to define what is an improvement and/or restoration to a historic property and then once again these are the three policy items as i stated defining what is an improvement and/or restoration to historic properties establishing an april 30th deadline and then the potential expansion of our current historic tax exemption ordinance questions okay questions for staff councilmember maguire and then councilmember beck yes thank you i have a few questions does our current as written include these kinds of tax exemptions for improvements that are done on historic buildings or just for renovation or rehabilitation so our current ordinance it states that it could be an improvement and/or restoration it is basically up to the guidance of the historic landmarks commission to approve the work done and if historic landmark commission approves the work done then it can move on to city council but as i stated some of those on that that slide some of those standards that are listed it shows exterior interior and some general work such as plumbing and electrical however it is not limited to that so it is up to the discretion of hlc okay okay um i does do do the proposed um does this proposed um sorry staff recommendations i guess um do those align with state and national standards related to um tax exemptions for for historic properties um do you mean just state and federal incentives yeah i mean are the requirements similar or or do we have requirements that are sort of different from from state national level we do have um they can be similar we do have different requirements so for instance at the national um the national level say if you have a national registered district then you can have incentives for income producing properties or non-profits um at that level uh currently we just have incentives for local landmarks and commercial and residential properties within our downtown area um so staff is looking to see what other opportunities we can give property owners outside of those historic districts or local landmarks to qualify that for historic tax assumptions okay thank you um i have one more question um i i so in in the example of um austin trying to look back at it there there was a distinction between um a homestead property versus an income producing property do we have um do we currently have similar distinctions in our code and are um is staff proposing that we include similar distinctions in our code we do we currently do not have distinctions in our code specifically for the historic tax assumptions and so staff is recommending as an example that um if we were to add those specifics of homestead and income producing in neighborhood stabilization areas that we would have those two differences okay and so then to be clear would um homestead uh properties be eligible for for a greater tax exemption we have not worked out the specifics this is just you know um preliminary ideas that we're bringing forward um but that could be a discussion that we have um moving on in the future and like i said during my presentation this would be something we would discuss with community stakeholders who are very interested in preservation okay thank you okay and then i have council member bet thank you mayor uh hey cameron i really appreciate the presentation i i i had uh similar questions to councilor maguire and it seems like we already have uh some some thc uh texas historical commission districts we've already got some things on the national registry and national registry districts and and those have um standards that are substantially aligned uh between the state and the department of interior so i guess my question is i mean i i'm all for expanding the opportunities for for denton to go into these these heritage properties and these neighborhood stabilization zones but i think shouldn't should we not have a ramp up or an overlay where the preferred uh mechanism aligns with the state and the the department of interior because whereas like say our stabilization area like for instance idiots hill is not and and i don't technically live in idiots hill so it's not a conflict of interest um the idiots hill is uh is is a potential upcoming region and that the standards for that um could be it would just apply to the city of denton tax exemption whereas if you align with the state and the national registry then you have not only opportunities to get larger state exemptions uh be eligible for state grants be eligible for national uh federal funding so it seems like you know we should have the you know yes maybe we have the flexibility to have these these city only domains but we should shouldn't we be encouraging them these historical properties to as closely as possible align our standards with the state and the national uh so that they can maximize the return on their investment by taking advantage of of these other funding opportunities no that's a wonderful uh question so currently at the local state and national level we're all following the secretary of interior standards so everyone is required to follow that that's what the city of denton is following that is what we would be following if we were to implement these tax assumptions so we wouldn't just you know find this area and state you know these seem to be historic properties and this is what we're going to do is put this overlay there would be design standards that are you know working alongside federal and state um standards um in terms of the incentives themselves properties at the state and national level some of them most of the time they're only qualifying if they are income producing or non-profit uh residences do not usually benefit from these incentives unless they have some type of federal funding or usually they just benefit from the local level so this is why at the local level we're looking to expand those historic tax exemptions because at the national and state there's only so much that can be done with those incentives but nevertheless the this this the construction standards and you know the whether it's hvac what kind of electrical what kind of plumbing what kind of fascia all the materials those i mean it seems like we we shouldn't i mean in terms of expansion yes maybe we have flexibility and only have a partial list but in in terms of guidance probably we should be shoving people towards the the more robust standards of the state and department of interior in terms of that kind of material so that they can have the maximum benefit depending like if we were to expand our national registry districts or or you know take downtown and make it a district like like in one of your maps that you were showing um and so i mean i i would encourage maybe you know this your recommendation plus um a strong encouragement to follow state and federal standards as well i did have um i think the other thing that kind of goes along with that is this idea of of the the 10 years in the cap i i sent this question into staff but it seems that someone who's taken the time to to make a historical parcel whether it's a business or or a residence is you know that's not going to stop being a historical parcel it's going to continue to be relevant to the history of denton especially if it hasn't gone through blight and been raised to the ground because it's crawling with rats or whatever so uh once once they're historical then i mean shouldn't shouldn't then we be following the guidance of like okay the state and the department of interior are saying that it's historical and then if we want to we can have additional dent and properties so i guess i i'm encouraging us to look at the option of not having a 10-year cap on on things that have state and national uh significance and only having our 10-year cap on the flexible zones that we ourselves create um otherwise you know these these like you know newton razor properties and and and other things are that we're seeing later today you know they're not going to stop being they're not going to lose their sign they're not going to stop being landmarks for denton and and so it maybe makes sense for them to continue always to not have to you know just to undergo the state and national review and and not have to constantly reapply every 10 years uh for their status that would be my encouragement and and direction okay uh councilmember davis thank you mayor um i guess to disagree just a little bit there i think the purpose of keeping the 10-year cap on there and that's not it's not a cap a 10-year reapplication process is to make sure you're putting money in every 10 years so you can uh you could certainly have a property that you spend 10 000 on first go around and it needs another 10 000 and another 10 000 um members of this council have lived in historic homes and you know uh you need to keep putting money into that house or it's eventually not going to be much a home at all and certainly can lose a historic character if not you know the fact that it was a historic piece of property you can lose that historic character pretty quickly with poor maintenance or not encouraging it so um i do however like i think the most i guess one of the more far-reaching ideas that staffs brought up is the idea of the different uh different ways of looking at how to do exemptions but one of the ones that i think is really important i don't want to overlook is defining the standards i i'm on board with all three of staff's recommendations here there's more work to be done you know kind of um nail down what those are and they'll have to come back to count council but um defining the standard just a little bit for what's going to quality what kind of preservation works going to qualify you given there's enough flexibility in there you know you keep it in these kind of broad categories but the best practices they've described for us uh in the slide um are to line out a little bit a little bit more particularly not just whatever hlc decides is going to qualify but a little more particularity of you've spent money on things that are going to preserve this structure the foundation hvac that's going to preserve the the materials keep them at the right temperatures all that kind of stuff um i also like the the creative thinking on making these exemptions available to more structures um you're you're going to have a historic structure in the middle of a street that is the only thing left it's never going to be in a district it's going to be the only historic structure left on that street and it ought to have the same ability or at least tools to get there to apply for and qualify for an exemption as well um i think these give us tools to as as presented they give us tools to reach in almost any neighborhood and give a homeowner a business owner the ability to and the incentive to preserve their structure um if we don't do things like this then i think we're going to start missing some things um there are already plenty of things go to the remember and denton facebook group and you'll see post after post after post of the building that used to be here and the building that used to be there and the things that are gone because there was not an incentive to maintain those places okay thank you uh councilman burton and councilman armature i just have a couple of questions here and i i noticed that you we spoke uh of downtown didn't a couple of few times and i know a portion of downtown is in district one for sure and i was just wondering about what what constitutes downtown didn't i'm not really clear on the boundaries of what downtown didn't is and uh for this purpose can it be widened depending on uh the demographics of the city whether or not there's additional growth towards a certain area can downtown didn't get any bigger than what we consider downtown didn't um so currently downtown didn't um it is larger than just the square itself it does extend um east a little bit and it does extend west down you know hickory there it goes extend about sycamore and then it goes north and south along elm and locust um i don't i i'm not sure i can speak necessarily to you know if we could expand those boundaries i think that's a larger discussion amongst more staff um i don't see if it would i don't think it would hurt um however i cannot personally speak to that i think that does have to be a larger discussion but downtown does include the square it does extend east and west a little bit about probably two or three blocks and then it does go um north and south along elm and locust okay all right um councilor armature uh okay i'm going to touch on some points and questions that have been made so far i'll try not to be uh redundant um so just first of all picking up on the most recent comment um i do think uh it's worthwhile uh for us to reconsider not not today but as a body moving forward uh a more extended definition of what downtown is that extends more of that includes more of the neighborhood uh you know formerly known as the solomon hill neighborhood now kind of generally referred to as southeast danton uh we have a you know a city that is you know literally split by the train tracks and i think that with the way we need the way we define uh what our city is um and i love council member bird's term the core you know seeing kind of district one as the core uh is is a way that um overlooks this kind of arbitrary well actually not arbitrary very intentional division based on the tracks um which is a very which is very divisive um so i really like including uh southeast denton in that um i'll say kind of as far as this whole process right now i feel uh you know very wary about uh moving forward with any of these recommendations until we can uh have uh public discussion uh with discussions with members of the public and with council um not so much about these recommendations but stepping back even further about what the state and federal standards are uh and the state and federal uh opportunities are uh that is what their definitions are of of historic uh preservation and what opportunities there are and then based on those asking the public what do we want to build on you know what what is not covered there that needs to be covered because uh i feel like we're we're kind of jumping in with you know here's some things you might want to consider without a kind of thorough review of here is what works at the state and federal level uh here and here's what doesn't work and why an example of this would be our our ethics ordinance uh you know the way that the ethics ordinance uh got written this was before i i got on council councilor armature we can't yet i am i'm using an analogy okay so so please just just let me just use this analogy for instance when we uh i'm gonna ask the city attorney can are we in bounds of an of uh the um i'm making a comparison your your thoughts within the posting at this time um yes it is i would suggest her finishing her thought yeah okay yes so i will finish yes i will finish my thought to say that uh when a previous council wrote an ethics ordinance for the first time the first thing they did was look at here are the state ethics laws and then from there you look at okay you know where does the city want to raise the bar you can't lower the bar you know but where does the city want to raise the bar or offer something different outside of that so that is what i'm bringing that up simply as a point of comparison has nothing to do with uh the the outcome of the ethics ordinance and it's it's it's it's faults and and benefits etc only to say you know i think that when you've got state and federal uh definitions i think it's important to start with those and see do we really want to change uh or build on uh these and where um so additionally uh so anyway so that's where i want to start with with with public conversations where we're getting input uh from different communities uh not only owners of historic properties but people who live in neighborhoods where there are uh historic historic properties that they value you know even though they don't have actual ownership of them um so i'd love to see more of that um uh also um what council member beck mentioned about the uh the the 10 years uh and and the the ten thousand dollar cap you know i concur um i don't uh you know like the idea of having um uh people uh you know reapply to or uh to uh and and have to pay additional you know for permit fees or go through you know any kind of bureaucracy in red tape uh when a historic property will only get more historic the older it gets the key is of course we want to make sure that the uh uh integrity of that structure is not being changed um and and sometimes that can happen uh by spending ten thousand dollars or more sometimes it could happen by spending less uh one could also spend ten thousand dollars to make a property worse uh from a historic point of view uh so i i don't like that there's a dollar amount uh placed on it and i know council member beck was speaking more to the kind of number of years i concur with that i would and i believe that the dollar amount also should not be relevant what what should be a matter of of interest is is this uh property being maintained now as a a livable property you know if it's if it's decaying if it's falling apart it's not doing well um and we might end up with situations where a property owner doesn't have ten thousand dollars or more to put into it uh and so i feel like what what the city should be doing is connecting owners of historic properties who don't have the money to pay for whatever repairs need to be made just for basic maintenance to connect them to grant opportunities to help them keep these properties which which are historic right and it'll it'll continue to be historic and if it falls into disrepair it'll be a historic building in disrepair but it will still be a historic building and so i i think that that's key um uh i wanted to ask um about oh and also i'm sorry i'll just say really briefly uh that you know the neighborhood that's referred to here as idiots hill i know that that's a common colloquial term i call it noddingham the noddingham woods neighborhood i happen to live in that neighborhood and i know that some that a lot of people in this neighborhood call it uh idiots hill i don't uh because it's a term that it has been pointed out to me by disability rights advocates you know that is considered derogatory and and has a history as a derisive term for people with cognitive disabilities that's not how it is intended i know when people in the neighborhood use that term i'm well aware of that um but it it has a sting uh that that goes beyond you know what is intended so we can take up that conversation later but i'll just say i myself will be referring to it as a noddingham woods neighborhood um so two questions are um the uh heritage i'm sorry that neighborhood stabilization areas uh what's the difference between this and an overlay are we talking about overlays or is it something different than overlays and then i have one more question in addition to that um so it is an overlay um i this is just a preliminary name that staff put together for this presentation um just naming its neighborhood stabilization areas but it would be considered an overlay a zoning overlay which would include design standards and possibly you know mini scale preservation plan if that's what we wanted to do moving forward but once again just a preliminary idea that we wanted to bring forward okay and thank you for clarifying that you know i'm i'm wary of uh kind of overlays that don't come um from the uh from the grassroots so i you know i kind of want to know what neighborhoods uh you know want to preserve um and then also to really consider since we're talking about historic preservation um to make sure that we don't go outside the bounds of historic preservation into things like the things that are just a matter of aesthetic taste for instance paint colors right if you're talking about a structure any structure that can be painted it doesn't um there's no reason for historic preservation to regulate uh paint covers because if it's a paintable surface any kind of uh exterior paint if it's you know good good exterior paint will preserve the surface uh so we need i think it's important um that we don't end up being a kind of a care uh caricature of what uh people think of when they think of historic preservation not that i'm saying that's what this is but you know being about fussing over everything matchy matchy and um you know epcot center you know recreation of the you know 1920s or something like that um so second i was wondering about the and this is my last um question and comment for now um about how in city permits would factor into into uh any kind of uh city um incentive or you know requirement that goes beyond existing state and federal requirements would somebody have to apply for the with the city uh you know for a uh for for permits um or to come before council you know and would that involve application fees and staff times time that would not otherwise be necessary um sure so currently right now um anyone who comes with a historic property is wanting to do an alteration or addition they are required to do a certificate of appropriateness or a coa that is at no fee or cost to the homeowner it is a free application that they can find online and fill out and then they will send that along to myself um so that doesn't come at any cost and then the next step would be any building permits so those will be required no matter any type of work that they're doing so if someone's doing electrical work putting in new light fixtures they would have to be required to go through a permit so this would not add any additional permitting or fees to the homeowner this would just be an additional tax incentives for their property got it thank you so much welcome okay any other questions let me see who we've had um mayor pro tem melter and then we'll go to councilor davis i think there have been a lot of great points made i won't you know reiterate uh all of them uh just on the question of is it a dollar amount or something else and the uh issue of whether somebody doesn't have the money to maintain historical property um i'm not uh i'm not solid myself on whether it should be a dollar amount and if so what uh but i think it would make sense to say there needs to be activity to maintain the property and to the and that's not mutually exclusive at all the idea that if there isn't and there's a need that would be you know a great role for the city to uh nudge uh those owners who you know can't do it themselves in the direction of grants and so whether it's through their own resources or through you know securing other resources i think the point of the exemption is uh you know to compensate for some activity to keep the the buildings uh habitable and you know in historic shape they uh and and just lastly i'll add there's a lot of people in this community have been who've worked for a long time on preservation and um oh you know i totally skipped uh welcome cameron and and i would just encourage you to uh uh just be as inclusive as you can what comes to mind right away is not just an individual but the the organization historic then that on its own has done so much to create these national register districts really without a whole lot of support from anybody uh and you know they've just they know these structures and they know the hurdles and i just think you'll get some good input okay uh councillor davis tag along with that just a little bit i i want to point out a couple of things one um i think cameron is very familiar with the state and federal guidelines in fact she's quoted them to us she brought those forward um so i want to push back just a little bit on the notion that that we're not already doing that building on uh existing guidelines um trying to invent something out of whole cloth in fact we have a whole slide dedicated to the fact we've looked at best practices these recommendations came from other places that are doing very well in this space i also know for a fact that cameron has been active in the community already because i hear from people who are very excited to have heard from her already um certainly there's always room for more public input um i just want anybody listening at home to know that um i mean since she hit the ground cameron cameron i have not actually been formally introduced in person we've never met before but i've already heard uh through the grapevine from a number of people including folks who don't live in historic districts but are very interested in these things um that she's already very active in the community so i have no doubt whatsoever that we're going to have some really great uh community involvement and the kinds of things she's bringing forward okay thank you and i'll say this and to to start to wrap us up so i want to pick up what you left off and those for those watching i'll direct you to you can go to the city of denton page and go to the city council meetings agendas and you can go to the different uh items this is item c in the work session but but cameron i just i want to tell you it bothered me as an individual uh when i read and i'm directing those watching to the preliminary public input that's exhibit six for me i think that's a problem i think when someone goes after you and kind of leverages kind of historical things in a way that dredges up the past versus talking to you about how to proceed and how we want to grow and even areas of opportunity just as uh council member davis said areas of opportunity to get better that's great but that didn't dredge up all the past and there's some accusations in there that i just found uh less than great for someone that we're welcoming to our city and wanting to give some kind of encouragement so for my just from my seat my individual look at it i thought that was a little discouraging the way that that conversation went via email and so i offer you my apologies and i want to welcome you and i encourage you again to to talk to a large swath of our community and and i'll find that you that won't be the flavor of the entire community uh i hope i hope that you're better received than that and that people take a more constructive approach uh versus destructive and bringing up uh people that filled your seat before that that has nothing to do with you so thank you for that i'll also say um that i i want to point out to those that are uh tracking along district one is the eastern entrance point to the city of denton so yeah it's the core it's the eastern entrance point it's the north barrier it's a lot right so i just think there's an interactive map again people can go to the citizen the city of denton website go to the gis map you can toggle on the council districts and you can see all the different districts but it is it's it's not a core it's not this or that none of the districts are they're all giant jesse goes out to 35w with his district three i mean they're all just monster uh areas of town and so we do ourselves a disservice if we if we boil them down to a kind of narrow geographic description so those watching i want to direct you to that gis map on the city website uh then i i would say um i like the the recommendation of of uh staff i think i really want to spotlight the idea of the heritage properties and the example use people's funeral home i think that's really critical so these are these are items in our community that have kind of made a kind of history history of themselves but may not have the kind of the other uh roots but do have significant roots in our community so i really like that i i encourage and support the definition uh refinement that sort of thing and then um uh i think that's the just of it uh from my input i like you know what you put forward and look forward to it coming back and so for for my peers i'll summarize and say this i've heard uh only council member armator that that one specified that she doesn't think paint color should be regulated in in the historic district and two that she was against this moving forward as presented so that's one but i need to know i'm gonna i need to hear from others that are that don't don't support it moving forward as presented seeing none council member back all right just just if it's going to be discussion i'm all for it i just want to make sure we're we we get this direction nailed down before we go into other conversations so is it is it in line it is a nuanced caveat if you're saying this plus more uh i i'm for this plus more okay uh if you mean this exact thing if you're going to be hard and fast um then i would like this plus more so it depends on how you want to slice no sir if you if you if you want to exclude something that's what i need to hear from from me okay thank you seeing none that gives you general direction uh staff and then well councillor armator you've already said you didn't want it to move forward as forward so i get it uh no i i want to clarify uh that because i think there's a misunderstanding and i also wanted to respond to some uh a couple of things that that have been said by all means thank you uh so first of all uh what i meant was that these specific recommendations these policy points uh i do not feel ready to move forward i do feel absolutely ready to move forward about having a conversation on on a city you know do we want to have city historical standards or not so i'm not saying don't have this conversation i was just making suggestion as to you know where i think we should be starting out with that uh and i just i wanted to mention uh you know since it was mentioned that um and welcome uh cameron um uh somebody i think it was uh uh councilmember davis i you know don't quite remember um or maybe uh mayor hudspeth that mentioned that you you know uh very well these state and federal requirements i i just wanted to make clear in case it wasn't clear i have absolute confidence that you do know uh the state and federal requirements uh my point was uh that and forgive me if i wasn't clear that uh we haven't had a discussion with the public you know or with council i think i wouldn't call this a discussion what we're having now a discussion about the state and federal requirements so um i'm not saying that you need to be educated on those um but that the public and council needs to have a discussion and a mutual educating uh on on what these standards are so that we because otherwise you know we won't be able to hear from the public on what needs to be improved upon on these state and federal state and federal uh standards and possibilities so and it's a great opportunity also for folks to learn about what is and what isn't considered historic at the state and federal level you know and i think and mayor hudspeth you might be surprised to find that this idea of paint colors you know not being considered historic preservation that's actually pretty standard uh principle of of historic preservation um i wanted to and then finally i just wanted to mention uh that one thing that i left off my list of recommendations um that i i don't think that we should include uh improvements in our considerations for historical preservation only uh rehabilitation i'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to improve their properties however they want um but again we need to focus on the you know preserving the historic integrity of this structure any improvements that you want to make that don't uh negatively impact that structure of course it's up to the individual property owner you know to uh to make those changes um but what i don't want to do is to be kind of blurring those lines uh you know between uh just home improvement uh for home improvement sake and historical preservation okay all right any other and and city miss city manager i have you kind of as we as you review this one council member doesn't you know constitute consensus so you'll just i'll trust that you'll review it and and kind of extrapolate extrapolate where you see uh consistencies that sort of thing we will do that uh and review it uh mayor and then um we will actually probably put um sort of put something back into a friday report that sort of captures the main theme sure thank you appreciate it i guess we got a couple more council member maguire councilor bett thank you mayor i'd like to express support for council member armenter's point about um improvements versus uh preservation um rehabilitation um i i think that we we need to be focused on incentivizing um the preservation of the building itself and not necessarily improvements although of course improvements can be fine but we don't need to be um uh you know cutting into city revenues uh in order to support that all right councilor bett thank you mayor i'll just briefly concur so that there's at least three people that are interested uh in not improvements uh that in rehabilitation all right seeing a trend councillor melzer mayor proctor melzer yeah for sort of counting noses now if there were a hot tub in 1901 and you put that hot tub back that that's different but uh yeah i would i i concur with that sentiment all right it's we're incentivizing uh preservation not enhancement i look forward to that definition and how are you going to you're going to we're trying to clear the definitions and you're going to define uh succinctly of improvement versus enhancement that i look i look forward to it uh council member davis i agree with that mayor i also want to point out you know you don't want restoration of your black iron pipe you don't want restoration of your your old busted up copper pipe if preservation of the structure is going to be better achieved with some pvc or pecs so i i think we just have to be careful when this comes back not to draw that line real brightly between improvement or restoration and accept some guidance from other places as to what i i agree with you council member melzer your your glib example the hot tub makes perfect sense you don't get a tax exemption for your for your nice spiffy new whirlpool that didn't exist back then but a working h vac system working electrical system a working uh plumbing system those can help you preserve the structure as it exists well said council member back thank you i i i want to leave frog up for that that's that's actually the standard practice um for historical commissions uh they're not holding you to to be blacksmiths and have cast iron if you want to have uh something that looks like a coal-fired stove but is made out of leds then that is very standard practice so it is more keeping the historical look and feel so i i can actually concur with all sides on that particular issue on of clarity excellent okay anything else great seeing none thank you cameron welcome welcome uh and uh have a great day got it takes us to our last work session item which is number four id 21437 receive report hold discussion and give staff direction on pending city council request uh so we have three today yes sir uh thank you mayor hello mayor city council steward birds eye assistant to the city manager i will uh bring up my screen and i am here for your uh pending council request for information uh just as a reminder or if somebody's first time watching we will review uh up to seven requests these are uh requests for items that take over two hours of staff time or is a work session request or policy revision uh i will briefly introduce each request and then the elected official that made the request will have uh up to one minute to describe and justify their request and then the remaining elected officials will have up to one minute to provide feedback and indicate their support for the request we will respond to all requests where a consensus of council is established today we have three our first one uh is from councilmember armature and it is a work session regarding this one minute pitch process that we are in right now uh there you can see her request is also in your backup and then uh to make sure that it was readable and not two-point font we have separated it into two slides today so we have her request and then we have the staff information here all that we did was provide kind of the history of ordinance number 19 20 26 uh that establishes this process and then uh the goals of the process and kind of uh what could happen moving forward with a work session for this discussion incorporating councilmember armature's request uh and some some other ideas that that might be out there from other cities um so with that i will stop sharing my screen and turn it over to councilmember armature and stewart i'll keep the time okay can everybody hear me okay as elected representatives we are a legislative body we are legislators and it is our job not just to keep the ship afloat but to improve on the ship by introducing new legislation and repealing or improving on old legislation when necessary as requested by the constituents we represent for the greater public good i want us to have a conversation about considering replacing these one minute pitches i have a suggestion in these slides on one possibility but i'm open to all possibilities and i really want us to talk to each other about what would be the best way one possibility is the one that i'm recommending whereby councilmembers would submit weekly bi-weekly monthly quarterly whatever we want our legislative recommendations and we could all separately have input on those in a friday report if we didn't want to go through this discussion about whether or not to have a work session right so that would actually save work session time that's time i also believe thank you comments mayor mayor pro tem melzer i think uh you know every council gets to figure out how it wants to run perfectly happy to have the conversation i think it might fit well uh within a council retreat where we revisit our list of priorities um and uh if if there's i'll just by remaining seconds toss one in there if the if the drift is allowing more members to to put things forward into work sessions without there being kind of a pre-approval uh you know i'd be open to some idea of like everyone gets one a quarter with no pitch at all uh and uh still allow the current process with 10 minutes of debate without this like weird like you can only say your thing and you can't reply just to have a time limited debate just because i don't want to spend all our time discussing whether we're going to talk about something okay councillor beck councillor maguire thank you mayor i concur i'd like to see a work session if staff thinks that we can do it in the retreat that's great so my direction would be for that as well uh and you know i i think you know we need to have some limits so you know you know practically we don't have infinite time but we definitely do not have enough time for discussion and i i concur with uh councillor melzer i think there's an opportunity to have time uh to get a every counselor get a freebie you get a golden buzzer as it were so uh i think that would be beneficial okay and councillor maguire i do agree that the one minute pitch process is excessively restrictive on our ability to to bring forward new legislation um but that we need to to come up with an alternative system that still protects staff time and doesn't put unreasonable demands on staff i would like to point out that we we do currently um each council member uh does get two requests per quarter where consensus is not met if those requests take less than 10 city staff hours to complete um so i mean not exactly what we're talking about but that that is in place um and i i would uh a second council member melzer's uh point that um that this is something that would be could be addressed in in a retreat that we could we could work out a new system uh of of managing these types of requests in a retreat okay uh councillor davis sure i just want to kind of quickly point out that um i don't think that the the current makeup of the council has been prevented so far uh in doing anything that it would like to do by the one minute pitch as evidenced by the fact that we just had four four vote voices for revisiting the one minute pitch i don't think it's excessively restrictive i think we had an excessive uh number of requests previously and we had to find a way to deal with it i think we found a way to deal with it i'll point out also when we come into the work session i think we should all remember that in our even absent the one minute pitch there's already a process in place for dealing with excessive requests on staff time and council time we have an agenda committee that can function just like a calendar's committee if it wants to we have a city manager who is tasked to manage the city and manage her staff's time um absent direction from the council a resolution or something like that uh the city manager is able to manage staff time and tell them exactly what they have time to work on and what they don't what's a priority and what is not so i think that should we should all be aware of that backstop to our conversation thank you um and so i will speak so yeah i think really the key is going to be this the work session is going to go is going to happen and i would direct those that are new to understand the push past the narrative because yes the system is working it's working today should is there are the refinements absolutely but here's the question for you that you should ponder when this work session comes what happens when mayor hutzpah's priority jumps in front of council member blah blah blah's priority and theirs never gets reached you know that's how do you prioritize those how do you we're all seven peers how do you then get past that logjam this process thins out that to allow everyone to get reached and there's nothing worse than you being stuck behind someone when your peers or your the people you represent are asking why isn't this moving forward and you say hey i'm stuck in traffic okay um anyone else okay council member i i appreciate the one minute pitch but that one minute pitch has to the mindfulness of bringing in that um that request still hinges on how much time and energy that it takes for the uh city manager's office to handle that that's the that's the bottom line to it i uh if it's taking over two hours for them to do whatever it is that a one minute pitch is giving then um you know we'll that again you know like everybody else i think that we just have to revisit it um but i appreciate it um personally i don't think that you know whoever is bringing it forward whoever is bringing it forward um the consequence has already got to be behind it uh the thought process has to be behind it and uh whether or not we're putting the city manager's office whoever has to do the the research on it and do the work behind it um you know like they're asking please give us an opportunity thank you okay all right thank you um i will reshare my screen and our second request today uh comes from council member beck it is a work session to discuss using ranked choice voting for officers of council committees uh for the for the council uh committees commissions and boards um his request is here uh with an example of how it could work and then staff has provided uh just some brief information about what rank choice voting is and then just some considerations if uh it was decided to move forward with a work session on this um and so with that i will uh stop sharing my screen and uh council member beck all right so so it's actually two requests it's adopt a full and open floor nomination and then a work session on rank choice voting for the results of that um so i i'm asking for an immediate rule change to full and open floor nominations for uh all officer positions for boards councils committees commissions as opposed to first to raise their hand the second thing is i concur as i'm asking that the vote that would follow that would be ranked choice voting that that's a simple way of defining the priorities of the council um you know it's simply it results in basically you know you having a greater than b the greater than c in terms of a rank choice and the votes of c are redistributed to a and b uh it's it's a way of avoiding a split if you have a 322 split it's a way of avoiding that split because you immediately know the answer uh that way we can have more nominations and we can have a more representative uh series of officers uh that follow not just first to raise their hand uh generally there will be one or two nominees and this will be all right um council member davis then council member maguire thank you mayor council member beck i appreciate you bringing this forward and i think i wish i had rank choice available in more areas of my life uh didn't just have to make kind of binary choices by default um but i think i might rather see this as an isr maybe even a public lsr first um i don't um i don't disagree with you on the nominations process i i cannot figure out for the life of me and there's plenty of people smarter than i am how you can do a rank choice ballot and be toma compliant for rank choice to be kind of meaningful it works best in a secret ballot doesn't have to be secret but you would essentially have to publicly say here are my two rank choices and bob i like you just a little better than bill and and then that that staff member has to do all the tabulation and whatnot but i think i'd rather see more information on it first including what some other cities do with their nomination processes um rather than go right into a full work session on it okay council member mcguire thank you mayor hudspeth um i uh i agree with both council member beck and council member davis um i think that both of these proposals would streamline the process and also help ensure that that the will of the whatever body is voting uh is is being reached uh in a quick manner um i i don't think that there's really any concern about ranked choice being on a public ballot because we all have to vote for who we would want anyway and that vote is is a matter of public record i don't i don't i don't share the concerns about um a rank choice ballot being public i would point out that in the staff information on this item um staff presented one possible model for ranked choice voting which involves uh uh like a runoff to second place um there are other models of ranked choice voting um which we can discuss in a work session okay anyone else council member uh mayor for tim melzer and then council member armature uh totally endorse uh the open floor nomination i think this idea of you know who raises their hands first i don't know where that ever made sense um and then on the ranked choice thing i think you can get to the same result i think uh council member mcguire may have alluded to this with just a lot less technology if we're talking about 140 000 people voting i'm all for ranked choice i think runoffs you know are expensive and time consuming but we're seven you know you can you can have a vote then you take the top two and you vote again if it's three two two you can do a runoff between the twos and then vote again between that person and the three uh but no technology required i'm not anti-technology i just don't think it's appropriate or it's not needed it's uh but i think the result you're advocating makes perfect sense council member armature i i too uh support having a work session on this topic and uh i concur that you know the atoma issue is not really a problem since rank voting does not have to be uh secretive because we're elected officials we would uh make public what our rankings are you know one two three four whatever one two and three uh so that would absolutely be public and we could still do it that way okay anyone else uh i'll just say and let me start this i'll just say i i don't obviously the work session is going to go forward so that's not the just of my comments the just my comments are i do feel like this is a little bit of a victimless crime you're talking about a traffic safety board that's trying to find a majority to meet we're trying to bring our boards and commissions back to me in person we're it's simple things staffs then i mean and you the city attorney could probably speak to the struggle of keeping everybody on robert's rules and simple things you know and there's never there's never been a contention because it affects every board we're not talking about this body only we're talking about every board and it's the airport it's the you know these committees don't meet often enough and there's never a point of contention i've not heard one complaint from one body that says that we didn't like how the chair was selected and so uh maybe that's just ignorance on my part lack lacking knowledge but i don't think so and i don't think we consider what we do to staff and with this step thank you okay uh stewart all right our third request today is from council member mcguire it's a work session on a city initiative to increase covid vaccine access um her request is here uh and you can you can see potential uh steps that that she did list there um and the staff information uh that we provided here uh just some information about dcph uh the number of vaccines that they have administered and then um also uh included in your backup is informal staff report 2021-032 which was released this past friday that just gives some background information about uh the fire department's city of denton fire department's uh coordination efforts with the county um just so that you all have that information as well uh so with that i will turn the floor over to council member mcguire for her first one minute pitch very exciting thank you stewart um and thank you to staff for putting together so much information um you've all read the comments that i sent to staff so i'm just going to summarize our highest priority when it comes to protecting public health right now is to get as many residents as possible vaccinated as quickly as possible dcph is doing an outstanding job it's true that vaccines are widely available at retail pharmacies but the fact is that only 41.89 percent of denton county residents are fully vaccinated and that is not a high enough number as community leaders we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to reach more folks in particular i would like to see us investing in door-to-door efforts one-on-one conversations those are the types of outreach efforts that are going to be most effective at reaching vaccine hesitant residents and the city may be better equipped to undertake those efforts than the county i would see both hired staff and members of this council going door-to-door and offering our constituents the opportunity to get vaccinated with as few barriers as possible so i'm proposing a joint work session uh with denton county public health to strategize how the city can support the county's vaccination efforts and what initiatives the city could undertake that would not duplicate their efforts okay um let's go let's go in order so council member beck then mayor pro tem uh melter then council member davis then council member armature thank you mayor i i concur that we need to have a county public health co works up uh there's there's exactly those kinds of things she spelled it very well so i won't belabor it uh i think there's opportunities for vaccination okay councillor uh mayor pro tem melter totally concur that it's uh about the most important thing we could focus on in terms of uh health safety general welfare i would just ask when the session happens that we minimize the amount of time spent just detailing all the great things that have already been done and just zero in on what incremental opportunities may remain and evaluate those okay councillor armature i i concur uh and i really look forward to having this essential discussion i think it's also important when we have that discussion uh to come up with a definite goal right we now know that we're not at enough uh percentage of vaccination in the city and we need to focus on city of denton um and we know that a hundred percent is probably not achievable so i think it's important that we pick a number and we come up with the time uh and really uh work really hard to meet that goal in that time frame okay forgive me council member davis but council member davis thank you mayor i just want to point out once again we live in the chick-fil-a of vaccination operations we are part of the best vaccination operation in the country right now are there some gaps that we could help fill i'm sure that there are the city manager has uh we've talked about this before almost every covid update that we've had has also been a vaccination update you know i i like the idea of going door to door if the county will give us vaccine to do that that is where our vaccine comes from is from the county um i i will join you council member mcguire going door to door knocking on doors i invite you to join me down here at city hall for city council meetings if we can do one we can certainly do the other okay um council member bird i just want to concur with um everything that i've heard and i don't think that we got a chance to speak on the didn't isd portion of it uh now that the vaccine is extended to uh the younger population i would definitely appreciate uh connected with didn't isd to see what we can how we can help them uh get to their to their level as well thank you okay and and i'll just say i i agree with uh council member davis i i just i've been waiting for those that are advocating to outline specific examples of people that were missed or i understand they're out there i understand people have made decisions not to move forward i respect all those decisions and i just would i i need to if the middle or the mist are so prevalent which it could be i just am waiting for someone to point that out it's it's it's all been in generalities and dr uh dr richardson has an open door policy so every one of us has an opportunity to contact him get those examples and bring that forth or to have this very work session discussion with him one-on-one to get the most uh out of it versus split in time you would have you could monopolize this time at any point uh so that's my thoughts okay uh so stewart you have direction there as well yes sir thank you great thank you so that concludes our work session takes us to our closed session we'll take a 10 minute break come right back uh that'll give staff time to set the room so it's 4 38 i'm going to conclude the work session and i'm going to call the closed session which is i will convene the closed session at 4 38 p.m we will consider the following items deliberation regarding certain public power utility competitive matters under texas government code section 551.086 consultation with attorneys under the texas government code section 551.071 again it's uh 4 38 we'll be back at 450 to get started thank you and good evening and welcome to this uh meeting with the denton city council we just finished our closed session we're going into our evening session um and so we're to the consent agenda it is 6 18 p.m it's uh five still uh may 25th we do have a quorum uh and and so i will uh take a motion on the consent agenda nothing was pulled no presentations count mayor proctor melzer i move approval of the consent agenda especially items b and c related to juneteenth thank you and do we have a council member beck i second thank you we have a motion by mayor pro tem melzer second by council member beck any discussion seeing none counts uh mayor pro tem melzer how say you aye uh council member beck aye council member maguire aye council member bird aye council member armature yes okay and uh council member davis looking good aye thank you and mayor hudson i as well that passes seven zero that takes us to our ic items i'll call the first which is item a id 21765 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city council of the city of denton repealing an ordinance number 20-420 approving the 2021 dent municipal electric energy risk management policy good evening mr mayor mayor pro tem and council my name is smith day i'm with uh dme at the executive manager of the regulatory and risk division and tonight uh as you as you recall a couple weeks ago we had a work session on this item uh to bring it to you and we've had questions uh we've had answers for you and uh tonight will be a briefer presentation because what we are seeking is your approval of the risk management policy give me a minute and i will share my screen okay hopefully everyone can see that yes we can thank you very good okay we're seeking your uh approval for this uh recommending we're recommending that it be approved as well uh as we stated in the in the previous meeting uh this is the 2021 version of the risk policy to replace the 2020 version that's currently in place uh the annual updates we do are a routine uh we're done with the goal of improving this risk policy uh making it better making it address changing market conditions uh again it's a brief recap the the overall goal of the policy and this whole reason for existence is to provide a government structure that regulates the roles and responsibilities in the organization around the uh the electric trading portfolio uh as we stated before the policy changes this year we're largely driven by the need to be consistent with the recommended hedge plan changes and so the hedge plan is connected to this policy uh this policy is of course uh connected with the risk committee of dme and then of course goes to pub and then tonight seeking your approval by the way i will mention that yesterday it did go before pub and they recommended uh approval to you uh by unanimous vote uh again the organizational execution responsibility changes are here uh again in reaction to the hedge plan uh we're we're also removing the outage insurance from this as one of the authorized transactions that's moving over to the procurement department and those are recommendations by city risk and legal department and not to beat this one to death that is really all i had for you okay out of here thank you any questions for staff seeing none i'll take a motion counselor beck i make a motion for approval with as described by staff thank you is there a second counselor bird i second thank you we have a motion by counselor beck second by council member bird discussion seeing none counselor beck i'll say you aye council member bird aye council member maguire aye mayor pro tem melzer aye thank you council member davis thank you council member armature yes okay mayor hutsworth is a is a i as well pardon me that passes um seven zero thank you okay that concludes item a texas item b which is id 21953 consider adoption of ordinance of city of denton texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager or their designee to execute a public works contract with mountain cascades of texas llc good evening team good evening there we go all right thank you so much good afternoon almost good evening council and mayor my name is tracy beck i'm the project manager for the hickory creek interceptor phases one and two this is a long overdue project you guys have probably been hearing about it a little bit and i'm excited to say that we are going to the construction construction award contract tonight the project scope to start out is on interceptors sanitary sewer interceptors stemming from approximately i-35 west south to us 377 variety of sizes from 30 inches to 48 inches and actually up to 54 inches the purpose of this interceptor is to increase capacity it's replacing an existing interceptor along the hickory creek basin and this project will add some capacity to take us into the future the original one was constructed in 1980 so we're looking forward to getting it updated the schedule so far was that we started advertising this is just jumping forward through design we started advertising this past march and we also went through design amendment passed through pre-bid with our team and we started awarding the contract with pub yesterday which was voted positively and then today of course we're into our council discussion and then the construction is anticipated to start with a notice to proceed as early as the first part of june with a 12-month construction window so we're looking to start in 2021 june and and sometime in summer 2022 the there is some archaeological findings that you may or may not have heard of i think we've done an isr for this so on this map if you can see we've got archaeological findings along this middle section as well as on the southern section we are currently investigating those unfortunately the weather's set us back a little bit when you dig a hole with this rain that we've been getting they get filled up so a little behind but the team has been out there trying to work as much as they can during the drizzle when we bid we received six different groups submitting and as you mentioned in the introduction mountain cascade of texas was the award that was the lowest we did an invitation for bid and they came out to be 7.1 million the engineer opinion of probable cost was approximately 9.5 million dollars we feel the difference in this after looking back there's been fluctuations in costs as well as mountain cascade and some of the other groups have been bidding on projects within the city so we feel that these are the reasons why there is a delta or bigger gap in these costs than what you normally see the staff's recommendation today is to adopt this the meant or the to award the contract to mountain cascade um construction of texas and the amount of 7.1 million dollars and some change there is a five percent contingency that we've also added not to the actual contract amount but to an outside amount of this um not to exceed and that is for the purposes of as change orders come through we have a change board system set up in place so that we can review it with our finance team with staff and with the owners of the the utility department to make sure that the change orders are approved again that's at a five percent that's a standard for our capital improvement program projects the project is funded and the funding is coming from wastewater project with that i'd love to take any questions if you have any yes sir councilman beck all right um yeah so councillor beck thank you thank you mayor sorry tracy i need to wait on the chair to recognize me um and by the way i just want to say you have a fabulous fabulous surname i very much approve uh we are no relation um that being said um uh so is the the core of engineers overseeing this because it's a waterway for the crm work no sir the archaeology site no sir no we're working with the texas historical commission and it'll be working with the the groups right now we're just trying to find out whether or not the items that they're finding are significant in nature they found a few things such as muscle shells and some burned um basically burned rocks and they're trying to find out if those are are substantial or not oh don't let my my archaeologist wife here you described them as inconsequential um so uh those were the words of our our archaeological group is saying that they don't think they're not significant so the the this is all through the thc and we're not even though it's a waterway we're not involving the corps of engineers is that correct that's correct we've gone through the permitting process and the majority of the areas that we have crossings we've bored through so instead of doing open cut we've avoided them which is why we're yeah that's why we're avoiding them i'm sorry and then the the uh the other thing is if we if um in terms of cost overlays that you alluded to that we might have some in a budget um if they do find a site versus a worthy of reclamation um do we have a sufficient budget to to deal with the delays of uh of digging that out or preserving or or even routing around it if the thc suggests that it needs to be maintained yes we've been working very closely with the archaeology group as well as the thc group they were sadly supposed to come out on site and take a look at everything but just because of the weather delays and we've also been working with our engineering consultant and the plan is is we've got real estate options part of the land on the northern site is actually in the city of denton so we wouldn't need any additional right of way or easement acquisition so we have a plan there um we could probably extend bores or do some type of a design if we need to pull an amendment we've asked the consultant to start thinking about that right now we expected to have an answer this week um with the archaeologist team we didn't expect all of the rain to happen so we were we were predicting that we could have said everything's fine or we have to go into operation mitigate on the southern end the rocks the sandstone and such that they found we're actually pursuing possible additional right of way for another project that would allow us to move over but there's also the benefit of we can bore a little bit longer and not have to realign so we have some contingency plans or risk management that we're looking into we haven't pulled the trigger yet to actually start the design because we don't have confidence that that would be the money best spent or the time but as soon as they're giving us day by day play by plane what they're finding when they're in the field to let us know if they think it is significant enough to pull the engineering team in immediately or until um our thc representatives come out and give us clearance with that also i wanted to point out that we are asking for clearance on all of the project with the exception of these two sites so in our contract we have cordoned off the areas that it's kind of the no-fly zone for the contractor so that they can get out there and start work getting their materials delivered and getting things set up which can take a few months before they actually start digging which could coincide perfectly when we when we get the clearance or we have to go into a mitigation plan okay thank you all right any other questions for staff councilmember mcguire um can you speak to what is the the size range of the current line that that's being replaced this the the dimension of the side the yes yes or the the diameter of the line i want to say my goodness that is a great question i have kind of ignored the existing and just excited about the future i want to say it was um 18 inches it wasn't the magnitude that we have right now okay um and so what type population increase could the the new larger size potentially support um i'm kind of i'm trying to probe to make sure we're not going to find ourselves in a situation where there's a huge population explosion in that area and what we've done is is the modeling that was prepared was showing that it was going to project out to another 20 to 25 years okay that's answering the question that you've got kind of yeah i um i like what what size of of community could it serve i'm sorry i don't have those answers i know when the modeling was taking place they took into effect current existing needs as well as the the population growth looking at land uses and it wasn't specifically saying we can serve this neighborhood that neighborhood or so many homes it was looking at the master plan and they were trying to achieve that that build out okay all right yeah that that does uh that does answer my question pretty well i think um i let's see oh um so i i think you kind of alluded to this but um are there any concerns around like tree loss or habitat disruption with this project no we've actually looked into that um our environmental team has taken a look because it is a creek and it's very sensitive and this project's pretty old as far as being on the books for some years so it's not the first version of this we've had our watershed team take a look at it we've had our environmental team take a look at it we've looked for species such as birds and such migratory plans so we've vetted this all through our own departments a lot of the work is being bored so that we're not disturbing a significant amount and a lot of that was on purpose by design so that we could preserve as much as possible that's great i'm glad to hear that um so will there be any tree loss there will be because we're going on green ground but there's not going to be substantial tree loss as far as we're marrying some of the existing easements that we have already um so we will be going off off route a little bit in some areas i don't have a tree count for you but it's it's not followed the line and it looks like there are some like fields open field yeah um my other question was about the um the evaluation and i i know that a lot of times um when we look at like the pricing evaluation there will also be sort of an evaluation of um you know uh ability to meet specifications ability to complete a project within a specified time frame and that is is not present on the the pricing evaluation for this i was wondering if you could speak to that so i'm not sure what your i'm not sure if i understand your question um so i'm sorry i'm trying to find the the darn it i'm trying to find the item here hi tracy this is christine taylor procurement director i can help answer that for you yes thank you so this we solicited this contract on invitation for bid which only considers price so as long as you meet all specifications when you submit your documents we're only considering price for award so we do have another option for competitive sealed proposal where you've seen that on other product on other projects but this one was done as invitation for bid where price is the only factor okay thank you yeah that answers my question um all right and so any other questions for staff seeing none i'll take a motion council member davis with approval thank you is there a second council member bird i second thank you so we have a motion by council member davis's second by council member bird discussion seeing none uh council member davis wait okay council member bird oh it was just a basic question is to um i know this is a sewer main is it going this this sewer does it go are we going towards 35 or towards 377 towards 377 it's flowing south south okay or east or west rather east okay southeast okay okay any other discussion seeing none council member davis i'll say you aye council member bird aye council member beck aye council member mcguire aye council mayor pretender melzer aye okay and uh let's see counselor yes okay and mayor hutsworth is a i as well that passes seven to zero thank you uh thank you uh okay that takes us to item c which is id 21955 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager or their designated to execute a contract with viking construction inc evening mayor council daniel kramer deputy director of operations for the city of denton good evening okay my screen shared here real quick so microsurfacing is one of the tools that the streets department uses in um maintaining our street infrastructure here in the city this is used on our asphalt streets microsurfacing is literally like a a um wax on your on your vehicle it puts a nice coat on top of your streets stops uh water penetration throughout the uh the road in order to keep the subgrade at its useful life um what this contract is is 404,400,000 and it is a one year um with a three-year renewal but not to exceed so as we use this through we use this as part of our crack seal and our micro seal in order to keep our streets up and moving we do this every two to three years per street to keep it going throughout the system so um staff recommendation is to award the contract of viking construction for uh micro seal for a one-year contract with the option to three additional years uh to a four-year not to exceed amount of four million four hundred thousand dollars any questions okay okay questions for staff uh so let's go uh mayor pro tem melzer council member maguire and okay yep thank you uh i occasionally hear from residents who you know regard this as just a patch and but uh you know we're guard we're stewarding you know the taxpayers money i wonder if you could in some high level terms compare the economics of micro sealing at the stage in a road in the streets like when you would do that versus a full resurfacing at that stage in a road's life just to compare the economics yes sir absolutely so as a street deteriorates it is on a um a steady deterioration curve um and if you put in a few dollars at the beginning which is a micro seal is a very minimal price versus uh what it would cost to do a mill and overlay or a full reconstruction uh it actually prolongs the life of the street so we try to hit our roads from both sides as preventive maintenance it's being proactive instead of reactive so as we go through on these roads um we try to hit the goal is to hit every road every three to five years with some sort of maintenance practices uh we'll do a crack seal first before we do a micro seal which actually will seal up any of the big cracks uh asphalt is a as a flexible pavement and it will move and it will crack that is natural uh the sealant goes in and we'll fill the deep ones and then we'll come back roughly about a year later or two years later and try to do a full micro seal on top of that crack ceiling and what that does is seals the whole surface and by doing that that just gets all the the small little microscopic cracks that lets water penetration into the system and it's roughly about three eighths of an inch thick and can go up to almost three inches and filling some ruts and helping with a smoother surface and you add years to the life of a street by doing that yes most of them are uh five to eight years by doing this practice uh prevents potholes from forming yes sir awesome i move approval thank you okay thank you and um councilmember McGuire um i just want to make sure that i'm clear on the the terms of um the the contract here so do we have a set number of like lane miles that we're contracting for or is this more flexible than that it is more flexible it's a do not exceed amount of four million four hundred thousand now what we do is roughly we try to do about a million dollars a year now based on the the prices and uh how stuff goes and uh which streets we can make sure we're prepped and ready to go on is that'll fluctuate up and down but we over the life of the contract the goal is to get the full cost out of it do you have an estimate of how how many lane miles we might be able to cover with with a contract like this i do not offhand i do apologize with that when we when we put out the first um how we bid this out is we put the first year of what we expected to spend uh out for them to bid on so they would have a amount of streets to look at and verify that and i do not have that number on hand right now okay uh but you can follow up with it after or have you know so that'll be great uh councilor beth thank you mayor daniel it's a similar question but can you ballpark us how much of the the city roadways you expect to micro seal per year or over the four-year contract or however you want to parse it but are you expecting to do the the entire city over the four years no sir um the goal is to hit roughly 15 to 20 uh in a maintenance practice per year on how we go about so that is not only micro silver there's also micro seal and crack seal uh right now our city roadway network is and we we just got our our new numbers so it is 460 miles if i'm not mistaken roughly right around there which is a little over 1400 lane miles of actually roadway in the city and 80 i think 80 75 to 80 percent of that is asphalt versus the the rest concrete and we will be coming forward with all that information with the exact numbers but that's that's off memory right now yeah so that's fine keep going um so as we go through uh we try to do roughly i would have to say 200 200 or 300 segments with the segment as a block block areas uh that we have and again i will follow up with the exact numbers i do apologize for not having those but um we get the ones that um our our pre-work that goes out is base failures so we'll go through and make sure that the road is in is in good decent shape we'll make sure all the base failures are there and as we work through that throughout the year that's how we'll come up with the the list two or three years in advance as we're out there i just don't have the numbers with me if we're somehow either sealing or resealing uh or micro sealing every uh you know roughly 20 uh you know it's going to take us five years to touch everything is basically you know the math uh is that kind of what we're looking at yes that that is the overall goal on how we go through and um if we if we keep that process up we should be able to keep our good streets good and then is and we will be going through a a presentation more when we come up to our our budget and everything that will kind of show you the life curve of of pavement and you can keep doing these services and keeps pushing the life out but at a certain point um it's still going to have to be replaced no matter how long we keep up the maintenance and where we're at so uh normal street life we we shoot for on an asphalt street is 30 to 40 years for a good useful life uh now that is considered with consistent traffic patterns and can consistent traffic loading as we go through as roughly around half life 15 to 25 years we'll look at a a deep mill and overlay which will take off uh the proper probably the first four to six inches and do a complete mill and overlay of that and put a new surface on that we can continue the process a lot of the issues that we're having currently is the the streets in denton do not have the proper surface thickness to do a proper mill and overlay at the half life some of the roads we're only finding our four inches thick that were built but ways back so we're digging out and going through some of those and having to rebuild a little more as we go through until we can get good solid surfaces that are full depth and the thickness that we need to properly maintain these roadways okay so that actually addresses the the next question so i was just going to say i mean um i don't want to rabbit hole a contract question too much but uh the there the the issue of uh you know resident complaints about the roads never getting touched which is i understand is is a sometimes a perspective issue but uh that's where i think you know some of these lines of questions were going uh considering the amounts of money involved okay any other questions for sarah mayor if i could just jump in uh real quick uh just to add to daniel's points yes sir uh obviously these are very good questions one of the council priorities this year was to come back with a discussion of this a new streets fund and streets funding and through the budget process so in july we're going to be bringing a full kind of comprehensive streets discussion to council that's going to touch a lot only daniel went through already with you a lot of detail just on what our streets are how our streets are right now what a long-term 30 40 year plan would look like that touches on um really kind of the comprehensive approach that that relates to a lot of the questions that that you all have raised so just wanted to go ahead and preface that and say that's coming here um in the next month or two okay thank you for that questions for staff seeing none looking for a second uh council member maguire i second okay so i have a motion by mayor pro tem melzer second by council member maguire any other discussion seeing none uh mayor pro tem melzer how say you i council member maguire i council member beck i councilman bird i thank you uh council member davis i thank you council member armature yes and mayor hutz with his eye as well that passes seven to zero takes us to item d which is id two one nine seven zero consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton texas a home rule municipal corporation authorizing the city manager or their designated to authorize the spend for a insurance binder to archer contingent energy risk llc uh good good afternoon good evening mayor council members terry nalte assistant general manager dme i'm going to run quickly through a presentation okay uh this particular purchasing item is to provide uh what we call outage insurance it is insurance to protect our customers in the event of a forced outage of one or more of the generating units at the denton energy center we typically buy this policy for the four-month summer june through september it is a requirement under the energy risk management policy which you just approved uh we are procuring the summer outage insurance at this time winter will be procured in december for january and february so our winter risk will be under a separate insurance binder the policy covers malfunctions of equipment uh here's a listing of the equipment that it covers it basically covers everything so if for any reason the units cannot run be it for lack of gas a mechanical problem an instrumentation problem subject to the terms of the binder and the insurance policy we receive coverage the coverage would be for the four-month summer it ensures only the on-peak weekdays and the on-peak weekends at night power prices are generally low enough in the summer that we don't worry about ensuring the deductible amount will be for the first hour one unit of the 12 units we have at the deck and the settlement is based upon the price in the market at the time that the outage occurs so it's the difference in price between a negotiated uh strike price or operating cost in this example it's fifty dollars uh and the clearing price for that particular period so here you can see it would be uh 4500 dollars and 4550 dollars times whatever the volume uh that was impacted the maximum term or settlement during the term is 18 and a half million and the premium is uh between our quote that we got was 629 550 uh the binder is actually executed with the insurance provider as we request the price on the day of binding and so it's premised upon the forward prices in the market at the time that we request the final price to give you an idea of the difference from last year last year the price to ensure this same amount was 493 000 uh the higher premium is a result of increased volatility as a result of winter storm uri and urcots projection of potential shortfalls of energy this summer here's the transaction process uh dme worked with procurement staff to achieve and gain these proposals once you approve this transaction we will execute the binder within 30 minutes of research receiving firm pricing which we will be requesting in the next week there is a two percent insurance tax that we pay this is a cost-effective way to manage the risk it is mandated by the policies we require pre-authorization and pre-approval so that we can execute within that 30 day or 30 minute window it is a competitive process we did receive uh four bids and the one that we are suggesting here was the lowest and that is the one that we are recommending approval for with that i will be glad to ask her any questions you might have okay questions for staff count uh mayor pretend melzer thank you mayor i apologize for not having thought of these questions before um and ask in advance but do with this policy uh have significant carve-outs for force majeure uh the kind of things that were experienced in the last snowstorm actually this policy uh does not have a carve-out for force measure or so lack of fuel weather conditions um in addition to uh this policy if the deck were to be hit by a tornado we would also have a claim on our property insurance i appreciate that answer uh uh secondly if if it's generally viewed or by actuaries you know viewed as unlikely to have something of that you know the scale of the experience frequently which is a lot more than 19 million dollars worth of uh financial damage uh would it cost a lot to have a much higher coverage amount yes since it would be viewed like i said it's a kind of low probability uh outcome uh mayor pro tem melzer i believe the reason why we cannot get significantly higher coverage amounts is because these these products are pooled insurance products and reinsured through the major reinsurers and they will not ensure those black swan events so this is a again it's a pool of risk that's being socialized across the industry well all insurance is pooled uh but whatever i hear you say yeah they won't do it i just think the the premium would be astronomical and would not be cost-effective i'll listen to other answers thank you okay any other questions for staya councilman maguire um thank you mayor so i i recognize that um you need some flexibility because you don't know exactly um what prices are going to look like when you do this um when you execute this um but but the estimate that you gave us was at the high end eight hundred thousand and um we're at being asked to approve nine hundred and seventy five thousand if you could speak to um why you need that much uh wiggle room i guess uh obviously uh council member maguire we will get it at the lowest price possible but uh you know if if tomorrow a nuclear plant melts down and is not available for the summer the prices will double okay thank you okay any other questions for staya okay councilor maguire sorry i okay so um uh i i asked a similar question earlier but how how often do does the deck experience forced outages and how much does dme typically lose when those forced outages occur uh it's a great question uh the availability of the dent energy center has been very very good as you would expect with a relatively new facility we've had availability numbers that have been about north of 97 percent of the times that we call on it however as the units age and get more runtime on them they are mechanical devices and they are prone to break down as much as your car would be after it gets 120 000 miles on it so we're insuring against a low probability event but if that low probability event occurs during a very high price period in the market the financial implications are significant and that's why we ensure uh using this type of a policy does that answer your question not really um so uh i mean as well i guess the 90 availability like three percent of the time there is an engine that that is is on forced outage or yes ma'am uh well it's it's uh really uh three percent of the hours that we call on it so if we only call on it for 25 percent of the hours in the year then uh three percent of those 25 percent of the hours what do we expect the units to not be able to perform that could be because of a most of the outages are controls related issues we have a a control system that's malfunctioning a sensor that may be malfunctioning at the time and it may keep the unit offline for 15-20 minutes until plant staff can correct the problem but all those periods are calculated and included in that 97 percent number we have had on occasion a few instances where we've had prolonged outages on individual units lasting a week or longer and in that case this policy would pay out very nicely okay now um excluding what happened during the winter storm because that is an extreme outlier um can you give us an estimate of how much revenue um the deck might lose in you know for example a june to september period due to the three percent outage rate well uh just i can't predict that number specifically but what i can tell you is that at the two thousand dollar cap price that we're going to see for this summer and it's capped at two thousand because under the market rules we've already exceeded the maximum number of hours at nine thousand that happened during your jury at two thousand dollars six percent of the hours missing six percent of the hours would uh would equal the eighteen point seven five million dollars of the policy okay yes thank you that that answers my question okay any other questions for staff seeing none i'll take a motion councilmember davis move approval is there a second uh mayor pro tem melzer yeah i second and i appreciate the fact that we're able to find a product that doesn't carve out force but you're thank you okay we have a motion by councilmember davis second by mayor pro tem melzer any other discussion seeing none councilmember davis how say you aye mayor pro tem melzer councilmember beck aye councilmember guire aye councilmember bird aye okay councilmember armater yes mayor hutz with his eye as well that passes seven to zero thank you terry that takes us to item e which is h l two one zero zero zero one a consider approval of resolution of city of denton texas approving an application for partial tax exemption of designated historic sites in accordance with the chapter 10 article 6 section 10-126 through 10-129 of denton municipal code of ordinances okay hi everyone um i'm going to share my screen real quick okay okay so the property that we are going to be discussing this evening is at um 10-03 west oak street um it is located in the oak hickory historic district it is on the south side of west oak street between well street street and denton street uh it is owned by salty and joanne rochelle who um if there is any questions at the end of my presentation they should be on the call um it is currently a local historic landmark as well as a recorded texas historic landmark um otherwise known as the james newton and ava taber razor house um so this is a request for an application for historic landmark tax exemption according to section 10-128 d uh for h back system updates as well as a new rear front port or a new rear porch uh the total amount came out to be 28 659 and 48 cents for um improvements and rehabilitation so just a quick background section 10-128 is just for an additional 10-year tax exemption um if the property owner demonstrates the city qualifying expenses of 10 000 or more so these are the h vac updates that were made to their system and this is just kind of a quick timeline of the rear porch that was added so as you can see in june 14 2017 is on the right um or on the left hand side of the screen this is what the rear looked like prior and then in january 2020 you can see the beginning of that porch being built and then this is the porch that you have there today so this is just kind of an overview of all the work that was done on this property um the new rear porch wall and ground wrap drain concrete piers metal and anchors treated lumber deck um electric and granite added um the installation of a five ton bosh condenser as um an evaporator coil coil with a new furnace um the installation of a new thermostat and the conversion to a horizontal application for their um unit so staff is recommending approval um of the application for the partial tax exemption um of the designated historic site for the property located at 10-03 um west oak street any questions thank you uh pull down the presentation thank you any questions for staff counseling armature and then councilman and then mayor put your milk sir so they're the uh the two expenses the uh hvac repair and the deck um and we've got the total what what is the expense for each the hvac um cost eleven thousand five hundred and forty dollars and the rear porch was approximately seventeen thousand one hundred nineteen dollars and 48 cents okay and so according to this ordinance all that's needed is the ten thousand dollars correct um okay thank you all right mayor put your melter uh this is a great house and in a you know an area that really shows off that well uh i'll just add that comment but my question just got answered okay uh any other questions for staff seeing none i will take a motion counselor maguire well i just out of curiosity do do salty and joanne reside at 1003 west oak street yeah i believe salty or joanne just responded okay thank you okay uh council member davis thank you very uh proud to move approval of this item okay thank you uh is there a second mayor uh mayor for tim melzer yeah i'm going to second but i'll also add some of what you you know uh may detect in the background uh is that i think it's very clear if i read the room right uh to everyone that is making the house continue to be habitable and keeping up the hvac is sort of unquestionably part of preservation and i think you hear some uh skepticism about however beautiful the deck is whether that's part of preservation uh but uh that having been said there's enough in there in the hvac already to qualify and i'm glad it's been done so i do second okay so we have a a motion by counselor davis uh second by mayor pro tem discussion counselor beck sorry microphone issues um thank you mayor uh yes i'm going to concur completely with what uh council melzer just said i i think given some of the ambiguities we talked about in work session on on the historic landmark uh policies uh i think you know we have to lean benefited of the doubt on this one i i concur that the hvac is is clearly there but i think we want to be careful that that our our restoration and reclamation goals are being met and the picture showed that while this is beautiful uh it it it may be just simply an improvement not a historical reclamation and so i want i i think you know i'm going to vote yes in this in a second when we vote but i think we want to be careful on this um going forward counselor require um i i want to echo what what mayor pro tem melzer and council member beck said that i i definitely am a little bit skeptical about the nature of the improvements it's a beautiful deck i'm very jealous but um probably not essential to the preservation of the home but the ordinance as it is written today does explicitly include improvements um so so i i do plan to vote yes on this um with with the caveat that i think we need to to look at the ordinance and and uh any other comments counselor armature so yeah i i too am going to vote yes uh but uh i also uh make a distinction between the hvac repair which is essential uh to keep this beautiful home livable um and the deck uh which uh is an improvement and not part of historic preservation by the way i'm not saying that it devalues the home historically in any way it is still a historic home um i i do want to say you know for the record that uh i don't that that moving forward i look forward to having the opportunity to revisit a putting a price limit uh and the 10-year renewal period on something like this um this home is still a historic home uh it would be a historic home uh regardless and i think it's important that we focus moving forward on uh keeping the historic integrity of the home and not the amount of money uh put put into it so anyway but but that's not what we're voting on today we're voting on this law i'm not a fan of the law uh but i think that you that you clearly uh deserve uh the historical status continued historical status moving forward counselor davis thank you mayor not to speak for the homeowners but i think they might be the first to tell you how much money it takes to keep us home historic and not falling down and the condition that they found this home in and all the work that was put into it by previous owners before they became the owners and i encourage any member of council to find salty and joanne at a free moment and they will tell you the entire story of this house and joanne is the official unofficial razor family historian for the city of denton thank you and i i want to say it would be an absolute absolute travesty if this body ever writes an ordinance that says that patio doesn't count and it would ignore the fact that that last patio is way too small and i guess those that would vote against it don't understand that as you get older you know you need larger steps you need flatter area you need safety features so i mean it's an enhancement in every way and it ignores the fact that life goes on you don't just keep a point a step that's out of code by one million years because we think sitting in the safety of this office that's great you change it because it needs to function and meet the uses of life that's just crazy to me that this body would think about writing out something that is is that helps someone function and live in a home as you get older that that is just uh that's an atrocity and so that's it's just disappointing we're not look all of you spoke i have a list i can read it to you i waited till everyone spoke and so here come the hands again and that's it's very frustrating so here we go and so another round of soliloquies councilman beck uh i can launch into shakespearean soliloquies by all means by all means have it uh i instead i will claim that the historical land preservation uh guidance that we're trying to do is not about your aging but about the homes aging uh so let's let's have a little perspective on that sure i i just happened to disagree with you councilman maguire i didn't raise my hand i was just rolling got it thank you councilman maguire i mean council member armature yeah i i don't want to repeat myself uh but i do believe that there's a misunderstanding mayor in your words i want to make sure that uh the public doesn't misunderstand as well um you can go back the public can go back and listen to the work session and those of us who were making a distinction between improvements in historic preservation we're not saying that people should not uh update their homes as they age make them more accessible all of these things are extremely important right but this the question is that do we consider that historic preservation or is it essential but something else right and and this is about historic preservation uh that that is the uh distinguishing factor nobody uh would would claim that this deck should not have at least i don't think so nobody made the claim in the work session that the deck should not have been made uh and that the and that the deck uh destroys the historic character of the house or anything like that nobody was making that claim just really looking at this as a matter of the preservation of the building and the h vac fills fulfills an important function of keeping the home uh livable for anybody and keeping it standing and and not uh this you know disintegrating and crumbling and becoming infested with mold etc etc um so that is all uh i just wanted to make that clear in case there was any confusion got it so we have a motion by council member davis second by mayor pro tem any other discussion great council member davis i'll say you i thank you uh mayor pro tem melzer how say you i don't go further to say i think many people are going to copy that deck just haven't seen it council member beck it's a lovely deck aye council member maguire aye council member bird aye uh council member armature yes mayor hudspeth is the eye as well that passes seven zero um that takes us to uh i'll call these to thank you very much salty and uh miss and you and your i forget sorry i don't have it in front of me forgive me thank you both and there you go thank you i just uh defaulted so all right and so that takes us to these two are going to be all together uh so it's id 211055 that's item f which is consider of consider approval of a resolution confirming city council's prior policy direction on public meetings strategy and transition back into in-person meetings and also i'll call item g id 211022 consider adoption of an ordinance of the city of denton repealing and replacing city of denton code of ordinances section 2-29 city council rules of procedure providing for servability clause uh good evening mayor city council sara kichler chief of staff i have a very brief combined presentation on these two items so one second while i pull up that presentation so the first of these two items that mayor hudspeth just read uh is a resolution on public meetings and this would affirm the policy direction that staff received from council during the may 11th work session um so by way of reminder i did include a screenshot from that may 11th uh presentation to city council or council agreed to proceed with the direction for all public meetings and this is all including all of our council committees and boards and commissions to return to in-person meetings as of june 1st however those select meeting bodies that we had produced and televised prior to covid would operate under a temporary hybrid model meaning they would be held in person and could have in-person public participation but it still would allow for a remote participation by members or by the public as well through the summer until september 1st and that hybrid model was only for those bodies as shown in the chart including city council and we had staff had recommended that due to a number of different considerations including allowing the boards and commissions and the various bodies to return to a pre-covid 19 meeting schedule if they wished they've been operating under reduced frequency of meetings just due to some of the limited limited resources that we have to help them produce and televised all of the meetings which currently has to happen because the public cannot come in and sit down and observe the meeting it also allows for public participation participation viewing in person as just mentioned and then for those select bodies that are doing the hybrid meetings temporarily over the summer would still allow for remote participation and then lastly it would return our production schedule to the pre-covid 19 status and make it more sustainable for staff who have done a tremendous job over the last 16 plus months to produce all of these meetings and make them available for the public so just a quick update of what's been done since the may 11th work session staff has taken a number of steps including drafting the subsequent item which i'll go over on the next slide which is to update the rules of procedure we've also sent initial communications to all of our staff liaisons and then also to all the board and commission members we've been working on making room modifications to the council chambers including barriers marking off some seats have a plan to set up a separate microphone making sure that we're limiting contact as much as possible we've also been testing how this hybrid model is going to work with our technology and we're confident in moving forward with that we've also been updating signage as well for our city facilities staff does have two modifications to recommend which is which are incorporated into the resolution for city council consideration and we're recommending to delay the start of hybrid meetings transition by two weeks to monday june 14th just wanted a couple additional weeks one so that we could communicate it to the public it's getting a little close to the june first start date and we want to make sure that we have clear concise communications to the public and then as well as honestly we have a key staff member that will be out on a planned vacation in early june i want to ensure that this transition goes smoothly and that that key staff member is available for us as well so i apologize for that oversight and then the other modification that we recommended in discussing further is to keep two committees all virtual for the summer again until september 1st or until the governor may lift his waiver of certain tomo requirements that wouldn't allow us to hold all virtual meetings but that would be for the committee on persons with disabilities and the economic development partnership board recommending to keep those two all virtual for the summer just due to their large size and a few other considerations it would be difficult to get them all in a room at city hall just due to the size and we do we do produce those meetings on a regular basis so we need the equipment that is here at city hall so that's the resolution that has been drafted for city council consideration and then the second item is an ordinance to update the rules of procedure so as you know city council meetings are conducted in accordance with these rules of procedure often referred to as section 229 of the code council temporarily amended those rules of procedure last march when covid hit in order to facilitate having only virtual meetings so there were some items that needed to be amended temporarily to allow all virtual meetings to take place for all the council boards and commissions with the return to in-person and hybrid meetings staff is proposing to repeal and replace the rules on a permanent basis and this is the recommended amendments are to make it more flexible depending upon the determined mode whether that be in person only or hybrid or virtual or if we would for some instance have another declaration in the future it really allows for that flexibility for the various different modes that we could operate under so those track those amendments have been made and proposed and are available in track changes as well as an exhibit to that item and then i'll take this down at this time and answer any questions you may have thank you questions for staff council member davis i just want to thank staff for all the time and consideration that went into this not only encapsulating what we talked about the last time we had this conversation as council but also taking that further i'm fully on board with the june 14th and i also like that this sets us up well to whether it's september 1st or whether for circumstances outside our control we have to go past that or if the governor takes some of these options away and we have to come before that the way you've laid this out really puts us on firm footing for whatever the next step may be and whenever that next step may come so i appreciate that very much okay uh council member beck councilman mcguire then councilman marmotor thank you mayor uh i was going to say given the uh the timelines uh correct me if i'm wrong sir but uh doesn't the isd restriction go until june 4th it does however denton isd has already lifted their requirement i believe they did so immediately that week that the governor allowed okay all right and uh yeah i i actually want to echo uh what counselor davis said and uh there's a lot of thought and work been put into this uh going forward i think uh there's a lot of options that we didn't have in the past and i appreciate that time um the the only thing i would i would encourage this is to to the extent that we are allowed to um without becoming coercive and i'll let legal make that determination but to add language that is as strong as possible that we we we strongly discourage unmasked unvaccinated people from gathering um you know we're not allowed to ask things about that and we're not allowed to require it but the the strongest requirement language we can possibly um get legal to to uh go for uh would be my recommendation not not a passive one but very active strenuous like we discourage certain behaviors so okay counselor guara i'm sorry thank you mayor hudspeth um is i first of all i want to echo um the gratitude for for staff thank you for working so hard on this i know that um y'all have been dealing with constantly changing directives from the state um a lot of turmoil from from us as a body um so so thank you for your hard work and trying to to synthesize a lot of um a lot of conflicting uh recommendations um my question is is it legal is it within the bounds of the tech is open meeting at meetings acts for us to limit the number of attendees at in-person public meetings you've always been able to limit the number of people based on like fire code provisions and off the top of my head that's something we can look into if you wanted to have a more limited thing i do think that is within the ability of of the um city manager to regulate as far as the capacity of the meeting room but we'll verify that okay and councillor armature so a question for staff uh you mentioned that uh the committee on persons with disabilities and the economic development partnership board are exempted because of their large size and for other reasons i'm curious to know you know what those other reasons are uh i'm guessing you know but i might be wrong that there might be an accessibility issue with people on the committee on persons with disabilities you know being uh immune compromised and and possibly nobody wanting to meet uh in person from there i don't know uh but but i'm wondering what the considerations are for uh for the edp board if we're not and this is kind of following on council member guire's question um you know if uh we're not limiting the uh number of people from the public who can physically be there and by the way i'm not saying we should uh but uh you know what difference does it make anyway if i if i could just hear a little bit more on that i'd be very curious sure so those two committees were produced prior to coven um so we would continue to produce those two bodies and because we do so the equipment is located here at city hall which means it would have to take place at city hall and the work session room and the configurations in the council chambers with 11 and think 15 person boards really isn't going to allow for good production of that to take place and to try to do a hybrid model with that with 11 or 15 different members would be very difficult so that's why we're recommending at this time just due to some of the constraints and that we continue to produce those meetings we do so just all virtual um over just for the summer uh months uh if it was a you know a meeting that wasn't produced normally and we could take it to the civic center or a bigger area we may do so but that's just not possible with the production equipment that we need i see so that now now that makes sense i was trying to wrap my head around it but with that information it makes sense so i'm going to save my uh you know direction and opinions till we have the discussion after a motion is made but those are my questions for now okay any other questions for stay councilor riguar um this is perhaps more of a discussion point than a question but um so i i suspect because um i you know i follow all of my fellow council members on social media um i'm fairly certain that every member of this body is vaccinated um so well while i appreciate the consideration of um issues like spacing on the on the dais and um plexiglass in between members um i i would encourage more of a focus on um social distancing for attendees than for members i i um you know uh my colleagues can can correct me if i'm wrong but i suspect that that all of us are more concerned about um attendees from the public than we are about ourselves and that's great feedback we are as well looking at different ways to block off some seats in the chamber some rows um perhaps having an overflow room if it's all it needed just to make sure that we've done that before in instances at city hall and we've actually had the chamber fill up so there's a few different ways we can help maybe manage that to ensure some distancing and capacity as well okay any other questions for staff council member beck council member berg thank you mayor um i was just going to say that we're we're learning so much so quickly about uh how to respond to respiratory diseases in the 21st century um so at some point the the governor's orders will um revert to normal and we will be back under our old code which one of the elements i liked about this was we're we're bulwarking our procedures so that we will have hopefully knock wood minimal changes when that happens um uh but i encourage us to maybe uh keep track of those changes that were effective uh so that the in in n years the next respiratory uh contagion is is more easily mitigated and we could just plop these rules down in place without relying on the governor thank you okay uh any other questions or i'll take a motion oh councillor berg i'm sorry you're muted if a particular group um decides to meet in person um is that for everyone in the group uh if we as a council decide to go back uh meeting together are all of us required or or can we still is that part of the hybrid yes that's part of those that will be in the hybrid model um you could as a member council member or board member you could still participate remotely if you are one of those hybrid if you're one of those hybrid groups okay yep thank you okay any other questions or i'll take a motion uh councillor bet uh i'll motion approval thank you is there a second uh councillor davis second thank you we have a motion by councilman beck second by council member davis discussion council member armature then council member davis so i'm going to vote no for this and i want to explain why um i was very supportive uh when we could require masks um and i i thought this this was a great plan uh so it's not that i think it's a bad plan i think it's a good plan uh but uh given that uh we can't require masks given that we're at less than 50 percent uh vaccination and we have not nearly reached 70 percent herd immunity which is kind of a bare minimum for uh just public safety uh under covid right now i'm sorry the city attorney i'm sorry i would wait until you were finished i just wanted to clarify the motion is on the resolution on item f or on item g thank you uh so this would be we're going to take them one at a time so it's item f thank you councillor armature oh yeah so uh uh back to my comments uh so anyway i i think right now uh we should while we can uh before the governor takes that away from us just continue um meeting uh virtually and then when we either can no longer uh meet virtually uh because we're no longer under that emergency order the governor has taken that ability away from us or uh we reach a goal that that we decide as a council in for vaccinations uh rate or herd immunity we're never going to get to that 100 percent um but we should be doing a lot better than 40 percent uh because precisely because we want this to end and we want to be able to go back to normal uh so i i think this is premature uh and i don't think it's safe i do think that you know if a majority of council decides to go with this i agree with what council member maguire says that you know plexiglass isn't necessary for us you know i would rather spend that money uh making members of the public safe uh i i feel safe because i'm vaccinated um and i want uh the public to be safe if this is going to happen but i don't think we're ready for it yet okay so council member davis i just want to say one of the things that i appreciate about both of these things that we're talking about is the flexibility that it gives us it lets staff do those safety measures that we've already talked about the the um spacing folks out in the room um we're looking into limiting folks in the room doing all of those things so yes we do have a very important tool removed from our toolbox but we still have many many other ways to keep folks safe and um you know if we hadn't been given the ability to do this early on we had things we were already talking about doing way back in march and april of last year in exactly this way so um i'm i support this enthusiastically especially those measures that give us flexibility in how to respond okay so this is item 2f we have a motion by council member beck a second by council member davis any other discussion council member melzer uh i just want to uh weigh in with a few comments uh the reason i support the movement toward hybrid is that everything we're doing now would still be available everything for us for members of the public uh like council member beck i would go further than to say our language should be something like strongly recommend urgently or whatever but uh signage everything that we think ought to be in place for anyone who chooses to come in i think we should just you know we should have no hesitation whatsoever to say if you're not vaccinated vaccinated we recommend you call in if you're here and you're not vaccinated we recommend that you mask i mean i don't think we need to be hesitant about any of that uh the now following social media the idea has been put for that phoning is more difficult i guess to that i would just say really more difficult than driving in uh i remain interested in preserving the call-in option for reasons unrelated to covet i think it adds more accessibility for many and i hope you figure out a way to do that and i would say to the public if you're dead set on coming in person i would strongly recommend getting vaccinated if you aren't already if you're not vaccinated or you're not done getting vaccinated i'd urge you to just call in that will still be available and if you still insist on coming uh i i i ask you to mask uh it's not just about you that that's the point you know in the past for masking is about protecting others it still is because by you allowing yourself to still be vulnerable to to becoming infected infected you allow the possibility of variants emerging that could put all of us back in the soup again and i don't think anybody wants that so that's all i have to say and i'll be voting yes all right okay any other discussion see none council member beck i'll say you aye council member davis aye council member guara if someone were to contract covid at one of our meetings and pass away as a result i could not live with that i'm going to vote no okay council member melzer aye council member bird aye uh council member armature no mayor has put his eyes what and that so that passes five two takes us to 2g i'll take a motion uh council member davis move approval is there a second council member armature i second but i want to make an amendment as well well how does that work do i second and then make the amendment or let somebody else second you would have to ask the if it's a friendly amendment then you would ask council member davis if he accepts it so a friendly amendment um that in addition to the changes suggested that several other changes be considered as well and i'd be happy to detail those or to save it for discussion you can just generally list them and briefly uh so article two number four says a misconduct the council may punish its own members for misconduct consistent with any ethics policy adopted by the council right now our ethics policy has the uh gives the uh board of ethics uh the power to do that so you know it seems a little strange to me that it's worded that way i'm fine keeping it worded that way but it seems potentially in conflict um so i wanted consideration of that uh second um the uh there are two points one in uh the uh section c under code of conduct for council members and administrative staff it says all remarks and questions addressed to the council should be addressed to the council as a whole and not to any individual member thereof that's item d under that um and also item h uh which uh that is three h which applies to citizens it has the same exact language um that says that you can't address a con that that you can't address a comment to a specific council member or a question has to be to the whole body uh i i think that's unnecessary i think members of the public as well as council members as we discuss with each other should be able to ask questions uh of each other by name i don't see the harm in that uh and let's see uh the uh section uh three um oh sorry no sorry section five um says seating arrangement the city secretary city manager and city attorney shall occupy the respective seats in the council chamber assigned to them by the mayor uh but any two or more members of the council may exchange seats i think that that should be up to the all of council as a whole and not just to the mayor that that's uh and uh and those are and then let's see an item to be uh work sessions or workshop items as it concerns the workshop agenda citizens or other interested persons may not participate in the session unless invited to do so by the mayor a couple sentences down it says citizens should be advised of the nature of the work session but that their input on these items is premature until such an item is placed upon a city council agenda for final action i i profoundly disagree i think that uh that it is imperative that we get uh public feedback before a work session and i think many if not most or all of us do uh get public feedback before a work session i don't think it's premature so i think you know we should change that as well uh so anyway those are are the changes that i wanted to suggest that we discuss if now is not the time for it we can discuss them another time but there's a lot in here that i think needs redlining uh councilmember davis do you accept those i do not they're not germane to the main question they're not germane to our conversation today about uh covid related virtual procedures and okay he froze but so katherine can you help me um how what's the what's councilor orators um options to try to move everything she listed was this provided was this sent to staff early do we have a list of these no and i'm happy discussing them later although but i will say that it's not mentioned under the item that it's under item g it doesn't say anything about covid it just says that we're updating our rules of procedure and gives a red line so i bring those to the table in this public meeting okay well then if you can just get those to staff and we'll talk about them when staff can get them to distribute it to everyone everyone can look at them and then put it in a friday report or so that everyone can see it that'd be great sure okay um so uh there's a motion by councilmember davis uh councilmember marmor do you do do you maintain your second as written sure okay great uh any other discussion seeing none councilmember davis how say you councilmember marmiter how say you yes councilmember beck aye councilmember guire aye mayor pro tem melzer i'm sorry aye sorry thank you sir uh councilmember bird aye uh mayor hudspeth as i as well that passes seven zero uh that that concludes f and item g if we could um take a short break before we finish the last two that'd be fantastic uh just for me sorry uh so it's 7 44 p.m we'll take a 10 minute break be back 754 finish last two items thank you and welcome back to this meeting of the didn't city council it is 753 p.m still may 25th we do have we're back with the quorum so um took a short break we're back last two items on tonight's agenda uh rosa do i need to call these both at the same time is that is there overlap or just one at a time there's no overlap mr mayor so it would be one into one at a time please perfect okay so i'll call the first which is uh 2h which is id 21975 consider nomination appointments to the city's board commissions and committees planning and zoning commission and before rosa does her presentation uh katherine you you did some research and wanted to follow up on our work session correct it's actually that research is actually applicable to i not not h okay so we'll come back to that so rosa if you uh your presentation and we'll take care of that thank you mr mayor there's actually no presentation but there was exhibit a on the agenda item that did list the one member that's scheduled for appointment perfect uh any questions for staff on that okay uh mayor pretend melzer yeah i i'll move approval of the nomination of eric crewett to planning and zoning he needs some place to channel his prodigious intellectual energies yeah he's awesome uh council member davis i'll second making no comment but uh appreciation for eric's service okay we have a motion by mayor protein melter second by council member davis discussion uh seeing none councillor uh mayor pretend uh melter how say you aye council member davis aye uh councillor maguire aye council member armature yes councillor beck yes and i wish that council member melter let me put him into nominations since it was by nominee but next time i'll add one if you want to no no i don't want to stop the procedure at this point council member burg all right and mayor hudson as well that passes seven zero thank you uh okay so that then takes us to uh our last item two i which is id 211009 uh consider appointments of the city city council committees uh development code review committee dallas regional mobility mobility coalition discovered didn't advisory board lake ray roberts pp and z commission and denton county leadership team uh behavioral health homeless and work uh workforce success so um rosa has a presentation katherine if you can get us started just i wanted to revisit one something that came up in the work session earlier the question of what what ability does the council have to change these and i said well it depends on each one in looking at each of them 229 creates the ability for the council to create the council committees but then the council committees are created each by resolution for the most part the resolutions and all of the ones that are at issue today provide that the mayor appoints and the council approves which means that the authority of the ability of the council tonight to not approve is simply that it wouldn't approve there's no ability to nominate someone else because that resides with the mayor the other items tonight um there is the um dcrc committee that is a council appointment committee and if the council wanted to carve that out and nominate and appoint separately they could do that um and that is also true for the denton county behavioral health leadership team i think some of the things that were at issue earlier and i don't know what all of them were may not actually be up for consideration tonight and with that i'll turn it over to rosa okay thank you rosa thank you sorry my name is rosa rios and i'm your city secretary i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and get this presentation going thank you so i'm here to present information resulting from the work session held earlier today on the council committees so um the agenda posting was very specific about um the committees that were scheduled for a possible appointment to today um it did the presentation during the work session did list other ones um just like the previous presentations on council committees in previous years we kind of include some that while they they don't really apply to the appointment process you know in a given year it does give staff the heads up on you know who's may be interested when the time comes to a point to those so for for the action item today um city council has asked to consider appointment to the following for the city council committees it would be to the agenda committee the audit finance committee committee on community engagement committee on the environment the council airport committee the community partnership committee which of course those there are two seats on that that they would also have to simultaneously serve on the discovered denton advisory board and then of course the mobility committee then there is one for a boarding commission which is internal the denton development code review committee that is comprised of three council members three pnz right now we do have two existing vacancies on the city council seats for the external committees we have the dallas regional mobility coalition the discovered denton advisory board the lake array roberts pnz commission and then the denton county behavioral health leadership team um i did uh there was an error in my agenda posting i had included the denton county homelessness homelessness and workforce success leadership teams but those terms as noted on the report that was covered during the work session those terms actually do not expire until 2022 so as you consider adoption of the item um you know for appointments um it would be an amendment to the to the actual posting so um the first slide here is indicates the committees um that were presented during the work session with no um you know desired changes requested or referenced or commented on by the um by council members individual council members also um we were asked to put um you know some information on the appointing authority so for the agenda committee um again the mayor's proposing to appoint um well the resolution is very clear that it has to be the mayor mayor pro tem and the city manager and of course that's governed by ordinance 1921 28 for the committee on the community engagement uh proposed appointments are council members melzer our mayor pro tem melzer and council members arminter and bird and that is governed by the resolution r 2012-026 which does state appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council and of course they serve at the pleasure of the city council for the council airport committee proposed appointments are mayor pro tem melzer council members davis and beck and it is governed by resolution r 2011-009 which is appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council serve at the pleasure of the city council um the council appointee for apartments review committee again that is inactive right now so it's not going to be one of the ones that's really being considered but it is included here um just to kind of indicate what the uh authority legislation is and of course resolution r 2019-015 the community partnership committee um proposed appointments for the dual seat will be council would be considered uh council members mcguire and bird and then council member davis would hold the basically at large seat and that is governed by resolution 20-1471 and of course it's appointed by city council and historically nominated by the mayor and council has concurred with his nomination so we followed the same process this year for the mobility committee um proposed appointments are mayor pro tem melzer and council members mcguire and bird and that is governed by resolution r 2019-015 appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council and of course serve at the pleasure of the city council so for the external committees here we do have the dallas regional mobility coalition and the proposed appointment is mayor hudspeth and the under the drmc bylaws the appointee is selected by the council and historically again in denton the mayor has nominated himself and council has appointed for the discovered denton advisory board similar to the community partnership committee with the exception of the at-large seat um proposed appointments are council members mcguire and bird and then council member beck would hold the at-large seat and under the um discovered denton advisory board bylaws city council appoints however because the city legislation requires two members also serve on the community partnership committee the mayor has historically appointed and council has concurred on the lake ray roberts pnz commission of course mayor hudspeth it had it is required that it be the mayor and that's under the lake ray roberts land use ordinance and again it must be the mayor so um for the there's a couple of the next couple of slides kind of include where there were some requested changes by council members so for the audit finance committee again the as discussed during the work session actually includes the names in the order that were presented during the work session and under the as proposed for the by the mayor for appointment um as you can see it would be council member mouncer although he had recommended um council member davis rather than himself and it was not unclear during the discussions whether council member davis would have accepted that replacement um also council member armenter and then council member bird pardon me i didn't mean i i never said in place of me i meant in addition wait wait paul paul paul okay well let's not let we we never interrupt that's not what we okay it's not that extreme it is not that extreme we'll take it up after the presentation okay thank you well first my apologies and then if you go ahead and proceed okay thank you and again we kind of did do the best we could with you know all of the discussion that was taking place so um council member armenter and then council member bird did indicate that she would prefer not to serve on this one and the appointing authority is under resolution r 2019-015 um similar to others it's appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council and of course serve at the pleasure of the city council for the committee on the environment council member mayor pro tem melzer davis and beck are proposed for appointment council member armenter did indicate that she did want to serve as you can see on the member selection and then council member mcguire had recommended council member armenter for appointment and the authority is resolution r 2009-015 and it is appointed by the mayor approved by the city council and of course they serve at the pleasure of the city council for the development code review committee proposed for appointment are council members davis and then of course the um to uh the two unexpired terms uh would be filled by council members mcguire and bird council member bird did decline um as she had withdrawn her selection during discussion at the work session um and of course council members melzer armenter mcguire bird did recommend council member beck who did acknowledge that he does want to serve on this board the appointment for this um committee would be just for the unexpired term ending august 31 2021 again appointments for all the three members uh would be uh presented for consideration during the upcoming appointment process and the appointing authority is that um there is a resolution developed i guess implementing the the dcrc as a full board and it's nominated and appointed by city council so for the later leadership teams here um i did include the other two because they were under the posting so for the denton county behavioral health leadership team uh proposed appointment was mayor hudspeth and again um it would be for the term to expire june 30 2022 council member armenter did recommend um council member bird or herself um and of course both were interested in being appointed to that the appointed authority are the uh the leadership team bylaws it states that it is city council last year was the first year that these were presented for um you know for appointment at the council level and of course you know the mayor did nominate individuals and council had concurred so we followed that same process this year um as you can see here for the denton county homelessness homelessness leadership team and the denton county workforce success leadership team even though they were part of the agenda their terms actually do not expire until 2022 so they really do not apply to the appointment for this evening but i have noted um you know what members indicated that they wanted to um to serve at the time that they come up for reappointment and of course those also are governed by by their own bylaws as noted and i will take any questions okay and let me take off my thank you mayor pro tem melzer uh pardon the interruption just trying to get the record straight uh there's there's so much there that i suggest that we take each item separately uh and where there's a question if the body you know has an interest in amending the recommendations of the mayor but where that authority doesn't currently exist i'll be at those times suggesting that we postpone until the next regular meeting uh at which time uh prior to that i would ask for a resolution to be voted on allowing members to amend uh the slates for those particular sessions for those particular uh committees um kathryn i'll take your insight there you can certainly divide you can divide them all out individually um i think in rosa's presentation um there was a set where there had been like the first slide didn't mention that there were any um issues with it if you wanted to vote on all of those together certainly welcome to divide them but if you wanted to vote on all those together that might be a more efficient way to do it uh i i didn't you know i didn't memorize it forget to well let's see we have we have the amended presentation in our emails yes yes okay so i'll take a look at that and consider that while others discuss comments uh anyone else councilmember bird counselor back counselor armature this is just a generalized statement uh you know after further thought on uh some of these committees here i do want to renege on uh my opportunities to learn and be a part of uh the committees that i i said no to uh the audit and finance committee in the development co-review i think it'll just do me some good to to stay on those and be as helpful as possible on those areas so just overall wherever i was that's where i want to be period thank you okay counselor bet yeah uh could i request that the the the mayor give us a five minute review period that we can look at this revised document that we just got um certainly so it's 8 10 we'll take a five minute break we'll be back at 8 15 thank you and welcome back to this meeting of the didn't city council it is uh 8 18 uh and we are back from a brief break to review uh the secretary's notes and uh want to make sure we are all on the same page where staff's notes uh the first page there were no changes proposed are we uh find a move forward with that as a slate and then there were some changes that were rescinded so we'd need to take that up and then uh thirdly uh how these work together council or mayor pro tem melzer has indicated he'd like to uh uh make some permanent changes that would then have uh potential ramifications to the ordinances that we would need staff would need time to uh make sure those there's no issues there just because these were predominantly passed in 2009 uh so there are some uh concerns there but uh miss city manager pardon me city secretary thank you mr mayor um i have to apologize one more time hopefully this will be the last time today so for the leadership teams just to clarify the actual two that do not apply towards for appointment tonight are the denton county behavioral health leadership team and the denton county homelessness leadership team okay because those are the terms that expire in 2022 for the denton county workforce success leadership team whom you had um you know um i guess wanted to appoint um count mayor pro tem melzer to um that is actually for an unexpired term okay that would that would expire in on june 30 2022 um and of course council member bird said that she was willing to serve on that in lieu of uh mayor pro tem melzer so i apologize for that no problem it's it's a lot it's and we normally don't have this in depth of a conversation um okay mayor mayor pro tem melzer yeah i would uh still make the same basic point that it is a lot and i think if we could chunk it up uh you know uh in some digestible way and address the issue since they arise and i take uh i take it under advisement that there were no um you know there were no issues raised on the first page let's just say the the committees going down to up up up above external committees so the internal committees um although uh i'm going to remove myself from the airport and uh there'll be a couple of others later to provide more learning opportunities for others but i'll remove myself from the airport okay well in the we're just going to well it's getting rather confusing uh so we're just going to take them uh we'll just be here straight most straightforward i think yeah well yeah but then everyone comments on everyone and we're we're here till midnight on something that is is not necessary and that's what i'm trying to avoid but it's not working uh councilor armature uh yes i have a question about one of the items on page one of the slides uh the dallas regional mobility committee uh so it says here that the bylaws um selected by the council and that historically the mayor has nominated himself and council has appointed but that is not the rule it it seems to imply um that's just the tradition and so if that's the case then we've got um you know both hudspeth and maguire each of them had nominated themselves i believe i had expressed uh an interest in having um maguire serve on that committee uh so could we i i just want confirmation that it's true what it says here that this election by the mayor has been historic but is not the rule and if so i would you know move that into uh the category of items that we would pull for separate consideration uh catherine can you speak to that i'm sorry i could not that is the one that i could not find the bylaws for during the meeting okay i presume that what rosa has on that is correct yes ma'am okay so then in that case i would like to uh remove uh the dallas regional mobility coalition from uh that list of agreed upon items to the list of uh items for discussion well is that something you would seek to be on uh councillor maguire you'd seek to yes i would like that appointment okay all right then we'll have that conversation uh and council member davis so i i appreciate uh council member excuse me mayor pro tem melzer's uh preference for kind of taking them one by one but i've been working the list here as we're talking and after some folks have kind of removed themselves from consideration for certain committees and then taking into account that he said he doesn't want to serve on council airport committee or be would be willing to step back and let others learn on that committee we really only have left in contention from rosa's list the regional mobility coalition the council airport committee and the council committee on the environment now because two of those are council committees that would require a resolution to change the rules to do something besides whoever the mayor appoints to those and then confirming my preference i think would be to go ahead and confirm because the vast majority of them we're going to be fine on go ahead and confirm and approve the mayor's appointments to these council committees and the ones that are not in contention that would leave only the dallas regional mobility coalition and then if we want to address the way that we appoint these committees i think that's a separate process for another day i don't think that's something to do in the middle of nominations i don't think that's something to do lightly you know while we have personal desires and all those sorts of things mixed up in it i think that is a big change from the way that we have our our rule set now and our resolution set now and we're really only talking about two council committees when you get down to it the airport committee and the committee on the environment everything else has kind of been taken out of out of contention i'm actually going to step off on it as well on the same rationale and i don't take it lightly i also strongly disagree with the characterization of the history i think most even members who were here previously cannot recall the mayor playing such a you know sort of a strong role i think it was probably a surprise to most of us that that was actually the rule now that's uh i think a reflection of just how mayor watts chose to do it obviously wasn't the role i mean i i'm not questioning what staff has said but the idea that we've always done it that way not my experience yeah we did it last year okay councilor armature i was here i promise we had this conversation the last time we appointed uh i don't i don't know uh what else to tell you we had this very same conversation excuse me excuse me mayor councilor armature so i i actually i think that you're you're both right um as uh mayor pro tem melter said uh it was you know up until uh last year it was just by a council decision that that was the tradition in spite of what it says in the resolution and then starting uh last year under mayor hudspeth uh we it was the mayor who appointed and that was when some of us learned uh for the first time uh that uh that that was allowable under the rules and procedures so there's another alternative that we could take but uh before i go into that i want to just just say and council member davis i might be misunderstanding apologies what what you were saying about there just being those two committees um to take out we've also got the development code review committee uh and uh yeah i guess that one the development code review committee because the um the the two leadership teams were not voting on tonight is that that's correct because they don't express me 22 that's correct but counseling for bird said she would want to remain on the she rescinded her her comments and wants to remain on the development code committee and i'll and i'll just be sorry i'm not i'm not finished yet um no i know and and i want council member bird to be on there um so but what i was going to propose uh was that it be uh brian beck uh beck maguire and bird um you know there was consensus for beck um i agree bird would be excellent on there i'm really glad that she wants to remain on there uh and maguire i think those three would be great on there uh and so that is what i was going to propose in pulling that okay and so if you're if that concludes your comments uh yes although i just just wanted to uh to clarify so would we have to call if we wanted to do this tonight would that have to call for would call for a suspension of the of the of the rules no so i'm asking the uh city interim city attorney got it so the answer is uh that the rule suspension would not change the resolution and that's we that's been discussed and then the other thing is the with your proposed changes is only two available seats on the board you mentioned the development code review may uh council member davis is carrying over and is not up for replacement so the only two there are uh maguire and bird and so your your direction would you you need to refine that to two people and can you explain why is uh he just up for replacement and not i'm sorry why is he uh not up for a replacement because for instance i i've only been on the mobility committee for a short while um but uh i'm being replaced on the mobility committee i don't have a problem with that i'm just wondering uh good here just if someone could explain the council committees are not don't have terms dcrc is not an exact council committee it has a special resolution of its own that created it and it sets terms and that's why that one's different okay and mr mayor if i if i may just interject really quickly the reason why council member davis is davis is not up because his term when in april when the dcrc was made a full boarding commission the resolution set forth that the initial quote um unexpired term would would be from april to august 31 of 2021 and the two seats um that you're proposing to appoint council members maguire and bird to are the vacant seats that resulted from the two outgoing council members okay got it thank you for clarifying so it would be in august to the uh august later this year today okay that that yeah thank you council member davis do you have a motion yes mayor i do all right i move approval of the mayor's nominations to the council committee on the environment the council committee on community engagement the council community partnership committee the council mobility committee the discover denton advisory board the council airport committee the council audit finance committee the lake ray roberts planning and zoning commission the development code review committee and the denton county workforce success leadership team and just for clarification that's the end of my motion but those are all of the committees which either we've not had contention on or that the mayor can appoint and we can only approve the remaining one is i didn't mention is the dallas regional mobility coalition which else we've discussed um has its own its own rules and the council can nominate and appoint separate from whatever the mayor's preference is okay um is there a second before discussion no second i'll second now we can have discussion um so let me make notes uh davis so motion by uh council member davis second by mayor hudspeth discussion mayor protein melter i'm sorry you're you're muted but what about it's brilliant why i was muted then uh do can question for city attorney do council members have the uh freedom to withdraw from particular assignments effectively yes they could they could decline to fulfill that role uh oh so you could be nominated even if you didn't you could be nominated and approved even if you didn't want to serve and then just not serve and be kicked off that's the only option you have i don't know that it's the only option you have that's the one that comes to mind immediately um you can certainly look at the resolutions again yeah see the process is so absurd that you can't just say this is a light matter that's how absurd it is so uh i'm certainly not in favor of the motion and i think this seriously needs to be reviewed uh at the next regular meeting of council and i move that we postpone this item until the next regular meeting of council to allow for that uh to allow for resolution uh to address the manner of appointments well then let's let's do this so you have a motion motion to postpone let's see if there's a second councillor armature i second that great so councilmember pardon me okay there's a motion in a second to postpone and discussion and i'll say i i i absolutely agree i absolutely could not agree with you more and no one has advocated more to get rid of some of these boards than me and maybe the people that that passed this thing in 2009 knew about this very conversation and said hey we need someone to make sense of this as all of these machinations are going on and just like you're frustrated as am i i you know i'm i'm trying to be the mayor and serve on a regional transportation with other mayors in dallas and somehow that is is not worthy of this body to to to be okay with right and that's fine that's this body's prerogative who they want to represent them in that space but just like your you have frustration uh on how the this is process is being micromanaged it's no different than on the other on the other foot right it's it's doing the same thing that just you don't agree with it right and so that's where hopefully this time uh away will help everyone will help cooler heads prevail and look long-term and understand uh the the i mean it's a lot of work to go in and i think it's work well done and come back with the resolution but these boards sit and again i'm looking to get rid of some of the boards and so that they sit dormant it maybe will help people realize that we don't need all we have 30 of them you know and so maybe staff will come back and say hey here's some we think we can get rid of that council just looks at things twice uh that that's not necessary so i look forward to the conversation but i also will challenge uh some of the narratives and i also challenge uh the the my peers to think deeper than your personal preferences for example and i i commend council member bird because when you're talking about this body trying to remove council member bird from the development code review committee the only person of color on that committee that would then nobody tried to remove her well border okay thank you so so when when the congress people can listen to the video and know they can discern it for themselves but when you're trying to remove someone of color from that body that then would then provide valuable insight then that's important and i think it's just it's a little deeper than people uh understand it to be and i hope we can come to a resolution that then puts the citizens of denton in the best place to be represented uh holistically versus a myopic look at it your point of person and so that's a shameful accusation well it was it was a statement it was a statement made it and i would have in fact put forward council member bird so i'm not sure who you're saying wanted to go back and watch the tape tonight and you'll see i was there i don't have to okay yeah can i can i get a ruling on this point of order you're right catherine on the motion to postpone we will either need to date certain i believe you have a motion and a second on the floor that's right falling correctly so if there's it there you have two options the motion to postpone need the date certain or these at the next meeting which is a date certain i believe it's june 8th yes okay there is a meeting on tonight yes so a motion postponed as i understood it he did say next meeting which to put a date that would be june 8th so there's a motion by mayor pro tem melter there's a second by council member armater and uh further discussion and then we'll vote no discussion council member melter a member to melter hasayi council member armater yes council member mcguire aye council member bet aye council member bird no uh uh then uh council member davis no and mayor hudspeth is a no it passes four to three uh and so that'll that concludes our agenda for this evening takes us to concluding items concluding items uh council member davis i have a point of inquiry mayor if we postponed with my motion uh pending then that means my motion uh is the pending item when we come back to this item that's my understanding katherine can you confirm for me that's correct was that motion seconded sorry yes it was by the mayor oh yes okay okay very good um and so concluding items seeing none i have a few all right uh so first and foremost my uh buddy my my sweet baby alice so she's my 10 year old she'll turn 11 on thursday so happy birthday alice she makes all my custom-made ties she's phenomenal uh and then my wife's birthday is on saturday uh so uh we're we're going back to back this week so that'll be awesome i want to thank uh my golf buddies uh played in a denton freedom house golf tournament with uh deke michael and adam uh and so that was a lot of fun so i want to tell them hello then ask everyone to have a happy and safe memorial day if you're out swimming wear a life vest if you're going to water work spend lots of money buy lots of food and thank you for shopping local uh then um there's i want to thank the denton parks and recreation and specifically gary packen as well uh for all the work they did with the bike for the mayor event it was a great success thank you to bike denton denton tv uh velo republic bike shop uh erin powell and and um a bunch of bikes with phenomenal living bar bike uh froyo popsicles for having great food and and giving me a break off that seat uh and and everyone that came out it was it was really a great event uh and and had a lot of fun so that's what i had i needed to touch on uh and also i will say this there is no meeting next week obviously that's memorial day week and then we are back on the 7th um and to do this all over again so thank you very much uh councilmember maguire thank you mayor hud smith in addition to of course having a fun and safe memorial day i hope that we can all take some time to uh reflect on the sacrifices paid on on the part of who served our country yes absolutely okay any other any other announcement statements none will conclude this evening's meeting 8 41 p.m it is still may 25th 2021 thank you very much have a great evening